Use Bigger Brushes
Obviously...
Oh boy. Guess what our family teamed up to buy for the holiday season? A high-speed photo scanner to digitize the thousands and thousands of photos and documents that have been haunting us from within the depths of various bins and boxes for decades.
This photo of Dad standing in front of a mural he painted in Chemainus in 1987/1988 was one of the first I scanned when testing out the new scanner.
Looking at it brought several things to mind about Dad and how he tackled big projects.
He rarely (never?) got any paint on him, even when the canvas was the length of a building.
He was endlessly polite with people who stopped by to ask questions like, “Are you painting that?” From atop his ladder, he would turn, paintbrush in hand, and reply, “It would seem that way, yes.” Somehow, when he answered, it didn’t come across as at all rude - just … patient.
He was undaunted by the huge, blank walls he faced. When asked, “How do you paint something that big?” he answered, “Bigger brushes.”
Oh, what a deceptively simple answer.
As you can imagine, a lot of planning went on before he grabbed his super-sized brushes, paints and ladder.
As we continued to work our way through papers, sketchbooks, mock-ups, notes, designs, and reference photos left in his studio, it was pretty cool to see evidence of progress from concept through the many steps involved in the execution of a mural (or print or painting or set of illustrations) to the finished piece.
For complex designs (like for the mural he designed in Ottawa, Illinois), there might be pages of drawings, sketches, notes, and reference images that were eventually brought together on a big wall…
Here’s how the mural eventually turned out:
For more information about the Ottawa murals project, visit this website.
In a weird twist of bureaucratic tangle, Dad wasn’t allowed to paint his own mural (US Border Services decision), so he partnered up with Murals by Jericho who executed the design under Dad’s supervision.
Despite the slowing of output here, I have been busy, busy, beavering away at various school-related projects. But, I’ve been restraining myself and not posting my homework here so you don’t need to endure my inner monologue as it spills onto the page.
For those following the school journey, the second semester of graduate studies is underway. So far we’ve tackled The Art of War, Ecclesiastes, Hildegard von Bingen, Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction, The Song of Roland, and The Bhagavad Gita. So, yes, we are off to a roaring good start and my brains are in a perpetual state of simultaneous expansion and deep confusion… Most days I can’t tell if I am learning anything or just adding to an increasingly huge stack of unanswered questions.
I do find myself in the unfortunate position of having so much cool material that I could be exploring through illustration but not enough time to do so… Though, I did cobble together a couple of portraits for a battle simulation exercise for my project on The Art of War.
That’s it for now! Until next time - ciao!
Loved it all, thank you! And can't wait to see more! (I'm working on graphic memoir, too, and would post a sample if I could figure out how in a comment! Please Substack, make that possible!)
Such a moving post and beautiful too.