Anatomy of a Painting: Mushrooms

Where did I get the idea for this painting?

When I first drew this image, I never imagined it would someday be a painting. It was a line drawing intended as a coloring page and nothing more. But as the Daydream Odyssey coloring book project pivoted into a painting series, I knew I would want to paint it BIG.

The original line drawing

Do Not Go Gentle

The opportunity came when a canvas I’d originally started as another idea kind of fizzled out upon execution. It was an homage to the famous poem by Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” which was purportedly an ode from him to his dying father. It was also a key moment in the Christopher Nolan movie, Interstellar. Read here for the full story behind the poem, and a video of Thomas reading it aloud for a radio audience.

While it worked well as a sketch, as a painting it just didn’t really hit the mark for me. So I when I decided to make the Mushroom painting, “Rage, Rage” got repurposed, repurposed. One of the cool things about this, is that now in the finished Mushroom painting, if you observe from the right angle, you can still see the letters from the poem. Fun little insider secret for you - another reason seeing paintings live and in person is far superior to only viewing images online or in history books. (Public Service Announcement: Go to Museums and See Paintings Up Close!) *steps off soapbox*

Here I’m using my projector to show the image so I can trace it onto the canvas.

One thing I wanted to change about the original image is the wallaper-ish background that I’d drawn. I thought that with the circle border & the curvilinear shapes of the mushrooms, the pattern in the background should be more geometric and structured to provide visual contrast and balance to the image.

Enter the isometric grid.

Tile design by Ann Sacks

Found in Elle Decor magazine and pasted in my sketchbook

Isometric grid in this cereal bowl from Costco

The pattern kept popping up around me and I couldn’t ignore it.

I painted over the words and purple dots on the canvas, using white gesso. Then outlined the isometric grid and the mushrooms in green paint.

Once the design was in place I had to think about what I was going to DO with the isometric grid. I really wanted to revisit the collage technique I used with my Unicorn painting. I had been thinking about using paper in this background, but what should I use as the source material?

The mushrooms - which have shown up in my work before - always gave me an Alice in Wonderland feel. My favorite version of this book has always been a 1955 hardcover from Random House, part of a series called Dandelion Library.Each book in the series is double-sided; with one story on one side, and another story on the flip-side. The Alice book is backed by Peter Pan, another personal favorite. The delicate illustrations are lovingly drawn by Marjorie Torrey, the stories edited by Josette Frank.

We owned three books in the series that were my mom’s when she was little. She would read them to me as part of our bedtime stories, and I loved the illustrations. I didn’t want to use my mom’s heirloom copy, so I bought a couple others from vintage book sellers. I still felt slightly guilty for cutting up a perfectly good book (!) but sometimes we have to make sacrifices for our art :)

Creative process behind the painting

I used some plastic packaging material from those evil, impossible-to-open plastic store packages that usually contain some type of kitchen tool, and made a triangle template. I poked a hole so I could mark the center of the triangle and draw lines in from the corners to show the delta pattern.

The triangle template showing the center point and outlines of the delta pattern.

tracing the pattern onto a book page

organizing all the triangles!

arranging the pieces in place

Collaging pieces to the surface:

After the collage, all I had to do was paint everything! Here are the rest of the process images, the small pieces are watercolor studies I made for color tests. Click an image to go through the gallery:

And finally, the last part was applying the gold leaf to the border! The first part of the video below is using a brush to paint on the gilding adhesive. This stuff is super sticky and dries fast, which is bad while it’s on your brush, but good after you paint it on because it has to completely dry before you add the gold leaf.

The gold leaf is SUUUUPER lightweight, fragile, and tears easily. There were a few areas I had to go over again because it didn’t really look too great the first time.

And here’s the back (below), which kind of came out cool, because the collage on the front of the canvas gave a quilted effect to the back. Happy accidents! Anyway, so here she is, all finished. The highlights & lowlights on the collaged isometric grid give a very cool kaleidoscopic effect which is what I was going for. As you move around the painting, light reflects off the triangles like faceted glass. I wanted the viewer to feel as if it is a portal to another world, just like Alice going through the looking glass.

Thank you so much for coming along on this journey with me! I hope you enjoyed your stay :)

xo

Heidi

*FUN FACT: This painting was not based on psychedelic mushrooms, I’ve never done them! I’ve just always enjoyed drawing mushrooms and I love their fairy-tale quality. But I’d like to try them sometime, just for the experience, and I know the medicinal effects are soo therapeutic and healing for many people. What do you think about magic mushrooms?

*ANOTHER FUN FACT: I HATED mushrooms as a kid, and I would pick out the teeny-tiniest pieces of them in my food. My mom used to make tuna casserole with a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup to make the sauce, and I would pick out every single piece. I was such a pain in the ass cause my parents loved mushrooms and couldn’t order them on pizza or they’d have to watch me dissect it for ten minutes and waste all those “perfectly good” mushrooms. And I was like that pretty much my whole young life. Never ate a single one. Until… I was pregnant with my first son and the smell of sautéing mushrooms was like HEAVEN. I all of a sudden wanted to cook with them just to smell them sautéing with butter and garlic. And then I tasted one. I thought it was going to be disgusting! But no, it was just as delicious as the aroma advertised. From then on, I’ve been hooked. The first time my dad saw me eating a dish with mushrooms, he about fell out of his chair. He said, “Who are you and what have you done with my daughter?”

*OK ONE MORE FUN FACT: Did you know the back side of a painting is called the verso?