New Paintings

Through the Window

©2011, Oil on panel, 20"x16"

White Keffiyeh

Oil on panel, 20"x16"

Two more paintings have been added to the "Portraits from Iraq" series. "Through the Window" is based on a random photo of a young soldier during a trip outside the wire. "White Keffiyeh" is of an Iraqi working-class man.

All of the paintings in this series are size 20"x16". This uniformity is one of the uniting factors in this series. They are intended to be seen as one work. I haven't decided exactly how they'll be presented yet, but I'm thinking that they'll be in one long unit to hang at eye level. Maybe I'll have to break it into two or more sections just for practical reasons ... right now there are 8 portraits and there will be another four to six more, meaning the whole series will measure up to 19 feet long. That's a little longer than the bed of my truck!

Posthumous Portrait

Helo Pilot

20"x16", oil on panel, 2011

Over the past week or two, I've been swapping emails with an old Navy buddy. We got to talking about issues that are central to my "Meditation on War" paintings: why we go to war, how military members feel about it, the costs of war, and personal losses. His daughter was engaged to a young Army helicopter pilot, a Captain. He went to Iraq in 2006. While flying a combat support mission over Mosul, in northern Iraq, he was shot down and killed. When he was buried, pretty much the whole town turned out to line the streets.

This story got to me. Reading stories about anonymous soldiers being killed in action is one thing, but hearing about the personal impact is another. Isn't it always? I asked for some pictures of the young man. One of them, where he was beside his helicopter, seemed to me to be the liveliest and captured something of his spirit. So I turned it into the painting above.

Doing a portrait is difficult under the best of circumstances. Doing a posthumous portrait is doubly so, particularly of somebody I never met. I can't see the person, can't study the way light bounces off different surfaces, can't see the color shifts in the skin tones, can't see the way he carries himself, and (most important) can't get my own first-hand impression of his personality and character. Even worse, such a portrait is loaded with emotional baggage that a regular portrait doesn't have. So doing a posthumous portrait is at best a guessing game done in a minefield. Fortunately, this time I apparently got it right, or at least close enough. My buddy said that I hit the mark with it, and that's a good feeling.

A few years ago, I saw a TV show about a woman who was painting portraits of fallen soldiers. She was a professional artist and her works were quite good. The segment followed her as she painted a portrait of a young infantry soldier from some photos, and then went to the his parent's house to record their reaction. It was evident to me that the portrait missed something in the young man's likeness or character. The reaction that an artist wants is "Oh, my gosh, that's John!" The reaction this portrait got was "oh ... ummm ... look, she got the way he always stands ..." Put yourself in their position: they've lost their son, somebody has gone to the trouble of painting a portrait of him and is giving it to them, here's a TV crew in their living room to record the Big Moment, and the portrait isn't quite John. What are they going to do? Say something nice, be appreciative, and when the TV crew leaves, they'll pack the picture up and put it away someplace while they try to put their lives back together again, only without their son.

I've done a posthumous portrait once before of a young Navy sailor who died of cancer. I didn't copy one single photograph. Instead, I used the general pose of one photo, combined with features from several others. It went through about three iterations before it finally felt right. I also had a contact who gave me regular (and very detailed) feedback. So I was pretty comfortable with the end result.

The Navy Chief

Oil on canvas, 20"x16", 2008

Apparently, though, I missed the mark. While it's a good painting, it evidently didn't capture something important of the likeness or the character. I never heard anything from the family nor my contact, so I have no idea what wasn't right. It's probably in a box in an attic now, if not a landfill.

Am I whining? No. It was a learning experience. I learned that posthumous portraits need to be handled with kid gloves. If I get it right, it's a wonderful thing for the family to have. If I get it wrong, it's another emotional burden on a family that already has more than it can handle.

Janis's Horses

Janis's Horses

Oil on canvas, 36"x48"

Janis's Christmas present is finally done. It came home this afternoon and is hanging on our bedroom wall now. This was a hard one for me to do - I've never done a horse before, and there was certainly a lot to learn. But it's done.

Over the past two weeks, I've gotten two exhibitions lined up. One will be at Wiesenblatt Gallery at Mars Hill College during the month of March. Actual dates are still to be determined, but I'll post them here as soon as they're firmed up. The other will be a larger exhibition at Flood Gallery in Asheville during August. This one will be a bit more raw. Both will feature my "Meditation on War" paintings with some new works. I'm very excited about both of these shows!

So now I'm beginning work on new paintings for both of these shows. Right now it's mostly conceptual: What needs to be painted? What stories need to be told? How are those stories best put into paint? Should it be more direct and in-your-face, or indirect and metaphorical? I think I'll be wrestling with these questions up until, oh, the first of August.

Horse Drawings

I'm still working on Janis's horse painting. I'm not ready to show it yet - there's still work to be done - but here are three charcoal and Conte crayon sketches that I did while trying to learn what a real horse looks like.

White Arabian

Charcoal and Conte crayon on paper

Profile

Charcoal and Conte crayon on paper

Running Arabian

Charcoal and Conte crayon on paper

I'm hoping to wrap up the painting in the next day or two. It's time to get it off my easel and move on to the next painting. I only work on one painting at a time, maybe two, which is admittedly a slow process. But that's the way I work.

Looks like a couple of irons that I've had in the fire are about ready to pop. I'll post the news here when it's ready.

Alex Kanevsky and Tom Richmond

Two artists that I've been studying this week are Alex Kanevsky and Tom Richmond. It's hard to imagine two artists with less in common than these. Alex is a Russian immigrant who studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and makes deeply layered paintings. Tom is a Minnesota caricaturist who works for MAD Magazine. So, maybe I'm a bit schizophrenic, but my study time this week has been split between a painter and a caricaturist.

Alex came to my attention because he was the juror for a national juried exhibit of drawings at UNC Asheville. I looked up his web site and was tremendously impressed. Alex's figures are beautifully done with a combination of accurate drawing and loose brushwork that I find fascinating. They are individuals with a story to tell, although these are not narrative works at all. They're real people, filtered through Alex's head and many layers of paint. Many times, I've seen this "filtering" process filter out every ounce of the subject's individuality, but that does not happen here.

On Friday evening at UNCA, Alex gave a presentation about his work. It was a great opportunity to see inside his process: how he came to a particular subject, how he worked through it, how his paintings developed, and what he experienced. One comment really got my attention - I have to paraphrase it here - "painting on the edge of incompetence". The idea is that if you're working within your familiar bounds, you're boring, not learning anything, and just producing widgets. If you're painting outside your familiar bounds, you're incompetent: almost by definition, you don't know what you're doing. But if you're "painting on the edge of incompetence", then you're pushing your own boundaries, still having a bit of control but running the risk of having it crash and burn. And by definition, your boundaries just expanded ... regardless of whether the painting is a success or failure.

That applies to so much more than painting, doesn't it? I draw a parallel to downhill skiing. When I was first learning to ski, we had about a half day of training on the bunny slopes. Then we went right up to the top of the mountain, where all the slopes were intermediate or above. I fell a lot on the way down, but I learned a lot, too. Had to. I was on the edge of my incompetence the whole way, and had to invent for myself a way of skiing that would keep me upright for more than 15 feet at a time.

Alex's paintings may sometimes look simple, but they are far, far from it. In one section of his website, he shows how some of his paintings progressed from the first block-in to the final signed version. I was blown away by how radically the paintings could change from one stage to another. One stage would show a well-rounded, warmly-colored figure, while in the next the whole painting would be hidden beneath a cool, flat wash of color, with the figure barely discernible. Few artists dare show how their paintings develop, but Alex does.

So this was my introduction to Alex Kanevsky. For more insight into him, his work, and his techniques, read this interview with him on the Truant Johnny blog. It's worth your time.

Also this week, we got this caricature of our daughter-in-law. It's brilliant, actually. Trust me, this is Julie! So I got to thinking about caricatures. What is it about them that work? Everything about them is an exaggeration, which means they can't actually resemble their subjects, but still, we look at a caricature like this and instantly say "Oh, my gosh, that's Julie!"

I did some study of cartoons and caricatures many years ago, and came to the conclusion that good portraits and good caricatures are not that far apart. In both cases, you have to know what it is about that particular face that makes it unique: the shape and placement of the eyes, the tilt of the nose, the way a mouth curves, the way each part relates to every other part, and much more. Both portraits and caricatures have to have all these things right, plus that indefinable "something" that captures the inner character of the sitter.

So I started poking around on the net and quickly found Tom Richmond's website. Tom is an unbelievably talented and skilled caricaturist. One glance at his subjects, like Jon Stewart, and you know exactly who you're looking (and laughing) at. Tom now does most of MAD magazine's celebrity caricatures ... and in this world, there is no higher honor, except maybe the New Yorker.

What's just as impressive as his skill is his willingness to share what he has learned. His blog is a must-read for anybody interested in caricatures, or who wants to learn how to do them, or wants to know the business of cartoons and illustration. For example, if you go to the "pages" section and click on "tutorials", you'll find a five-chapter program that goes into caricatures in great depth. I mean great depth, better than any other book on caricatures that I've ever seen. I hope the guy puts it all together into a book, because it'll be in my reference collection as soon as he does. Because, as I noted earlier, the difference between a good caricature and a good portrait is not that great, and the things Tom tells you about in the tutorials can apply to a painting as well as an illustration.

So. Two very different artists. Two very different approaches. So much to learn, so little time!

Catching Up

Since my last post, there has been a lot of different, non-studio things happen that have occupied my attention. First and foremost was the shootings in Tucson. At present, it appears that the shooter, Jared Loughner, was a lone, literal nutcase. As more details come out about him, the only thing that's clear is that we have no clue as to why he did this. But that has not stopped the discussion on air and in the blogosphere.

The Tucson sheriff started it with his statements that the vile state of politics contributed to the shooting. Others jumped in, some echoing the sheriff and others loudly denying it. From my perch, it appears that Loughner did the shootings for reasons of his own that probably had nothing to do with whatever they say on Fox. However, I also think that the sheriff is right. I've been saying for some time that all sides need to cool down the rhetoric. Calling each other the enemy, putting cross-hairs on maps of opponents' houses, and other such statements are reprehensible. We're all Americans, for God's sake. We disagree about a lot of things, but none of us are enemies of our own country. The only thing divisiveness does is drive up the blood pressure of good, normal people, and pad the wallets of those who spew the hate.

Although it appears that political hatemongering probably didn't contribute to the Tucson shootings, the discussion about it is still very worthwhile. I've found two video clips and one blog that, I think, were very well done.

One is Jon Stewart. It's a helluva thing when a comedian is one of the most respected political commentators around, but Jon is. (Another of his ilk was Will Rogers, back in the '30's. One of Will's pithy observations: "I belong to no organized political party. I am a Democrat." Still true 80+ years later!) This particular clip is long, and you need to get past the first attempt at humor with John Oliver, but Stewart's comments are worth it.

The other video statement came from Keith Olbermann, the liberal voice on MSNBC. Keith denounced the tone of politics, apologized for any role he had in contributing to it, and called on others (with specifics) to do the same. It was a "have you no shame" moment for the new decade, powerfully done.

The blog post came from Paul Krugman, an op-ed contributor to the New York Times. Paul said he was not surprised that something like this happened. I agree. Even though Loughner is a nut job, it's the nut jobs that go over the edge first.

On the other side of the coin, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have been loudly denying any responsibility for anything whatsoever. They remind me of little boys standing beside the broken vase, crying "I didn't do it!" when you know damn well they did. Bill O'Reilly, to my knowledge, hasn't said anything. Sarah Palin has taken down some of the more inflammatory posts on her blog (good on her) and then went on to deny any responsibility like Beck and Limbaugh (bad on her). None of them have the guts to stand up, like Olberman did, and help move this country forward.

Okay, enough politics. I've been working away on applications for public art projects and art show submissions because I haven't been able to get away from the house since Thursday. We've had round after round of snow over the past month and, as I write this, it's still coming down. I'm getting a workout by shoveling the driveway every couple of days. Frankly, I'm getting sick of it - tell me again, when will spring get here?

Finally, we had a scammer target my wife's cell phone. Somebody (we have no idea who) managed to sneak a $9.99 charge for "premium data messaging" onto our cell phone bill the past two months. I talked to an Elizabeth at Verizon this morning (very helpful lady) who reversed the charges for me and blocked all other such charges in the future. An interesting twist: to stop the incoming messages, you're supposed to send a text message saying "STOP" to the number sending them. When I did so, I got a bounce-back saying that the number did not accept any incoming messages! Since I've blocked all premium messages anyway, no big deal, but that's their trick: send you text messages, charge you $10 a pop for them, and give you no way to stop them.

Okay, I'm off to shovel some more snow now.

Art Opening

Last night we did something we haven't done in a long time. We went to an art opening. It was at Blue Spiral 1 gallery in downtown Asheville and we had several old friends who are showing there.

One is Hunter Stamps. Hunter and I were in the Fine Arts curriculum at UNCA together, ten years ago now. He's now a ceramics professor in Lexington, KY. Hunter makes abstracted ceramic pieces that are based on the human figure. Over the past few years, he has started incorporating strong, vibrant colors in his work. Blue Spiral is showing quite a few of his works this month. I hadn't seen him in years and it was good to catch up with him again.

Another one we wanted to see was Hunter's lovely wife Amelia. She makes the most beautiful functional pottery - very delicate in appearance, with understated, soft colors, primarily a light green. We have a couple of her pieces at home. Amelia is the sweetest young woman and we had a great time talking with her.

Yet another one is Robert Winkler. Robert is ex-Bostonian, ex-New Yorker, and a sculptor of architectural forms. We worked together a number of years ago on a juried outdoor sculpture exhibit here in Asheville. He's an incredibly sharp man. Blue Spiral is featuring him in their downstairs gallery and it is a strong exhibit. I saw a lot of his works that I'd never seen before, things that were meant to hang on walls indoors. Very beautiful and exceptionally well done. I hadn't seen Robert in maybe three years and had a good time playing catch-up with him.

The art world is not really that big, and the art world in Asheville is really not that big. So if you go to an opening in this town, you're going to run into a lot of old friends. And since we hadn't been to an opening in years, we had a lot of people to talk with. We ran into Kyle Carpenter, who has a studio just down the road from mine. Just because our studios are within a quarter-mile of each other doesn't mean we see each other very often. Kyle makes really beautiful functional pottery - in fact, Janis had one of his pieces centered on our mantel.

We added two new artworks to our collection last night. One is a lovely little jar by Donna Polseno. In fact, if you go to her web site and look at the functional pottery, #15 is the one that is now on our mantel. Donna's ceramics go in a couple of directions: functional pottery with plant and animal motifs and figurative sculptures. Go take a look: it's some really beautiful work.

The other is a wonderful wood engraving by Andy Farkas. This particular piece (not on his website) spoke to Janis and me - to us, it was about the risk and joy of being an artist. Andy's work is incredibly well-done. It appears at first to be whimsical, but there's some serious meat to each piece. Each one is deserving of contemplation and study.

Life Drawing Again

With the holidays finally over, I re-started our life drawing sessions tonight. I had been going through figure drawing withdrawals. It had been a month since our last session, and it was time for a fix! So tonight, we had a new model. It was her first time working as a model, but she did a great job. And despite the forecast for snow, we had a good-sized crowd show up. We went with a single pose for the whole session, which was good for the painters. Here's what I came up with. I was pretty happy with my painting process - the color choices and brush selections seemed to be done automatically, with very little thought, the way it should be. Not a bad evening's exercise.

I'm still working on Janis's horses. This painting is a tough fight. Nothing is coming easily - not the color choices, not the brushwork, nothing. But it's slowly getting better. No, you can't see a picture of it yet. I'm learning a lot about horses, though. One of our neighbors has a couple of the critters, so I went over there and sketched and took a lot of photos. Janis took one look and put her foot down: "You are not going to paint a picture of those horses! They're nags!" She went on: "If you're going to put a picture of a car on your wall, are you going to put up a picture of a beat-up Chrysler minivan, or a Ferrari? It's the same with horses. So paint me a picture of an Arabian!" So I've been learning what an Arabian is, doing some drawings, and trying to get an Arabian horse to magically appear on my canvas. Maybe it will. I'll keep you posted.

Goodbye, 2010, Hello, 2011

What a year it's been. Twelve months ago, I was working in Baghdad, writing Statements of Work for six new projects. I had my last R&R in January and got to shovel a lot of snow at home. Back in Baghdad, I got some of my projects launched, while the others were cancelled. Those projects that were launched are still ongoing and will make a big difference to Iraq over the next several years. Makes me feel like my time there was worthwhile.

At the end of April, my time in Iraq was up. I came home and readjusted to the Real World. Janis and I gave ourselves a vacation to Florida. The highlight (for me) was the 165-mph ride around the Daytona Speedway in a modified stock car. What a hoot! My adrenaline still gets going when I remember that. Then it was time to go back home and get into a normal routine, which meant going back to work in the studio. Oddly, I have found it harder to go from being a project manager to being an artist than it was to go from artist to project manager. Maybe my years as a Naval officer made the project-management side into second nature, but getting the creative mindset working has been difficult. It seems to be working again, now, but it took about six months to get the thought process going again. In July and August, I made a Star Wars-themed mural for a young boy's bedroom in Annapolis. My next project was to make five new series of hand-colored drypoint prints. They were on exhibit at the Bella Vista Gallery in Asheville during November and December.

Also in November was the River Arts District Studio Stroll. After talking with a lot of artists, it appears that the number of visitors to the Stroll was way up, but the sales (both volume and amounts) were way down. Artists are the economic "canary in a coal mine", and these canaries are still on life support. Our economy has a long way to go before this recession is over. Later in November, Janis and I went to Baltimore to visit my aunt and cousin for Thanksgiving. It was great to see them again.

Janis has started a pet-sitting business (Mars Hill Pet Sitting). She had some clients who live in a log house on top of a ridge - a beautiful house in a beautiful location, with two sweet older dogs. What could go wrong? Well, the Great Christmas Blizzard of 2010, that's what! The driveway to the house is about a quarter-mile long, very steep, and made of dirt and gravel. No way could our car get close to the house in 10" of snow. Actually, with all the snow and ice on the roads, our car couldn't even get out of the driveway. So I wound up staying at the client's house for three nights to make sure the dogs were taken care of. (And this is Janis's business?)

Looking ahead to 2011, I see several things coming down the pike:

- One or both of us will get a job. We've been drawing down on our savings from my stint in Iraq and that can't go on forever. I'm looking for something part-time so I can continue to work in the studio. J's working to get the pet-sitting business to take off.

- I'm going to exhibit some of my paintings around the region. Several opportunities are in the works, but to keep from jinxing them, I won't say any more at this point.

- This year, I'm going to work hard on getting the quality of my paintings to a new level. That learning process is always ongoing, but right now I'm putting a lot of emphasis on it.

- This year, I'll revamp/reinvigorate/refocus my marketing efforts. Paintings like mine have a very special audience. Simply putting them in galleries doesn't put them in front of the right people.

Sounds like a fairly simple list of things to do this year, no? No. Sometimes it feels overwhelming, that there's too much to do and not enough time to do it in. Creating decent paintings takes a lot of time. Creating murals takes a lot of time. Creating a marketing plan takes a lot of time. Researching potential commissions takes a lot of time. Networking and advertising takes a lot of time. You get the idea. With all the things that need to be done, it's like I'm trying to fill up the Grand Canyon by chucking pebbles over the edge.

So now it's time to get back to work. Goodbye, 2010. Let's hope 2011 is a better year!

Janis's Horse

My wife, Janis, loves horses. She used to ride a lot when she lived in Chula Vista, and she has wanted to have a painting of a horse for some time. Recently, when we were at an opening at 16 Patton (a gallery here in Asheville), she spotted a beautiful painting of a horse. It really was (is) stunning, and she's talked about it ever since. Then, a few weeks ago, she decided "dammit, my husband is an artist, and he can damn well paint a horse for me!" And since I have no desire to sleep on the couch, I agreed.

We did a Google search for photos of horses and started sorting through the roughly 8.2 trillion images to get an idea of what she wanted. The ones she liked the most were the ones where the horse was tossing its head with its mane flying. I printed out several images along that theme, worked up a sketch of a running horse (mane waving in the wind), and got her okay. Then it was time to start putting paint on canvas.

This is a good-sized canvas, 36"x48". I roughed in the horse and then laid on the paint with a painting knife. This isn't my usual style, but since a horse isn't my usual subject, it seemed like a good opportunity to try something new, and works done with a painting knife have a certain intrinsic energy. After a couple of days, though, this was clearly not going well. In fact, it sucked. So I scraped everything off. The next day, I came in with a brush (my normal painting tool) and started the horse over. From the beginning, the pose was much more dynamic and accurate. I could feel the weight and heft of the horse's body, the movement of its legs, the flow of the mane, the way the dust was being kicked up. The painting was rocking. Then I stood back and really looked at it.

The painting was awful. Terrible! It looked like something you'd see in a Tijuana tourist shop. It was as trite as you could get: "here's the white horse, running through the dust (or water, or whatever)" .... gag! I was embarrassed to have my name associated with it. Clearly, nothing could (or should) save this turkey.

So I went back to the source of all these troubles: the paintings of horses that Janis saw at 16 Patton. The artist is a woman named Mase Lucas. Her works are simply beautiful. The horses are real, with their own personalities. The paintings have a life of their own, a vibrancy, that my turkey lacked. Mase knows horse anatomy, and her creatures are accurately painted without being slaves to photographic likeness. They're portraits of specific horses, while at the same time capturing a universal horse spirit.

Once I saw Mase's works, I understood my situation better. I did a painting several years ago titled "Welcome to Sarajevo". It was of a house near the Sarajevo airport that had been severely damaged during the Bosnian civil war. My painting was done from photos I'd taken while with the peacekeeping forces there. I'd stripped out all the extraneous junk surrounding it and just focused on the house. An artist friend later described the painting as a "portrait". Good portraits capture, not just a likeness, but the essence of the subject - you immediately understand what he/she/it has been through and what its character is like. That's why my "portrait" of the house in Sarajevo worked so well. And that's also why my painting of the running horse failed so badly. It wasn't about a real horse, it was about some hackneyed idea of a horse.

So I'm starting over again. After this morning, here's how the painting looks right now:

The crappy running horse is gone. Now I have a great, mottled, richly textured surface to paint on. The next step is to research horses, understand how their bodies are built, find some good source material, and create a good composition. Something tells me it'll take a while. Meanwhile, Mase Lucas' paintings are my guide. I'm not going to copy any of them - they're her horses, not mine. But if I can get half of the character of her horses into mine, then I'll consider it successful.

Jerome Witkin

Pensione Ichino

Jerome Witkin, 1997

From the Painting Perceptions blog, I found an excellent interview in the Huffington Post with my favorite painter, Jerome Witkin. The author, John Seed, has some excellent insights into Witkin and narrative painting in general here and well worth a read.

Pensione Ichino (center panel)

Jerome Witkin, 1997

Back in the Studio

The snow finally relented enough on Thursday for me to get back into the studio. Now I've got a new painting underway that will be Janis's Christmas present. She has wanted a painting of a horse for years, and had been looking at works by other artists and trying to make a trade. Then she realized, "I'm married to a painter!" So I've got a "commission" to get done within the next week.

With this painting, I'm trying a couple of things that are out of the ordinary. For one, this painting is being done on polyester, not cotton or linen. Polyester does not stretch out like cotton, and is not affected by temperature and humidity like cotton and linen, and it lasts much longer. When conservators re-line an old painting, they use polyester now. So far, I really like it. The canvas is as tight as a drum, with a lot of spring to it, and is as tight after two days of work as it was in the beginning.

The other thing that's different is that I'm painting with a painting knife instead of brushes. Painting knives are kinda like small, narrow trowels. I wanted a very energetic paint surface and you can certainly get that with a knife. This isn't a tool I'd normally use, and probably will not use very much after this, but it's different and fun, and it's good to get out of your normal routine every once in a while.

So now it's off to the studio. Got a lot of work to get done and not much time to do it in.

More Snow!

I'm getting cabin fever. It's Tuesday, and we've been stuck at home since Saturday evening. Right now there's about 6 inches of snow on the ground. I've shoveled the driveway three times, both to keep the snow from turning into ice, and just to have something physical to do. We have a fairly long and pretty steep driveway, so keeping it free of ice is very important. We learned that lesson eleven years ago, during our first winter here. I've spent the past couple of days working on the business side of the studio. Important stuff that needs to be done, but I'm really itching to get back to slinging paint again.

Speaking of painting, I wanted to share something by one of my favorite artists. It's a little bit of Southern California expressionism:

My Hands

Jackson Kane

Water-based paint on paper, 11"x8 1/2"

My grandson, the budding artist. World's best refrigerator art!

The Painting Process

The Red Dress

Oil on canvas, 30"x24"

I finally finished The Red Dress yesterday. It's been in progress for about six weeks, a typical period for me to work on a painting. This one started after looking at some portraits by John Singer Sargent, which made me want to work from an elegant, clothed model. So Whitney and I discussed which outfit she should wear and decided on this one. In the first session, I roughed in the figure and finished her face, and was so excited about the progress that I had her come back the next evening. In the second session, we more or less finished the figure. It was off to a good start.

Now my question was, what to do with it? It was a good painting of a pretty girl, but so what, those are a dime a dozen. So I decided to try an approach used by one of my favorite artists, Jerome Witkin, and make it about a model in the studio. I moved the edges of the backdrop from off the canvas to inside, then roughed in the bricks. Now it was apparent that there was a "hard" and "soft" theme going, with the hard bricks and soft model, so some additional things related to that theme needed to be added. My answer was the dog on the red pillow, which played to both the "soft" and the "red" concepts in the model. Now the painting needed something to the left of the figure. I thought that a glass of red wine would be perfect, but it had to sit on something. There are a couple of small tables in the studio, but they just weren't suitable. Then I spotted my studio partner's wooden crate - it was the right size and kinda funky, so in it went. Pretty perfect so far. Next, I added the lamp on the right, the easel/painting/hand on the left, and the open book on the floor. Now we've got an artist's studio. The last addition was the green rug, chosen because (a) the green is a complement to the red and (b) it was there. This was the final element to be added.

The next step was to go around the painting and bring everything up to an appropriate level of refinement. Almost everything needed tweaking: the shape of her legs and their shadows, highlights and shadows on the backdrop, color of the easel, lights and shadows of the dog and pillow, the bricks had to be darkened, and so on. My biggest headache was the artist's hand on the left - I had a helluva time getting it right, and spent several days on the damn thing. Yesterday, though, I went in and got it done in fifteen minutes. Bam, bam, there it was. Cool!

This is going to be the start of a new series of paintings. Should be more fun than some of the "Debbie Downer"-type paintings I've been doing for years, although those will still continue.

Next, though, I have to do a painting for Janis as her Christmas present. Already have the drawings done and canvas prepped. I'll probably start it on Tuesday or Wednesday, after the snow lifts.

I mentioned Jerome Witkin earlier. There's a wonderful interview with him on the Painting Perceptions blog that is well worth reading. (I just discovered this site; if you're an artist, you should know about it, too). One of Witkin's statements really hit me. He was talking about the time he met Giorgio Morandi, and segued into the role of teachers and mentors, and then said this:

"We are deepened by our teachers, our mentors, and I think the Morandi experience was so special, so special. And I think when you’re in your studio by yourself, you think, Who is my audience? If Morandi is standing behind me, or Isabel Bishop, or Bill de Kooning, or Phil Guston, or Orozco, or Rembrandt, those are your real audiences. They’re the climbers of Everest and they’re helping you to get to the top."

Wow. Too often, some artists (including me) think of our audiences as some unknown potential collector who might buy our work, and we tailor it to them in hopes of a sale. Witkin is pointing out this is too low a bar. Instead, we should paint each painting as if we're going to present it to Morandi, or de Kooning, or Rembrandt, or whoever our own personal art inspiration is. Raise the bar: do your best.

Cold Snap

Well, it's hardly news that we've been hit by a cold snap. So has everybody else in about 90% of the country. We got a good bit of snow over the past two days - about 4" total, and right now the temperature is about 17 degrees outside. Brrrrrr! I took the opportunity to stay home and work on some business aspects of the studio, mostly marketing. Some highlights:

- I created a FaceBook page for the studio. This should provide a way to reach more people, and to allow those who are on FB a lot to get updates more easily. So if you're on Facebook, check it out, and if you like it, then please "like" it.

- For the Christmas season, I decided to highlight my Forest Nymph photos. They've been well received over the years whenever they've been shown. I'm running a special on them right now, with both a reduced price and free shipping over the holidays. I added some PayPal "Buy It Now" buttons onto my web site to facilitate sales. Yes, it's crass commercialism creeping into my web presence. But I already know what the answer is if I don't do it (no sales), so this is an experiment in keeping the studio financially afloat.

- I also wrote up my sorta-regular studio newsletter. That took a bit of time, since as I wrote it, I kept getting ideas for other things (like modifications to the web site) that had to be investigated or implemented or whatnot. But the newsletter went out successfully last night. And, of course, I immediately thought of something else that should've been in it. Ah, well, next time ... maybe.

A while back, I made a snarky comment about how all these time-saving gizmos are taking up my time. All the above (plus a bit more) took up the better part of two days. How much painting did I get done in that time? Zip!

So this afternoon it was back to the studio. With outside temperatures in the mid-20's, and with all the (nonexistent) insulation in our century-old building, my heater was blazing away constantly. So tomorrow, I'll get some supplies from Lowe's and put plastic up over the windows to halt the draft. For today, though, I worked on the painting of the girl in the red dress. It's almost done now, I think. Another painting is in the works. This one is Janis' Christmas present, so it's going to be quite a bit different than my normal splatterings. And it's gonna be a fun painting. Can't wait to get it going!

Painting Progress

Yes, I'm still working on the painting of the young lady in a red dress. Here's the way it looks right now. Since the last progress report, I've put in the floor, rug, and red purse, and darkened the brick wall. Now I need to go around the painting and refine everything: lighting, edges, color saturation, perspective, you name it. I like the way it's coming along, but I wish it was coming along a bit faster!

Technological Progress?

I got a new phone today. My old phone (on the left) was a Razr. I loved it. It's small, lightweight, well-made, tough, easy to use, and good-looking. When I got it four years ago, it was the latest and greatest from Verizon and Motorola. State of the art. Now it's so obsolete that it doesn't work with Verizon's network anymore. Seriously. Over the past couple of weeks, Verizon has been doing some kind of upgrades to their networks that pretty much knocked my old Razr off the air. I could have 5-bar reception one minute and zero the next, without leaving the room. I took it in to the store and they just shook their heads. ("Imagine ... that old fart is still using a Razr! What an antique!! It must be at least four years old ... I was still in junior high then!").

So I got a new phone. It's a Samsung and does more or less the same thing that my Razr did. I didn't want a smart phone with a data plan, I don't need to send or receive emails on my phone (I've got a computer for that), I don't text anybody, and don't want texts sent to me. Face it, I'm a codger now, and codgers don't like all this newfangled stuff. My new phone has a better camera, for what that's worth; but it's also thicker, heavier, and not nearly as good-looking as my old Razr.

So it's goodbye to my trusty old phone. There's not a thing wrong with it, it's just that technology has moved so fast that it's been left behind. At only four years of age.

Sometimes I feel like my phone ...

Thanksgiving Road Trip

Thanksgiving is a time to spend with family if at all possible. I'm a firm believer in that. So this week, we went up to Baltimore to spend Thanksgiving with my aunt and cousin. In short, we had a wonderful time.

We left early on Tuesday morning. This was the first real road trip with the Volvo and it turned out to be an excellent highway cruiser. We went north on I-81 through the Shenandoah Valley, our favorite north/south route. Traffic was pretty light for a holiday season and moved well. We ran at about 75 the whole way and got over 32 mpg. That's a bit better than the 16.5 mpg that our Land Rover used to get on the same trip! Everything was great until we got two miles outside the Baltimore beltway, where we hit the rush-hour crawl. It took over an hour to make it the final 15 miles to my aunt's house in Cockeysville. I swear, every time I go up to the Baltimore and DC areas, I'm reminded of why it is that we don't live there anymore.

Still, it was wonderful to see Aunt B, Bridget, and Logan again. We caught up on what we all were doing, ate some fabulous food (Aunt B's crab cakes are WORLD CLASS, worth the drive all by themselves), watched some TV shows and movies, played with each other's dogs, and did all the things you normally do during family visits. Bridget and Janis, in particular, are two of a kind, and bond deeply over shopping at Nordstrom's. Which they did. Again.

I needed a good art fix, so Aunt B and I went to the Baltimore Museum of Art. Their special exhibit was on Andy Warhol's late work. We both thought it was quite a good show. Warhol (in my opinion) wasn't necessarily a good painter, but he was great at conceptualizing, and these works showed it. For most of them, the more you studied it, the more there was to the piece. That's what good art is all about. We then browsed through the collections of European and American art, which includes works from the Renaissance through the early 20th century. You expect to be blown away by a Monet or Van Gogh painting, and of course we were, but I particularly enjoy finding beautiful works by artists you rarely, if ever, hear of. There was a marvelous portrait by Thomas Sully, for example, and this beautiful tonalist painting by Thomas Dewing. Some museums (the Getty comes to mind) aren't too particular about the quality of the works as long as they're by "name" artists, while others (like the BMA) make sure they get top-quality pieces. It was great to just wander in a really great art museum again!

Aunt B and I spent a good bit of time going through old family pictures. I've been working on our family tree off and on for thirty years or so and take every opportunity to pick her memory. There's always something to learn. I discovered, for example, that my grandfather was left-handed - it was common knowledge to them, but since I never saw him write anything, it was news to me. I also came back with a trove of old pictures dating back over a century. One of the really cool things was a scrapbook that my grandmother kept between 1914-1916, when she was a teenager. My plan is to scan all the old photos so they can be preserved and shared. I just gave myself a lot of work to do.

We came back on Saturday, hoping to avoid the worst of the traffic crunch, and we pretty much succeeded. The weather was cold but clear, and while there were certainly a lot more cars and trucks on the road, it not as bad as it could've been (and probably is today). We ran at about 75 most of the way and stayed out of the crowds of pushy drivers. They'd come by at 80 or more, running on each other's bumpers, darting from lane to lane, trying to get out in front, and generally being in a hurry. Anytime I wound up in such a group, I'd just get in the right lane, drop my speed down, let 'em go, and then pick it back up again. Then I'd just watch 'em battle each other. We stopped about every hour and a half to stretch our legs, walk the dogs, and swap drivers. Breaks like this keep us fresh and prevent falling into the "pushy driver" category. What's the rush? We still made it home in less than nine hours.

So today has been a recovery day. Lots of clothes are going through the wash. I cleaned out the car and put up the Christmas tree. The dogs were ecstatic to be back home - they had to catch up on every smell left by every critter for the past five days.

I hope your Thanksgiving was as rewarding as ours!

Painting Developments

This painting seems to be developing quite nicely. Since my last posting about this painting on the 8th, I've added quite a bit: the crate, wine glass, easel, painting, hand, book, pillow, dog, and light. Next step is to add a purse under the crate and do something about the floor. Then it'll be time to bring everything up to a more refined level of execution. This painting is a lot of fun to do. I'm thinking of doing a larger one (this is 30"x24") with a similar theme of "model in the studio".

Life Drawing in the Studio

My life drawing sessions continue to go pretty well. Last night we had a new model. My drawing was pretty crappy at first, but then it started coming together.

Cari #1

Cari #2

Today I'm working on the painting of the model in the red dress again. It's been over a week since I last painted and, as usual, getting back into the swing of things takes some time. But it's getting there.