Antemortem Arts | Fine Art & Custom Paintings

Cross the Sky

Thursday, July 14th, 2011

Cross the Sky by Amy Crook, $499

This piece took an amazingly long amount of time to complete. I used a steel-nib quill pen (with a real feather on it, very silly) dipped in purple ink to do all the crosshatching, and not only did it just take a lot of time to physically draw all those tiny lines, I had to take days-long breaks between sessions. I have very mild joint problems, which are mostly not a problem, but flare up when stressed (or sometimes with the weather, which sucks), and this process made my hand and wrist ache horribly.

It almost seems egotistical to say that this piece was inspired by one of the most famous paintings in the world, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, but I’ve been thinking a lot about his work and life since I saw the BBC’s Vincent Van Gogh: Painted With Words. It was amazing that the year before he committed suicide was also his most prolific, as though he poured all of himself out onto his canvases until he couldn’t stand being himself any longer. He didn’t have any political agenda with his later work, he just wanted to paint, to make beautiful things, to share his vision of the world. I’m always reading people who write about the world-changing this or that they’re doing with their art, but most of the time I just want to make something lovely that lifts the spirits of the viewer with its beauty, not its message.

Edward Gorey, too, had a lot of inspiration to contribute to this piece, and my fascination with his obsessive style of inking. The physical pain I went through to finish this seems to have dampened my enthusiasm for it for the moment, but I’ve already got more ideas for future works. I guess there’s a certain inherent masochism in some forms of art, but there’s also a certain satisfaction one gets from finishing such a piece.

Cross the Sky, 7″x5″ pen and ink and salt on watercolor paper, $499, framed, with free shipping.

Aside from the pained crosshatching, there’s a ton of detail in this piece. The salt pools flattened out and changed whenever they touched the edge of the page, so I went back in and created a few extra spiraling stars as well as the moon itself. Below you can see the flat, almost snakeskin-like texture where the salt crystallized into the moon shape, though most of the salt water flowed off the page and got my bookshelf wet instead (oops). There’s even a little row of crystals that extend off the edge of the paper.

Cross the Sky, detail 1, by Amy Crook

I also put in a bit of “glow” around the moon, extending the gold into the purple crosshatching for a small space around the quarter-circle.

Cross the Sky, detail 2, by Amy Crook

When the pen was well-loaded with ink and bumped into the edge of the salt circle, it tended to leave a spreading stain of purple on the outer ring of salt. I cultivated this effect to give the salt-circle stars their own violet bordrs. You can also see how I’ve added some more dim and distant stars to the mix but tracing blue or gold into select purple spirals, and then of course leaving some even more distant by making them just purple.

Cross the Sky, detail 3, by Amy Crook

I had a tendency to turn the paper this way and that while I was working — here you can see my tools, and the upside-down art with the crosshatching just barely begun. You can see clearly how the moon did have a shape and color of its own even before I went back in with the spiral texture.

Cross the Sky, work in progress part 1, by Amy Crook

As the dark night sky grows out from the edges of the moon, you can see the places where the paper was dampened or roughened previously, and thus the ink blurred and ran, giving even more variation in the velvety violet night.

Cross the Sky, work in progress part 2, by Amy Crook

In this third progress shot you can see where I added some more ink and water to one of the blurred-out stars to get a little more definition. In the end you can see I redrew the spiral on top of the wet paper, giving it lovely blurred effect.

Cross the Sky, work in progress part 3, by Amy Crook

Lastly you can see it in its frame, which gives the whole thing the feel of something seen through a window, a glimpse of the world as it might be, were things just a bit different. Or perhaps if we just saw them a little differently.

Cross the Sky, framed art by Amy Crook, $499

Tags: crosshatching, edward gorey, for sale, moon, pen and ink, salt
Posted in Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Daily Art, Flowers, Trees and Landscapes, Shop - Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Shop - Flowers, Trees and Landscapes | 3 Comments »