MLYON.com » Paper Surface

54 x 29 inch gesture painting (self portrait)

Mike Lyon — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:48:00 +0000

Another ‘gesture’ painting — this one uses the same gesture character set as my earlier (and smaller) airbrushed “Jim”, but the gestures are slightly larger (1/4 inch squares) and are painted using the Paasche Flow Pencil, so the tip touches the paper. It’s painted on Rives BFK, so the paper surface has been abraded quite deeply — more and more with each additional stroke of the tip across the paper. I like the effect, but it interferes with the clarity of the line and with the paint flow, so I imagine that I’ll use a stronger paper for my next effort.

self portrait in gestures, July 3, 2007, ca 59 x 32 inches, acrylic on Rives BFK

painting underway -- starting to lay down the blues

detail of area around eye -- three colors down

detail of area around eye -- completed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVVqzAelb9g

In the movie and several of the photos, three colors have been painted in order: black, yellow, red. A final color, blue, is starting to go down along the left side of the portrait.

Painting with Paasche Flow Pencil

Mike Lyon — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 13:42:00 +0000

I’m working on a short series of painted self-portraits at the moment. I’ve mounted a Paasche Flow Pencil (very much like an airbrush, only without the air — the ‘nozzle’ is conical and a needle valve seats in the nozzle in order to control the flow of paint. The Paasche is not a very high-precision device, so fluids which aren’t very viscous (like water) flow out quite fast, even when the valve is ‘closed’.

I suppose I could’a figured this out in advance, but it seemed to me that coffee or tea stained paper would make a good first trial image and clean-up would be very easy… WRONG! WHAT A MESS!

So viscosity about like cream works quite well.

I removed the little paint-pot which came with the flow pencil and replaced it with a water bottle I’d modified for the purpose. The cap has the paint outlet mounted in it and I mounted a vacuum-relief/pressure port (to force more viscous paint to flow using a bit of air pressure) on the side (a tube runs to the ‘bottom’ of the bottle so air can get in). This allows me to fill the bottle with paint (or whatever) without making a mess, mount the cap, and connect the hose to the pen before inverting the bottle and allowing paint to flow. Works well.

Because the pen doesn’t have many parallel surfaces — it’s all cones and curves and joints, it wasn’t easy to conceive a way to hold and actuate it. In the end I decided to make it easier for me to construct the gizmo and so I made it to kinda work backwards (power-off allows paint to flow — so when it stops, paint keeps running). A single solenoid both lifts the pen off the paper and releases the trigger, stopping the ink flow while the pen is moved to a new painting location. When the solenoid is ‘off’, a spring pushes the pen down onto the paper or canvas and actuates the trigger at the same time.

The paper surface on my 2nd attempt is now badly abraded with ‘fuzz-balls’ all over the surface in the darkest areas — next attempt I’ll use a heavily sized paper and adjust the height of the flow-pencil so it JUST BARELY TOUCHES THE PAPER!

I’m VERY excited about the possibilities for color work, both directly (painting flat areas of transparent color), and especially indirectly (using weighted gestures again) since the flow-pencil produces a VERY sharp-edged line — much cleaner edge than my airbrush!

“Arthur” 77 x 42.5 inch pen and ink drawing

Mike Lyon — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 16:20:00 +0000

“Arthur” pen and ink drawing completed October 31 after 282 hours — almost 9 miles of ink line and 8 million lines of machine movement instruction. This one used a new (to me) pen with oil based ink and I’m not very fond of this pen at all. Drawn on Rives BFK paper, the paper turned out to be too soft to hold up well under all the drawing, the ink went in somewhat grayish and although I very much like this image of my 83 year old friend with the youthful eyes and hair, Arthur Kase, the drawing itself lacks the crispness of my previous work. The pen eventually abraded the paper surface in the darker areas and then kinda soaked into the rough surface in a way I don’t much appreciate.

"Arthur", Oct 31, 2006, 77 x 42.5 inches pen and ink on Rives BFK paper. Private collection (exhibited September 7–November 4, 2007 Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art)

panorama of Backstage Pass at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City

I’m about to begin another drawing, this time using water-borne pigmented inks and a tiny capillary pen. But first I have to solder up a little circuit to actuate a pen-lift solenoid so that the tiny hollow nib can ‘float’ over the paper without bending and breaking. Should begin this full color drawing middle of next week and I’m very excited to see this one develop!!!!

– Mike