Studio Time

Category: Hard Bop

Hard Bop

Last night’s opening went really well. The place was packed, I actually made it through my talk and the artwork was pretty well received. Mario‘s glass worked very nicely with my paintings and the “linear” theme held up through most everything. (The show is called “Pathways”. It’s a sort of celebration of line.) The artwork is for sale on Artnet if you want to browse through things there.

This is the finished version of the painting I started last October. I’ve named it “Hard Bop“; seeing that it’s sort of the next generation of a painting called “BeBop” that I did several years ago.

April 13, 2024
Paint

It’s been a while. I figured it might be better if I waited until this showed some actual progress and this style of painting is extremely slow going. It took a while before you could clearly see what’s going on. ( 🙂 I’m not sure if it’s all that clear yet.)

Colors here are Rembrandt’s Cadmium Red Light, Winsor Newton’s Cobalt Turquoise and Terra Rosa and a combination of Liquitex’s Magnesium Blue, Sennelier’s Titanium White and Winsor Newton’s Purple Madder. The light blue is a combination of Sennelier’s Titanium White and Phthalocyanine Blue with Winsor Newton’s Cobalt Turquoise. It’s actually a little more green than it is in the photo.

November 3, 2023
Glaze

🙂 I’m back to shooting in the dark again.

I covered this with a “glaze” of Sennelier’s Ultramarine Rose, followed by a bit of shading with their Ultramarine Viole t yesterday. I’ll call it a glaze though the paint is so transparent that it doesn’t actually require much medium.

This is actually this dark. The actual painting is a bit more violet though. Once the paint had dried a bit, I went over it with a rag and sort of daubed at it to get rid of any brush strokes and add a mottled texture. It did give some consistency to things and the surface is a little easier to paint small details onto now that it’s covered with oil. It is very glossy. I’m surprised I was able to get this clean a photograph of it.

October 28, 2023
Underpainting

Several Hard Bop playlists and a half dozen or so Tangerine Dream albums later… this is the finished underpainting. Much of it is painted as “every other shape”. I tried to leave as much of the noise from the watercolor wash and the gradients from the airbrush work as possible. Watercolor is basically pigment with a bit of gum arabic to hold it on the paper. Coated with acrylic… it’s pretty much the same thing as an acrylic painting. The pigments are reasonably lightfast.

Basically, this clarifies stuff and gives me an idea as to where to take things. I gave it a couple of coats of clear acrylic and am letting it dry overnight.

October 26, 2023
Started

There are definitely times when I question my own sanity. Frequently, those questions come at about this stage of one of these paintings. This painting is no different.

This represents several hours of filling in tiny shapes with an equally tiny paint brush. I decided to use acrylics this time seeing that it saves me waiting for things to dry. This is just the start of the underpainting. It will be finished in oil

October 23, 2023
Start

Given that I just finished 3 pieces and have several others close… I decided to treat myself and start a new one. This is 22×28 inches, which just happens to be the size of my largest, empty drawing board. It’s on Arches oil paper. This first image is the thing covered with a watercolor wash of Sennelier’s Chinese Orange as well as Winsor Newton’s Cerulean Blue and Brown Madder. I tossed some salt on it to give it the texture.

After letting it dry for a day, I scrubbed off the salt. Half an eraser later… I did the automatic drawing/scribble you see here with watercolor pencils.

In an effort to sort of speed things up, I used an airbrush and the same colors I used to start things as well as Winsor Newton’s Dioxazine Purple to begin defining some of this. This image is taken after I put a light coat of U.V protective sealer on things.

October 16, 2023