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copyright © Kate Kretz.

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This painting, "Fate Of A Technicolor Romantic" is 6 feet tall and 8 feet wide. It took over a year to paint. Most paintings begin with many rough sketches in my sketchbook. I will then shoot 4-5 rolls of film from different angles, points of view, etc., and gather the objects I wish to incorporate into the painting. The final sketch (as shown in the first image above) comes from a combination of photos, my head (many years of drawing from life), and real objects which I bring into my studio for details. The image has an opportunity to change again when I make the cartoon (shown in the second and third images above). The cartoon is drawn on a large piece of tissue paper, approximating the size of the canvas. On the cartoon, I decide how large the canvas will be: I make compositional decisions about the edges and the corners, which are very important to me... an inch more or less would dramatically change the composition, and, consequently, how one "enters" the painting and is "held" in it. Once I am happy with the cartoon, I prepare the canvas and transfer only the major outlines to the canvas. The large shapes are blocked in, then patterns and details are painted in, often with a brush containing just a few hairs. Some areas, such as the carpet, demand a more textured surface. Once the details and patterns are in, I begin glazing. Glazing is a Renaissance technique where thin layers of transparent paint are applied to the surface of a painting. The darkest areas of the painting could have as many as 30 glazes on them. This technique creates the illusion that the paintings are glowing, or giving off light. This is because light rays go through the transparent layers, hit the white of the gessoed canvas, and bounce back.

The glazing process is important to the content of my work: in this painting, there are objects which are bathed in the "idealist" blue light of the television, and other objects which are influenced by the "realist" yellow light of a dismal 40-watt light bulb. The light in the image carries content, and I am thinking of that as I am glazing the areas where that particular kind of light is hitting this specific object. Some areas have many layers of dark glazes, and this is a perceptual as well as psychological "pushing back" of the objects and what they represent (there is an unpaid bill hidden under the chair on the left, for example). This process replicates night vision, where the longer you look, the more you see. In this age of ever shortening attention spans, I like to reward people for standing there and taking the time to really look.

I feel that the dedication and investment of time involved in my work is a defiant act in the age I find myself living in. I have never done assembly line paintings: I don't get an idea, then make 20 variations on it so that I will have a "series". Each painting is a full blown love affair, not an infatuation, and they are hard to give up. People often look at my work when it is half completed, and say "it's done, right?...what else could you do to it?" I don't stop working on a painting until there is nothing that I could possibly do to make it more powerful or more resonant.

YOU CAN OBSERVE THE DAY-TO-DAY PROCESS OF CURRENT WORK BY VISITING THE STUDIO BLOG AT   
http://katekretz.blogspot.com