Artist's Magazine - USA (2020-05)

70 Artists Magazine May 2020

Day in Tuscany

oil on canvas, 30x80

CALLING ON THE

IMAGINATION

Rather than working from

a live still life setup,

Balmer prefers to create

sketches based on his

imagination. Letting go of

reality allows the artist to

continue to tweak and

change a composition

throughout the painting

process until he gets it

where he wants it to go.

BUILDING HISTORY

When Balmer paints, he blocks in color quickly, applying the

oil paint thickly with no linseed oil to thin it. He brushes the

paint over the scored lines so that they’re not filled in by color.

The object is to have the linework remain black. Since he’s

painting on a black surface, the colors go down vibrantly,

thanks to contrast, and the dark ground allows him to create

tonal variation without mixing colors. At this stage, he’s still

trying to work fairly loosely, even putting down colors outside

of the elements he has drawn. “I can choose to follow the

etched line or not,” he says. “Sometimes I’ll even change the

position of objects as I’m working out the composition. This

means going back to the Dremel tool, etching new lines, filling

in with black and continuing. The best paintings are the ones

that go back and forth a few times, building up ‘history.’ ”

As he works, Balmer will use another power tool, a disc

sander (see photo, opposite), while the painting is wet and also

a few days later when all is dry. When the paint is wet, the

sander smudges and mixes paint in unexpected ways, creating

surprising color combinations. It helps to break up edges that

are too sharp and exact, and allows bright color to be pushed

into shadow areas. “There’s real pleasure in working this way,

because of all the unexpected results,” he says. “If parts of the