Studio Time

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

Automatism, Hard Bop, Watercolor
A Difference of Opinion

I finished this yesterday… mostly. It still needs to be re-stretched. The painting itself is done for now.

This is 12×18 inches; oil on some fairly heavy canvas. Strangely, it was easier to keep things crisp and clean than it has been with paper. I’d expect the opposite. I’m going to attribute that to the glaze I did a while back.

October 14, 2023

Automatism, Oil Painting
Chaos

I managed to finish another of these today. It’s a representation of “chaos” as opposed to the somewhat more ordered “anarchy” of the last image.

12×18, oil on Arches oil paper

October 13, 2023

Automatism, Oil Painting
Psychic Anarchism

These things take forever. Mainly because I just work on them a little bit at a time. It doesn’t take long before there’s no place to rest my hand and I really don’t like using mahl sticks. I have a dozen of them or so going at the moment so I can just move on to the next one when one gets “full”. I have two more that are probably a session away from being finished. I’ll probably post them in the next day or so.

These are basically automatic drawings that I decided to treat as abstracts rather than using them to create figures and so on. The drawing for this one was digitally manipulated and re-printed on Arches oil paper. It’s 12×18 inches.

October 12, 2023

Automatism, Digital Emissions, Oil Painting
Three Trolls and a Baby Dragon

This is pretty much what the title implies. It’s 18×32… Oil on canvas

October 11, 2023

Automatism, Oil Painting
Joann

This is a portrait, in process, of my friend Joann. Joann is the very embodiment of the word “beautiful” (grace… poise…).

🙂 I will finish this eventually.

October 8, 2023

Automatism, Oil Painting, Portrait
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.

October 7, 2023

Automatism, Improvisation With Bird, Oil Painting
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.

October 6, 2023

Acrylic Painting, Automatism, Dance Floor Frenzy
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…

October 5, 2023

Automatism, Improvisation With Bird, Oil Painting
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.

October 3, 2023

Automatism, Oil Painting