abstract painting gold metal leaf

Over Underworld 2: The Sky is Falling on the Little Red Hen

Image | | Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio

This is the second installment of the Over Underworld art exhibit, a virtual release of paintings in March 2020.

Featured art: The Sky is Falling on the Little Red Hen

over underworld the sky is falling
The Sky is Falling on the Little Red Hen, acrylic and gold metal leaf on canvas, 16″ x 20″. Private collection, Montreal, Canada

I’m here in coronavirus lockdown in Sonoma County, California, watching our collective sky fall.  In 2019, I did a series of small works that reflected the political situation. When I do these paintings, I just really let anything happen, but normally a fairy tale or folk tale or aphorism starts to emerge, combined with images from my daily life.  I don’t know how or why these paintings happen. I try to paint first, analyze later.

The Little Red Hen in the story was the worker who could not get any help to make bread from all the farmyard animals.  Nonetheless, everyone wanted to eat the bread when she was done. It seems to be an original American fable not based in European storytelling.  The link is to a 1918 version of the tale.

The Sky is Falling involves another hen, Henny-Penny, which must be why the two stories melted together in my painting brain.  The Sky is Falling is as apt a metaphor for our current toxic political crisis as I’ve seen.  It is a nasty and violent story of trying to have your urgent message of emergency and disaster heard by The King (Trump)and being eaten alive along the way by his rich henchman, the devious propagandist named Foxy-Woxy! The link to the version I’ve given you has illustrations by Arthur Rackham.  Both tales are worth re-reading.

The painting implies a reordering of the world.  The gold of the good is fractured and falling down the sky.  An ominous figure in the right corner is scheming on Henny-Penny’s egg– try to eat something he has not produced.  There may be a weeping eye in the sky, if a god is looking on.

I actually do have a little red hen in my five-hen free-range urban flock.  She’s named Hedy Lamar, is a bantam Cochin chicken with feather “slippers” on her feet, and lets me carry her around. She lays adorable little bantam eggs.

 

5 chicken eggs and a Coturnix domestic quail egg
Peach blossom garden blooms
Hedy Lamar, my Little Red Hen

At the end of The Sky is Falling, the little red hen looks at the massacre around her and “crawls out of her burrow” because she has to get productive and lay an egg! Our hopeful vision is  that we all need to get to our small creations to start to bring the good back to the falling down sky.  Stay safe in your shelter and enjoy your “burrow,”  but don’t forget to lay your “egg.” Make your little contribution to the normal and good.  Folktales and history both say it has all happened before. It’s our turn of the wheel now. Suzanne

You may share this freely.  Link:https://saltworkstudio.com/2020/03/19/over-underworld-2-the-sky-is-falling-on-the-little-red-hen/

2020 Events

March-April 2020: Over Underworld: New Work

Virtual Exhibit released by Saltworkstudio, Facebook, and Instagram.

#overunderworld  #saltworkstudio

Backstreet Gallery, where the exhibit is installed, is available for visit by appointment.  Email Saltworkstudio@gmail.com.

 

 

 

 

 

How to Use Gold Metal Leaf in Abstract Painting, Part 1

Image | | Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio
Abstract Paintings with Gold Metal Leaf – Suzanne Edminster

Gold leaf always seems so complicated.  It makes us think of old masterpieces and secret processes.  How can you use  gold metal leaf in intuitive,  contemporary abstract painting?

  1. Prep the canvas first.  I like to use gesso and modeling paste.  Build a few bumps and ridges into the canvas.  This will make the gold metal leaf have interesting texture when you apply it later. Then drip on a few interesting colors in light, abstract washes. You can use Golden liquid paints.  Remember that you are not planning too much.  In intuitive art, the painting will form itself from the media. You will get ideas as you go along. Let the  layers dry.  You can see an example with texture under the leaf here.

    Detail of Danae by Suzanne Edminster. Note the different kinds of texture under the gold areas.
  2. Let the gold metal leaf tear into large and small forms.  Don’t try to control the shapes: that’s part of the process! Then use regular waxed paper from a household roll to pick up the “broken” pieces.
  3. Apply the gold metal leaf first or in the under layers of the painting.   I use  a Minwax acrylic deck varnish from the hardware store.  I brush it on, let it dry a minute so that it is neither wet nor completely dry, then apply the gold leaf.  Let each random fall of the leaf lead you to decisions on where to place the next layer.  Press the waxed paper to make the leaf adhere.

Now you have the start of a very interesting abstract painting!

But how do you integrate the gold leaf and make it a finished painting?

I will write more on the process next month.  I don’t believe in “trade secrets” in painting anyway.  I will always reveal media and techniques– because your painting process and finished work won’t be like mine anyway!

I am hosting a class in my Santa Rosa, California studio this month.  You can find the listing for Abstracts with Gold Metal Leaf here on my website.  Please scroll down.   Gleam on!   Suzanne