Variation on an assignment

This week's LFI2021 assignment was to coat a piece of paper heavily with various texture mediums to get maximum bumpiness and then, after it dries, to do a drawing in charcoal over the top, that will naturally be affected by the underlying surface.

The teacher had about eight different things she plastered on the paper, including super heavy gesso, light and coarse molding paste, fiber paste, and ceramic stucco, all of which she applied in varying amounts with a palette knife; then she drizzled it with grated-up charcoals in shades of black and gray-green and plastered them in for a little bit of grit; and finally, added a few gold highlights just for fun.

I have gesso. Period. I have it in white, and in black, in acrylic primer weight. And since I don't think I'll ever use all those other things again, I'm not going to spend between $6 and $15 apiece for a jar or six. So I decided to do a little variation on her assignment.

Last night, I picked out a reference photo of Mary McLeod Bethune in old age, in black and white. I opened up both my white and black gesso. I covered the page with a heavy coat of the white gesso, and then I dropped bits of black gesso around the edges and worked it in as the background. I purposely left her hair area white to reflect her appearance in the photo, and I smudged in some paler gray in the face area to give it some texture when I go back to do the drawing / painting. I then had to let it dry for hours, because it was so heavy.

Here is the prepared surface. You can almost already see her hair, the outline of her face, her ear, and the darker areas of her jacket.

Later on, I took up my charcoal pencil and began a detailed drawing, but I just wasn't feeling it. As a painter, I have an innate suspicion of charcoal as an impermanent medium, and didn't know how I would seal it after. Also, I don't really enjoy charcoal that much, and if I was going to do something less defined than an ink drawing, I'd rather use paint. So, I picked up as much of the charcoal as I could with a kneaded eraser, and then gave it another coat of gesso in the face area to cover any wayward lines.

Today, I decided to paint the entire picture using gesso. The first thing to do was a drawing to locate all the features in their proper places, so I took care of that, and then considered my medium. Since it's pretty thick, I used some "Flow Aid" to thin it out. I put pure white in the middle of my palette dish, and then mixed white with black in successively deeper values so that I had the variety I needed for all tones from blackest to whitest.

And then, I began to paint. It's taken a while to come back to me, how to handle paint that you don't water down to blend. The whole idea of taking one color and pushing it into another strategically to give the lights and darks is so different from the successive layering of watercolor! But it's fun to play around, and especially solely in shades of black and white–it gives such an appreciation of gradations.

Since I had a clump of each value left over when I was done, I used it to create another black-and-white background to paint on later, so there will be at least one more like this.

While we are waiting for Miss Bethune to dry so that I can scan her, I'll mention some of the reasons I wanted to paint her. 

Mary McLeod Bethune (July 1875 to May 1955) was born in South Carolina the 15th of 17 children, to parents who had been slaves; in fact, many of her siblings were also born into slavery. But the family worked and sacrificed in order to buy a farm, and her father grew cotton while her mother did washing for white people, including her former owner. Mary went along to deliver the laundry and became fascinated with the white children's books. She believed that the only difference between white and black children was the ability to read and write, and decided that's what she would do.

She walked five miles each day to attend a black one-room schoolhouse; since she was the only member of her family to attend, she would then go home and teach her family what she had learned. Her teacher mentored her and ultimately helped her to attend college, where she prepared to be a missionary in Africa, but she was turned down for that and instead became an educator.

She married at age 23 and she and her husband had one son, but her husband later deserted the family. Bethune taught at various schools, but was most affected by her stint at a Presbyterian mission school run by Lucy Craft Laney; Bethune ended up adopting most of her educational philosophies, especially embracing the education of girls and women to improve the conditions of black people. She started her own school in Florida that began with six students in a house that sat next to Daytona's dump; after years of tireless fund-raising, her school merged with Cookman College to become Bethune-Cookman School, which later achieved official four-year college status.

She subsequently went on to found a hospital for black people, served for eight years as the president of the National Association of Colored Women, working to register black voters, and founded the National Council of Negro Women. She came to the attention of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt when she lobbied for their National Youth Administration (part of the WPA) to include people of color, and became good friends with them. She used this access to form a coalition of leaders from black organizations that came to be known as the Black Cabinet, an advisory board to Roosevelt on issues facing black people in America. She co-founded the United Negro College Fund in 1944.

These are merely the highlights of her achievements, astounding for a person of any gender, let alone for a black woman of that time period—or any, for that matter.

And here is my portrait: "Miss Bethune"—black and white gesso on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress watercolor paper. I could hardly do her justice, but hopefully it will remind people of this significant woman's lifetime of persistence.