The painting begtins – but not before hours and hours and hours of preparation.  Once Rama has completed HIS part, the real work begins.  When painting, Rama is always at play.  His contribution is one of magic and fun and creative license, and when he’s done, the real work of painting a new Exhibition painting begins.

Carefully choosing the perfect one of his creations for each painting is no small part of the process.   In the choosing, Calley’s creative process, her meditations, her waking dreams – all lend power and often serendipity to the final product.  Calley can see, long before any of us, and it’s a good thing, because her vision is always impeccable, and we are all left to wonder how she does it.

Here you see the beginnings of border drawing, with an acetate sheet over the Rama painting.   Calley has mapped the areas on the canvas where she plans to insert the coral paintings onto the acetate.  She will work at home to prepare the drawings to transfer to the canvas.  The size of the easel and painting prohibit taking it back and forth, so she devised this clever means to have a way to transfer between home and plein air studios for the initial drawings and planning stages of the work.

Preparing the canvas, adding border canvas, measuring, cutting, and gluing, attaching the canvas to the board – all behind-the-scenes preparation.  Countless hours of work must be done before it even appears on the easel at The Four Seasons, where Calley paints in the sunshine under a tree twice a week.

As the privilege of being part of the process unfolds, I take photos and will try to chronicle the progress of this, and other paintings I have photos of.  If not here, the photo logs we have will appear on the website for each of the paintings, as available.

Stay tuned for more developments as they progress!

18 Jun This entry was published on June 18, 2012 at 9:11 am and is filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.