Larry Sanders

I’ve just seen a couple episodes of The Larry Sanders Show, Garry Shandling’s show from HBO about life backstage at a late night talk show. It’s showing up in syndication late Saturday nights on channel 5 (NYC’s Fox affiliate, but I don’t know if it’s local or network programming), where Stargate SG1 used to. I’d heard lots of good things about it, but I found it only mildly amusing; pretty much the only reason I might watch it would be to stare at Jeanane Garofalo. I think it suffers from comparison with Sports Night, another TV show about a TV show, written by Aaron Sorkin, with really tight comic pacing and good writing.

Glazing

Glazing, glazing
Mix on the canvas, do
I’m half-crazing
Blending up red and blue
The pthalo is dark and somber
Toned down by the burnt umber
But to my sight it don’t look right
Not the brightness or depth or hue

(Actually, it was burnt sienna, but that doesn’t even come close to rhyming with “somber”.)

I’m still fiddling around with color blending techniques, trying to compensate for the stuff I wasn’t taught at SVA. They gave me color theory, but I really could have used a course in elementary paint handling. What the various media do, how to move stuff around on the palette, etc. Though my reading has given me the impression that sort of thing is actually very idiosyncratic, with no One Best Way. Still, there might at least be a Half-Dozen Pretty Good Ways I could have been exposed to.

What I’m actually trying to figure out is how to produce that mottled look I see in a lot of paintings. I think it’s mostly an oil paint thing, but acrylics with the rights mediums (no, not “media”, not in this context) ought to be able to do anything oils can. I thought it was glazing, but I suspect it’s more scumbling, or a combination of both. I think I’ve got it, kinda, but I need to figure out how to get more colors going, that optical mixing thang.