Two week painting - process (Part One)

I don't know about you but a good portion of my work never gets sold or hung or shown. They simply sit, waiting. And not that they're unsuccessful, though god knows there are a ton of those, too! But more because they've kinda fulfilled their purpose, I don't like them enough to hang it in my house so it needs to be repurposed. Such is the case in this "Tale of a Substrate". 

It's had a LIFE!

The first go-round, for this homemade cradle board, was  early days in my "new" studio when I had this abundance of energy and inspiration and productivity that was a THING to behold. The first of which was documented here and above. It was so. dark. More literally than figuratively. I liked the way it turned out but I didn't want to hang it. So it morphed into this:

Created for a show, and described here including the final painting above, it DID hang in my house after being shown. But I made the mistake of putting it into our "cottage" aka three-season sunroom and guess what? If you put encaustic works in a freezing space, the wax chips off. Lesson learned. So the poor board has been sitting in my studio nether regions waiting for a redo. It required a fairly lengthy process of melting the remaining wax, scraping that off and pulling off any of the under layers that I could before being gessoed over. It's been awhile! 

But never fear, enter Week 19 for Let's Face it 2025 with Sabra Issa. Her lesson features a mixed media substrate and whilst she's using unstretched canvas, I thought this a perfect opportunity to reuse this cradle board. Additional texture was added with old papers and cheesecloth.

Here it is in the deconstruction phase:

And here it is all scraped, textured and gessoed:

Sabra was taking inspiration from Gustav Klimt, specifically the textured background and frame within a frame as well as the use of a gold background:

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907 by Gustav Klimt

Portrait of Joseph Pembauer, 1890 by Gustav Klimt

So I did my drawing also using gold as the background:

And the final portion of this week's lesson, laying in the values on the portrait, darkening and defining my framework. And now it awaits next week's finishing of glazing and colour which I'll document in Part Two of this two week painting lesson.