Paint It BLACK: Shipwreck With Countless Spectators Helpless to Save Them

That Old Shipwreck Scene

Neither that rainstorm in the middle of the night
Nor the brilliant sunlit day changes a thing
The castaways are doomed

Those well-fed victims clinging to a black raft
Mounted on the wall in the Louvre
Will float adrift forever waving at that distant ship

Never to be rescued
Yet never to eat nor starve
And I say well fed because these are models

Parisians with full bellies and not those
Who at the moment depicted
Had neither nibble nor sip for two weeks

Always in torment much like a frozen ball
Of worms or tangled marionettes smeared with tar
Painted with bitumen a fake paint

And their tipsy raft is lost upon choppy water
Meringue on lemon pie not yet cut into wedges
Never placed on the table with fork and cup of tea

Just a raft of people who have perpetually
Lost their boat and are fated to float till the end of time
Last night’s rain will not quench their thirst

None of the thousands who walk through the gallery
May pause for a moment wondering what is going on
Will ever come to rescue The Raft of the Medusa

Sinking and never sinking
Perpetually doomed
Under the weight of inky paint

I discovered decades ago why Gericault's painting was so unintendedly dark. He had unwittingly been using a tar-like substance, bitumen, to modulate tones. Bitumen was not a pigment. Each particle of pigment is a microscopic chip of a colorful piece of mineral. Bitumen is not a mineral. When mixed with linseed oil the bitumen would form a dark skin around each colored pigment particle. This mistake became visible only as the painting dried, leaving each particle of pigment shrouded in a black veil.

Many other artists had also played with the seemingly polychromatic "pigment" Bitumen, but Gericault's massive depiction of a newsworthy catastrophe caught the most attention. Fortunately for artworks still unpainted, once the downside of bitumen was discovered artists removed it from their palettes and studios. The Raft of the Medusa contains so much bitumen it serves forever as a dark warning.

The painting itself is forever tossed about in the cloak of a dark sea.

Also exhibited in the Louvre, althought not in the same gallery as the large canvas, are two of Gericault's small prepartory sketches for the famous painting.

One is an oil sketch.

Both studies are bitumen-free. IN A WORD, BITUMEN IS: COAL TAR.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Mummy's Curse and the Armani Suit

Image
    There’s a reason it’s called rag paper.   For centuries, ragpickers supplied the papermaking industry with cotton and linen. Discarded clothing scraps were the aluminum cans of the past. They provided a livelihood to the unskilled. At the dawn of the Industrial Age, everything changed. A rising bourgeoisie and the success of education lead to increasing demand for printed material. The impact upon paper and the rag   supply chain was unanticipated. Consumption of traditional cotton and linen scraps outstripped supply.   The price of rags rose. When demand for papermaking material exceeded supply, alternate sources were sought.    One long forgotten trove of very, very old rags was rediscovered in the 1800s: linen wrapped Egyptian mummies. A Maine papermill owner imported a boatload of them and removed the linen wrappings. The linen was then converted into pulp with the end product being butcher wrap.   Production of the brown   ...
Read more

Jackson Pollock's Over-Splatter

Image
  Jackson Pollock's Over-Splatter,   How They Happened, Where They are Located, Why They Went Unnoted for More than Fifty Years, and How They May be Understood and Put to Use By Sandy Kinnee and Lauren Kinnee, Ph.D. Once You See the Drips You will Always See them PART 2 Jackson Pollock’s Stray Drips (Over-Splatter): Their origins and implications   Abstract   This paper proposes a wholly new method for reconstructing the chronology of Jackson Pollock's oeuvre based on the presence of drips of stray pigment on otherwise cohesive canvases.  Pollock, after having finished a painting and let it dry, moved it to the side in his studio where it occasionally accumulated drips and other marks that were the byproduct of his working method.  These marks, here termed ‘over-splatter,’ are present on both recto and verso of many Pollocks in major museums.  Lavender Mist of 1950, for example, has a large and distinctive red splotch on the front, right s...
Read more

Noguchi Doing Time

Image
  Noguchi Doing Time     While it is true that at Poston Isamu Noguchi was neither fish nor fowl not fully Japanese and was in the internment camp voluntarily None of those   who had reason to not want him around had authority to release him.   He was a perpetual outsider in a similar way Jackson Pollock was portrayed as a cowboy but was anything but Except for the drinking   Two artists doing time in ill-fitting Pigeonholes             Sandy Kinnee New York October 10, 2019    
Read more