This is a dark, mediocre shot of my latest painting. I shot it with my phone camera.
The painting is basically a re-working of an image I did back in ’91 or so. This is in acrylic on linen. It’s 30×40, stretched over a piece of heavy cardboard that I’ve attached to a rough (cedar 1x4s) stretcher. It’s just to work on. It will get re-stretched in a bit. It’s still wet. Once it dries I’ll add a coat of medium and finish it in oils.
Another painting from my show at S.A.A. and another in my long running series of “lunatics“. This is 18 by 12 inches… oil on paper.
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.
Another painting from my show at S.A.A. This is two older paintings (I’m not quite sure which. 🙂 I tend to do these in very large batches and pick the best half dozen or so.) that I composited together in gimp using the difference layer mode. I flattened and equalized that, converted it to greyscale and printed it on oil paper. Next, I spent an inordinate amount of time painting things in. This is 18×12 inches… oil on paper.
This is another painting that will be in my upcoming show. This started life as an old, electric, organ that I was given by a local church.
I upcycled most of the thing; tore out the innards and added a shelf where the keyboard had been originally. It made a lovely computer desk. The panel that held the speaker was a piece of incredibly well seasoned, half inch plywood that was just large enough to cut to 16 by 20 inches. I covered that with muslin and painted this on top of that.
🙂 There is actually a figure in there.
I know… it’s been quite some time. I’ve been buried in the studio finishing things and really haven’t had the time to shoot paintings, type, etc, etc.
Anyway, this is the final version of On the Street. You can see it in person at the S.A.A. Collective Gallery for this next couple of months or so. You can see the final version of much of the work on this page as well as several paintings that I’ve not put up here yet. I’m doing a featured show with Mario Clarke… Mario does some very nice glass work.
Stop by if you’re in the area. The opening’s this Friday night (April 12). You can drink wine, look at artwork and even listen to me talk about my work. How that will go is anyone’s guess.
This is basically a reaction to Baudelaire’s ‘Les Fleurs du Mal“… Something I was reading at the time. I figured I’d do a painting that represented the flowers in the title. I’m not sure if the painting looks particularly “evil” or not but I think our culture’s idea of what that might entail has probably changed a bit over nearly two centuries. Like most of my paintings of the past few years, it’s oil on acrylic on panel. 18 by 24 inches.
This is the beginning of one of several paintings I’ve done that recall a fairly distant memory of that mysterious machine in the back yard of many homes.
Many of my relatives… Great Grandma, my Great Aunts and Uncles and so on, lived in “country” homes, way back when. Usually a small plot of land, farmhouse, gardens and grapevines, chickens, an occasional pony, tumble-down wooden sheds that were the source of all sorts of magic and mystery in my young mind and, in one case, a bunch of peacocks that delighted in chasing me around the back yard. (Not to mention a few bomb shelters.)
In pretty much every case… there was some sort of bizarre, rusted machine, behind one of the sheds or just sitting in the middle of the garden: an ancient thresher, an old stove, a dead tractor… even the rusted out shell of an old Morris Minor, sitting just on the other side of a deteriorating barbed wire fence. Some things I had no clue about but developed a sort of curious infatuation with anyway.
…That’s my intent here, anyway. I’m not sure if I can pull it off with this one. The other paintings are much more “machine-like”. They include gears and mechanisms, legs, wheels and so on. With this one, I want to see if I can capture some of that in a purely abstract form.
Of course, I’ve started out with an automatic drawing. The colors in the sketch are just whatever tubes I had of Open Acrylics that were the least used. It gives me an idea of tones and colors to use to develop things and clarifies a few of the areas in which there are a lot of lines… keeps them from getting lost in the process.
The ground was canvas that I tinted with various blue and green acrylics. It probably qualified as “raw” before I stated working on it. The drawing is done with watercolor pencils… something I usually seal before moving on to the painting. This time I used a combination of water and acrylic colors to block things in. The watercolor pencil blends nicely into the acrylic and bleeds into the fabric. It makes it really easy to shade things and helps define the lines themselves. There are a few grey shapes on the lower left that are done purely with water… The whole thing’s been sealed with a couple of coats of clear acrylic medium then sanded.
The plan is to use mostly Mars colors which are pigments made from (synthetic) iron oxides (rust) to start things out. We’ll see how it goes. If it works, I want to try integrating machine parts into a future piece.
This went to the gallery this past weekend. It was one of the most frustrating pieces I can remember doing. Originally, it was an acrylic painting that I decided to re-work in oil, make some changes and so on.
This is on paper mounted on plywood. The acrylic was just heavy enough to completely fill in any texture on the piece and left me with a surface that was about as slick as glass. Seeing that I scrub in much of what I paint… this was a real problem. It ended up being a combination of finger-painting, shading with a rag and a bit of normal painting with a brush.
Luckily, the acrylic painting was smooth enough that it didn’t require a lot of sanding to clean up the edges of forms and so on. Somehow, the whole process left me with an odd, painterly texture across the whole painting.
I bought a frame the other day, thinking I’d use it for this piece. When I got it home, I realized that the mat that was in it would fit a full sheet (22×30) sheet of paper. So, seeing that it doesn’t really take much of an excuse for me to start something new… I got out the Arches oil paper, cut myself a couple of appropriately sized hardboard drawing boards and stretched 2 sheets of paper. I did water color washes on them and got a couple of new pieces started. The other one’s back burnered for a bit but I decided to go ahead and get this started.
This is basically an automatic drawing that I’ve shaded in with black watercolor pencil. I shaded things a bit more with the airbrush and sprayed the whole thing with UV protecting clear.
The title? Is tentative. I’ve always loved nautilus shells. I’ve painted quite a few of them over the years. The form in the center of this reminds me of one. I sincerely doubt this will ever end up looking anything like a nautilus but, for the time being, that’s where its at.
Studio Time 