An homage to the women of the seventies… eighties. 🙂 Maybe the boys of the eighties. I’m not really a fan of hair metal though.
Category: Automatism
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Lunacy
This is an automatic painting with some loose intent behind it.
Sometimes it just feels more appropriate to start something with a brush. With a colored ground, you may actually have no choice. (I do tend to do lots of experiments with acrylic paint that at least define a starting point or give things a base color.) Pastels or colored pencils may show up on it and give you a usable drawing but it’s frequently easier to just go straight to paint. It can be a lot more fun as well. I started with circles for eyes, blocked in a loose drawing of a face and let the painting sort of work its way from there.
🙂 “Lunacy” is a sort of recurring theme with me. I’ve done quite a few variations on the idea. It’s inspired somewhat by the faces from older cartoons.
This is 18×24 inches… oil over acrylic on panel.
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Green Dress
I did a fashion shoot for a friend of mine… um… many years back. Mostly goth/industrial clothing… lots of PVC, latex, metal things and so on. This painting is based on one of the photos from that shoot. I like to clothe figures in stripes; either as contours or, like I’ve done here, as a sort of construction or lattice to twine the hair through.
This is 18×24… oil on panel.
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Jack in the Box
I’m not really sure where this photo came from. I found it while digging through some gallery directories. I may have shot it with my tablet or something. I must have stripped the EXIF camera data.
This painting is oil on canvas and was originally much larger… 4×6 feet or so, and more complex, and… just didn’t work. It sat rolled against the wall for some time before I decided to cut it up. I cut the original in half, reworked it and mounted each side on wood (plywood or hardwood, one. I sold this a long time ago. I really don’t remember which.) The other painting’s about half this size. I did manage to cut out the elements that weren’t working for me and come up with two paintings that I liked.
That is one of the advantages of working with panels. This was on a stretcher. When you stretch stuff you lose several inches on the sides when you wrap the canvas around the stretcher bars. Re-stretching it would kill a lot of what I was trying to save. If you adhere things to a panel, you can cut your canvas pretty precisely.
It’s basically a sort of fantasy thing that’s generated from an automatic drawing. In the first version of this; the “Jack in the box” (That face you may or may not see in the upper left hand corner. 🙂 ) was much more clearly attached to the forms on the right side and may have looked a bit more like an actual Jack in the box. I think it works better this way.
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Dryad
This is 18×24… oil on canvas panel. It’s just straight, out of my head, with no references; one of those rare paintings that just worked out of the gate. I blocked it in with acrylic paint. It took, maybe, four brushstrokes to resolve the face… the rest went pretty easily. It took a bit longer to add the details and so on.
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We Stand Like Whores
This is old… like really old… late “eighties” old.
I used to be obsessed with the airbrush. (I no longer have a Badger 100 (sg)… That is what this was done with though. These days I have an Iwata Eclipse (gravity feed) and a special edition Paasche VSR90 (which they no longer make) which still works very nicely 35 years later.)
It was one of the most productive periods of my life. You can turn out images in just a few minutes with one. The prep may take some time. Cutting stencils out of acetate can be really time consuming. Once you have the stencils cut… it’s fairly simple to build images with them though. Once you have a library of stencils, things go pretty fast. Even without stencils you can do some incredible things pretty easily.
This was a simple line drawing that I traced on to acetate and cut out with a number 11 X-acto blade. One stencil for the shoulders, arms and neck, one for the legs, the dress and the shoes. The straight lines that build the staircase are just the edge of the acetate sheet. The lights at the top are simply dots sprayed with opaque white ink. I just moved the stencils around and sprayed until I’d built up the image. Some of the splatters are intentional… some not. I like the way they accent the image, add random elements and make things a bit less sterile than airbrush can be capable of.
The colors are Winsor Newton watercolors. The original painting is on Crescent museum board.
Conceptually? …I don’t always love the fashion industry. The artificiality and crass commercialism of it can be really tiresome.
The title is taken from “Sleepwalk“, a song by Christian Death. (Something else I used to be obsessed with.)
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The Indeterminate Fate of Baby Bunting
This painting is about as close as I get to fantasy art these days. It asks the age old question; “Whatever happened to that kid? Did he freeze to death? Did he get his rabbit skin? Did Dad ever come home from his hunting trip?”
This started out with an automatic drawing. Strangely, the nursery rhyme kept occurring to me as I drew things out. I began to see elements in the painting that reminded me of elements in the poem… the wild hunt for the rabbit skin and so on. I started pushing things in that direction. Aside from the baby and, maybe, the hunter up in the corner, the color is probably the most influenced.
It’s altogether possible that you may not actually see Baby Bunting, the child’s father or anything to do with the poem in this. I suppose we could call it “playful, cartoony, greenish painting” or something then.
This is 22×30 inches… oil on canvas that’s been adhered to a hardboard panel.
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Glamour 2
This painting is the second in a fairly long running series of “glamour” portraits. There’s nothing digital about this one. I just drew an inverted triangle for the head, blocked in the rest of it then did an automatic drawing on top of it. I’ve done these sorts of things for as long as I can remember. They go fairly easily and give me a break from the more complex stuff.
I love mid-twentieth century glamour photography: George Hurrell and Milton Greene and so on… pictures Of Dietrich, Garbo, Gene Tierney, Hedy Lamarr, Lauren Bacall, etc… Those pictures offer a sort of break from the glut of images on the internet today. Not that today’s photography is bad… some of it’s amazing. There’s so much of it that it loses a lot of its impact. There’s a sort of magic to those old film photos, anyway… the greyscales, the lighting, the clarity… the subjects…
(I just realized… I sound a bit like Norma Desmond. 🙂 )
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Dancing With the Dragon Lady
When I originally got in to making artwork… Well, high school, anyway… I wanted to be an underground cartoonist like Robert Crumb or Vaughn Bodē. (I might have been inspired a bit by artists like Roger Dean, Frank Frazetta and Gage Taylor as well. 🙂 ) It was the early seventies… a reflection of the times. I still love those guys work though.
I did page after page of cartoons on typing paper and eventually had a fairly huge stack of them. College… introduced me to folk like Paul Wunderlich, Hans Bellmer, the Surrealists and so on. I lost much of my interest in cartooning in pursuit of other styles and forms. My stack of cartoons got lost or destroyed along the way but that influence still shows up in my artwork these days. This painting is a pretty good example.
This is oil on canvas that’s adhered to a hardboard panel. It’s generated with an automatic drawing that I’ve run a few straight lines through. Colors are typical for me… cadmiums, cobalts (gotta’ love poisonous stuff, no?), Naples yellow and so on.
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Foetus With Puppy
Every kid needs a puppy, right?
This is another image that’s been digitally altered in gimp. The original was a figurative piece that I sold a while back. The subject; babies with dogs… is something I’ve dealt with for a long time now. The medium is oil on Arches oil paper.
I really have no idea what colors I used in this. White is a pigment I refused to use for many years. At least, unless it was truly necessary. It tends to suck the life out of colors. This is an attempt to come to terms with it.
Studio Time 