Word: gesso
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...fact, that sensibility is frequently in distinguishable from Updike's gilded-gesso prose, a doge's palace of words that are as unexpectedly suited to fill the dreaded emptiness of Kush as they did the drab streets of Olinger, the fictional setting of some of the author's earlier stories...
...work like Tango (circa 1919), the dress suit and the white vest-rendered with the utmost economy as a patch of gesso on the smooth cherry-wood - take on a sleek, concise elegance far removed from the naive woodcarvings of country America that provoked Nadelman's hand. He was an exquisite connoisseur of gesture, and his finest works-particularly the suite of woodcarvings to which Tango belongs-stem from his delight in performance: in music halls or burlesques, at plays, piano recitals or even tea dances...
...picture took six weeks to complete, from the first ink drawing on a gesso-covered wood panel to the final delicate strokes of ocher tempera. The result is a memorable portrait of a girl with a look-wary, contained, but challenging-that speaks of the courage and the ordeal of those who, in Frost's phrase, have taken the road "less traveled...
...last bramble on a bush, while in the distance a minuscule brush stroke may distinctly show a man walking or working underneath a tree. Bruegel began with ships' timbers of seasoned oak. He set the planks edge to edge, smoothed them, and then brushed on a white gesso base. He drew his composition on the gesso in gray chalk. That done, he would start painting in egg tempera, thinly and swiftly. His first layers of color, though, often bore no overt relation to the effect in his mind. Ice, for example, might be lemon-yellow at the start. Blue...