TACAW 5000 sq ft of plaster in 5 days

There are very few Scenic jobs in my little corner of Colorado but sometimes things come full circle.

Dick Carter is a fabulous artist, art director and (may I be so bold to say) friend. He's a long time denizen of the Roaring Fork Valley who does what a lot of us do- call this home and hop to LA or NYC to keep that career thing breathing.

I got a call from him in April about TACAW. "The Arts Campus at Willits" was opening a space called "The Temporary" as a transitional performance space while the Arts Campus is under... well... let's call it governmental "review".  The bottom line being- for pities sake lets just get something up, running and on the boards.

Dick wanted to take the retail rental space and turn it into a place with some history. You know- where you'd go to imbibe some Fringe theatre- listen to some jazz or a Mozart string quartet. Transform the hot tub showroom into a place with soul. He gave me photos of distressed plaster walls

and chandeliers hanging in empty rooms. 

I immediately got a stupid grin on my face and said "Ushuaia!" My trip to Argentina just found a place to land and there is nothing which says old plaster wall like the walls in Ushuaia.

Thank you Joyce Kubalak for developing the fantastic rust technique we used on Man of La Mancha  - use gray instead of orange and go for it.

.... a few samples later.....

5000 square feet of distressed plaster wall in 5 days with 3 Scenics and a short list of supplies
Day 1. Mix the paint and set up the work space.

Day 2 first full day on site. The base color a deep base gloss has already been rolled on by the Paint Contractor (thank you Monty) which leaves Allan Trumpler, Pat Dailey and me to start laying on the first "plaster" breakup.  This is all about avoiding repeat patterns and playing matte against gloss. The initial layin is fairly quick it's the fine tuning which takes time.

Skip to Day 5: Really everything else is more of the same- warm up the "wainscot" lay in some water staining- drips- darker at the top - age spray at the bottom- add some vintage rust to all the new electrical conduit and the fuse box.

Nutcracker

The Nutcracker and Christmas... Sugar Plums, Mice,  and a chance for hundreds of little kids to wear leotards and slip into dance slippers. It's easy to be an audience member when it's your kid in the cute little bee suit spinning with the lady in the tutu. It's easy to fall in love with the audience from behind the footlights when that audience is holding you in a warm safe place... when that audience is your family. This is the place where love of dance starts for so many of us...

It's enduring and not just because of the music.

The Aspen Santa Fe Ballet asked me to repaint their Nutcracker 'book" for the 10 year old production of Nutcracker.   No one could tell me the name of the original designer but this Nutcracker is a pastiche of Victorian wedding cake lace architecture and a carousel complete with some glossy painted pony's. It's a bright colorful production with all the whimsy intact.

The Book does tricks. Each page is a little over 8'x6' and the entire book flies in. Six pages are painted muslin but the seventh is a gag page. It's spandex with a split for the Nutcracker to "break" through during the pyro.

They wanted something more colorful.

Seah Johnson , lighting supervisor for the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet redesigned the pages and Danny Bachelor Production Manager had them printed to scale on bond.  This helped a lot with all the lettering.

The printouts where then pricked and pounced onto the pages.

 pounce wheel used to prick holes into the printout.

bag of charcoal attached to a stick to pounce the design onto the muslin

the charcoal transfer

inking in the design so that the charcoal can be flogged off prior to painting

laying in the design

stencil for the decorative border on the book cover

laying in the border

to get  a velvety richness some into the blue book cover I used a dot roller 

alternating between green shade blue and utramarine

laying in the decorative border for the text pages

the 6 muslin pages in the shop

text pages

laying in the text on the spandex (you can see the split at the top)

Thanks to Isabel Rubio for finding the fabric.

frontispiece 

bookcover

Santa Fe New Mexican

Purple, it needs more purple …. murals for Chris Ofili

I got an email from Scenic Arts Studios in March asking if I knew any painters in Aspen. Now that's a loaded question if there ever was one…. There are all kinds of painters but when it's a Scene Shop calling the question is "Do you know anybody who knows which end of a paintbrush to hold, how to mix colors without a swatch book, can climb a ladder, distrusts tools invented after Cromwell, shows up on time,  can paint in the dark, watched the Tony's (all the way through) , can quote lyrics to at least 3 Rogers and Hammerstein songs and knows what "a dead kitty on a stick" means?"

My response was predictable, "What do you need?"

My good friends at Scenic Arts did a full room mural for Chris Ofili's Night and Day at the New Museum in New York and now the show was traveling to the Aspen Art Museum.

Work in my hometown… with friends I hadn't seen in 25+ years?  Kidding myself that I could still work like a Scenic I said "Sure." Just my luck it dovetailed with the Aspen Ideas install. Well, at least that meant I could snag the inimitable Mr. Trumpler for a little work before we started at the Aspen Art Museum.

The concept is the film "Black Narcissus" …

1947 with Deborah Kerr in glorious Technicolor,  Production Design by Alfred Junge for which he won the 1948 Oscar  and Cinematography by Jack Cardiff who also won the Oscar.

Six Scenic Artists,  

Ron Gottschalk charge, 

Charlotte Vosseler, 

Cassandra Holden, 

Nicole Laemmle, 

Allan Trumpler 

and me (photo Allan Trumpler),  

four 14' high walls (40x70) and six days… 

here's the sequence:

Charlotte arrived early on Wednesday and mixed all the colors.

Full crew shows up Thursday morning. The walls have been base coated by the Museum and protective flooring has been laid down. We start by making a thread grid of 4' squares around the room. Joe and Deb Forbes - owners of Scenic Arts Studio and Studio and Forum of Scenic Arts show up for lunch in Aspen ….

Some cartooning (sketching with charcoal) is done on Thursday. On Friday we start laying in the first layer.  The trick is dark/ chromatic/ translucent over lighter opaque tints which keeps the glow in the paint.  Want the complete explanation of both the chemistry, the physics and the color theory? Go to your copy of Ralph Mayer or you could go to a personal favorite The Practice of Tempera Painting. 

Friday Sketching  and lay in continues….  

here is a video of end of day Friday:

Saturday… RAFT TRIP!  (No Joe, we did not die on the river)

photo Aspen Whitewater Rafting

Sunday… day off for the crew and a chance to see a little bit of Colorado.

photo Allan Trumpler

Meanwhile,  I plant some late potatoes with help from a couple of local young athletic gentlemen- could I sell this as "more than cross-fit"? Surely flipping a tractor tire isn't as difficult as breaking up my clay "garden" with a broad fork. It is the ab workout from hell.

Monday through Wednesday we continue with layers of color, glaze upon glaze to get that rich Technicolor glow… 

Ron giving us some direction:

Here's a video of the end of day Wednesday:

and some finished details from Thursday:

crates of Art ready to go on the walls….

All done… 

Time for an evening snack on the Mall… with some Folklórico music and dancing.

…and here's the exhibit at the Aspen Art Museum

walkthrough the exhibit