Study/Experiment With New Materials

Here's a study for a much larger work. This "study" is 24" x 24" already, but I needed the working room for the new materials. I used tar (roofing tar, specifically), enamel (Rustoleum, almond color), some VanDyck Brown and mineral spirits. Most of this is painted with chemical-proof gloves, not brushes. And lots and lots of rags! These materials are hard as hell to work with and fairly counterintuitive to the normal opaque-medium painting process. There's some surface concerns in terms of the way it sets up, and I may introduce some shellac, but we'll see in a few days when it stabilizes. Oddly enough, other than the possibility of the enamel being a bit brittle, the tar compound will be nice and flexy, so I'm fairly confident it won't explode on me.

When I finish the final work, I'll elaborate on my intentionality, but you can probably guess why I'm using petroleum-based products for this subject matter.

Minumental in 10 "Easy" Steps!

Okay, here's the how-to on painting your basic "minumental" (remember to click on the images for a closer view):

1. Setup. Here's a little sake still life with a coral-colored shirt as my background. The chroma is a bit intense, so I should neutralize that somewhat. I've got my linen-mounted panel secured to a board on my easel, and I'm ready to go!

2. Drawing in raw umber. Nothing too fancy. Just getting the sizes right and my ellipses somewhat accurate. I will correct them further as I paint.

3. Palette. Not a lot of color in this setup, so all I need is (clockwise from bottom left) burnt umber, cadmium red, cad orange (2 piles - one for pure grabs of orange, the other for mixes with dirty brushes), cad yellow, titanium white (same clean & dirty piles), raw umber, ivory black, and ultramarine blue. The mixed bit in the middle right is my base color for the background. It's mostly orange and white with touches of cad red,raw umber, and black to neutralize.

4. Background values. Just a basic 3 which I will blend on the panel as I go. FYI - as I lightened the value, I needed more light warms to counter the coolness of adding white, so orange and yellow were added. For the dark value, I needed warm darks, and I used red and burnt umber, adding touches of black if it got too warm. I mixed enough to cover the panel and have some left over for corrections and reflective light in the objects.

5. Background block in. Simple enough - just adding to the drawing of the objects by establishing edges. The cast shadow is basic, and will be amended later. The gradation is designed to keep the eyes in the painting, focused on the objects.

6. Mixing the object colors. The ceramic is pretty neutral, and not full white, either. With the exception of the specular highlights (generally speaking, on shiny objects, these are the highlights that mirror the light source directly), it's maybe a value 9 or 9 1/2. The cool shadow plane side of the objects are about a 3 1/2 to 4. That's on the far right. The others are strictly neutral (white, raw umber, black) and are 6, 8 and a 9.5 right to left. I will add warms to these to imitate the background color infusion as I paint - mostly a red-orange, no doubt.

7. Blocking in objects. No detail yet, of course. Just getting a sculptural sense of things. The decanter isn't really round, it's hand made, so it's a little asymmetrical. I'm making it more symmetrical, just to keep things simple. It's at this time, I've decided to make a little change.

8. Pattern detail and... changes! Um, yeah, if you hadn't already called it, everything was a little right-side heavy, so I added the second cup. Better balance now, no? So, I blocked it all in, and now I'm going wet-into wet with ultramarine blue for the bamboo design on the decanter. I'm refining the reflective lights, too, as well as the cast shadow definition.

9. More detail & refinement. Completing the rear cup, trying to keep the values a little more compressed, in order to make the front cup really pop. Again, I'm using background colors to correct the ellipses and blending edge planes to keep the cups looking rounded.

10. Finished! Notice the brighter lights and slightly warmer tones in the foreground cup. It's the closest thing to the viewer, so in order to maintain a sense of atmospheric perspective, these are the "tricks" you need to employ.

Other than a bit of a design glitch, this one was pretty straightforward. The limited palette, due to the predominance of the ceramic, helped speed it along a bit... Although the multiple ellipses and patterns made up for it. All in a day's work, as they say.

Fire and Water

Laurelin - oil on panel, 14" square.

If you're familiar with Portland, you may recognize this tree. Autumn's fine colors are gorgeous this year, and have peaked this week on the southern Maine coast. If you're wondering at the name, you'll have to read the first part of "The Silmarillion" again, I'm afraid.

I have been in and out of the studio quickly these days, unable to put in a lot of time on any one project. There have been quite a few social and familial obligations to fulfill, and I was hoping for a slowdown this fall, but to no avail. Even so, I have concepted out quite a few paintings for the future, and I am through the preliminary setups on two of them. One is the study for the painting with Molly, the other is more akin to the series I'm off-shooting from the successful "She Dreams." I'm very excited about this stuff.

Again, I wonder a bit about the efficacy of doing these figurative works, but hey, I don't need to move them as fast as I would were a gallery asking me for paintings. I would be eschewing the figure for landscapes, no doubt. Not that there's anything wrong with pure landscapes - I enjoy painting them dearly - but, as I'd said before, my vision is leading me towards the figure. Since I currently have the wherewithal to entertain this direction, I'm going to go for it.

Color Study & FFAW

Color Study of Molly - oil on museum board 14" x 9".

This is from a 3-hour session. Another quick photo, sorry - there's glare coming off the wet paint. It is intentionally low contrast, though. You would think I would want a darker background so her pale skin tones would really pop, but I have a particular atmosphere in mind. I really didn't try very hard with her features or proportions, as you see. It's more comic-book scale here at 7 1/2 heads high or thereabout. Nevertheless, this is what I need for the bigger painting in terms of color. I wanted to work out the edge planes and flat light against the light neutral, as well as incorporate some of the atmosphere in the skin tones themselves. It was fun to do, and Molly is fun to work with. I hope to see her back this winter & I wish her the best in her cross country trek. I might need her anyway, should I run into trouble with the final piece.

Tonight is First Friday. Come by if you can!

More info at www.firstfridayartwalk.com

New Model

Here's a 3-hour Study of Molly (Ebony pencil on paper, 14" x 24") for a new painting I'm working on. Sorry for the poorly-lit photo of the piece - I just snapped it quickly before I locked the studio for the night. [click for a larger version, as usual]

It's been a long time since I've worked one-on-one with a model, and I'm so glad that it's Molly who I tapped for this project. She's an artist herself, and it makes things so much easier (as I've stated in previous posts about figure models) for me, as she is truly into the idea and understands what I'm striving for with the image. I had wanted to work with her since March, after having worked with her at drawing room, because she fit in perfectly with an idea I had for a figure in a landscape. There's some specific things I won't mention, because I'll give away the idea, but I will say that her skin tone had a lot to do with it. Of course, now that I have (barely) some time to get down to work with her, she's headed for California until the winter. But, she was gracious and cool enough to fit me in, knowing that I was serious and that it would be a good experience for us both.

So far, as you can see, it's been great after the one sitting. I plan on working with her again tonight and hopefully I will get a quick color study out of it. She's leaving over the weekend, so I think this may be it. Nevertheless, if I nail the study, as I feel I did with this drawing, I'll be armed with all the info I need to place her in the landscape. Of course, I'll need to do a composite study of that too. You'll see it all here!

Time and Timeless

From the top-

• Gnomon - oil on panel, 19"x28"
• (a detail closeup)
  
• Study for Gnomon - oil on linen, 8"x10"
• A side by side look at the larger piece with most of the underpainting showing and the study.

The study was done en plein air at Two Lights State Park alongside my good friend Meghan (it started raining on us at the end, so the foreground never really got resolved). I was attracted to this rock's shape, as it reminded me of the triangular piece that casts the shadow for a sundial. That piece is called a gnomon. There was a contrast here, as there is a timelessness to the place: an incessant beating of water on rock for eons. Yet the shape of this rock is reminiscent of a device crafted for a human scale of time. After looking at the study for a while, I felt it demanded a grander scale in paint.

Working this way generally gives the best results, as it allows for a lot more of an innate understanding of the subject. That is, I painted it once, so it can only get better if I paint it again. A lot of passages are so familiar, though they are on a larger scale. Color choices have already been made in the study, so that's an easy thing to deal with. The palette was limited: raw umber (always!), ultramarine blue, cadmium orange, ivory black, titanium white, some indian yellow for effects in the seaweed, and a touch of viridian for the trees on the distant island. So it was mostly about pushing value and warm/cool as a point/counterpoint.

You'll notice in the study that the rock is more truncated than in the big piece. That's because I had to fit it into the panel, as the panel dimensions didn't really accommodate the shape that well. I rectified that in the large piece with some photo reference, to which I applied a grid for drawing purposes. Sorry I didn't get a photo of that aspect, but I referred to it only for the sake of the underpainting and layout. The contrast, values and colors of the photo were so unlike the study, that it was only useful for shapes and detail. Just shows that there is no substitute for painting from life.

I had a little bit of difficulty in the near foreground with the rocks and tidepools. I didn't want any of that to detract from the big rock, so I tried to shift the hue to a cooler state, as well as pattern the clinging seaweed (the most saturated color) to lead the eye up to the rock. It took some doing, but I think I achieved what I wanted. This may not seem like a virtuoso feat of painting in the grand scheme, but for me, this was one of my biggest efforts in a long time in terms of size and dedication.

Of course, it's way more fun to look at this in person. Come on by and visit me, and take a look!

Charcoal = Controlled Smudging

Another drawing room session piece in charcoal with the wonderful Caribeth. This was a 20 minute pose with some enhancements after the fact. I think adding the dark tone is a plus in order to get added dimension and even a little atmosphere. Sargent did this often - and who better to try and emulate?
No drawing room this week - there's a show happening there, so I'm a little bummed. However, there are some things I could and probably will tend to in the studio Thursday night instead. I have completed a large piece, and need to properly photograph it. If I get a good shot, I'll post it here, plus a small WIP of how it came together.

No Present Like the Time

A little life drawing for you. This is Ida in an Eames Chair, 14"x17" charcoal on paper. This was done in Joe Begnaud's studio a while back.

Been a while since the last blog entry. I had the chance to browse a few blogs, and I realize that the most successful ones are the ones that are updated more regularly. Well, I never set out to win any awards with this thing.

So, a lot happened in the interim: I had to go to New York, as my father had to have open heart surgery, and at the same time, my brother-in-law became a first-time dad. So, the visit was kind of an emotional rollercoaster. I also got sick with an ailment that seems to have visited most of the people I know including my family, my co-workers, and basically anybody I run into on the street in Portland. I had a birthday, and I also played two league matches to start the men's 4.0 season. All those things combined served to kind of run me down so that I fell ill again, or perhaps, I relapsed from the first illness. It was only yesterday that I really started feeling like myself again.

I missed a week at Berehaven, but I'm making good progress, still. Gnomon is nearly complete, and it looks like I had envisioned it. There was a small issue of the earth tones in the shadows sinking in, but I hit the completed sections with retouch varnish, and I was able to match the adjacent areas. I actually (geek) made a little diagram to remind me what I varnished, so I can apply retouch to the rest of the piece when it is done, so that the varnish surfaces and gloss are even. I kind of forgot that this happens when you work big. It's been a while, and I'm glad I'm doing this, regardless of the time factor. I won't be working this size for a while, as most of the ideas I have are for smaller pieces.

drawing room was excellent this week, with a model I had not met yet. She was graceful like a dancer (I suspect she was a dancer), and had a lovely poise. I hit the mark a few times that night, so I was pleased. I haven't taken pictures of the drawings from that session, but I have some from other sessions. I may post them here, but I think I might hold out until I get this website thing underway. Yes, I will have a site again, finally. It's a long time coming, but the priority wasn't that high when I first started the full time job. Now that I'm back painting my own work on the side, it's time to market it a bit.

I have a big trip planned for the Spring. Details soon.

Work in Progress

Typical Saturday at Berehaven. Here's a little sidelong glimpse at "Gnomon."

New Projects

Is anyone is ever going to read this thing? I wonder. I know that current opinion has come around to the conclusion that blogging is no longer cool - rather, it's self-indulgent. That said, I have to ponder the worth of this medium.

Well, I shall soldier on for a little while longer. Funny, I think I planted a suggestion in my own head with that last post in that I engaged in a bit of "Artist's Way"-style cathartic writing the other night. I was a bit morose in regard to the current state of things at my workplace. That being, the new year is already starting off with a "bbbth" rather than a "bang" as regards the concepting phase of what we do. It's basically the same old thing. I came to the realization that I really have zero room to stretch on the job, and that I must exercise this elsewhere. I will always continue to put out professional-looking work, but the fact is, I am just a solid pair of hands with a brush (or Wacom, depending) for the company. I must accept this as my reality, and move on. But the other night, I had to write it out in a rant of self-examination regarding my artistic state of mind. It helped, oddly enough. But I didn't re-read it, I just tucked it in the pages of Andy Wyeth's bio and will probably forget about it (I read that book around 5 times).

So, I was at Berehaven most of Saturday, and I completed the preliminary work on "Gnomon." (If you want to know what that is, you have to come visit me, or wait 'til it's done.) I have this unusual (perhaps) practice of naming a piece before I even begin, because it allows me to develop a narrative in my head as the painting progresses. It keeps me interested and "inside" the painting, if you will. I've gridded it up from a plein air study, old-school style. If I had my druthers, I would do this 100% of the time, as it really completes the vision when one revisits it in paint, rather than, say, having the source material be purely photographic. A certain kind of translation needs to happen there, and often, one can misinterpret the mechanical facts of what the camera sees.

I'm also submitting an oil study and perhaps a drawing to drawing room for the next show there. I'm hopeful that some of my students and friend-artists will do likewise. $100 takes it! That's damn cheap compared to what my former gallery charged for my work! I'm happy to show there, though. It's a great thing to have in this town.

Okay, time to imbibe some more Chateau de L'Abbaye de Saint-Ferme . It says its a Bordeaux Superieur, and it is lends credibility to the title. Perhaps a bit much Cab Franc in the palate leadoff, but for 10 bucks, I can't expect the weight of a classified growth. It's just that I'm achy from playing mixed doubles this afternoon (I got roped into the Leagues again), and I need some liquid joint-loosener, if you get me. Cheers!