Thinking and Dead Color

     I took a day off from the paintings that I have been working on, more drying and thinking.  I cannot however afford to do nothing today, so I spent some time harvesting some stretchers from some old paintings that a local man was throwing away a few years ago.  He said he quit painting.  I never forgot that.  There were two sizes, 40 and 30.  They are some kind of standard sizes in metric lengths.  The smaller ones had a lot of heavy paint on them so I stripped them and decided to add some quarter round from a store called J-Mart around the edge.  They were mysteriously lacking any lip and I like to apply a lot of pressure to my work.  If I don't use these this summer than I will next year when I return.  The two larger ones look like they were abandoned in the under painting stage, so I will sand them and apply a primer on top.  Unfortunately, the linen was cut right at the back of the bar, so i will draw a rectangle within the support so that I have enough material to re-stretch these upon my return home.
     Speaking of hiding and underpainting, I also spent the day looking at my work and doing some research about "dead color."  This is a classic technique of underpainting in a monochromatic fashion, so as to heighten the color balance/value and to create more depth and pop.  This brought me back to conversations I had with Tony Apesos about sennelier colors and their origins.  I looked into some traditional takes on the subject like those of P.L. Bouvier, Thomas Bardwell and John Collier.  I learned a lot about things like shade teint and mars colors.  The problem is that most of the examples shown feature artists who go to great lengths to hide their brushwork, which is definitely not me.  I am interested in finding a way that this kind of technique which I never learned at Mass Art could be applied to my work.  I can see the benefits, but don't want to get too mechanical or tight.  I am going to really think about where, when, and why this could be useful.
     I think a lot in between stages of my work, I spend some visits to my studio just looking and thinking.  As an educator, it always surprises me what little value we put on thinking.  If a kid doesn't have the answer at his or her fingertips, we move on.  Concepts like "time on learning" do not account for time thinking, and I have said to many administrators who have asked, "what is that child doing?"... "I think he is thinking."  I am currently reading Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man as a part of my academic plan.  The relationship between visual art and literature is of great interest to me.  One of my favorite lines so far is when Steven Dedalus says "by thinking of things you could understand them."