My wife Jeanne has been asked by her friend Asha to make her a large 4′x9′ silk veil to be painted with an image of a nebula, this to go with the theme of one of her dances. In her research on what nebulas really look like, Jeanne found the Hubble Observatory website and enthused about the beauty of the images. I took a good look and agreed with her, they are quite something special to see. I have painted Asha in performance several dozen times in the past and two months previously she had performed a new work based on Sufi dance traditions at an art opening of my work where Jeanne had made a series of photographs of the event.

The dance forms have to do with a constant spinning and rotating kind of motion and it occurred to me that I might like to try doing a spinning Asha against an astronomical background. In reviewing the Hubble photos and Jeanne’s dance photos I gradually narrowed my images down to what I will use for three (or four, or more) paintings.

Jeanne, a visual artist who has abandoned tight, nitpicky drawings for loose and flowing forms, encourage me to stray from the tight, anal-retentive practices of traditional tempera painting, and suggested that I go large for this series. Large, she insisted, with big loose brushstrokes. I considered her request.

My first two tasks were to make a set of drawings of the dance poses I wanted to use, and make a series of gessoed panels on which to paint the images. Usually I work with acrylic gesso, which horrifies traditional tempera painters, so I decided for this one, since I was breaking so many other “rules,” I should revert to “the way things have always been done.” I worked on both these projects at the same time, the drawings taking a day or two each and the panels taking a longer time.

First I bought the masonite panels in the sizes I thought I wanted and enough 1×2″ wooden strips to glue on the back of the panels to give a firm rigid support. When each panel was glued up it was time to mix up a batch of white gesso to cover the surface of each panel. Four to six layers is generally enough to do the job.

The standard process for preparing panels is to build up a thickness of gesso in excess of your judgment of how thick you think the ground should be, and then to sand it down to a perfectly smooth and featureless surface, as they say, “like burnished ivory.”

Given the character of the images I am planning to produce and the larger than usual scale of the paintings I decided to aim for a less immaculate surfae, and I produced a texture that has a certain softness but has retained evidence of the various layers of gesso laying one over the other with only enough sanding to obliterate the more annoying lumps and bristle marks. I am working for a surface that has plenty of visual incidents, perfectly imperfect.

Painting one

I take the first of my panels and begin with a blunt stick of vine charcoal to sketch in my dancer and her flowing costume and veil. Then using my Hubble photos as a guide I sketch in the nebula as a background around the figure, only instead of the vine charcoal I use several colors of pastel sticks which relate clossely to the colors in the photos. When I feel that I have the design I want, I give the panel several light coats of shellac highly diluted in alcohol, just barely enough so that it will not lift up when it is painting over with the first layer of tempera.

Painting two

Normally I would start right in with the tempera immediately after the drawing was fixed but in this case I skip on to the second panel with its own dancer and nebula pattern, doing exactly the same process as on the first panel.

Painting three

After panel number two was fixed I took it off the easel and set up the third and largest panel and began it in exactly the same way. Here the background consists of two galaxies, one overlapping the other. The photo caption tells that the nearer galaxy is much closer to our vantage point than the second, so that even though they appear to be in contact, they are actually far distant from one another. On this panel once again I do the dancer in vine charcoal, then I sketch in both galaxies in a pale yellow ochre pastel. On the near galaxy I reinforce and refine the drawing with a red ochre pastel stick so that it goes red orange. The second galaxy I redraw with a medium value blue so as to keep the two levels of stars separate visually as well as separate in my own mind so I don’t confuse myself.