Bodhisattva
by Kristin Serafini
23 April 2008
acrylic on canvas
18″ x 24″ plus frame

$500.00

I began this painting more than a month ago, just after finishing Sometimes in Nature. It wasn’t one that came quickly. It sat half finished on the easel for a long time. Now that I think of it, there were actually three stages to this painting. First, the background. I scrubbed down the canvas in the back yard with a drywall screen and a handful of pumice soap. After hosing off the grit and the remains of the terrible oil painting I was trying to exorcise, I let it dry in the sun and then brought the canvas back in the house, ready for something new. I hadn’t succeeded in removing all of the old pigment, so as I worked the new gesso into the old surface, I left some of the neutral tones exposed. I then layered on a series of earthy gold washes, so that it became hard to tell where the remnants of the old painting ended and the new one began. I thought for a while that I might do another painting relating to the Teton Trip – an enlarged journal page perhaps. But that is not what happened.

I turned instead back to the idea of creating a series about the Buddhist monks. Again they were in the news – this time in Tibet. As I was writing the artist statement for Sangha I (finally!), and doing some online research to remind myself of the particular dates and political circumstances surrounding the Burmese monks’ protests, I came across a deeply touching photo of a young monk crouching in prayer. He seemed to be worshipping in some sort of sanctuary, as his slender arms, saffron robe and innocent face were illuminated by dozens of candles at his feet. I printed out the picture and painted the monk onto the canvas. This was the second stage of the painting.

I had to think carefully about how to properly connect the figure with the background; I was very conscious that they had to stand together as one thing in the end. So the painting stayed half finished for a while as I pondered this idea. I eventually decided to add an anchoring shadow beneath the figure, and then to weave the whole piece together with several complicated layers of rust and gold tones, interspersed with coats of clear UV protective varnish. The effect turned out to be a luminous picture of prayer.

A bodhisattva is “one who is able to reach nirvana, but delays doing so out of compassion for suffering beings” (Oxford American Dictionary). The title of this piece speaks to the idea of innocent enlightenment and compassion as a way forward out of calculated oppression.

Danaus plexippus
by Kristin Serafini
30 September 2007
acrylic and pencil on canvas
16″ x 20″ plus frame

$400.00

The perennial need to shovel out my studio with a backhoe so I can at least have room to open the door is what prompted this painting. Sure, sometimes the motivations for some of my projects are very profound, but not this time. I guess the reason I was cleaning my studio in the first place is a good one, though. I was getting ready to paint “Ressurection Breakfast”, which is a 60″x30″ canvas. My studio was the only place big enough, so I had to make some room. In the process of cleaning, I found about 11 canvases with awful paintings on them from just after college when I thought oil painting was a good idea. It’s not. At least not in my case. Nobody should see these paintings, ever. So I took the canvases out in the back yard, grabbed the hose and some GOJO pumice scrub, and went to town with a drywall screen. After scrubbing as much of the oil paint off the canvas as I could, I let it dry outside, and then put a couple of fresh coats of gesso on it. Some of the phthalo colors, perticularly a red near what is now the top of the canvas, stained through. But that’s okay – we can work with that.

While I was busy pondering what to paint on these recycled canvases, Gabriel came into my studio to show me a monarch butterfly wing he had found on our front steps. Excellent idea! Why not make a series about metamorphosis? I painted the wing that Gabriel brought me, but it looked pretty morbid just sitting there on the canvas, but I also didn’t want this to just be a glib picture of a butterfly. So I decided to compromise and just sketch in the rest of the monarch. To set off the sketch, I added the layer of “basement mold”, which is basically a subtle enrichment of the surface. I like the delicate ghosting effect on the sketched-in wing. When I was thinking about which way to orient the canvas, I again wanted to avoid just putting a picture of a nice little butterfly in the middle of the space. So I chose to have the butterfly clinging to the top of the frame. It sets up an appropriate amount of tension, I think. It turned out that the red bleeding through from the old painting makes a lovely pink phthalo halo effect around the top edge of the painted wing.