[proof removed, see later entry (August 30) for updated image]
Here is the trial proof of the large mezzotint titled I'm Thinking of You, Leonardo. It is 18"x 24", quite large for a mezzotint. It is still too dark in places and I will be fussing with the mid to light greys, making some edges sharper and some more blurred, adding more subtlety to the cast shadows and punching up the shine. About 50 to 100 hours left. When a good final print is made, I will replace this image with the final result. But I aim to try to keep the strong sense of darkness in it. That's what mezzotints do best.
The view is as if you are sitting at the drafting table with a sketchbook open, ready to draw and/or write. The pencil is handy. Paint brushes wait on the left side above the notebook. The objects I gathered up from around my house; all reflect something about Leonardo da Vinci or something you might read about in his notebooks. The skull and cow's ribs and tail vertebra allude to his interest in anatomy. The book is obvious; it is
Leonardo on Painting. The title will be more clear when the print is finished. On its cover is the image of Cecilia Gallerani, one of his portraits, and on the spine you can read the name Kemp, the editor of this book who is the world's foremost authority on Leonardo. To the right of the book is a strange little glass object, 12 sides of rhomboi, that is so weird it is hard to see it when it is sitting there in front of you. The twig shows the pattern of its growth in the bumps, preserving in death the incessant slow movement of its life. Beneath the twigs are the two halves of a geod filled with crystals and another geod is on the other side in the dark area, to allude to his interest in geography. They also record the growth and movement of what seems so solid and still, the earth. The loupe and magnifying glass suggest careful observation and the significance of sight in both art and science. The mathematical object, a model of an icosadodecahedron, is made in the likeness of the drawings he supplied for the book
de Divina Proportione by his friend Luca Pacioli. It is made of a single piece of paper which I drew out, cut, folded, and glued in order to have a model to draw from for this print. The spiral in the circle next to the glass of water is a sea shell. Leonardo liked to think about the fossil shells found on mountains and their implications for the movement of earth and seas. It is the bottom of a type of shell called a pyramid, but it is actually a cone shape. It is something of a pun, but you would have to recognize the type of shell to get it. Of perspective, what Leonardo called the visual pyramid, ancient people called the visual cone. The feather alludes to his love of birds and the dream of flight. Ironically, this is a chicken feather and chickens usually can't fly. The glass of water I put there because Leonardo liked to think about water (mainly its power when moving). I like the glass of water because it grabs the light and hurls it into the darkness. Leonardo speaks of the power of light to dispel the shadows. In the depths of the shadows things disappear and edges are lost. Shadows change density and their edges are sharper or fuzzier depending on placement of light source and distance from the objects. Leonardo paid close attention to these things. I've added also subtle reflections when hard surfaced objects are in contact with the shadowed surface. The glass sphere is like the crystal orb in the hand of the Salvatore Mundi, a newly rediscovered painting of Leonardo's. But this sphere contains air bubbles blown in. In his notebooks Leonardo talks about blowing bubbles in water (glass is a liquid) and how the air becomes light in relation to water and so rises in its desire to be above the water, while the water becomes heavy in relation to the air, until they have reached their place. But alas this air is trapped in its location and will never reach its heart's desire.
All these connections to Leonardo I must confess I thought of as I was working on the print, having gathered up the objects on impulse and intuitively created this arrangement.
Whether the person sitting at this table is left-handed or right-handed I have left ambiguous. The brushes are handy to the left hand but the pencil sits on the right. The magnifying glass, usually held in the off-hand, is also set down as though for the right hand, for a lefty's convenience, and the book is set as though placed by a left hand. The light is convenient for the left-handed and will shade the attempts to draw or write by a right hand. Leonardo, they say, was profoundly left-handed. I am ambidextrous.
The entire image had to be drawn and scraped in mirror reverse 180 horizontal flip.
The whole is lit by two sources of different wattages. When I designed it, I was doing what I liked to do, making a complex interweaving of the different strengths and directions of shadows. Would you believe that the work was well underway when I came across in my reading that Leonardo liked to shine multiple point source lights of different wattages on things to play with the shadows too.
I hope to have the final version by August 20.
