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March 24th, 2010 Posted 9:57 am
Alas! Poor Yorrick
nude male, back view, head leaning against wall
I went back to figure drawing last night at the weekly drawing group that meets in Frederick, MD. Clayton Myer (www.claytonmyer.com) was the model. There was a plastic skull laying around the studio and we posed him in this contemplation of age and death. While we drew, Clayton regaled us with stories of his acting career and the time he played a boxer in an indie film.
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March 19th, 2010 Posted 3:07 pm
Steel Canyons
This is a rather large piece (40″ x 30″) that was based on a photograph which I used previously for a small sketch (see January 5th).I find these larger canvases a challenge to keep the whole thing holding together. With smaller canvases, I have a feel for the whole thing, maybe because you can see everything at the same time when working at arm’s length. But with a larger canvas, the work needs to be done piecemeal. In this case, I first worked on the buildings, then on the foreground, then on the sky, etc. but rarely worked on the piece as a whole. There a quite a few layers here as I tried to work out the kinks in the composition. Though the original photograph has a river in the foreground, during the painting process, the river dried out and a figure appeared, who seems to be looking up at the city spread out before him with amazement and some dismay. The painting seemed to demand a more illustrative approach in order to tell this story.
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February 25th, 2010 Posted 2:36 pm
autumn in a quaint new england town
Another attempt at abstraction..starting with blues and oranges and intersecting shapes, which led to a repetition of triangular shapes. Shortly after I took this photo, the painting coalesced into a small seaside new england town, replete with sailboats, a lighthouse, well maintained white clapboard houses and church with freshly painted blue roofs. And of course the requisite autumn foliage. I mean that I saw this in my mind but once I had that image there I couldn’t maintain the integrity of the work. At least as an abstract. And I didn’t really have enough information to paint representationally. And it sort of fell apart. But at least I have this photo. And maybe I can resurrect this stage again, which, though not finished, is sort of interesting.
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February 15th, 2010 Posted 2:34 pm
single file
And the orange guy just keeps on trucking, rain, sleet or, in this case, 4 ‘ walls of snow. (See February 3 entry)
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February 12th, 2010 Posted 2:00 pm
signs of a rudimentary civilization
Starting with a simple design of horizontal planes and intersecting lines and a few ideas for color, I began to randomly fill in with flat color just to see where it would lead. At some point it seemed that pink had to dominate. I got looser with the paint, using a palette knife. Purples and blue contrasted nicely with that. It seem like a pleasant design but looking a little flat. Something had to go in the foreground. A few quickly drawn black lines and daubed-in white and gray shapes and an ancient civilization seemed to sprout instantly off the rocky cliffs. I began to wonder, what was their means of sustenance? I had such a storyline built up around this that I don’t think I could finish the picture. I ended up painting much of what you see above with what looked like a huge freeway (not shown). More on this later.
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February 3rd, 2010 Posted 1:52 pm
February 2010 snowstorm
When the snow first hit the DC region, little did we know what was coming. It looked so pretty at the time. I loved how bright the colors of street signs looked in a world otherwise devoid of color. A week later, we were so tired of of the 3 plus feet of snow that had fallen, who wanted to take photos of it?
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January 26th, 2010 Posted 4:57 pm
Night Visit
This is the result of a class I am taking called “Abstract Representation” taught by Jordan Bruns at the Yellow Barn Studio in Glen Echo, MD. Jordan is a new teacher at the school and maintains a studio there as well. I had been fascinated by his large swirling drawings and paintings that start with random marks or paint drippings but then turn into vast ancient ruins that don’t exactly obey the laws of gravity but seem real enough to get lost in. I started this work by covering a large sheet of heavy paper with a coating of powdered graphite. All the marks on it were made by erasing away the graphite to the white of the paper. I then went back in with more powdered graphite applied with a Q-tip. Somewhere along the way the random markings I made begin to turn into images–buildings,trees and clouds. Eventually this drawing coalesced into a scene of a strange city at night. It is interesting how this process works; you start with seemingly nonobjective marks on paper and then suddenly memories and experiences start to come up. It seems the trick is to wait until the right image comes along, the one that won’t minimize the abstract power of the work but harmonize with it.
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January 16th, 2010 Posted 4:51 pm
Diagonal Construction
Like the previous work, this is a “painting construction”. That is the painting starts with a general idea of the process and then is pieced together on the fly. The subject matter, which here looks like you are looking up at some office building under construction and seeing some leaves floating down towards you, is accidental and comes towards the end of the work. I started with masking out some diagonal lines on a small sheet of watercolor paper with painter’s tape, then filling them in quickly. Then reverse the maks and filled in the sky with a large soft brush which gives some very subtle gradations in color.The contrast of these soft gradations and the hard edges seems to give the painting some depth.
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January 16th, 2010 Posted 4:35 pm
No Smoking
Instead of painting from a still life of model, I thought I would try to make something up. I just started this small work filling in the background with a smooth gradation with a large brush, then filled in some white shapes here and some dark green shapes there. It seemed a little skewed to the blue-green range and was crying for some red. What better way to tie the painting together than with a big red “X”? I added a little house and connected the white cloud shapes to the house’s chimney. Is the painting a warning to clean your chimney before you light a fire? Or is it just a silly excuse to paint. You be the judge.
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January 5th, 2010 Posted 5:09 pm
Red City
Though recently I have been drawing mostly, I have also been working in acrylic lately to ease myself back into painting. I am also looking for a subject matter that I can sink my teeth into for a while. Since I have done several paintings of urban scenes that have been well received, I thought I would continue in that vein. Typically landscape painting focuses on more rural scenes probably because people find natural subjects more pleasant and relaxing to look at. I mean who wants to look at the freeway after driving on it all day? But living only blocks from the national Beltway, the subject matter is close at hand for me. And maybe there will be some kind of catharsis in the viewer who will take a new look at their surroundings on their daily commute. Anyway I have always been more of a city boy.
Blue City
