This Could Be The Last Time
5/2/2024 2:51:22 PM
"Well, this could be the last time
This could be the last time
Maybe the last time
I don't know"
I have blogged about the Dresden Frauenkirche so many times now even I am getting sick of it.
In a nutshell, there is an authentic rebuild of an amazing centuries old church located in Dresden, Germany. The reason it is a modern reproduction is because during the Second World War, Allied Forces bombed the previous one to smithereens (defined in most dictionaries as “biscuit to Volkswagen Beetle sized bits and pieces of something once monstrously huge, not one iota of which can be recognized for what it once was”).
I loved this church the second I laid eyes on it, which is why I have painted it more than once. And as I have previously reported, a version hangs in our dining room in direct line of vision to where I usually sit and it annoys the living hell out of me.
I also previously reported that I painted another one from scratch, hoping to correct all the things that irritate me about the first attempt. This 2023 version has not yet migrated to the dining room; rather it remained on an easel in my art studio. I see it at least five days out of seven and while it addressed much of what annoys me about the dining room version, it still came up short for me.
So I sat and thought, a process which bears considerable resemblance to Winnie the Pooh (often depicted as thumping his stuffed head with his stuffed paw whilst mumbling “Think, Think, Think” in Sterling Holloway's voice).
Every single how-to-paint tutorial since the beginning of time tells you to get up and walk away from a painting on a regular basis to see what it looks like from across the room. That is the vantage point where most people will see it. If you stand too close and don’t take the long view you’ll be much more likely to give the background, midground, and foreground the same “feel.” I suck at following this standing order.
When I created all these paintings, I believe that I was able to separate the church from the buildings behind it. However, the statue of Martin Luther (which survived WWII) stands at least 200 feet in front of the church in real life, and you would never know it looking at the painting as I left it in 2023. I had, and have, zero interest in attempting a third 4 ft by 3 ft version of this scene, so I Winnie the Pooh thunk thunk thunk for several months on what to do. When enough time had passed that any remaining sentimentality regarding all the effort that had gone into the second big painting had flown away, I decided to ACT!
This meant picking up a paintbrush again and glazing the church. What is glazing? In this case, it meant painting over the church with a homemade glop prepared using unmeasured amounts of paint and linseed oil. This is often how things like mist, smoke, and fog can be put into oil paintings, which I have done before many times. This was the first time I’d tried the method to use deliberate translucency to blur down a single feature comprising over one third of a large painting. I think it worked well, which is terrific because the only other possible outcome would have been that I'd ruined the painting. Having done this, and seeing that it worked, I then added some white highlights on parts of the Martin Luther statue and the folks since the late afternoon sun is obviously coming from the left.
In my mind there is now a clear foreground (Martin Luther statue and friends), midground (the Frauenkirche), and background (the buildings and whatnot behind the Frauenkirche). This might not be how it strikes you, but tough bananas if that's the case. It’s not going to hang in your dining room.*
So there we have it. I give my solemn word that this will be the last time you will read about the Frauenkirche on this website. Unless I paint it some day from a different vantage point.
ps - Before and After
2023
2024 version (after glazing)
*Unless you buy it, of course 😊
