Peter Stucki - Art

Finally the painting for Lent is done! The wash of purple was still wet today as I hung it up in the Falcon Heights UCC lobby.

Yesterday, I showed it to my 7 year-old son, Matthew. I was playing some jazz on the radio (Randy Newman's "Marie") and turned it off, when Matthew said, "It looks better with the music on."

(The 3x4ft painting is acrylic with silver metallic highlights on the wire, and golden metallic highlights on the wheat kernels. The clouds use white and iridescent media. I put a wash of 1 purple to 4 parts glazing medium on all areas but the cloud surrounding the wheat.)

Work in progress: Painted int the foreground barbed wire fence and have begun highlighting the wire with silver iridescent paint. Next I'll put in the stalk of wheat and then put down a wash of purple glaze. I'm about 4 hours of work away from the finish.

I'm working on the Lenten painting by first putting in an opposite color underpainting to make the purple of the overpainting more vibrant.  This is on a 3ft x 4ft canvas with acrylic.

I've created a rough draft of the Lenten painting using Photoshop so I can move the elements around more easily. The crown of thorns are represented by barbed wire. The wheat is represented by a lone wheat stalk. The color purple is in the color of the sky. Preparation, the most difficult to represent pictorially, is represented by a winter field and a sunrise.
Now I'll start painting soon and, inevitably, the act of painting will reveal surprises, and possibly take the painting down unforeseen avenues.

I'm thinking about painting works for the liturgical seasons. In particular, I'm thinking about how to represent the concepts of Lent in visual form?

• It is a season of preparation
• A friend remarked "Simplicity IS Abundance"
• Purple is the liturgical color for Lent
• Marked by making a sacrifice
• The cross
• The wheat grain
  
• Sack cloth
• Thorns
• Fractals?
  

A friend of mine said it is a challenge!

Perhaps it has to do with having a Dick Blick's Art Supplies store nearby, but for the past five years I have gotten into acrylics.
In a way, after 13 years working in chalk pastels, a fellow artist said, "your pastel style is 'painterly'!" So I took up acrylics.
Though they dry vexingly quickly, especially in our dry Minnesota winters, I liked being able to have to plan less and express more.
Then, thanks to my wife's efforts at Falcon Heights United Church of Christ, where the pastors were open to allowing their space be used to exhibit art, I got the chance to create liturgical art.
My wife and I worked together to organize a way for the congregation, mostly non-artists, to help create four panels for Lenten based on the themes of "Temptation/Threat", "Thirst", "Stars", and "Love" and the Psalms that accompany them.  My wife, who has extensive experience in working with non-artist on collective art projects, said there was a need to provide structure so non-artists would be less intimidated.
Acrylic molding paste allowed me to create a hard, white, textured background in the theme that the participants could paint over -- freeing them from the intimidation of the purely "blank canvas" while still allowing them the freedom to create.
It was not only the participants who ended up being freed: as you can see in the slide show, I have been using exotic acrylic media, such as "fiber textured molding paste", to develop a kind of child-like "folk" style, that has revitalized my sense of art-as-play!

It seems that my life comes in 7-year epochs, with periods where I find myself having to figure out where next to go. In a sense I am reminded of when at the beginning of the previous epoch my wife, Heather, and I had to decide what to put on the moving truck and what to leave behind on the sidewalk. Once, again, I'm having to figure out what to put on the "moving truck" and what to leave behind on the "sidewalk of life". Though I don't know, at this point where the next destination is, I know that my art is coming along on the journey.