Musings of a Travelling Mind

Patrick Self-portrait

MY TECHNIQUE MIXTE PAINTINGS (2006)

My paintings (see pictures below) are an homage to the late Patrick Betaudier, my teacher and mentor who fondly always said, "Sadia become serious about painting. Stop writing and doing other things and being the class comic. Just paint."

I would say,"I am busy, I will seriously paint after my kids are in high school and I retire from work."

Kalaash Valley Sepia,
 (based on  a photograph by  Steve McCurry,
with his permission)

He would always response, "then it will be too late, because I will not be alive by then."

Patrick passed away in 2008, but lives on through the hundreds of students he has has taught -forever immortalized in thousands of their paintings. He taught  his incredible glazing technique (called technique mixte) at his Atelier Neo Medici in France and Friends of Community Public Art in Joliet, Il.

Technique mixte is a laborious painting style that was modernized and reinvented by Patrick and has been used by Renaissance masters like Jan Van Eyck. The paintings are made with accurate graphite underlays that are detailed in their rendering. 

Kalaash Box

Sepia toned tempera is layered over the black and white graphite and every layer goes on with deft, small and definitive strokes. Layer after layer is applied as lightly as a gossamer veil, until the paintings are have a luminous glow, intense depth anddetail. The final part of the process is to add the last layer-color. 


In one painting, I left it at the sepia tone stage because I liked the effect, but in this one I did apply the final color oil glaze. 


Strangely, both paintings are still unfinished after 6 years and were done in two to three months. So these are lazy and 21st-century-time-encapsulated renditions of the technique mixte, as the proper process can take take years (see his below). After I stopped studying with Patrick, I stopped painting all together. 


Patrick was a master painter and true Renaissance man who took this art form to its most complex, modern and heritage-culminating height. Those of us who had the opportunity to work under his tutelage got a glimpse of something rare and remarkable. 


Thanks Patrick, though I never really had time to pursue this more than a summer, I promise I will find time, someday.

http://site.patrickbetaudier.com/