Being Seated

Before the first stroke, there’s the ground. The bit nobody claps for. The concrete under the house, the tilled soil before the seed.

You’ve got your substrate, wood, Masonite, canvas, and you add a priming layer: a gesso coat, or a rabbit-skin glue coat. Something that lets the paint last and stay saturated and perky on the surface.

Take New Zealand timber. Lovely. But paint it raw and two things happen. First, the paint seeps into the wood and loses its potency and colour, like rain soaking into dry ground. Second, and worse, you shorten the life of the paint. All that’s needed is some white first.

Gesso differs from ordinary acrylic paint in two ways. No fillers, so nothing to weaken the paint. And it usually uses chalk, which makes the finished surface a bit more absorbent. Think of a sponge. Rather than running through into the wood, the paint sits on top and holds.

Someone asked about canvas tightness once, and I’ll tell you what I told them. Your canvas needs to sound like a drum. It must sound like a drum. If it doesn’t, it’s loose and flappy and won’t react well to your brush.

Here’s why. The brush flexes. With a canvas, the canvas flexes too. When the brush touches it, the canvas moves slightly, and there’s this dance that happens between brush and canvas. You push a little, it bounces back a little, and everything looks sleeker, more fluid, smoother. With Masonite you have to be more delicate, because the brush moves and the board won’t.

Paint right around the edges. If you go all the way around, you leave your options open for framing later, and if a floating frame goes on, you still see the paint wrapping round the side like a wave curling over a rock.

If you want thickness without spending a fortune on paint, there’s modelling paste. Artist’s cement, basically. It adds extreme thickness by default. Gesso primer in the mix can thicken things too, if you feel it’s necessary.

The studio matters as well. Mine is a shed with one whole side that opens. It’s watertight, but two things keep art safe: temperature and humidity. It doesn’t need to be a gallery or a wine cellar. It does need to stay within a band. You can’t get too moist, and you can’t get too hot. Cold’s kind of fine. Thermometers, dehumidifiers, and an honest eye on the weather.

And keep the space clean. I painted the studio floor dark, partly so every bit of dust would show and keep me on my toes. Messy workspace, messy mind. Big believer in that.

People ask why I mix on plates instead of a palette. I like plates. Porcelain plates are lovely to mix on. Disposable ones are good too, because when one’s done you take it away and there’s another waiting underneath, like the next clean page in a notebook.

But that’s not really why. I spent many, many hours in many, many years serving lovely faces in restaurants. The plate is my “don’t forget your roots”. You’d be surprised how much of waiting tables applies to painting. I can’t think of a single example right now. I’m sure there’s a bunch.

And first things first, every session: a nice clean plate. Numero uno. Liquid medium straight onto a flat plate will slush all over the place, so go easy, especially if you’re not on the grass.

My trusty brush is a shape that tapers to one end. It gives you detail and coverage in the same tool, a fat body and a sharp toe, like a good dog that can herd and also find a single dropped glove. Mine is now looking like a proper mess. We’ll have some fun with it anyway.

For my thirty-second birthday, my uncle gave me one of the most incredible gifts I could ask for: handmade paintbrushes. New Zealand timber, and you can see the change of the heartwood running through the handle. I was so precious about keeping them nice that I started with the square one.

Then there’s the monster. A brush so big it looks like a broom that’s been to art school. One load on that and even dry-brushing, the saturation pops with unstoppable power, because we’ve made the paint ourselves and haven’t used fillers.

I invented a brush once. I called it the Cooper brush, after my daughter, because I’d been out in the shed with her that morning. It’s a hatchet-style brush that comes off at an angle. When I get really close to the canvas, everything gets annoyingly cramped and there’s no grace in a stroke. So I cut the top off a hammer and the top off one of my brushes and screwed them together.

A prototype. If it works, fantastic. If it doesn’t, no harm, no foul. That’s how you should treat every tool. Including the ones you think you can’t live without.

Some housekeeping that’s really painting. Put your lids back on, always. I’m still learning that one. Wear a painting uniform: messy pants and a nice clean shirt, op-shop if you can. Sunscreen if you’re outside, even if it makes you look like the Abominable Snowman for ten minutes while it sinks in. Water nearby. Coffee if you must, but on a hot day, water.

And keep a bit of poster paint around if you have a toddler. When my daughter wanders in and wants to join, I can hand her a tub of poster paint and she thinks she’s joining me. Gaslighting 101. Only joking. These days she paints with egg tempera too. The kid has standards.

Every painter needs a cave. Mine started as a restaurant storage shed. Now it’s a chicken coop.

Back in 1981 the white wall behind me and the floor I stand on would have held a commercial number of chickens. The only reason I know is the council plans: it was approved as a commercial chicken coop. No chickens in here anymore. It’s all above board. It’s all art now, with a door that creaks.

Massive kudos to Shelby for letting me convert the whole shed into a studio.

The most important thing about this studio is that it’s a shed. Three walls and barn doors. That gives you a massive space to work in. It also gives you an airflow problem.

So there are two holes in the back wall that run through to extractors, and three fans, a little bit dinky but they work, pushing air one way while the extractors suck it out as fast as they can. Between them we’re moving somewhere around two hundred and fifty cubic metres a minute. I still want to get a smoke flare and set it off at different points in the studio, to see physically what the air is doing, because it might not be as good as I think it is.

I painted the floor light grey. Didn’t work. Medium grey. Better. Then I wanted to go black.

Black will keep me on my toes. Every little bit of dust will show, and I’ll have to keep cleaning. This needs to be a semi dust-free environment so paint can actually dry, so it doesn’t matter that it’s a really dark surface. Unconventional for a shed. Messy workspace, messy mind. I’m a big believer in that.

White on the inside. Black on the outside. We’ll see what comes to fruition.

In the studio, I love the paints laid out perfectly. Blues in their different hues, yellows, greens, purples, all your whites, all your blacks, beautifully laid out. If your paints aren’t organised, you end up using colours as compromises instead of the one you were actually looking for.

My problem is going between the studio and the outdoors. Out in nature, rain’s coming, there’s wind and there are mosquitoes, and you want to get the job done efficiently, and you’d never go out there without all your colours. So the box comes back a mess. Then I lay it all out again.

There’s a moment, as paint gets really thick on the surface, when instead of making ground you’re just moving it around. Like porridge. And while I love porridge, porridge in painting form is not so great. That’s when I move to another painting and let this one dry.

Loki is a golden retriever. When he was ten months old he was gigantic and the best-behaved puppy you’d want, and very good with Cooper, which was one of our biggest worries. They say dogs mould themselves into what a family needs. I reckon that’s what Loki’s done. The neighbours’ dogs bark, and he never joins in.

He has the most expensive dog bed you’ll ever see: a giant slab of Italian amber glass, three and a half metres long and a metre and a half wide. It was an insurance job. Someone smashed the base and was selling the top off on Marketplace. No one wanted it without the base. Except me. The plan is for it to run through the middle of the studio as a table.

And the plate I mix on today is French glass from an op shop. No one else wanted that either. Its last home is the art workshop. Everything in here is something nobody else wanted, given a second life. Maybe that’s the point.

Around the studio there’s a whole bunch of fruit trees. Massive olive trees, with apparently a commercial number of olives on the way. Feijoas, I think. Definitely peaches. Pears.

And on the roof, an old-school fire extinguisher I’d never seen before in my life, which lets out a reservoir of water. That has to come off at some stage. Water all over the art would be just about as bad as fire.