This is the first video of 'Wisteria' once it was reglued to the wood frame after the ground bubbling loose when it was attached to plaster.
Why attach it to plaster in the first place? I had been studying some scientific papers about Caravaggio's 'Medusa' and its restoration. I discovered he used plaster and glue as a mixture and I wanted to try it with this painting back in 2016.
I now understand that the mixture I used was not the same as he did, but being an experiment I trudged forward even though this painting was doomed from the onset. In the month intervening between 04/2019 and 09/2019 the whole project hung in doubt as if it could be done, but luckily I found some books on vacuum veneering and it was restored to life.
I also hated how dark blue the sky was in this and tried at the end to lighten it, but it stayed dark blue no matter what I tried. I'd like to do this piece again just larger as I learned many new processes and what does and does not work.
It is my hope that next time I can have it made directly on the wood or canvas without any water soluble plaster-glue mixture layers at all. Studying that Caravaggio painting and actually using plaster as a ground helped form my whole present theory of painting. I believe oil painting in the Renaissance was born out of wall painting. They put plaster on the walls of the Sistine Chapel when Michaelangelo painted it.
This was also the error of Leonardo Da Vinci, when he tried to oil paint 'The Last Supper' over plaster and the calcium sulphate di-hydrate ate into his oil paint later caustically eating through the entire painting. By Caravaggio's time, nearly 100 years later in the Baroque times, this problem Leonardo had was likely well known. To mitigate this occurance, they put an isolation layer between the paint layers and the plaster-glue layers because of these unfavorable kinds of reactions.
My experimental layer didn't work as well as Caravaggio's shield against plaster, but I do believe 'Medusa' has tons of cracks today on it due to this water soluble layer he used. I also believe his excessive use of verdigris, the only green color at his time & also water soluble led to this cracking.
The most interesting thing I learned in that study was that Caravaggio used verdigris prepared according to the salt green recipe recommended in the Theophilus manuscript 'On Diverse Arts' probably written by German Monk Roger of Helmarhausen at the turn of the first millenium, around 1000 AD.
I've tried manufacturing this Theophilus green and its actually more sparkly and crystalline in appearance like atacamite is, versus the modern belief that verdigris is composed of copper acetate. I wouldn't recommend using any of the copper greens of the ancients today, as we have much better chromium greens.
My favorite to use is chromium hydroxide, (although chromium oxide is very stable and very usable). The chromium greens, unlike verdigris, can be mixed with almost all the other paints like lead white, cobalt and cadmium colors and mostly anything else without difficulty.
This is the video series for an oil painting 'Wisteria' I did from 2016-2020. The painting was destroyed in 2021 due to a number of reasons, but mainly: the painting's faulty experimental linseed-epoxide substrait, Covid-19 crushing lockdowns, extreme poverty, family attacks and ongoing US government (Big Tech + Big Media) censorship of me and my 30 years of artwork.
Its not ideal to not be able to show this piece, but I still gained the knowledge of how to do it and invented several useful oil painting mediums & varnishes used in its creation which never yellowed and still cannot be bought anywhere.
I am posting these videos for posterity and for people that are interested in seeing an oil painting created from start to finish in the Baroque style evolved for the 21st century. I also must have deleted some of the initial videos when I did the quick underpainting, but what still exists, I give to you.
I hope this can be an educational experience as no gallery will show any of my controversial art even today.
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