modern 70s living room

today, we are going to be workingin the manner of yayoi kusama. specifically. her infinity net paintings. these are the paintings thatreally launched her career here in new york city in the 1950s. you'll see that we're working on, i guesswhat i'd say is a medium format painting. it will be an easel painting shortly,as you'll see. you'll also notice thatthis canvas is stretched.

and it is already primed here. kusama, typically, not always. but almost always workedon primed canvases. and very much like all the other artistswe're discussing together in this course. there's not one way that kusamamade an infinity net painting. there's not one way that martinmade a gridded composition. so we're just exploring one approach here. feel free to experimentquite wildly from this. all right.

so what we're going to do here, first of all,is to apply a base coat of a color. let that dry. and then we're going to work ontop of that in so-called net to the gestural brushstrokesover this work. and in fact, because i'm pressed fortime a little bit. and you may be, too, in the studio. i certainly could work in oil. put on a flat coat of oil. but then i might have to wait a week forthat oil to dry.

so i'm going to work in a firstcoat of acrylic emulsion paints. those are water soluble paints. i'm going to let that dry anduse a hair dryer. you can dry it quite quickly. and then i'm going to switch to oil forthe top coat. rule of thumb here, one more time. don't forget, please. it's totally fine towork in oil over acrylic. it is not totally fine towork in acrylic over oil.

if you paint acrylic over oil,it's going to peel off rather quickly. oil over acrylic, no problem. that's what we're going to do here. okay. so let's talk about mixing paints here. i'm working with acrylic emulsion paints. these happen to be made by dick blick. but there are plenty of the othercompanies out there that make good ones. and what i've decided to do today isto make a black and white painting.

as kusama did somany times early in her career. but black by itself isa little bit boring. at least i happen to think so. so i'm going to juice up this blacka little bit by making it somewhat chromatic. i'm going to start off witha generous douse of black paint here. what i'm going to do is usea little bit of burnt umber. this is a much warmer color here. kind of a dark brown color. add some of that in there.

and i'm going to make it a littlebit complicated with a dioxazine. an organic violet color. adding some of that there, as well. now, black and white are colors that reallyoverwhelm what other colors you add them to. so this is still going to look quiteblack by the time i'm done with it. depending on the consistencyof your paint out of the tube. you may need to add water. i don't, because this is going tobe a nice brushable paint here.

but if you're working withsome artist quality acrylic, sometimes they have a heavy pigment load. sometimes they're kindof toothpaste thickness. and you may want to add some solvent. in this case, some water to thin that. so, nice thorough mixing there. you can use the canvas to clean offyour paint brush, your palette knife. why not? another thing to think about here iswhat is going to happen to the edges?

kusama usually left the primingvisible on the edges of her canvas. and sometimes the net, the gesturalcomposition, goes slightly over the edge. again, feel free to deviate thisfrom this model as much as you like. and what i'm going to do now. this is very similar to just the brushingtechnique of how to gesso a painting. i'm just going to stretchout this paint quite thinly. quite widely here, using a lot ofaction with the bristles of the brush. forcing that paint down into all thelittle interstices of the canvas here to make sure i don't have anywhite peeking through.

now, the reason i'm stretching this outis that i don't want to have a lot of texture here. why? well, the texture is going to come inthat second coat, as we'll see shortly. other things you may do,depending on your fancy here. you may use masking tape onthe edges of your priming here. and what that would do is allowyou to have a really crisp line between this dark violet brown color. violet black color that i'm adding here.

and the white priming visibleon the edges of your canvas. again, that's purely aesthetic. it has nothing to do with the structuraldimension of the painting. it's really just how it looks. so just very quickly fanning out this nicekind of black violet layer i put on here. and now i'm really just barelykissing over the canvas here. barely touching it. so i'm really smoothingout the surface and not leaving a whole lot of brushwork behind.

and because this is an acrylic emulsion paint,it's waterborne paint. this is going to dry very quickly,i've painted this very thinly. so it should dry within an hour orsomething like that. again, if you're in a rush. using a hair dryer is a niceway to speed up this process. okay, soour paint layer is now completely dry. and what i'm going to do nextis to do some sanding here. i'll tell you why in a second. but any time you're sanding paint, youreally need to make sure it's bone dry.

because if it's a little bit wet,then you're going to end up smearing it. and pulling and perhaps tearing the paint. so, what i'm going to do here is justwork with a medium grit sandpaper. it's 120. you don't want to use something that's reallyrough here. but it's not socritical what grade you are using. and the reason i'm going dosome sanding here is twofold. one, i want to matte out this surface. as you can see, in the way that the lightis reflecting off the surface here.

it's pretty glossy. and, in fact, the top coat that i'mgoing to put on is also pretty glossy. so i want to provide a littlebit of interesting matte gloss relationships so i'm going to sand outthe surface to matte this out. to provide a kind of counterpoint to theglossy top coat that i'm about to put on. number two, in sanding. [sound] i'm also starting to exposethe tops of the weave white again. so, in other words, i'm sanding off someof this acrylic paint i just put on to give me a really nice active surface.

not something that's so flat here. and you can see a little goes a long way. so, just very light sanding. [sound] one thing you don'twant to do is sand too hard. push down too hard on the edges. because remember,looking at the back of the canvas. you have this wooden stretcher bar here. and if i'm sanding right over that edge. and i'm pushing down the canvas.

i'm going to get a ratherstupid looking white line. a box within a box,all the way around the painting. so, don't press here. really just some lightsanding is all we need. [sound]all right. so we have the canvas on the easel now. we're going do some work with the brush. and i just want toemphasize that this is not the way to make an infinity net painting.

kusama worked in many different ways. sometimes with sanding,sometimes without, for example. what i've chosen to do here is towork with a titanium white oil paint. remember, oil over acrylic no problem. the reverse, big problem. working with titanium white,which is kind of a neutral white color. not too warm. slightly on the cool side of whites here. and hopefully has a nice contrastwith this roughed up background here.

so what i'm going to startdoing here is just to squeeze some of this paint from the tube here. and you see that its consistencyis very similar to toothpaste. quite thick or quite pastose. as i'm getting a feel forthis paint here, it's quite sculptural. in fact, i'm actually working asa sculptor here in the palette. pushing this these really pastose,this really stiff paint around. and it's that kind of use of oil here. the sculptural use of oil that we'rereally going to be playing with.

and my first brush load,you see here, is kind of a scoop. typically, you'd wipe off excess paintfrom your brush to paint like this. i'm going to use that excess paint. i'm scooping that paint up, almosttrowelling that paint onto the brush. and as i'm getting ready forthe first mark of the painting here, it's just going to bekind of a looping mark. now i'm going to simply reload andthen make a similar one of those marks. and we start to see that, okay,the gesture here was almost identical for those two marks.

what kind of gesture is it? it's a movement of the fingers. the wrist is pretty much stationary. the elbow's absolutely stationary. so as we start seeing here, each one of thesebrush strokes is a little bit different. they're all off kilter,they're all cousins. in a way, it's the same kind ofgestures here again and again. slow, tracing gestures usingcurves of the fingers,the thumb a little bit

of the knuckles here. not really the wrist, not the elbows andcertainly not the torso like the. so something serial, there's definitely somethingrepetitious about this kind of brush work. there is something therapeuticabout this kind of mark making. there are many legends about kusama, manyof them propagated by the artist herself, that she would stay up for days on end,with this kind of brush stroke and a huge canvas, literally doing exactly what i'mdoing right now for three days straight. now, whether that's actually true or not,well, maybe we'll find out, maybe not.

but, regardless, what i'd like youto try to do here is really lose yourself in this serial activityhere as a way to quiet the mind. now i'm talking here andtrying to describe what i'm doing. but very likely in the studio, if you canreally lose yourself in this activity, you won't be thinking about your job,or your children, or whatever it is, whatever kind ofstresses that you have on your mind. normally, you can really loseyourself in this activity. and this is not unique to painting. some people get the same loss of inertiaand escape from anything repetitious.

chopping wood, running, sowing, whatever itis that you're accepting what's happening here. you're not doing any kind of aggressiveediting, you're just allowing the mind to just accept what the hand is doinghere and really just to go with the flow. because i'm working withpaint unadulterated here, straight out of the tube, you'll noticethat there's a lot of very rich imposto. there's some very loud tracksof the brush, if you will. all these bristles leaving thesestrokes in the paint here. and you'll see that in some,but not all of kusama's work, because as i

run out of this paint. i'll change it, i'll do something elseto it, and then a different zone of this infinity net will take on a differentcharacter from a preceding one. it's important that these brush strokesgo all the way to the edge, and perhaps over it. these infinity nets, they're allover a composition meaning that. just kind of slow gestural, tracing markmaking does indeed go all over the canvas. it's not something that iskind of relational composition where you're reading onepart to another part.

instead, this entire paintingwill be able to of a kind, it will have a kind of optical flow. couple of things i'd like tobring your attention to here. first of all,i'm not doing a whole lot of editing. i'm accepting almost everysingle mark that's made here. also, i'm trying to reallyhave some kind of consistency. not exactly the same kind of mark, but samekind of speed, the same general amount of paint on the brush. also, i'm leaving roughly the sameamount of empty white space between all of

these marks, but you cansee that none of these are identical. of course, each one is different, but they'reall informed by the same general parameters of mark making. where did kusama's technique come from? well, in the slide lecture this week, we talkedabout her hallucinations that she had as a young girl. but certainly, when she arrivedin new york city in the 1950s as a japanese woman, the odds were stackedrather violently against her chances of becoming a successful artist in this verymale dominated new york avant-garde, kusama

a very bright young woman. you better believe she did some carefullooking at the other painters around her. and i promise you that she was deeply andvery sensitively aware of the abstract paintings of philip guston in the 1950s. guston known for his very slowanxiety-ridden kind of nervous brushwork. which doesn't look identical to whati'm doing here, and what kusama often does in her work, but rather,it's a reference for kusama. the slow sculpture orsculpting type of brush stroke here. because actually, if you look at each andevery one of these marks here,

think about them as individual sculptures. and in fact,when you start to explore kusama's work, you realize that shedoes make sculptures but all these strange little organicprotrusions off of them and really those are an extension on this very sculpturalprocess of painting that she practiced. okay, so i've a nice start here, and we cansee some really beautiful texture being developed here, a lot of reallybizarre and interesting little nnoks and crannies. these voids, these black voids in there.

but i am going to use somethinga little bit different. adding a little bit ofa material called maygilp. maygilp has been used since the italianrenaissance and you can see it's thick, kind of this honey consistency. but you can see it's like addinghoney into your paint here. and it's going to soften the textureof the paint considerably. so, this next area of the paintingthat i'm going to be working with, is going to have more ofa buttery consistency, rather than that toothpaste consistencyof our first paint application.

kusama would more typically doing this, addingsome more medium to her paint in a different hour of painting, let's say. so that although the infinity netis relatively consistent in terms of the color, in terms of the brushwork, etc. the paint itself does have these doeshave these rather nebulous zones floating around within it. and what you'll notice in a studio, when youstart adding more medium into your paint, whether it's maygilp, as i'm workinghere, or perhaps venetian turpentine, another medium.

or just more binder,more linseed oil or poppy. the oil is that the feed backfrom your own hand has changed. and be sensitive to whatthis paint feels like. because it's really part of the processas i'm feeling out this canvas, as i'm allowing painting toreally grow in front of me here. the friction this really slow, solid,mark making that i started out with here has been replaced by somethingmuch smoother, much softer and much more buttery again, here. so that you hand knows that, and as you'rebecoming a better painter, now when you look

at that paint, you should be able toknow, that's what that paint feels like. and this is going to help you when youstart going to museums and galleries, and you start understanding how someof these gestural paintings, the aesthetics that the artistsare dealing with, have so much to do with the way theirbody moves with the way. that they've prepared the materialto track the different actions or gestures of the body in different ways. so, even though my hand is moving inthe identical way, as i did earlier here, the pain feels different,the paint looks different, and really, this

is the name of the game here. this is how this painting isgoing to grow in an organic way. okay, and for the third application here,sticking with nice titanium white here. but now i'm just going to usegood old fashioned linseed oil. this is the binder that'salready in this paint. so, i'm just going to give ita haphazard nice generous douse there. and again, i'm not going to be to methodicalabout blending this paint perfectly. because in fact, i like the fact that eachone of my brushstrokes are a little bit different here, so, i’m just going to getsome of that nice juicy medium in there.

and this is good enough, a kind ofheterogeneous, incompletely mixed, blobby, kind of slimymixture of this paint. and this heterogeneity is what i'mactually going to capture here. what i'm also going to capture isa different geometry of my hand here. because everything i've been doing,i happen to be right-handed, everything has a certain logic to it,based on how a right-handed person is going to move the knuckles andthe wrist, so on and so forth. i don't want that to informthe entire painting. so rather than paint left-handed, althoughyou could do that if you're feeling daring,

i'm just going to changethe orientation of the painting, and i'll continue to do this a coupletimes throughout the painting. so that, again, it's one more variables thateach one of these little zones within the entire infinitynet composition is imparted with a slightly different character. and now i'm going to carry onpainting exactly the same kind of gestural slow brush mark that imade before, but look at that already. you'll notice that because this is sopoorly mixed, intentionally poorly mixed, that it's falling off of my brush.

it's going to have a slightly lumpy,moving blobby kind of a texture. great, i'm accepting everything here,and that's the name of the game. work with it, don't try to force it tofollow any kind of preconceived notion of what the painting should look like,and allow it to be translating your hand in different ways as youmove across the canvass. okay, so after a nice course of paintinghere, a painting that could be finished or could keep going. couple things i want to drawyour attention to, first of all, these different zones of the paintingthat each have their own character.

this area here,you can see these dry brush marks, which really highlight the texture of thecanvas, at the end of those brush strokes, contrast that to a much more richlypainted area that has some really thick, kind of blobby soft areas of paint. and then,contrast that to some more thick paint, but here the texture is much heavier. we have a much more crisp kind of impastothere, kind of a crackle of the paint as you have some of these realstiff spikes of paint peaking up. the reason forchanging that consistency is that, okay, this

is an all over composition,but it doesn't get boring. because your eye has no center of gravityhere, your eye kind of, restlessly moves around this canvas, and it's not the same,so that, wherever your eye roams, there's always something reallysatisfying for it to appreciate. this is the reason why kusama'spainting work when they're real small. when they're medium format, or whenthey're huge and almost environmental. other things to think about, some kusama paintingsare not painted as thickly as this. some are actually quite thin,others are thicker than this.

so start to think about howyou want to handle your paint. also, this painting is not necessarilydone, sometimes what she does then is to go back into these black holes, if youwill, with something really dilute,and to color them, or to make them glossy,or to make them matte. so that essentially what we are dealingwith is a figure and a ground, only two part painting, but she does very, very complexhandling of that figure and that ground. so a painting here looks really simple,white on black in the beginning but as we start to test our hand andalso our eyes on them, we realize that there's

actuallya lot of complexity here.

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