Days of Wine and Hedges

Meet "Pensive Bacchus".......my newest mural for a wine cellar. 

My clients love France...and they asked me to design a "sculpture" of a young Bacchus along the lines of Michelangelo's adolescent Bacchus....(not the riotous infant Bacchus or dipsomaniac paunchy Bacchus, although they would have been fun)....against a stylized " Versaille" parterre or tall trimmed hedge. 

All this against a base color of deep cobalt blue, which I pointed up with a  ceiling comet of gold leaf stars and a sprinkling of stars on the ceiling, the sky and some of the parterre. 

The wine cellar is to the left, and this mural is in a small tasting room.  The "hedge" or parterre will extend all the way around the room.  The effect I aimed for is a moonlit night, and it's surprising how the deep color and the repetitive patterns have enlarged the space visually.

I literally overlapped on two big projects.....had to place plastic over my big triptych pieces and whale away on the wine cellar mural.  It can be done.

And here are some of my steps....

I painted some of my Roclon canvas a deep cobalt blue.  I don't have to stretch this type of canvas (see [email protected] for sources) ; otherwise I couldn't have overlapped my underlying canvas as I did. 

 
I drew and cut my stencils for the leaf patterns and drew my Bacchus on tissue and pricked the lines with a pouncing tool. Then I started applying layers of stencilled leaf patterns onto the cobalt canvas.....lighter yellows and greens at the top, darker greens and black greens at the bottom.

Then I started glazing with blue, purple, and black glazes in the appropriate areas....darker at the bottom.

 I then pounced the pattern with white chalk, and then followed the pouncing points with a fine white line of paint and started filling him in with naples yellow, leaving some bluish areas for shadows or adding  and changing shadows with a mixture of paynes grey and naples yellow.

After I got the Bacchus to not look so snarky,  I applied  a glaze of cobalt blue and/or red violet to Bacchus and all of the hedge at once.  I wiped  off a few areas about the shoulders, his head, his wine glass, his fingers and left arm to create a feeling of moonlight falling on his form.

My client and I worked together on the application of the canvas to the wall, rolling claybased adhesive (Roman brand at Rodda Paint) on both the wall and the canvas...waiting for about 20 minutes to let the adhesive set up, applying the mural to the wall, smoothing it out from the center....and then, cleaning up!

I finished the mural the day before Xmas Eve, when my talented clients included Phil and me in a sit down, Oh La La,  fourteen dish, (Julia Child recipes,) 7 wine FEAST for Revillion de Noel. A work of art in itself.

Uh.  Sorry to say, after that,  we didn't end up the evening with the traditional Midnight Mass.

Today we have felt blissfully weak and wandered around all day in our pajamas.

Salut.