Okay, so let's so start working in the process of Agnes Martin here. I've stretched a simple 12 by 12 inch canvas. This is cotton duck canvas which Agnes Martin worked on periodically, also working on linens here and there. So feel free to do whichever you prefer. I am going to start by priming this canvas. And in Martin's work its really interesting to think about the fact that she never used more then two coats of priming and she never sanded between coats of priming. And the reason for that is that she actually wanted some roughness in the canvas surface. Now, usually most painters when they are priming they go through great pains to stretch out the prime, you don't want to have lumps and bumps, etcetera. In fact, Agnes weren't like those lumps and bumps. She use those lumps and bumps as we'll see shortly to her advantage. So, I'm not going to be too particular about stretching out this priming coat here. If I leave some streaks, if I leave some impasto, if I leave some texture, that's going to be all to my advantage once I get to the graphite step shortly here. So I'm going to put on two coats of this priming. And you can see I'm not really being too concerned about exactly how this is going on. I'm just covering up the canvas here and leaving a little bit of texture here and there. All right, so that priming layer is more or less dry, not 100% but that's fine. I'm going to add a second priming layer, again, to give a little more tooth to the canvas now. And I'm going to turn the canvas by 90 degrees, in other words, that second coat is going perpendicular with respect to the first one. And just like that first coat, I'm not going to be too concerned with exactly how this priming layer goes on. Because a little bit of texture is going to be just fine. Okay, good enough, so I'm going to let that dry as well. All right, so, we're here, and we have two applications of ground here, a thicker, more absorbent layer to paint on now, and it also has a little bit of texture painted in orthogonal directions, or perpendicular directions, with respect to one another. So we have nice heavy, nice primed layer to work on top of. Now, what I'm going to do is add an all over paint application here to change the color of the ground. But, I'm going to quite translucently, because I want to keep this painting looking mostly white. But, I'm going to work very thinly. Now, what Martin would do later in her career, after moving to New Mexico is to work in acrylics and really highlight the translucence, the water white, so to speak, the clear, translucent quality of those paints building up layer upon layer, sometimes as many as eight or ten different layers of paint applications. So let's start small here with just one. Another thing that Martin often did is to use acrylic priming as a paint. So I'm going to add a little bit of that to my palate here. I'm going to tone that color yellow and I'm using an azo yellow. This is a acrylic paint and a synthetic pigment here. Nice bright translucent yellow. And I'm going to add some water because I'm going to make this a very thin application of paint here. Just lightning the color a little bit here. Think of lightning it a little bit more. [NOISE] Then I'm going to thin that out again, with some water. [SOUND] Painting very lightly here. Letting some of that white shine through here. And here we have a nice, light, quite translucent glaze, if you will, of this yellow. With that base toned layer dry no, I'm now going to work on the graphic part, the drawing of this painting. But first, I'm going to add a border, and the easy way to do that is just to use some simple masking tape. This is one inch wide. We're simply going to run a band of this all around the painting, To make sure that these pencil lines are not going to cover the very edges. Now, it's important when you start making this grid in composition that you not only use a ruler, but you do some arithmetic, too, use a calculator, what have you. Because once you start making these marks, it's going to be real difficult for you to do any editing. So you want to figure out how big your grid is, what are the dimensions vertically and horizontally. In other words, you should have an idea for what this painting is going to look like before you start making it. It may not work and you can always change these all over layers, one after another, but once you lay down the drawing. The editing becomes a little bit more difficult here. So I've decided here to use a blank one inch border around my drawing and then I'm going to make a grid so that each box here is going to be a horizontal rectangle one quarter inch tall and one full inch wide. Now, the other nice thing about using that masking tape here is I can draw right on it. I've gotta take that off afterwards, so there's no real problem here. So what I'm going to do here is simply to notch each inch. So that first inch is right where the tape ends, and then 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 And so on. Same thing on the top edge. And by the way, Agnes sometimes used these borders, these blank borders. Other times, she made these little lines right on the edge of the canvas. And the next time you go to a Agnes Martin exhibition, take a look at the edges, and you'll often see these small pencil lines. And you're just peeking over her shoulder, as you are mine right now, as to how she was able to make these grids. So we have the top and bottom axis marked with every inch. Now, the lateral axes, excuse me, I'm going to mark every quarter inch. Happens really importantly that you do this exactly otherwise your grid Is going to be pretty far from rectilinear, pretty far from geometry. Now to draw the grid. What kind of pencil to use? Agnes used every kind of pencil imagined. Lead, graphite, colored pencils, sharp, dull. These are all variables that she explored. Again, we're talking about an artist who's often called a minimalist. I'd prefer to think of her as a maximalist, she refined her means to a quite narrow margin, and then really found the maximum expression with it, so, what am I working with here? These are 2Bs, in other words, a pretty dark lead pencil here. It doesn't matter how hard you try, and don't try too hard, you're not going to make a perfect line because the canvas is bumpy. It has not only bumps of the canvas itself but all these waves of the brush strokes. So if you look closely, my lead is going to be bouncing around from peak to peak. Bouncing over the valleys of this canvas weave, skipping over some of the brushwork of the priming layer. And that's fine, in fact as we are going to see, that's actually part of what makes these paintings so wonderful. Agnes sometimes used rulers, she sometimes used masking tape. She sometimes used string, actually tacked to either side of the canvas, that she then just passed over, following over that string line. What's important here is that I'm not pushing down too hard because I push down too hard, the canvas flexes and my line is not going to be linear anymore. It's going to have a little wave to it. So there's nothing perfect but we don't wanted to be so far away from a straight line either. Let's make a lot more If you really zoom in here, you can see that that line is actually jumping back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, in addition to skipping forward, forward, forward, forward, forward. In other words, it is not continuous, it is not complete, there's all these beautiful little whispers of yellow in there and this is a gorgeously imperfect line. Okay, so the pencil completed here within this masked off border here. You can see all of these gorgeous irregular lines jumping around over the weave of the canvas. And as you look closely, you'll notice that, in fact, this grid is not perfect because this is not math class. And although Agnes used the grid as her principle template for so many years, she never made one mathematically correct grid in her entire life. In fact, what I've allowed to happen is a little bit of imprecision. A little bit of error and that's fine. Because it's equally informed everything. Now, if you get carried away and you start having crooked lines or lines that are really irregularly spaced then it just looks sloppy so there is a threshold that you can't really pass and you'll find out in your own studio practice. Very likely you'll miss it a couple times, and actually she did too. She spent her entire career exploring this kind of manual geometry. And I have it on very good faith that she threw out more paintings than she actually saved. So, she'd finish a painting that didn't work because the lines weren't quite right. Because the paint didn't quite take in the right way. Garbage, start over again. So if you're having the same experience in the studio, don't worry. You're on a good track. So, let's take off this masking tape. All right, what I am going to going to do next is to give the entire surface a really light sand. Now don't over do it, because you can sand the pencil right off here. It's just to give it a little bit of smudging, a little bit of smearing, a little bit of this kind of thing. Some nice rubs, some more complication in the surface. Now overall I really like that effect. I like some off these really faint marks here. But I over did it over here. And in fact, I got this strain zigzag. That's a little bit too loud for me. So firstly what we can do here, just using a Q-Tip. Just moisten it a little bit and you can rub out some of those marks that you don't like. Now, be careful because you can rub your drawing right off. With it. Now this kind of smudging is actually kind of nice. And any time you find yourself being a little bit too fussy as I am right now, just stop because the name of the game here is to allow these materials to do their thing. And in fact I've got a dark line right there. It's going to lighten a little bit as it dries. That this is interesting. You know this is the kind of stuff that you just accept as they happen. Let the painting carry through. Finish off your plan. And then take a look. Now maybe it worked and maybe it didn't. But when a Martin type painting works, it's because everything comes together. All the little errors, all the little mistakes here and there all kind of equalize or normalize in the entire flow of the painting. So we'll see if it happens. Now I want to start thinking about the next color to apply to the canvas. And what I've done is to use the same exact paint I used for the ground here. And to give myself just a little blank here to test the kind of blueish gray that I've chosen to work over it. So in the pan here a little bit of acrylic emulsion black, a little bit of ultra-marine. A little bit of our old friend titanium white. A little bit of gloss medium here. Now this looks white right now, but that dries clear. So don't be confused by that. I'm using a golden product here, a polymer medium. This is the same kind of stuff that's already in the tube, and it comes in two flavors, glossy or matte. Here I'm choosing glossy, because I want the marks I'm about to make to really leap off of the canvas. And what I'm going to do, to make this painting rhyme a little bit more visually, is just start off with that same yellow. As my base coat. This is a nice, easy way to guarantee that the color that I'm about to mix have something to do with the color that I've already used. So I'm going to take a little bit of black, I'm going to cool it off with a little bit of blue I'm going to ensure that this gets nice and glossy. Now by the way, not only does this make it glossy, it also makes it more translucent, so be careful, don't add too much. You might say, well, I want it really, really glossy, but suddenly, it becomes really translucent and you get the color underneath it too much. Now I'm going for something that actually has a nice body here and I want to cover up that yellow, so I don't want to overdo it and make this too translucent. So I'm making this nice and homogenous here. I'm going to lighten it up a little bit with some white. I'm going to add just a little bit of water here. To make sure that this dry out on me. [SOUND] So I'm just going to pick up a little bit of that paint here and lay it on that color I put out beforehands. I like this. You have a nice neutral cool grey over this really light hot yellow background. It's a nice push pull relationship, hot colors, cool colors. In fact the cool colors on top of the hot colors which allows them to sort of sandwich around the picture plane. And remember the push pull color theory that we've talked about previously in the course. So what I'm doing here is using a round. And as you can see here, the beginning of each brush stroke is going to have a profile of that brush, which is quite round. Just to the left of each one of these brush strokes. But when I pick it up, I can pick it up flat. I'm working from left to right starting round with a full load of paint and then trailing off flat to the middle. Eventually, I'll turn this around and come from the other side. Another rule that I've kind of self-imposed here is that I'm re-loading. Every other brush stroke. And I do that one and I'm going to flip it over and paint with the other side of the brush for the next stroke, and then reload. Now I'm going to do this the entire painting. So that there is a logic there to how this painting should work. However, you can see all of these marks are not the same. In fact, some of them aren't even close. Now I'm breaking a rule here in fussing a little bit, trying not to fuss to much. Because the more you fuss, actually the further away you get from this fresh direct spontaneous type of painting our after here. Now, if you really screw something up then by all means try to save it, but again, Agnes herself, the way she would deal with screw ups was usually just to chuck the entire painting, rather than to fuss. So essentially what's happening here is what we're really playing with is tension between the geometric determinancy of the grid, automic geometry, something that our minds know is perfect. The tension between all of that perfection, that conceptual perfection and manual imprecision that we have because well face it, you're a human we make lots of mistakes that's what we're best at. And really this is what makes Martin's works tick is the fact that humans are filled with errors yet we know the concept of perfection. In fact, where the hell did we invent the idea of a triangle from? Where in nature have you ever seen a triangle, perfect triangle? But we all know what it is? Why is that? I don't know either. But it's pretty interesting that geometry is something that is extremely human yet it's something that we're extremely bad at actually making. In fact, this grid is not a grid, it's filled with errors. These brush marks here, nothing complicated here, but I haven't been able to make two of them identical yet. So what's going to happen if we pull this off right? Is that we're going to have this beautiful tensioning the entire painting between exactly those two variables. Perfection and imperfection. I'm going to come back and fill in the right half of that first column. But I'm going to do it from the other side, so I'm going to flip the painting over by the time I get there. The reason is I've decided and this is arbitrary there's a million different approaches to making an Agnes Martin painting, no need to copy mine. But I've decided these brush strokes are going to go from the outside in both of them. You could do the opposite and go from the inside out. So here I will finish my first pass. I've worked on the left side of each one of these columns with a brushstroke working from left to right. I'm not going to work on the right side, from right to left. But rather than try to paint with my left hand, I'm just going to flip the painting over. The reason I'm doing this is that symmetry is very important to modern paintings. Symmetry is very easy on the eye and her paintings are certainly that. All right, so just finishing up that pass of brushstrokes here. And to my eye we have a pretty nice looking painting that we're looking at here. Couple things I want to bring your attention to. First of all, the edges of the grid, I left open. Whereas the top and the bottom of the grid I closed off. This gives the painting a little bit more horizontality and a little bit of a floating feeling. Which is nice, rather than boxing it off that way. You also could open up the top and bottom to really give a lot more air into the entire composition. As this painting is reaching completion one thing that Martin did that you may also want to do is to varnish the painting. You'd likely want to use some kind of a synthetic, probably an acrylic varnish but you would not want to brush on this varnish because if you did that you would lose almost all of your drawn grid here, as that graphite would just get dissolved into the water of that acrylic varnish and be dispersed. In other words you probably want to use a spray varnish on this or just leave it with this very fine matte surface. It's a beautiful matte surface, the only problem with leaving it matte is that it is quite fragile, it is quite vulnerable. So if we're to wrap this painting with something directly on the surface or if we rubbed it or touched it with something that graphite line would be smudged and eventually rubbed right off. But there you have it a beautiful little painting in the style of Agnes Martin here. Working with acrylics, some cool colors in this broken brush work on top. Working with graphite and is broken line in the background, and then working with this very nice nebulas warm yellow ground.
