: www.dace.co.uk :
strange but beautiful paintings
A nymph in a landscape
inspired by Boucher and Falconet
painted on a wooden tea tray
Present state as at April 2007.
Initial drawing. This detail is about 6 inches high, and the whole tray is 17.5 inches in diameter. Work started in 2005 but only resumed this year.
Here are the first two in a series of images of this work in progress. I started with a standard IKEA tray, which is made in China out of what appears to be light pine. I am beginning to regret using a tray because in order to make it look properly rococo I shall have to remove the handles. On the other hand the colour of the wood coming through the paint gives the painting a real glow.
When the painting is finished of course it will be far too lovely to use for serving tea except when the Queen pops round.
(Ooh! I can see her chauffeur-driven Roller coming round the corner! Best put the kettle on. - Cup of tea, ma'am? - Ohh yes please, I'm fair cream crackered after a busy day Queening. - P.G tips or Co-op 99? - As long as it's warm and wet, I don't mind. Make it nice and strong, though. - Digestive biscuit? I'll get out the chocolate ones, seeing as how you're the Queen. - Ooh you do spoil me! Thank you ducks! Mind if I take my shoes off? What a lovely tray! It's got a naked lady on it, that's a bit saucy isn't it?)
But I digress.
I might scan the final image and have it printed in lightfast inks. Then I could create similar trays by découpage, which would look almost as good as the real thing, but a lot easier to make. I can foresee some technical difficulties, though. We'll see.
I have also used this image on my poetry page Love: four haiku. This experimental page works properly in a standards-compliant browser, but only sort-of in Internet Explorer 6 for Windows.
Click on the link for another Boucher-style extravagance on an IKEA tray: shepherd and shepherdess.
Technical information
First I drew the nymph, and a very rough outline of the landscape, in pencil.
Then I lightly sanded the tray with fine wet-and-dry paper in order to give it a slight tooth, making the drawing fainter in the process. I then sealed the drawing in by applying a layer of a mixture of damar varnish, turpentine and linseed oil in roughly equal parts. This prevented the later paint layers picking up the pencil, and provided a suitable ground on which to paint. Maybe painting straight onto the original varnish would have worked, but I didn't want to risk it.
This painting medium takes a long time to dry when used neat, but dries much faster when mixed with pigment, particularly raw umber. Most of the initial painting was done with a very floppy brush, to create a sort of textured haze suggestive of hills and trees.
After establishing a tonal drawing in raw umber I added a lot of highlight to the figure of the nymph, using titanium white. At the current stage I am adding green to the tonal painting and adding plants in the foreground.
All images are copyright © Martin Dace 2007: you must contact me for permission if you wish to publish or reproduce my pictures. Permission will usually be granted for web use provided my authorship and copyright is acknowledged and a link back to my site is provided. A link from my website to yours is also a possibility.