This is pretty much what the title implies. It’s 18×32… Oil on canvas
Category: Automatism
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A little More Improvisation
Usually, when you sand down a painting, it removes the high spots and doesn’t really mess with the painting a whole lot. Imagine my surprise when the image just sort of disappeared the moment the sander hit it this time. It was a pain but I just repainted what I had there following whatever traces were left and the photo I had on the studio computer.
This is an absolute mess but I think I finally got it to work. The way I see it in my head works anyway. 🙂 The composition doesn’t seem quite as “off” as it did previously. I can see some potential in the forms as well.
Colors: Sennelier’s Prussian Blue, Titanium White, Naples Yellow and Sepia as well as Winsor Newton’s Cadmium Red Deep, and Purple Madder.
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Back to the Dance Floor
I spent a couple of hours blocking in some temporary colors then decided that the yellow background was boring, so… I started a gradient. I figure I’ll just let it fade back to a horizon line; something like Tanguy would do. 🙂 It’s a big dance floor.
I put an alizarine crimson glaze over the whole thing, tipped the painting on end and sprayed it with water. I’ll let the drips add some texture.
This has two coats of clear on top of it.
I’m going to have to trace that skanking dinosaur and whatever the green guy is in inkscape and add them to my library of critters…
Colors: Open Acrylic Ultramarine Blue Cadmium Yellow, Hookers Green, Cadmium Orange, Cadmium Red Light, Sennelier‘s Venetian Red, Utrecht’s Titanium White and Winsor Newton’s Alizarin Crimson.
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Improvisation With Bird
I was digging through the paintings on my paint shelves and ran across a couple of paintings that I made last year. Essentially, they were finished but I wasn’t really all that fond of the results. So… I decided to rework them.
This is the first painting. I sort of like it but it strikes me as overly simple and I’m not really fond of the horizontal forms. I think that they throw off the flow of the whole thing.
This second image is after a couple of hours (Two sessions, actually.) with Sennelier’s Alizarin Crimson and Titanium White as well as Miameri’s Yellow Ochre and some Phthalocyanine Blue that I had left on my pallet. I’m not sure that this will stay this way. The composition is a little wonky. I still need to spend some time sanding out the lines from the previous version of this as well. That will change things a bit. I do think this works a bit better. I like it a lot more anyway. We’ll see how it goes…
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Judgement
The idea behind this one is probably obvious. It’s basically meant to illustrate “Judgement”… the feeling you get when you see that look in someone’s eyes that says they’ve already made up their mind about you. Any guy that had long hair in the ’60s or wore a mohawk in the ’70s knows the feeling all too well. If you’re too old, if you’re too young… if you’re from the country or “another” country… any woman that’s had to enter “that” workplace… any person of color that’s had to walk down the street. Many of us have had the experience to some degree or another. I figured that a jury or tribunal pretty well illustrated the concept.
Technically… I covered this with paint and mineral spirits and let the paint run down the face of it. I built a grid on top of that, blocked in the basic forms and added the figures. It’s oil on paper mounted on a 28×22 inch panel.
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Impassioned Dance Floor Frenzy of Passion
…Tentative title. 🙂
I was beginning to feel a bit “scribble dependent” so… I decided to put on some BeBop and start something that was scribble free. It’s still an automatic drawing in that I really had no intent when I first picked up my pencil and just let the image develop as I went along. The drawing isn’t quite finished but I’m going to try to leave this a little bit loose and not fill in every inch of the canvas.
So far, this is done in watercolor pencil and Utrecht’s Titanium White acrylic on raw canvas that’s adhered to a 16×20 hardboard panel. The yellow on the outside is a wash of Sennelier’s Indian Yellow.
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Finish Line
I decided that I was going to wait until this was finished to post about it again.
For now… it’s finished. It could stand a little cleanup but I’m going to wait until it’s cured for a bit before I do that. For one thing, it’s a bit easier… for another… I’m at the point where every time I look at this thing I see something else that needs to be “fixed”. I need to leave it alone for a while. 🙂
This is scheduled for a show I have coming up in March. I’ve got plenty of time to pull it off of the wall and completely re-work it. 🙂
Colors are the same.
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A Continental Breakfast
Strangely enough for me… I wasted the entire day trying to update my gallery resume… looking up exhibition dates that I didn’t actually bother to record and so on. So… this is a painting from a while back… when I made the switch back from digital to traditional media. I used acrylics for the first year or so then switched back to oils. This is one of the acrylic pieces.
I called it “A Continental Breakfast” because of the cinnamon rolls.
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Home Stretch
It finally “clicked”. 🙂 That’s technical, artsy talk for “the forms all work, everything fits, the composition is fairly tight and the motion flows unimpeded across the face of the image.” Nearly time to stop, in other words.
I realized this afternoon that this painting channels, pretty well, the psychedelic, stoner music that I’ve been listening to for the entire time I’ve been working on it. I did listen to Renaissance for most of this last session. 🙂 I suppose that’s appropriate for refining things. It will still probably take another session or two.
Colors are the same.
Studio Time 