ArtistsNetwork.com 45Adventure in Figuration
1 Having established the basic drawing,
Kordic applies a monochrome oil under-
painting. This might be any color, but for
this work she used a warm gray-brown,
quickly blocking in the image.
2 In the next stage Kordic adds white
to the underpainting color and brushes
in a rendering of the image. “I’m still
keeping it monochromatic at this
stage,” she says. “I’m not yet sure of
the direction, so I establish the image
in a traditional manner. Typically, that
happens when I’m not sure what to do
next, so I fall back on what I know. It
grounds me for a while. At some point
something will jog me out of that.”
3 The artist then begins to introduce
paint action that deliberately competes
with the image. In this case, she sloshed
a thin wash of red brown over the paint-
ing, pouring it on from a plastic cup.
At one point she rested the upended
cup on the surface, simply to see what
kind of mark it would leave. “My default
mode is to noodle and become overly
rendered in my expression,” says Kordic.
“There’s nothing wrong with that, per
se, but it’s not my preference anymore.
I can easily fall into that trance. Once
I catch myself, I either do something
extreme, like throwing in a completely
nonsensical color, or make a big mark;
then I’m forced to respond instead of
remaining in automatic mode.”4 At the next stage Kordic blocked in
a tree trunk, using an improbable vio-
let, while adding cool blue highlights to
the flesh and painting in what appears
to be a hat on the model’s head. “I’ve
stopped naming things,” says the artist,
who’s content to let viewers read the
image as they choose. “Even though
there are many abstract features in the
work, I always hold onto some realism.
It creates a grounding to the piece and
gives viewers a touchstone they can fall
back on.”Kordic then began to paint the
background more heavily, developing
weighty green shadows in the lower half
of the painting and even pushing the
background color into the model.1 2 3
4
“A painting always begins with a spark of inspiration, be it a
person, pose or light,” says Kordic. “Sometimes it’s all three.”
The artist generally works from photographs she has taken,
often spending hours or days with a model, shooting hundreds
of pictures of various poses and settings. “The source material is
simply a start,” says Kordic. “I rarely adhere to it completely.”
From there, Kordic chooses a substrate—birch plywood for
this demonstration. She orders it from a manufacturer,
cradled and sealed with clear gesso. “I love the surface
because it’s really rough,” she says. “I also like the option of
having the color of the wood show through, although often it
gets covered. This surface is very absorbent, too. It gives me
this meaty, gritty, tough beginning, and it’s interesting to
pound on, work with and struggle with.”
Working from her photos, Kordic draws directly onto the
surface, usually without preliminary studies. Using vine
charcoal allows for easy erasure, although she’s not super
fussy about accuracy.