Monday 30 January 2012

Funcia di basilicu (part 1)

Fungus is not something you tend to give a second thought to most days, am I right? I am.

I think there are aspects of this range of organisms to provide food for thought. And food for, well food too, in some cases.

Take the case of "Funcia di basilicu" which is a fungus perhaps little known beyond Sicily where, even there, it only grows in a fairly small area. For me this thing has a number of interesting properties. It forms an interesting shape, it lives somewhere I might like to go on holiday, you can eat it and it is (I gather) delicious. There are other properties that lead me to select this fungus as my subject but I will tell you about those another time.

I will be doing a number of smaller paintings so I begin with a large canvas that I'm cutting up.

Well, they say a picture paints a thousand words. I don't think we need those words here.
Next I do the diligent thing and put gesso on the canvas squares & allow them to dry.

I will be doing another engraving but some things will be in a different order. I start with the usual undercoat background.
Sure, it's not very exciting yet... but you never know what's coming next...

Tools! Now I'd found it tricky getting the most out of a jar of moulding paste with my moulding knife. There was a reasonable volume of stuff that was a pain to get out. I wanted a spoon but obviously this is not the job for your family silver. I remember that one of my daughters use to be very fond of a particular bent yellow plastic spoon when she was a toddler. She'd grip this spoon with her whole fist and shovel in whatever food you put in front of her. If only we could get her to eat everthing with such gusto now. Anyway, I found the spoon, it works a treat and it was lovely for me looking back on those toddler days.

If you check my "Mobile Event Horizon" blog entries you will see that I put the moulding paste on and waited for it to dry. This time I want more control over the thickness of the lines so I'm engraving the wet paste.

As you can see, this strange fungus looks a little bit like bent jugs or vases. Very peculiar stuff. Obviously we are not finished with this yet. I now have to wait for the paste to dry which could take a few days (although I hope that it will be quicker than that as it is only up to about 1mm thick).

No comments:

Post a Comment