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.
This is one of the paintings featured in the most recent Arnet newsletter.
🙂 I feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
This is Marian (a version). A painting I did for the first time back in 1989. It’s based on the song by the Sisters of Mercy. Originally, Marian was floating above an airbrushy ocean… as per the song lyrics. Version 2 was sometime in the ’90s. I changed the background to a sort of greyish, drippy, abstract thing. I did this version a few years back. It’s 28×22 inches, oil on muslin that’s adhered to a hardboard panel. I’ve been forbidden to sell it. 🙂 It is one of several paintings that I’ve done with the same “figure”.
Somehow, this is just crying out for another version…
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.
🙂 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 Violet 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.
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.
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
Studio Time 