68 Artists Magazine May 2020
A NEW GENRE
Several years ago Balmer left big city life for Connecticut to
start a family. No longer surrounded by buildings, he turned
his attention to large still life scenes of food and drink. He’d
always admired artists who took an impressionistic approach
to the still life genre—painters like Pierre Bonnard and Paul
Cézanne, whom he’d studied in art school. It felt like the
right time to try out these subjects for himself, using the
same techniques he’d brought to his cityscapes. “I wanted to
paint still lifes using the same approach—flattening the
perspective, exaggerating the forms and shadows—and have
them not be real but an ‘impression’ of fruit in a bowl on a
table. I wanted them to be blurred and textured,” Balmer
says. “I saw it as a challenge initially, and now I’m enjoying
coming up with different compositions and working on
oversized canvases.”POWER TOOLS
Breaking from convention, Balmer paints his still life sub-
jects from memory rather than working from an arranged
tableau. “If I were to set up a bowl of fruit and paint from
that, I’d probably end up with something too real,” he says.“It would be restrictive. I prefer doing many drawings from
my imagination. This way I can focus on the shapes, light,
shadow and composition while not feeling tied to any rules
of how things should be.”
Before sketching a composition for a still life onto canvas,
Balmer takes a trowel and applies three coats of Utrecht pro-
fessional gesso over his surface, which alternates between
wood panels or No. 10 duck canvas stretched over custom
frames. Instead of white gesso, he’ll sometimes use acrylic
mixed with wall compound or marble dust to thicken it up
and create a colored ground. Next, he paints the entire sur-
face with black house paint. Once the paint dries, he sketches
a loose composition in white so he can see the lines clearly.
At this point, Balmer uses a Dremel rotary tool (see,
phote, page 71)—something like a dental tool with a spin-
ning wheel its end—to go over the drawing, etching lines
into the thick black surface. “At this stage, I’m not trying to
be accurate. I’m trying to be as loose as possible,” he says.
“When you sketch, you’re trying to find your way through
the design and composition. I’m doing that—only with the
Dremel tool. It doesn’t matter if positions have to move, I’ll
drill right next to what I just drilled and move an element’s
position. The more lines, the more like a sketch, the better.”