Goings on in the Night Sky

I'm going to let you follow my progress as I work on my second installment of the planets playing jazz in the night sky, entitled "Midnight at the Moonlight Lounge".

On the first set of 9 paintings, each planet is in its own 24 x 24 inch square. (See website.)

In this work in progress, there are 6 canvases that make up the 6' x 8-3/4' mural. The canvas sizes are based on the Fibanocci numerical sequence of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc. My canvas sizes are (square) 9, 9, 18, 27, 45, 60 inches.

I had an artist-carpenter-canvas maker build the stretchers because they had to be precise. If the dimensions were off, they wouldn't fit together and I had to have the rectangle (the outside edges) perfect or it would look awful. Lucky for me, this guy is a perfectionist. He had to stretch the canvas around the stretchers so the corners didn't have any bulk. To get these all to fit together, he had to complete the two 9" squares, bolt them together and measure the exact dimension to get his measurement for the 18" square, then bolt the 9s and 18 together and measure to get the dimension for the 27" square and on and on. As these things were getting larger and larger, he took it upon himself to build me an adjustable easel so I can raise and lower the whole unit depending on where I'm painting. I'm glad he thought of that because I didn't and I was beginning to wonder how I was going to paint at the bottom edge.

It's difficult to see everything that is going on in the photo right now, but it will become clearer as I begin to fill it in. Not all of the planets have made an appearance on the canvase yet. Some of them are still deciding where they want to go and how they want to look. Prima donna planets -- who knew?