Some New Semester 2 Work

All Natural - oil on birch panel, 20" x 30"

And a close up:

Alcyone - oil on birch panel, 18" x 18"

Close-up:

In my very recent visit with Emily, we both agreed that this was a successful venture into creating facture on the painting surface. It was highly experimental for me, but I was able to develop a decent technical facility with bigger, juicier marks of paint in a fairly short period. The use of panels rather than canvas was a big help, as the paint truly sits up on the primed birch, as opposed to sinking into the weave (and more absorbent commercial primers) of stretched canvas. I'm proud of the fact that when it came to using just pure layered wet-into-wet paint, I stuck with large (#12 and up) bristle brushes, and kept the blenders in a drawer. The only blending (purposely done) was the no-texture cloud background of All Natural.

Again, as far as discussing conceptual aspects, I have to leave that between Emily and me, and give full disclosure at my Group 3 residency in January. I am happy to tell that Emily felt these were very solid pieces as far as the direction I'm looking to go conceptually. Let's go out on a limb here and say that things are slowly coming together.