I just finished this new painting in my "Meditation on War" series. This one is titled "Madonna of the Shell Casings". I see it as a comment on how life continues even in a war zone ... your interpretation may be different and just as valid. The painting is 24"x18" in oil on canvas. You can see the whole series here.
An artist friend of mine, Constance Humphries (who does beautiful abstract work that you can see here) sent me an interesting link this evening. She found a blog entry of somebody who had attended a workshop by Odd Nerdrum. She took some pretty good notes and posted them online. Quite some time ago, I wrote about my poor attempts to copy some Nerdrum paintings in order to learn something of his technique and hopefully improve my own. One of the things I learned from this blog is that Nerdrum uses some really strange colors - mostly off-the-wall earth tones, a fugitive red ("fugitive" to a painter means that it fades quickly), and a white tinted with blue. If you're interested, you can find the blog entry here.
And finally a thought on figure drawing. A while back, I came across the website of an artist named Helen Gotlib. I think her drawings of figures and plants are fabulous. She has a wonderful line quality - very light, almost dancing, searching yet accurate. Her drawings are done in pen and ink on tan watercolor paper, then she hits them with washes of watercolor and ink. The result is very lively; her figures are real living people, and done in a very beautiful manner. Take a look at her web site and I think you'll like what you see.
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