Wunderkammers and Kremlin

After a slightly debilitating morning of the all-too-well-known gastric effects of travel, I decided that my limited time here would not be well-spent lying in bed and moaning. I had decided to see the Moscow University Museum of Zoology, and walk back to my hotel via the Kremlin and Red Square. To save time, I took the Metro, only naturally in the wrong direction. After a short wander in the equivalent of Queens, New York when you're trying to get to Lincoln Center, I figured it out and went back the right way.

I love old science museums. I pretty much love all science museums, but the closer they get to a wunderkammer, the happier I am. I grew up near the American Museum of Natural History, before the big makeover began, so when I think of museums I think of dim, echoing halls (mostly echoing with kids) and the tar-colored skeletons of dinosaurs looming in the gloom. I think it definitely put adults off, which was part of the appeal. To see a bit of the old museum, check out "Journey To The Beginning of Time", a Czech SF(?) film. I loved that movie as a kid, especially because I also knew the little cave that the kids go into in order to go back in time. Nowadays, I'd just like to go back in time to meet Zdenek Burian.

The Moscow University Museum of Zoology is an old museum. It dates from 1791, and is gorgeous, inside and out. It's full of what are now considered downers in museums--lots of slightly startled looking taxidermy, formaldehyded things from seas, lakes and intestinal crevices, large dusty cabinets and the smell of mothballs. In short, heaven.

The main hall depicted on the site is beautiful. My Russian is nonexistent, so I couldn't ask who did the murals. After buying my ticket (100 rubles~3 dollars) I was informed by the very nice and patient lady upstairs that I needed another ticket to take photos. And I needed to take photos. As you see.

I have ideas about why museums like this are so appealing, at least to people like me. There's a quality about them of incompleteness--of exploration needing to be done. Modern museums are spectacular shows of what has been figured out and accomplished, but they're entertaining, not provoking. The information is often laid out as a fait accompli. Old museums lay out what was brought back with an attempt at showmanship, but it's worn thin and seems more carny barker than James Cameron. It's allowing the viewer to imagine: what was this individual like? What was its life like in the wild? What sort of person collected it? Stuffed it? The process is there, not swaddled by video and interactive displays.

Another reason I love them is that they seem to share my brain's pack rat sensibilities--things are often where they are because of an odd shape or color, not rigorous systemization. Systemization was the word here, though, but of the organizational and dry kind that's easily disregarded. A cabinet of raptors could as well be together because they look cool as because of their genetic and cladistic similarities.

I walked back via a series of wrong assumptions of where I was along Kalashny Per (must look up what Per stands for) into the Vodzvizhenka Ul (note to self: look up Ul, too). Going as far afield as the Itar Tass news agency. The Kremlin was quite recognizable when I got there, though, even discounting the heavy police presence. I took my obligatory picture in front of St. Basil's cathedral.




Then across the bridge on the B. Yakimanka Ul, which I could swear featured in a Bourne movie, and a longish but now familiar walk home.

Location:Шлюзовая наб.,Moscow,Russia

Levitan At Last

I got to the Levitan show today, and it was spectacular. Slight mess-up as I went to the State Tretyakov Gallery, only to find it was a kilometer or two away in the Tretyakov MODERN. It wouldn't be a problem, but Moscow is so difficult to walk in. The streets are nice, but cars are parked everywhere and very densely, so you're constantly having to cross the street just to continue your walk.

There's also a lot of ice around now, and people seem to put up sections of chain and gating almost at random, excluding pedestrians from some stretches of sidewalk. I assume it's for keeping people out from under falling icicles or off icy walks, but it could just be cantankerousness. So walking is slow and arduous, but it was well worth it, and quite a beautiful day for a walk. I got to see the Peter The Great monument, which is quite a piece of work, I must say. There was also a floating karaoke bar moored right nearby.

Needless to say, the Levitan exhibit was beautiful. Despite the mid-sixties eyesore quality of the building (I think the Soviet mid-sixties architecture may be worse than US mid-sixties architecture, but I couldn't swear to it) the exhibition was excellently presented and thoughtfully laid out in roughly chronological order.

I was thoroughly surprised by the work, despite having two large volumes on his paintings. For one thing, some of the work I thought was large was small and vice versa. For another, his handling of paint and color are extraordinary. He mixes and switches between transparent and opaque, thick and fluid with total virtuosity. Some paintings I could have sworn had pen lines in them, but also had equally thin but heavily impasted white lines in them. My guess is he used a rigging brush, but it's just a guess.

My favorites in the original would be the painting of flooded shacks (I have to be descriptive since I don't read Russian) and the painting "The Gulley" (the title was on the frame in English!) although it's very uninspiring in reproduction, and the one of fern leaves. And "A Quiet Abode", and the mill dam, and the morning mist, and.... and the only one I was disappointed with was "Above Eternal Peace", one of his showpieces. At the scale it was done, I thought it lacked subtlety and came off didactic, a bit WPA-ish. The study for it was wonderful, though.

When I went back that Saturday, I did shoot a couple of angled shots with my phone in order to try to capture some of the impasto and glazing. I'm including them here for ease of comparison. The good, on-square images of his work are scanned from the catalog and cleaned up by me based on what I remember the originals as being like.

In general, his color was richer and details crisper than I'd thought. A few of the little studies, like the fallen leaves, were just jaw-dropping. It's about 10 cm on its long edge.

Photography was not permitted, but I had to document that I was there, so I made a few "phone calls"with the iPhone. That's the mill dam in the background with a disapproving Russian lady.




After I left the show, I found myself in a strange little park next door to the museum. It's a sculpture garden where they're collecting all the old Soviet sculpture that nobody wants around any more. It seems a popular place for moms and nannies to give the kids an airing. It's a very surreal place, a little Ozymandias-like.

Well, Made It!

As you may be able to tell from the "Location" blip below, I'm in Moscow. Actually, I just got back, but since I don't like to post when I'm away, I just wrote these notes using the Blogger App on my phone and am posting them now. Why, you ask, would someone go to Moscow in the end of winter, knowing no Russian, or even how to decipher Cyrillic? Because a once-in-a-lifetime show of the work of Isaac Levitan is up until the 20th of March at the Tretyakov Gallery. I just adore Levitan's work, even though I've only known of him in any depth for about a year. There's only one hard to find but soon-to-be-reprinted book on him in English, but I have two in Russian with great plates.

Levitan's best known work is the "Vladimirka Road". If you Google it, there's a decent reproduction on the page. It's in the show, and I can't wait to see it.

I haven't seen the show yet, though. An all night flight and an all night allergy attack, whether from airplane air or something in my meal saw to that. I did manage to navigate the scrum at passport control and the municipal bus from the airport to the metro just fine, and the metro in Moscow is very similar to the New York subway, only cleaner, with prettier and far more ornate stations. It smells like home, though--damp, diesel fumes, and people, aahhhhhh....I didn't quite have the nerve yet to go full tourist and haul out the camera, but I guess I will. By the way, the rumor of the Moscow metro having international multi-language signage is overblown. The signs are sometimes there, mostly near the entrance, but not at all apparent from the platform, so listen for your stop. They seem to announce well and clearly. "Paveletskaya" isn't too far off from how it's really pronounced .

First impression of Moscow and it's surroundings is really great. The highway in from the airport is lined with birch trees, many of them bent nearly double (snow?). The city so far reminds me of Boston, same mix of old and new, same casual regard of parking rules, same endless construction. It's also impossible to give street directions non- verbally without a lot of hand waving and even shoulder and hip swinging--nothing is rectilinear for very long.

Tomorrow, I walk to the Tretyakov, see a bit of the city and finally see some Levitan originals.

Location:Шлюзовая наб.,Moscow,Russia

Studio Lighting

I was thrilled to move into my studio last year, but just as quickly dismayed by having to adjust to a totally different lighting arrangement from my long-time home studio. Since the natural light at home was so lousy, I'd gotten quite used to doing all of my work under artificial light. For the last few years it has been a four-bar fluorescent troffer of the kind used in suspended ceilings, only in my case I found that by hanging it at a 45-degree angle over my easel and putting in two warm and two cool fluorescent bulbs, it cast a reasonably even, reasonably bright and shadow-free glow over my work.

The new studio, by contrast, has high ceilings and absolutely enormous windows--facing South. During the Summer, these windows cast a great light since the sun is high in the sky and the light beams barely enter the room. During the Winter when the sun is low, though, the light enters practically horizontally all day, making for bright and dark patches that are impossible to paint through, and then the days are so very short that without some artificial light, painting time is unnaturally (or is that naturally) short.

This required two separate solutions. The first was to sling up muslin curtains over the windows to diffuse the sunlight and make the light more even. The curtains had to be single-layered and with as few waves and weaves in them as possible, as these would create areas of greater and lesser shadow. My solution was to get large sheets of inexpensive white photographers' backdrop muslin and support them with lengths of PVC pipe from Home Depot. The muslin arrived with two sides hemmed for slipping over pole supports, so I slipped them over the PVC pipe and tacked them in place with hot-melt glue. To allow for raising and lowering them, I attached rings to the ends of the PVC pipe with stainless steel pipe clamps/straps, and tied them to lengths of marine rigging cord. I climbed a ladder and drove large screw-eyes into the ceiling and attached pulleys to them with clip-locking carabiners. Attached to the wall near the floor are cleats that I can tie off the cord with, allowing me to raise or lower the muslin to any height.

Of course,having muslin over the windows only lowers the light-level even more if it's a cloudy day, so I needed to add some artificial light to the mix. Hence the light stanchion. A friend recommended I look into large-format fluorescent lighting for photographers' studios. It was gorgeous, but at well over $2,000 just to start, it was beyond my pocketbook. Besides, cameras need much pickier light than eyes, in my opinion. Film will get a color cast to it, as will digital CCDs at the drop of a hat. The human eye, by contrast, is much more forgiving. I've done reasonably accurate paintings under colored light. As long as the palette and the easel are under the same light, you can muddle through some pretty extreme situations.

This light stand is made to cast a big amount of decent, glare-free and shadeless light on a large surface with little falloff. And it was relatively cheap. As you can see, it's a portable basketball net, of the kind used in driveways across the world, to which I've bolted (or actually asked someone to bolt--I'm emphatically not a handy person. You know the expression, "Measure twice, cut once?" Well, I measure twice, then cut a hole in my thumb.) two two-bar, 96" fluorescent fixtures, making for a total of four eight-foot fluorescent tubes. The base is filled with play-sand, so it's very stable and has wheels so it can be moved around with reasonable care. Total cost, under $400 for materials, low power consumption, and with the right bulbs it casts a bright light large enough to evenly illuminate an 8' X 6' canvas. Yes, I'm planning an 8' X 6' painting. Three, in fact.

As you can see, the standard UL-Approved lighting junctions are mounted to the back, and the clear backstop barely blocks any window light in the daytime. As an addition, it can be raised and lowered considerably if needed, although the lowest setting seems to work best for me at the moment.

As to the bulbs, you have to be a little careful with fluorescents. The most common ones are somewhat cold, but their big drawback comes from the fact that they artificially boost a few narrow ranges of the color spectrum, which can selectively throw off your colors. I got around this in my previous setup by having two bulbs each of warm and cool, and their overlapping spectra cast a pretty good light. I found to my horror that they don't make 96" fluorescents in "warm", so I did a little research and found that what I needed to get were bulbs with a high "CRI" or Color Rendering Index. These are specially constructed to have a good balance across the whole spectrum and are used for industrial color matching. The bulbs I'm using have a CRI of 94 (out of 100), but I understand that out there are some with CRIs of up to 98. The important part of the number is the distance-from-100 part (or so I hear), meaning that a 98 is three times better than a 94, not just a few percentage-points better. Nevertheless, between natural light part of the day and reasonably accurate, bright and even light the rest of the time, I'm pretty happy with the arrangement.

Jacobs Point-March

Late winter is the most black-and-white time in the marsh. Pretty much everything you see is shriveled, bleached, blackened and broken, and most of the snow is gone so it's harder to see the sky color in shadows. In any event, the sky around here is usually gray, so it doesn't add a lot of vivid color, either.

As such, you really get to see the mix of land and water and what the constant erosion and rebuilding does. That's why this painting is so linear--I just liked the way the "S" curve of the channel got foreshortened into a sort of arrowhead swoop. I was particularly happy with the way I got the distant strip a barely-remaining snow: one stroke of a painting knife. Sometimes it just works. Most of the time it doesn't and you have to do it over and over until it's right, but when it just works you have to just be grateful and leave it the heck alone.

I thought for sure I had a larger image of this one, but it looks like I'll have to make one. I'll post it as an amendment later on. One of the tougher things about working big is that I have to concern myself more with issues of lighting and documenting the work. It's relatively simple to light a small painting well--even a desk-lamp will do. You can also document a piece by just slapping it on your scanner (when dry, of course). With larger pictures, though, there's significant fall-off if the only light is from above, as by ceiling fixtures and so forth. This means that the lower portions of the picture may be in less illumination than the upper portions, leading you to mistakenly paint them lighter to "go" with the upper bits. This goes both for painting and for photographing the work. This is why artists have for years loved working under the fabled "north light".

True north light can only be obtained by having skylights that face the unobstructed north of the sky, with no admixture of the other directions and no objects like trees or buildings in the field of view to reflect back their colors. This way the light is even throughout the day (you never get beams of light directly from the sun), and slightly cool from the sky or cloud reflection and transmission. Since daylight is so much brighter than most lamps (a fact hidden from us by the adaptability of our eyes) it also experiences much less falloff over distance than artificial light and hence illuminates even large work relatively evenly, depending on the size of the window letting it in.

My studio has south-facing windows, so I've had to make a few adjustments both to the windows and the lighting to get things to a comfortable level for me. You can see these adaptations in my "About Me" picture, but (teaser) I'll go into them in detail on my next post.

Jacobs Point-August

I'm going to be posting my way through a small backlog of completed paintings, while getting set up (mentally and equipment-wise) to resume my daily oil exercises. This one is the most recent completed landscape, again Jacobs Point. I miss warm weather.

This one was painted on a really rough-woven hemp canvas from HempTraders.com. I love painting on heavy canvas, but my slightly frugal soul rebels at paying upwards of $70 US per yard for linen. Hemp canvas is nearly as strong as linen and is only about $15 US per yard. Its staple, or average fiber length, is about 20 cm as opposed to linen's 25-150 cm. Cotton, by contrast, maxes out at about 6 cm. Supposedly Titian liked hemp canvas for his larger works and I'm happy to follow in those footsteps. I prefer to mount my canvas on board in any case, since I tend to abuse the canvas and really dislike it if it gets flabby during the painting process.

This was also the first larger piece I've painted using the linseed oil/chalk medium that I've come to favor. I'd read about it from several sources, notably Francisco Pacheco's "Art of Painting", but it's gone into pretty thoroughly on Tad Spurgeon's site. Even though I've got a larger, airier studio now I still prefer to paint without stinking up the joint, and the medium also does such wonderful things to the paint that I'd favor it in any case. Basically, it's just a mixture of linseed oil and powdered chalk or marble, and you can vary the quantities to vary the thickness and flow. It also adds a stringiness to the paint that I love, similar to the behavior of white lead. Add to that the fact that its translucency allows for some delightful color effects and I'm hooked. Of course, it works best with linseed oil that you've refined yourself. Yes, I'm geeky enough to refine my own linseed oil now. Honest, it's better. Really.

These trees form a nearly straight line out toward the end of Jacobs Point. I assume they rooted in that way because of a ridge of drier land, perhaps originally a sand bar. I've got reference photos of them in all weather, including a notable day when I had to wade out in a Winter floodtide to take the pictures (no outdoor sketching that day). Standing near knee-deep in brackish water with a thin rime of ice on top was a bit of a trial, but I found that if I stayed reasonably still, the water that had overflowed the tops of my boots warmed up nicely. That was the day I resolved to buy a good pair of tall neoprene hunting boots, suitable for long walks in low temperatures and waterproof to their tops. Mine are by Kamik and very, very toasty.

First Post, And an Explanation

First off, welcome to my blog. I've had a website for years (www.nickjainschigg.org) but after a number of changes to the software I used to build it and the aging of the overall design, I've decided to relegate it to an archive and continue to post my work here. Yes, that is my real name. It sometimes strikes even me as somewhat preposterous. In the unlikely event that I learn PHP, MySQL, XHTML and the rest of the alphabet salad that makes up contemporary Web-design, I suppose I may redesign that space, but in the meantime....

I've Been Working on Landscapes

The area I live in has a lot of salt-marshes, and I've become enthralled with painting them. One in particular, Jacobs Point (no apostrophe) seems to take a lot of my attention. Perhaps because it's a nature preserve, perhaps because it's so conveniently close, but it's also gorgeous. I've done a number of paintings of the place, and have plans for many more. I've settled on a standard dimension for the pieces, too--two feet by four. The panoramic proportion seems to suit my sense of landscape design. I suppose it's because, growing up as I did in New York City, the broad view was always both rare and exotic, confined to such things as Central Park, Riverside Park, tall buildings with large windows, and Summer vacations.

This one is called Jacobs Point-September, and was inspired by the way the different types of grass brown over at different speeds, and by the way the few trees out at the end of the point cast long shadows over the marsh in late afternoon. This clump of phragmites reeds caught the light quite dramatically. The Warren Land Trust has been trying to return the Point to its original plant species by increasing the salt-water flow through the marsh. This will push the freshwater reeds back closer to the mainland and rather extensively reorder the painting possibilities of the place. At the moment the reeds, being so tall, create backdrops, walls and curtains that restrict the space in interesting ways. I'm looking forward to seeing how the local spartina grasses affect the overall look. I can only presume (and hope) that they regain some of the appearance that Martin Johnson Heade painted in his saltmarsh pieces, notably Newburyport Meadows.