Umber and Turpentine

Housekeeping

2011-12-15T11:04:00.000-05:00

I have been really bad about posting here lately! In my defense, things have been BUSY. Anyhow here are a few tidbits of note:

1. An interview on ArtVenue's Blog!

2. I've had some work up at OKW since the beginning of November (pictures to come)

And now a few photos:

The final critique for my MassArt class was last night, providing me with a perfectly lazy way for me to showcase what I've been doing lately.

Work from class

Work from the model

Inspiration and Critique

2011-10-27T23:22:00.000-04:00

Last night was the Midterm Critique for my Painting Class at MassArt.

All of my current/ recent work together!
This is the Birch Panel Redux, 5 quick paintings (Homework), A small abstract window, the Irish Beach and Lily Pond.

Irish Beach, Lily Pond, Winter Arroyo and the dreaded Floral Duo.
Shockingly the Floral Duo was somewhat well received, no one hated it. But maybe people weren't looking closely. It is still the WORST.
* That shoebox on the floor? A genius wet-painting transport device from my small abstract piece.

The Winter Arroyo in good light. The whole snowy bit really looks very unpainted, but actually, it's snow. A lot of ground left to cover, but a solid start.

This IS finished!

These might be finished.

One of the assignments for the critique was to select three artists whose work is related to mine. I've not been good about posting inspiration here of late, so I thought this might be a good way to get back into it.

My first artist, and one of my real standbys of late was Pierre Bonnard. I have a book of his work which is pretty much always out in my studio. I feel very strongly connected to the spaces Bonnard creates, they seem recalled more than observed. While everything has the requisite feel and structure to be believable, it is hazier, less concrete.

Grape Harvest, The Philips Collection

Open Window, The Phillips Collection

Dining Room Overlooking the Garden, MoMa

The Bathroom, MoMA

Second up is Claire Sherman, who I encountered via a recommendation from my Professor.

Crevice, 2008

Sherman is only four years older than me and has an awesome vision. Her work is sharper than mine and more geometric, but the way she builds up shapes and space out of the swaths of color is something I really respond to in terms of feeling a relation to what I want to do in my work. Her color is structural- intense and purposeful.

Woods and Snow, 2008

Arches, 2008

Rock Wall, 2009

Swamp III, 2011

Cave VI, 2010

Cave and Trees, 2011

Cliff, 2011

I looked in a lot of places to try and find people whose work really fit my vision. In my research I was poring over painting images from MoMA and came across one that was so familiar it had become unconscious:

Per Kirkeby, New Shadows III MoMA

The more I examined Kirkeby's work, the more I realized his patchy marks, interspersed with graphic lines really resonated with the way I apply and move paint. His master of subtle (but broad) palettes is impressive, it is more limited than mine but he finds every pertinent color, which is amazing.

Weltuntergang

Untitled

SO that's all for now, hopefully I'll keep more coming inspiration-wise. (Both for me and the blog).

Lily Pond

2011-10-27T09:50:00.000-04:00

It has been a looong time since I updated about the Lily Pond. To make things easy I'm really not going to say much. There will be a bit of commentary, but mostly I've been trying to get this post done for weeks now and I just want it out there

Here it is as we last left it, bright and open.

Perhaps a little too bright. That yellow green proceeded to get into EVERYTHING. Even after I had done an initial removal.

Here is where the first major settling of forms happened. The rock wall began to materialize, the sky/trees set in place and the bushes are taking form.

That laurel bush on the right just got darker and darker. One of the things I had hoped to explore in this piece was a sort of twilight light, lots of dark and glow.

But that concept ended in a very disjointed relationship between the lime/orange azaleas and the super dark laurels. I guess they were both looking flat, but what I did next really set me back a ways.

Brown?

And back. Actually all that brown ended up making a much more three dimensional shrub.

The azaleas look like quivering confetti. In a really bad, regular, patterned way.

Intriguing. I feel like this phase was ENDLESS. So much ochre, so much definition of flowers versus leaves. Also not that, from this point on, the rock wall does not change.

Mistakes recognized. I'm meeeeelting.

A quilt!

And building back. This time with a sense of structure and planar dimension. And a worldly knowledge of how badly that bush can fail.

I forgot to take pictures for a few days, but this is where the painting began to pull itself out of the hole.

Both bushes took on a better sense of form and weight.

So I realized that the number one thing I loved in this painting (maybe tied with that blue/orange tree) was the rock wall. However, I had rendered it in a manner completely different to the rest of the painting. So I too the big plunge and went back into that. But with incredible consideration.

And finished! Shockingly it not only works, but I really like it. No, I don't think I'll ever try a similar composition again. Suddenly barring the viewer from travelling through the space really frustrated me. And next time I'm putting a LOT less paint down. I need to learn to do more looking than painting, regardless of how fun it can be.

Fin.

Classwork!

2011-10-17T12:02:00.000-04:00

Here's one big update on what I've been doing in class:

The other week our homework, which is optional but fun, was a color exercise.

I had a lot of fun with blue and orange and all the colors in between.

Two weeks ago I began work on a new, large piece. Because I had just gotten some clear gesso for priming a wood panel, I thought it might be interesting to try it out on canvas as well.

The only thing i didn't like about it was that it is a little hard to tell what parts of the canvas you've covered and what parts you haven't.

At first it seems easy enough to tell the difference.

But once it spreads out, it's a lot more difficult. That means that I really had to inspect more than usual to make sure there weren't any unprimed patches. However, I loved the final effect. I don't really like using a colored ground but I do like painting into a not white surface sometimes, and for this piece that was essential .

It's a southwest scene, but a winter one, so there'll be a lot of white painted in.

I feel that not having the bright, white ground helped me to start creating more interesting and varied colors for the snow.

This is only after one painting session, so it will need a lot more work, but I really like it so far.

On to the Birch Panels:

Panel No. 2 gave me a lot of trouble that week. It seemed to lose a lot of vibrance and gain a lot of white. It had these three sections which seemed completely divorced from each other

But the next week, Panel No. 1 was looking up. All that beige-tan-bark looked great and really unified the space.

I worked pretty intensely on the leaves, initally making them a little too literal and suggestive of a totally weird scale discrepancy.

So I evened that out a bit, added some more subtle shifts in the broader sections of bark and I think I'm done.

No. 2 also got a lot of work last week, I think I finally made some headway in the disjointed sections. In fact, it shouldn't take up too much time next week (I hope) I like the way that the shadow now reads and (though you can't see them well in this pic) the fact that some more saturated color made it into those shadows. Overall, some good painting.

Also...

2011-10-14T10:35:00.003-04:00

New Layout!

I kinda like it. It's less personalized than my old one, but I think it makes things easier to find (for me at least). Also I can make the photos a lot bigger than before.

And a few source photos I've been looking at for the Irish Beach. Particularly the damp stones and the hazy cliffs.

Also, for good measure, my favorite cliff picture:

Irish Beach SO Far

2011-10-14T10:25:00.000-04:00

It's been some time since I've updated about this guy. Here's an abbreviated version.

As you may recall, it looked like this:

A lot of interesting color variation developing in the water, and the tones in the stone reading very nicely.

Here, I started to obsess that the proportions were too even (1/3 sky, 1/3 sea, 1/3 land). So I redrew the horizon. Also, I got very involved making sure the sand sat back in the space.

Cliff gone!

Cliff back! Did I actually change anything?? Not sure. But I moved a lot of paint around.

Here I stated to make some good choices as far as the cliff's concerned. That orange-y patch is great. The beach is also really starting to recede on the sides.

Developing some more light and texture on the cliff, controlling some drippiness from the sky.

I realized that the grass was looking too specific and individualized (something that I have grown to dislike about patches of the Wheatfield painting). So I generalized it a bit, which suits the scale of this piece.

I also decided that the sky was too rigid at the horizon.

And that the sea could benefit from some of the same generalization (read: removal of fussiness) as the grass.

And it did! This looks quite a bit better in person than in the picture, but the sea looks more subtle and it sits more accurately in the space. there are still some problems with the strong disconnect at the horizon juncture, but overall this piece is really getting there.

Classy!

2011-09-29T13:34:00.001-04:00

Like I said in my last post, I liked those Birch paintings and decided I wanted to do a blown up version of 2 of them. That's the subject I'm currently attacking in my Mass Art Class. This class is different form the one I took over the summer in that it meets once a week, at night and is entirely open in terms of the type of work I'm able to make. Here's the first set of images:

Day one for painting A.

Day 2 for painting B. I neglected to get a photo of this before the second painting session, a bummer, but you can see that pretty much the same thing is going on in terms of color nad tone.

Day two for painting A. It had started to separate into three sections (not unlike the above piece) and bringing in a lot of that bark white/tan unified it pretty well. I had to lose the really gorgeously colored olive line in the lower third, but that's how it goes...

Overall I've been really pleased with the way this course has me thinking about my work and how it has me pushing myself.

For homework this past week, we did a painting a day. While it's unlikely to be an exercise I revisit (without some stricter parameters) it was refreshing and challenging. Here are my offerings:

Painting number one, like all of these exercises I spent far too long on this one.

This is probably the biggest failure to me. I think what really threw me off was to keep coming up with interesting subject material. The works that had the least specific or most abstract subject ended being the most successful. With that little time and so much wet paint, it's best to concentrate on painting not concept.

Again, too ambitious.

The start of something interesting.

One of the better ones. I think having a looser concept really made it feel more natural and less pressured.

Unfortunately, I dont' have a photo of he last one, hopefully I can snap one when I'm at school next week. That one was probably the strongest, so it's worth recording.

More on the Lily Pond and the Irish beach, plus a few reincarnations, next time.

Birch Study

2011-09-11T16:49:00.000-04:00

The house where I grew up had some white birch trees in the backyard, and when the sun set there was always an incredible progression of light and color on the papery bark. With that in mind I set off on a series of 4 studies (teensy tiny studies).

Before I started, I dropped one of the panels in my palette. Oops.

The panels should read as fading light from left to right: bright and full sun, dwindling white light, the burst of warm sunset and lavender dusk.

I got fairly experimental with my paint handling here, and it paid off. There's a lot of textured layering, knife scraping and soft layers coming to play with my usual pieced strokes and translucent layers.

Now they're done! I'm quite pleased with the way they all turned out. This was a test drive for a larger abstract work (or works) and I think what I am going to end up doing it turning the last two into a large size diptych. So stay tuned!

As for the rest....Something New!

2011-09-01T13:21:00.000-04:00

As crowded as my studio and apartment currently are, I decided it would be a brilliant idea to start a new, large canvas.

I went through a lot of sketches and ideas for this one, but had a difficult time deciding between these two. They both seemed to fit with the direction in which I wanted to go both for this particular canvas and my work in general. I've felt the need to really start considering my work, and what I'm looking to do as a painter, with an increased seriousness. What do I want to do as a painter? I'm trying to figure it out.

This one is maybe a little more difficult to make compositionally interesting, but it has some potentially great variation in terms of what the palette can be.

This one really stood out because it's a very strong sketch. I think that's what made me reluctant to choose the other one, because I thought some of the looseness and color/light relationships would come through in the canvas. I really like how graduated color and shadow defines the plans of the cliff. However, it is another cliff. While they are certainly central to my cannon of work, I don't want to over-saturate and begin getting formulaic and patterned.

So I did sort of a funny thing. I started painting them both, to see how those images would look transposed to the larger surface. It's hard to see, but the central vertical line is the far edge of the cliff, the horizontal line is the horizon for the sea in the beach composition.

As I continued, I decided to go with the beach, since it's both sufficiently different from the current roster of works (all the flowers) and has an interesting theme. It seemed like a good place to push some of the things I've been hoping to work on, in terms of really considering color relationships and choices, really looking and evaluating the work as a whole- technically and conceptually.

So to better concentrate on the composition I chose, I started sketching in a base background for the water, the sky and the beach.

At this point I got into some more concrete blocks of shape- the shrubbery on the sides, the shadows and light in the sand, the cliff off to the back.

The shadow of the large cloud in the sky tends to look a little like a volcano, which is awkward.

I wanted to get into a lot of dry layering (scumbling) in the water- getting some bright, vibrant colors and color contrasts underneath the top layer of water. I tend to use glazing a lot and more surface color and light differentiation when painting water, so this should be an interesting new approach.

Here it is, getting pretty well defined. The greenery is getting light and yellow so that I can get in some low-lights and natural highlights.

There's a lot of texture developing in the foreground, in the grass and the shrubbery. There's a lot of nice oranges developing in the sand and the water. I want to see what the water will look like with some bright, contrasting colors woven underneath.

As for the rest...After the Pool

2011-08-22T15:35:00.000-04:00

I just looked back at the first photos of this piece and I am incredibly disappointed. I feel like something really simple and gorgeous got lost in the process of painting. perhaps working on the other two abstract pieces strongly altered where I thought this piece should go.

Instead of the relationships between subtle greens and a dull rose, bursts of orange and blue began to make their way into the palette.

I reacted by trying to get back to basics and block out some areas for light layering.

But in this I made some unconsidered decisions; I ended up messing up the composition.

So I went a little too dramatically in the other direction. I removed almost all of the groundwork I had done in favor of some drippy, light blues and yellows (not the original palette of greens and pinks).

And then it became a light explosion. This was intended to be a piece that really evoked the glowing light of dusk, not the blazing sun of midday. The crazy yellows are not at all what I had intended. My guess as to what happened is that I really worked so much in that bright, sunny palette both during the day (while I was taking my Landscape painting class) and in the studio (the Lily Pond really got almost neon).

In addition to the light problems, the composition appears t have melted away. Where did it go?

At least the compositional structure was fluid for the last few pictures, here it has solidified. Now I really wasn't looking at the big picture. I began to give structural integrity to chance elements, making odd parts of the painting more concrete than others. Also, where did the leaves go? This was supposed to be a bush!

Is that a rainbow heart? Yikes.

This must have happened around the same time that the spidery red lines made their way into the Floral Duo. While the building blocks of the original composition have reappeared, this is now totally abstract- in terms of the fact that they do not appear to represent anything concrete. There is no discernible natural feature besides the sky (which appears as a patchwork of blue/green/yellow).

Back to green! But not where I started. Frankly, I have no idea where this painting is, whether it's coming or going. Bleh.

As for the rest... Floral Duo

2011-08-19T09:59:00.000-04:00

Here's everything else I've been working on.
The Floral Duo:

These have been particularly troublesome pieces. They're just not going anywhere. I think what makes these less successful, from a process point of view, is that they have a more fluid inspiration. they are meant to be "floral" but aren't really sticking to that in terms of color or form. For the Provence abstract minis and the Leaves Study, I was able to stick to an inspiration in a more concrete manner.

A couple of nice things are happening here- the melon-yellow tones on the left hand side of #1, the relationship between the peaches and greens on #2.

I experimented a little with pushing the level of expression in the composition, and finding the correct types of mark and shape for these pieces. Unfortunately, I think I made some color missteps and neglected to really look at them from a longer lens. #1 is too patterned looking with the two big Sienna lines, they don't so much echo as duplicate. Also I dis this silly rosette-type shape on the top line (in an effort to make the floral motif stand out) that ended up looking like a pipe. #2 is just patchy and totally lack an overarching sense of space or composition.

At this point I had brilliant idea. Drips! That's what will save this piece. Guess what? It didn't.

I really started to dislike what was happening with the Sienna shapes, so I started to alter them, by using background colors to edit into the Sienna.

But then I remembered that this is a floral inspired piece. So it had to get blossom-y. But it also got too red- the red/green relationship is bad enough, but the whole effect is a rainbow. Rainbow palettes haunt my dreams: no balance, even distribution, all colors carry the same weight- which is to say none.

So I got away from the pastel situation by removing a lot of that spidery red work and pushing into those nice background colors, creating some totally weird shapes.

Unfortunately the shapes were a little blocky and patterned. On both panels they are sort of columnar- repeating verticals that occupy the same plane in space. Not great to look at.

So I tried to remedy that. There are some interesting pockets of color here and some nice swirling and embracing lines.

I like how what is technically the background color is now encroaching on edges here. Of the two, this panel is really interesting me the most right now. some good scumbling transparency and intriguing spatial relationships are maturing.

As the done-ness of paintings go, the trajectory is rarely chronological. There are dips and bouts of freshness and of resolution and you have to hope that you end on an upswing. Here, the second panel is as close to being finished as it has ever been, while the first one is a born-again toddler, struggling to make sense. We'll see if these two can meet at the finish line.

The Lily Pond

2011-08-16T12:48:00.000-04:00

So it's been some time since I've updated on my active roster of paintings, mostly because I haven't been in the studio too much. Between the MassArt class, vacation and general summer-ness, I haven't been working as much as I should. I've also had something of a hard time getting back into that full creative mindset after my prolific burst this May. After that Pavement show I felt slightly exhausted, creatively.
To kick things off here's the Lily Pond.

Looking at these I realize there is a critical flaw, not rooted in any formal aspects of the work, but in the fact that I'm calling it the Lily Pond. There are no lilies.

Later, it dawned on me that the composition had a pretty large flaw: the bushes were the same height as the stone wall. Also, the wall just sat there, not really doing much spatially. It's not really the best approach to have an element that completely eliminates depth in the middle ground.

I brought up the foliage on both sides, making the left really slope down. I also looked for some interesting color and light in the stone wall.

Except, while fining all sorts of lovely lines and color in the wall, I realized that the scale was off. So I pretty much rubbed a lot of it out an began again (on the wall).

Here the wall looks a little crooked, but it's starting to work better for me. I want you to be able to see it though the two bushes and fro the stones to read individually and strongly. I also put some orange into the sky, which is really making it look even bluer. All in all, this piece is really on its way.

Summer Update

2011-08-10T12:15:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm back in town after a week out of town. I was in Santa Fe, which was as beautiful as always. Here are a few choice scenes:

Aspen Forest in the Ski Basin

Sun Mountain

It was a nice break, and well-timed as it came right after my landscape painting class. The class was through MassArt and went for 2 weeks. We painted outside all day, including during those incredible heatwave days - so now I know exactly how paint behaves in 100 F heat (melty, fluid and messy). We spent sometime near the Fenway, at the Arnold Arboretum, a few days in the Public Gardens and some time at the Harbor by the ICA.

Here's the work that I did at the arboretum.

And the view I was painting from.

And my view in the public gardens.

I really loved this weeping willow, it had great movement within the trunk.

And here they all are together. Taking the class was really interesting because it forced me to work in a completely different way. Being taken out of my routine took a little adjustment, but I learned a lot about my painting and got some good work out of the experience. I don't usually paint from observation, and while I enjoyed those 2 weeks, I probably still won't. While I enjoyed really spending time looking at places and finding incredible color and light in nature, overall, I felt it was restrictive. I made some choices in my paintings that I feel I probably wouldn't have made if I hadn't felt the natural pressure to work literally.

There's a pretty genuine progression here. The first day I was a little nervous about being in a group setting and getting academic feedback again, as well as getting comfortable physically with painting outside. This really is a pretty unsuccessful painting. It certainly taught me quite a bit about how I work best though. Here, I was physically separated from the landscape by height and distance, once I really got into the space of the paintings, my work improved.

This is from the Fenway. Overall a great improvement and a pretty interesting painting. I really love the blue in the tree trunks on the right, and the relationship of the trunk shadows to the water. This was another one-day painting and I'm surprised how easily I was able to finish something off in a day (I haven’t' done that in a looong time)

This is from the Arnold Arboretum; we spent two days there in the blazing sun. I actually expected this piece to radiate a little more heat than it actually does, but still, I'm pleaded with the way it turned out. Here, I'm painting most like myself, something that the extra time may have influenced. I also started to overdose on green at this point. As many colors as I could find within green, it still didn’t stop me from feeling like I was constantly mixing variations on yellow, green and yellow-green. I may end up going back into this one.... maybe.

This is the one from the Public Gardens; this was done over 3 days. While this it a successful painting, and really came into its own, the actual process was hardest during those three days. It wasn’t physically taxing, or unbearably hot, but socially frustrating. Being in a large touristy spot in the middle of the city meant that passersby treated me as a tourist attraction. I normally dislike working while being observed, it gives me that uncomfortable feeling of someone reading over my shoulder. This was well beyond that. For every polite person who asked to take a peek there were a dozen people who sent their children close enough to bump my brush, took photos of me without asking permission and spoke about me as though I wasn’t there. A few took pictures while I ate lunch, somehow I doubt the images of me with a sandwich hanging out of my mouth and an affronted scowl on my face will make it into the family album. Clearly this means I’m not cut out to be a tourist painter, no Seine riverbanks and Central Park caricatures in my future. Genuinely, this painting might have taken a few hours less without the interruptions. I am pleased with the finished work; I spent a while choosing my spot here so I could get in that great willow and the red of the Japanese maple. As I mentioned, green was starting to bore me, so I pushed to find a spot with some more variety in color. To me, this water isn’t as successful as the water in the painting from the Fenway, but the overall color and shape hat I was able to find in the tree trunks and rocks are really strong.

For our last day in the field we went to the ICA and painted the harbor. Mirroring the first day, I ended up working far away from the point of interest. I looked in vain for a closer setting that suited me, but I felt that architecture, boats and waterscapes were of little interest to me. I also had to cooperate with the heat again, and picked this shaded view across the harbor, and zoomed in a couple times. It’s good in pieces, but not a terribly strong work overall. While I’m happy with the sky and the clouds (particularly the one on the left), everything else seems a little flat to me. The water is a bore, standardly blue and boringly unbroken, and the stroke and mark in the houses and trees are not nearly interesting enough. They are unvaried and not fully descriptive. I may continue to work into this one, it think it has some potential, but needs a lot more guidance.

Floralia!

2011-07-29T19:58:00.000-04:00

The show at Uptown Espresso is up! I'm planning an opening for sometime in August and it comes down at the end of September. I'm very pleased with the way the show looks. I was pretty nervous the last few days because I haven't had time to really work on it as much as I usually would have, not to mention the fact that it's a totally different format/stable of works from the usual thing. Anyhow, it turned out great.

I know I haven't posted too much about the works for this show, but here are some pictures:

I have a lot of new stuff to post, including the work I did during my summer course at MassArt...but let's save that for later.

Visibility Updates!

2011-07-07T13:43:00.000-04:00

A little housekeeping:

First, my show at Pavement is down. It was a great space for an exhibit, and I got a lot of good feedback.

Second, I am on a lot more places online. I just joined Behance , here's a link to my profile there:

http://www.behance.net/clairealtaelliott

It's a nicely designed site; I joined mainly because it has an app that can connect to my Linkedin profile. I don't know if it will give me much more exposure, but it can't hurt. (Can it....?)

I also signed up with a new site called ArtVenue, that profile is here:

http://clairealtaelliott.artvenue.com/

It's a pretty cool site; their goal is to connect artists with exhibitions paces and business owners. It's very new, but hopefully it works out!

My Gawker Artists profile is updated too!

http://artists.gawker.com/post/5463483235/claire-alta-elliott

Finally, I don't have all the specifics worked out yet, but it looks like I'm going to be showing at Uptown Espresso again this August. But more on that soon....

Lily Pond

2011-06-28T23:06:00.000-04:00

In preparing for my first big piece after that May explosion, I did a bunch of sketches to get my mind working and to feel out some of my ideas.

French Sunflower field c.2005

Childhood Backyard c.1990

Provence field c.2010

I went with the middle image, it's a beautiful, moody sketch and interested me more on an emotional level than the others.

It got off to a sketchy but pretty start. Already it suffered from being a little flat- it doesn't sit very far back in space. Also I got nervous about Monet, I hate easy comparisons. I don't want anything done "in the same style" - that's surface and insincere- I want my work to stand alone.

I beefed things up, and worried a little less about impressionism. The color scheme in the left bush has the potential to become complex and interesting. Right now it looks like neon-Florida- Christmas.

I don't know that anything is getting resolved yet. It needs a lot more work and a lot more paint before I can definitively know what this painting is about, physically and theoretically.

Note:

It's becoming obvious that a theme is developing here. There are a lot more flowers and foliage sprouting in the studio. I guess it's an effect of the warm weather, though I'm not certain I trust it. I usually paint a good variety of subjects so I don't get too lazy or complacent with technique and color. I like switching it up. This might not work out so well....

Getting Behind

2011-06-28T23:04:00.000-04:00

So it's been a while since I've been able to update consistently on the blog- between getting the last show ready and the start of a busy summer I got pretty behind. Instead of playing major catchup, I'll just move ahead. To start, here are the final photos of the works I finished for the Pavement show:

Rose Garden, Wister St.

Glenveagh

Shoreview

Walden Pond

Place des Vosges

On the Seine

Now that that's out of the way, here are the new pieces. To start there's a floral duo:

Clearly pretty similar to the Color Study sets, dealing with a different palette and reference point though.

Then some roses:

The roses are pretty basic, and maybe a little dull. I've been doing all this flower-based stuff though, so it seemed like a natural subject so me. It's gotten to the point, however, that these roses are no longer very exciting and, compositionally speaking, irrelevant.

After the pool, a summery, mood-based piece:

About here, this painting looks gorgeous. Below, it starts moving into an artstic adolescence that is pretty frustrating. The root of something good is there, but it seems to be experiencing an awkward growth pattern. I'm also noticing things that I'll be changing pretty soon:

-The identical shape and parallel placement of those two orangey, blossom things

-The slowly shifting color pattern

-The lack of variety in depth and stroke

- The lack of balance in the composition

C'mon, ugly duckling.

Come One, Come All!

2011-06-14T14:30:00.000-04:00

I'm having a closing party for the show at Pavement Coffeehouse this Saturday, June 18th from 5:30-7:30. The show will stay up until the 30th of June.

On View

2011-05-14T13:55:00.000-04:00

The show at Pavement Coffeehouse is up!

It's a great space, and the work looks really lovely in it.

Moving Along / Crunch Time

2011-05-04T11:13:00.001-04:00

Well the show at Bukowski's is down. And the show at Pavement goes up in a week!

Things are coming together in the Studio, here's a few things that need updating.

A new painting:

This one's moving quickly and, so far, I like it a lot.

A changed painting:

I took the supremely frustrating tree painting and completely painted over it.

Now it's a beach scene.

I think it looks great, I'm about a thousand times more excited about finishing this than its previous incarnation.

So summery! So bright!

Finally, the progress of a little guy:

I don't know that I've ever posted this tiny canvas, so I'll start from the very beginning. (A very good place to start).

At first I was thinking of doing an abstract piece.

But it sort of fell apart and became a landscape.

Voila.

Here's where it stands now. Also, pretty close to the finish, though not as exciting looking as I'd like. I sort of feel like the scale is preventing it from being truly dynamic, but that might be my reaction to working so small after being on all these large scale paintings lately.

P.S.

This one is finished!

Good News and Bad News

2011-04-29T06:41:00.001-04:00

So I have another show coming up soon- exciting! But I went to check out the space and found that it's 2x bigger than I thought....

So I am painting up a storm. I need to finish pretty much everything in the studio right now in order to have enough options for hanging in a few weeks.

On the positive side, I finished these guys:

Pretty good looking little things.

On the more...daunting side:

This is what's left. Pretty unfinished big things.
Here's a peek into my current, harried state. While stuck on a plane I obsessively made notes and plotted the futures of each painting, down to how many studio sessions/hours each canvas needed.

So while I go crazy for the next few weeks there may be fewer posts here....

Light and Water

2011-04-22T21:00:00.000-04:00

Again, here's another fairly mature painting that I neglected to post until now...

I started this about 2 months ago, and it's been a pleasant break from the other work- lighter, less broad in the palette. At first it was an exploration of reflected sunset on a beach at the Jersey Shore.

I very quickly abandoned the concretely representative subject and let the color and light direct the piece.

I also pulled in some inspiration from another water based experience- a trip to Walden Pond last summer. I wanted a shimmering, bright summer light everywhere.

Here things are coming along beautifully- the distinction between the sky and the water is very subtle.

Then I brought in some stronger, representative elements- a tree line and some stones in the water. While it was airy and beautiful before, in person it looked maybe a bit too empty- like it was going to float away.

Things darkened up a lot.

An then I tried blurring it back out a bit, while keeping the stronger, more graphic elements.

So green!

And here's when I am now. It's pretty far away from that lovely, airy canvas that I started with. Is it better? Not sure. I don't think I have the restraint and guts to leave something so unfinished feeling as it was before, at least not yet. So I did what I often do- I overdid it. I need to reign some aspects in, but as it is, the painting is still more loos than most of my work. What's next? Take out color by bringing in other color- it's too much of one palette now- the peaches and pale greens and creams have sort of disappeared. I want some contrasts to come back in, I want the surface of the water to knit together and become flat in space, I want to be done with this soon.

Place des Vosges

2011-04-20T20:57:00.000-04:00

Oddly, I really haven't had enough post about this painting. It's based on my favorite park in Paris, a square, really. This summer I was walking by and an incredible light effect was happening. Underneath the border of trees were deep blue shadows and sunny, yellow light and just past them, was a clear gray palette. That's what I set out to capture:

The dark blues sort of became spidery and entwined in the painting process- instead of looking like pools of deep shadow.

Things are a bit disjointed here, but still going strong.

Getting the background down was problematic, it read so differently from the foreground, as disjointed as the yellow/blue palette.

Around this point I began to run into a problem, I rarely have such a structured composition, such a stiff idea of what things should look like. Between the strict palette and defined structural elements, it started to be a hard thing to paint. I'd leave it for long periods of time, because it wasn't fun to work on.

I started to deepen colors and make it a little more visually complex to combat that problem.

And then realized depth was an issue- I solved it with that great diagonal shadow.

And I began bringing in some of the grays and blues that make up the light in the background. By integrating that blue/yellow shadow/light system I opened up the whole space again, making it feel truer and active.

I took a look at what was working in the early images of this piece and what had started to make it look patterned and stagnant. Finally, I'm back on track. It may not have that strict, otherworldly lighting effect that I felt I saw that evening, but I'd rather convey an accurate, if comprised version than an overly stylized, distractingly flawed one.

It's not done yet, but I think that by setting it on the right course it will be finished sooner, rather than later.

Finale

2011-04-14T11:21:00.000-04:00

Though I finally finished the Wheatfield painting a few weeks ago, I've neglected to post it here.

So what changed here? The sky got less yellow, in fact, the entire painting did. And the stalk of greenery on the right disappeared. I also spent and endless amount of time working on the shadow in the middle ground- I needed it to read better. In the end, I think I've done well. It has much of that feeling I was going for expansive and sunny, with all of those colors of Provence. I wanted to wheat to look expressive and full of movement. I think, after so much editing and revision, I finally succeeded. I'm glad I finished it before the Pavement show this May, I really need to get cracking on the rest of my inbox so I can have enough options when hanging...

Catching Up: Rose Garden

2011-04-04T10:55:00.000-04:00

First up after the great photo drought: The Urban Rose Garden.

First, I layered over the blanked-out spots with some pale yellow-greens.

And then I changed it back a bit. Revisions on this painting a re sort of slow and back and forth.

I decided there should be more color peeking out in the layers.

And more dripping layers in the siding of the house, to give it the peeling, tumbling look I want.

And then, of course, there was an un-documented interim.

This photo is a little dark, but I'm very happy with how it's going. The flowers are a little delicate, but not all too fussy. And I'm very pleased with the way the porch looks now. It all needs depth and some bolder, definite elements.

Photos Forthcoming!

2011-04-01T12:35:00.000-04:00

I managed to fix my camera! Which is both exciting and impressive, as it looked like this at one point during the process:

What else do I have to update on?
- The Wheatfield painting is finished!
- There are not one, but two new paintings I haven't posted here yet.
- The Urban Rose Garden piece is progressing nicely
- And my Place des Vosges painting is near completion, having taken a turn for the better

All of this- and more- soon.

Sketch Sunday

2011-03-27T12:30:00.000-04:00

Some source sketches for the wheat field painting.

So due to a camera malfunction I haven't been able to post the work I've been doing of late. Hopefully I'll get it sorted soon, as I've actually finished the wheat field and made a huge amount of overall progress in the past couple of weeks. There's new stuff to post but, alas, I can't shoot it. In the meantime, here's a somewhat goofy side project that is all about sketches. www.clairesketch.blogspot.com

2011-03-02T11:17:00.001-05:00

The Wheatfield is really coming along- it's almost done, actually.

I finally got down a system for painting the actual wheat, which looks great. Unfortunately, as great as they look, the rest of the scene is pretty disjointed now.

Part of how I'm trying to join up the two is the tree in the left foreground- I'm sort of using it to bridge the gap between the two.

And here is the current state of things. It's working pretty well, but there are aspect that continue to bother me. The most bothersome right now is that cypress tree on the left. It's too small for the field. Frankly, I'm not sure how to deal with the problem without entirely rethinking the painting. I've tried to set the far background as distant as possible- that diagonal line in the left side is sort of trying to do that- to create different levels in the terrain so it rolls back. The other issue is that there's too much uniformity in the strokes and mark-making as it gets further back. More painting still needs to be done, but it's approaching a conclusion.

Moving Along

2011-02-24T15:14:00.000-05:00

So I've got plenty of little bits to update on. First up, the Rose Garden:

As it looked last time.

It's spring! In the painting, at least. Lost of blooming and color is starting to show up here. I went to town on this in terms of ways I could make light and attempts to build up a lush atmosphere. I've got yellows and whites and yellow green and pale blues coming through. And a ton of great and varied brushwork.

The explosion continues! I want to get that part of the lawn to really lead into the darkness of the house, the way it is starting too. And the sort of over the top, rococo florals are really starting to come together and build a look here. And, at this point, the structure of the house is finally settled, so now I can just let it get overgrown and fall into decrepitude.

As I started layering back in, it really started to achieve what I'm shooting for. I want to to be exponentially bigger than what is already happening but this is a great start!

Finally, I put in a lot more white spaces, I want to be able to fill in with the lights of my choice in the future and I wanted to take precautions against things getting too yellowed. The telephone pole needs redefining, the house needs more detailing and the sidewalk won't lay flat, but otherwise it's looking great.

To keep this post so positive I'm going to put in just one other thing, a new canvas, one that I'm pretty pleased with.

It's a water view, but beyond that, I'm not sure what's happening with it. And this time that's a really good thing. I started pretty representational but decided that I didn't like the composition.

So then it turned into a more loosely defined water scene. The colors retained some of the same palette as in the initial concept, it's a very light, ephemeral piece.

Right now I am thrilled with how this looks. In fact, before reviewing these images, I had a far more concrete plan for this painting. Now, I feel that moving a head without a direct reference point is OK. In fact, I think this might end up being a mostly abstract piece. there's some really great painting happening here- the sort of fuzzy, drippy coming together of color and light, the way things are interacting- it's great.

By the Way

2011-02-24T14:14:00.004-05:00

I guess I forgot to post about finishing the Long New Mexico painting- which is unusual. Typically I'm so excited to get something off of the docket. Any way- here is it's last progression:

When we left off the painting was redefining itself, getting brighter and broader and breaking free of some of the bad, patterned compostion that had started to take hold.

Things started to smooth out- the sky sat back in space, allowing the whole thing to have a more full rounded look. This is also where I started developing shadow to play off of the brights.

The shadow deepened in color and tone here, particularly in the sky. I also developed these nice drop-offs for the cliffs into a sort of obscurity. Everything is looking well formed at this point, more detail needs to develop, but it's a good starting point.

I started to concentrate a lot on the greenery here- making sure it differentiated in terms of color and the descriptive mark-making that defines it. I also continued to struggle with that strange block of rock on the right. So square! So flat!

I put some highlights into the greens so I could give them more overall depth and continued to tweak shadows and rocks.

And then I finished it!

I think, for something that gave me this much trouble, these piece is reasonably successful. It's an awkward shape that I'm going to try not to go back to again, every time it really doesn't end well. But this one works, or works in places, at least. I wish it had conformed to my original vision, but maybe I was reaching for something that I didn't really want to paint- since the original vision kept falling by the wayside in the studio. I'm glad that it's done and currently making its public debut at the Bukowski's Tavern Show.

On View

2011-02-20T13:47:00.000-05:00

I've got work up at Bukowsi's Tavern in Inman Square in Cambridge! It was a great last minute show arranged via craigslist and will be up until April.

Tending the Field

2011-02-14T17:33:00.000-05:00

So I've been doing a lot of work on the wheat field painting- moving it around, building it up and bringing it back down. I felt the the biggest problem facing this painting was the believability of the wheat field itself. It keeps building up and looking too feathery and disconnected.

I decided that part of the problem was that it all looked like on single form, so I stated in on rows. I felt that if the ground was visible then there would be depth an a readable sense of space.

And so, I started separating rows.

Things actually were not too bad here, but I wasn't satisfied.

I wanted to start the wheat from the ground up- so I razed that part of the painting.

Here, I made the dirt darker for the area between the sections of wheat and started to block in some lights and colors.

Putting the rows in so concretely made me see that the whole perspective was a little off. So, for the second time in the past month, I pulled out the old perspective skills and drew lines to really figure the whole situation out.

I was like a little star burst erupted in the corner of my painting. But I've been spending too much time on the field- let's look at everything else:

The play between the peach, yellow-green and lavender sky is gorgeous. I hope I haven't painted this relationship out too much at this point because it's lovely. Also all of those yellow-greens remind me of the actual Crayola crayon, which was one of my favorites. The importance of the Crayola repertoire may be a whole post (if not blog) its own; and now I'm digressing.

So here's how the rows played out after I got the perspective settled. Overall it's looking a lot better- it's lively but not too patterned and frenetic.

I realized here that there was a real imbalance of detail in the painting- the field is very specific and detailed but the rest of the background is very broad by contrast. So I got some different types of mark making and brushwork in the background- particularly on the wall and cypress tree.

So the rows- while a good step in the process- turned out to not quite work the way that I wanted. They read as very geometric and a little disjointed- particularly as the rest of the painting became softer.

I also wanted the wheat to have that sense of wind-ruffled movement present- and it definitely wasn't.

Here's what the piece looks like right now. The field is looking a little too blocky now but it has reclaimed a little of the movement that I was originally looking for . However, it's got some serious problems still - like how it's beginning to look like a big homogeneous block again. It also has too many varied colors now- I'm trying to get in some solid blocks of color and then bringing out detail and highlights. It's all blending better here than it was, but there's still some disconnect between the field and the rest of the painting. That strict, straight horizon line is starting to flow better now and looking a little more natural and broken up, but still needs work and, again, more specificity and detail. Look like I won't be done with this guy for a while....

Wheat Field and the Rose Garden

2011-01-30T12:43:00.007-05:00

It's been great to have tow large pieces to work on at the same time; I had forgotten how much I like working in a larger format. To start the recapping, here's the Rose Garden:

While everything is blocked out in the composition, the architecture is still a pretty big problem...Here something still looks off.

With the exception of the porch, the architecture is looking better here, the lines are crisper and look properly aligned. Overall it's starting to feel more concrete.

Basically the changes are pretty small here, it's about building up a sense of space, expanding and deepening detail and layer.

Here the colors got a lot brighter and the whole palette settled. I'm pleased with the combination of brick red and sunny greens. The palette on the house is a little dull and messy though....

Finally I became so frustrated by the top of the porch that I attached a piece of cardboard to the side of the canvas (not that you can see it in this photo) and got into the perspective. I don't think I've done this since college, but I found the horizon line and drew perspective lines to a vanishing point. My renaissance masters skills are a little rusty, but I think Giotto and I could go head to head on this one- the whole thing actually reads now!

Here's the Wheat field as we last left it. It is suffering from a few of the same problems as the Rose Garden; the perspective and scale is a little awkward on the field. I realized that there was way too much activity in the field, but the scale was all off too. It's too big, broad and unspecific.

So I started to re-examine the underlying structure - I wanted to have it read as wheat in rows- that was the inspiring idea in the first place.

Then I pulled out my broadest brush and set about fixing the problem. I also dealt with the strange lavender caboose that was doing nothing at the top of the field. I also brought in a lot of great sunny colors that I can use to build the sense of light as I continue and begin to layer more.

Here's the painting as it looks now- the fields are set now, and they look concrete but I'm already getting a little variety and detail in them. The sky mellowed out a little so that O have a better surface to work on going forward. Right now, I'm very pleased with the piece.

Trees and Light

2011-01-25T21:26:00.006-05:00

Remember what happened when I tried out that blue abstraction? It got erased into something like this:

So i went in an entirely different direction with the do-over. It's now a scene from my summer trip to Paris and a real lighting trick.

The illusion is that, while it was just before sunset, the shaded part of the park, just below the tree's canopy looked like it was well past twilight. It was a beautiful effect and the light was golden and dapple, the shadows were a soft, moody blue.

So this is the first go at building that scene. I've put down a whole layer of yellow so that it can shine though the shadow and have the glowing effect I'm trying to achieve.

Here I'm setting down the basic light/dark relationships and building a sense of weight and gravity for the compositional elements.

Here come the bursts of light.

And a golden glow. This has been a really successful work so far, and it's moving along a a good pace. I hope I can keep up the good work. The painting started as a sketch:

As did the next one:

This painting is of a sort of a dell, very green- almost monochromatic, and very atmospheric.

The grain on this panel is really active and funky! I liked it.

Here's the start, it's going to be a little tricky to get the whole set up correct- or at least plausible.

It's a good start for spatial plausibility, hopefully I can keep it up and not go insane over it. Next up for this guy, a developed sense of light and dark.

On View

2011-01-25T18:41:00.005-05:00

Now that my work is installed at OKW in the South End here are a few pictures:

I've got about ten pieces up, most things that I completed in the past year, if not the last few months.

My card on the wall! How professional looking!

Pretty cool shadow trick here.

Prime placement!

One Last Thing

2011-01-19T11:43:00.007-05:00

So a while back I wrote about a sort of study I had done on a long strip of canvas. And it was my intention to mount it on stretcher bars and then finish it off. Except it really was too much of a remnant so I just had to restart the project from scratch.

This is what it looked like then.

After this it went through a lot of changes- so I figured I'd do a full slide show and then a highlights tour of the progress.

The slide show runs in reverse chronology for some reason- oh well.

So this image is pretty much what I envisioned the whole thing looking like when I started:

Dark, stormy, moody. Lots of nice deep cobalts layered on each other and that great burn sienna rising out of the black. But, as it turns out, I couldn't leave well enough alone. Because I went ahead and did this:

Horrible grays and strange muddy colors took over! How did this happen?! At least that nice outcropping is still looking good - bright lines and decisive marks.

Never mind, I will destroy that too, with way too many colors.

So many colors! And so much patchiness! It's a quilt!

I tried to bring back the blues. But couldn't escape the allure of patchwork.

But realized that I needed highlights- so here's drastic paint out #1.

Which resulted in this- not a terrible thing, but not what I had been looking for. It also looks way too much like the Taos painting I did this summer.

Like a bad version of that painting.

Which is how we get paint out #2.

And a hazy new start. I began to realize, and still think, that maybe that particular light effect, combined with the difficult compositional constraints, is just beyond me. Or maybe just can't effectively coexist. SO here's what came next:

Springtime in the desert! It's a little pastel, but so far a lot more interesting to look at than what had previously been there. And with this brighter palette I can still keep my options open to go darker- like I've started doing in the sky.

I think it still has miles to go, and it will need a lot of drying intervals, given how much build up there is now on the canvas. But here, it is looking pretty promising.

New Things, Part II

2011-01-19T09:53:00.004-05:00

Here are the two new smaller works. First, and briefly, a new set of panels.

I'm modeling the palette for these on the Wheatfield painting. This series is another color study set- this time themed on Provence. There are some wheat- ish colors, olive greens and lavenders.

They're progressing very well but are still very young. They're pretty though- particularly the green one and the one to the left of it. I do like how they are all developing independent but harmonious compositions. They just need to differentiate themselves much in the same way that the wheat field does- the marks are a little too uniform and needing a bit more detail and specifics.

Here is the next one:

I started this painting mainly as a bit of a distraction from the rest of my current work- it's a manageable size and I was sort of just letting loose on it. The big paintings can get a little rigid by nature of what a physical undertaking it is to work on them. It was intended as a sort of sky and color study. It's very dusky and fluid and relaxed.

And then I started some experimental mark making- note the swirls.

It got drippy.

I felt that it was far too dark to make a go of things so I started to blank out a bunch of highlights and paler blues. But as I continued this, and when I came back to do some layering a few days later, I found it was insufficient. There was not nearly enough variation in palette to be sufficiently enjoyable a project.

So this happened. These are lovely colors for a sort of under painting- melon green and blush pinks. And I have still let a few deep blues peek through. However, I think the whole sky study may be lost- I just don't feel like it's dynamic enough to hold my interest.

New Things

2011-01-18T18:47:00.010-05:00

I've started to big new paintings and some small new ones too. In this post, the big ones:

The first piece is really large, based on a wheat field in St. Rémy in the south of France. Here are the beginnings:

One of the most important things, beyond the basic composition, is the way that the wheat moves. It moves in cross patterns- sort of like living cross hatching - an animation of the above image.

While it was developing, I put a lot of poppies in to the field. I also started to put a bit of lavender in the back.

The poppies were distracting: too cartoonish and patterned. I started to get more variation in the color of the wheat too, and fill in the ridge.

All of which continued, leaving me with one more poppy and a growing shrubbery on the left.

Then I added lots of graphic lines to the whole thing, particularly in the field.

I was doing a lot of 'building and blocking' in the next stage- building up paint surface and blocking out what goes where (defining edges, determining lines, angles and shapes)

And now I'm doing a lot of 'blanking' - whiting out places that I've built up too much, or that need light, or that I'm going to layer over later.

More of the same,along with a lot more lavender and wheat variation.

That one poppy made a comeback, and all of the greenery deepened.

And here it is now. The wheat is separating and defining and regaining that quality that I tried to describe earlier- moving in crosshatch. The only real problem that I've had with this painting so far is that if was feeling very bored and lacked any specific or detail elements. I think at this point, I've really been able to deepen the whole piece and to achieve the template for a more specific, dynamic painting.

Now for a slightly younger, slightly smaller piece:

This one is based on a house that I used to pass by during my commute in Philadelphia. It was completely run down and condemned but full overgrown with bushes. And one week in spring I realized that the bushes were, in fact, roses. It was a great childhood throwback moment and I really felt like I was seeing the secret garden. So while these initial phases look like they're all about the house, actually it's about fully laying down a foundation for the vegetation to go wild on. I'm fully expecting to cover most of the canvas with tangles brambles and big white blossoms.

It took me a log time to figure out the architecture of the house, particularly the porch. I sort of feel like I'm doing a really strange experiment of process where I have to build the house, then make it decay and fall apart, then cover it in growth and neglect. Which sounds pretty silly and a little contrived, but is working well so far...

I finally nailed down the way the house will look- it's not perfect bit it reads well enough for me to tweak it later.

And I've already moved on- I'm blocking out the highlights for the foreground brush.

On to the Next One(s)

2011-01-09T00:59:00.003-05:00

After a few weeks away from the studio I came back this week and finished not one, but two (!) paintings.

Here is the final progression of the Sea Cave.

I did such an astute job of blocking out this piece that, really, I had a pretty easy time finishing it. So this series of photos really is just about the subtle changes that went into the piece over time.

Starting to get some good layering- especially in the water...

Making some definite decisions about rock wall structure and the structure of the central rock.

Deepening the water.

Working on the shadow/light/spatial relationship between the smaller stones.

More of the same- this was the only truly frustrating part of this painting.

And, voila!

This isn't a great photo but I'm pretty pleased with the way things turned out here.

And now for a painting whose progress was a little more...complicated.

The New Mexico hillside painting was far more difficult because I didn't really help myself out in the very beginning. This was one of those paintings where I had an ambient, evocative vision and started without a good sense of where the image was coming from in a concrete sense. So I sort of started without contemplating compositional repercussions and an overall palette scheme. Sure, I worked on all of these things as I went along, but I'm not sure it yielded as successful a result as a more considered approach would have. Also, the format (panel size) is difficult.

One major problem I came up against was color palette and how to define light. I wanted this to have a hazy, sunset palette, but found that to read as very yellow. When I went for yellow and pink lights they bounced off of the blues and few greens in a terrible, My Little Pony pastel disaster. So in this image it is in a very reactionary, yellow state.

My other issue was in creating a plausible physical structure. Having the hilltops disappearing into shadow seemed like a great way to get around this, but it still wasn't reading well to me. That one ridge, the one on the right (second from the back) was the worst. Where does it connect to the hill behind it? How does it drop off? What kind of shadow is it falling into? Does it get darker than the ones in front? Or does it simply become less severe in contrast? Ahhhhhhhhhhh.

So her it is as a finished product. It all turned out better than I hoped it would, but overall, it was more stagnant than I would have liked. I'm not sure it lived up to the vision I had of sloping hills rolling back under the rose quartz sunset. That's how it is though, some paintings expand and advance you, others simply sustain you until the next true discovery. This was one of those daily struggle paintings, I'm not sorry to see it leave the inbox.

Having finished these two paintings I'm feeling good about a new year for art. I did a total of 12 paintings in 2010- hopefully 2011 is off to a more prolific start!

On View

2011-01-03T14:22:00.001-05:00

My work will be up at OKW on Tremont Street in Boston's South End until Mid-February. Come on down and check it out!

Southwest Scene

2010-12-14T10:41:00.004-05:00

Here's what's up with the dusky New Mexico painting:

Things were actually looking pretty good here, but apparently I didn't think that at the time.

I made it very colorful next. Way too much yellow/pink/mint green. Also it was far too patchy.

So I covered things up with an ochre-yellow glaze.

And then brought the color back. Too patchy again! I need to be thinking about the big picture more and the way things lay spatially.

Patchy again but more sculptural now.

It's not really working but I'm determined to keep trying.

Catching Up on the Squares

2010-12-13T18:07:00.014-05:00

So here's the progress on the square paintings. The green one is pretty much the same, which is to say, done:

and here's what's happening with its counterpart- newly restarted:

And here they are together:

Here's what happened with the re-do:

I went for some of the better aspects of it's previous incarnation. I liked the interplay of greens and the pinky peaches. But I tried to make the composition spatially interesting and keep things light.

Together again.

It's not too interesting now though. Things are too thin and too airy- the sense of composition doesn't really exist.

The whole thing got a lot more green and more uniform.

I really like what's going on in the green strip on the right- there's some good development happening in the newly uniform patches- adding color contrast and detail.

Here's the little cave painting.

A little to rainbow here.

And now it's too yellow but the shaping of the rock walls by the light and shadow is great. I am mostly thrilled with this painting.

There is still too much yellow but overall I am loving this piece. I don't want to build it up too much more- it's very nice as is.

Finito!

2010-12-06T23:25:00.009-05:00

Well the Beach painting is done! Here's it's most recent evolution.

This was all before I came back in and glazed over the highlights.

At this point it was all looking a little too patchy and pink in the surf- all my marks were about the same size.

I yellowed things up a bit in the sand and started layering into the shrubbery.

The whole thing became more refined pretty quickly, the water is a bit more smooth and separates from the sky better.

I worked into he waves a bit- adding a second scroll of foam. I also continued to get into the greenery - developing highlights and colorful shadow.

The shapes of the green on the left bothered me though- it's all too blunt and unspecific.

So I started to work into detail and description on the left.

That tall tree got bigger and more lush.

But it felt too flat- and separated the elements of the painting from each other too much.

So I let the background shine through a bit- to make the whole piece feel as airy as I had wanted.

And here it is, finished!

Squares

2010-12-02T00:41:00.005-05:00

After a lovely holiday break, I've had a lot of studio time this week. And I've made a good deal of progress on all the paintings in my studio. To start, the saga of the square paintings.

So when we left off, I had two (a pair), after reaching a roadblock with those I started a third, not in that series but to look at the compositional possibilities of the shape and to clear my mind a bit. I'll start with that:

I began by finding compositional themes in the wood grain, as I had done for the other two. But I wanted to be vigilant about palette, since I felt that was a big part of the problem the other to had encountered.

But it didn't matter, as I went representational.

It's another sea cave scene.

So looking at these now, I realize that it might be a good idea to restrict the palette again. There are too many colors here and it's getting to be that rainbow effect (equal amounts of all color). I am really into the gold-y ochre that is starting to show up in the rocks; and the line work has been consistently interesting and descriptive. I also want to keep the sky strongly simple- it's very powerful as it is now. Overall, I want to keep the entire thing loose and light- I hope it's a quick and easy painting. (ha. ha.)

Now the other two-

I'll talk about the green one first.

This one is giving me a lot less trouble than the other- you can tell by the ratios of the respective photos. This pieces has stayed sort of blurry and gauzy and felt true to the original palette concept.

I think it's really close to being done!

And now for the bad one:

It's sad to look at these now- it's pretty workable as it appears here.

I love the green streak but I am so frustrated by the entire lower half. It's disjointed, there's no sense of space or one color sitting on top of another.

Ugh, the shape on the lower left was an attempt at fixing the spatial problem but is such an eyesore.

Big blobby, green patches appeared. That's when I knew it was infectiously disastrous.

So I tried to wipe it all out.

And this is where the journey of this particular square comes to an end. After this frustrating moment, I scrapped the entire thing, re-gessoed, and hope to start anew when it dries.

Closing Party!

2010-11-27T12:36:00.003-05:00

So my first Boston Show is finally coming to an end!

It's time to go out in style - now I can concentrate on getting sold works to their owners and finding a new spot to show!

Done!

2010-11-18T12:01:00.003-05:00

Bam! This guy is done.

I don't love certain things here- it's a lot brighter than I intended. But nothing's perfect....

A New Painting

2010-11-15T22:07:00.006-05:00

So there's a piece I've been working on for a while now but haven't posted on yet.

It's a moody, slightly more abstract piece about the southwest- my nickname for it has been new mexico dusky- which sounds like a kind of bootleg whiskey or something.

I'm mostly concerned with the color and mood and less with the trappings of reality or tangibility. I see this piece as a bridge between the color study-type works and the rest of my body of work.

Here it is evolving:

Lots of Pink and Lavender, tawny Beige and Golds. I'm enjoying letting the composition and space reveal themselves though painting, rater than working off of a strict, preconceived, template.

More recently, I've made it a bit les ephemeral. There are darker colors (aka actual contrast) seeping in and strong lines emerging.

I will try and bring back the softer, twilight colors in the next few painting sessions, but I think that I've got a good ground laid for the composition and color relationships. My only gripe is the top right corner- the way that one hill slopes up is unconvincing and distracting; it makes the knoll directly beneath look too round and stunted. Sot that's something to fix...

And, as they are closely related, here are the 12x12s and their progress:

Changes here started subtly but have been successfully progressive- in terms of moving the paintings along to where I want them to be. I tried to make both panels more harmonious and broader- color wise and compositionally.

Here I got a lot of paler greens in so that I could glaze and layer for a fully leafy effect.

Make it subtler!

So it's very green here- you can't see becasue of hte shine but there's some very delicate layering going on on hte left. there's also a sort of mutating graphic crustacean there- that navy blue guy. I don't know what happened....

I tried to thwart his progress, that spiny, spiky blue dude.

Annnd together.

This one really got glowy and dreamy. I am in loe with the melon-y palette.

Not too much change, except my attempt to get that dark mass to integrate.

But if I'm going to integrate it- what is the compositional point? So he's all but gone in this photo. Attempts at a stronger spatial sensibility are emerging on the right panel.

Soft focus! I like the idea that the palettes of both panels are communicating with each other. I also love what is happening between hte yellowy green and that orangey- peach.

This pink on top turned yellow- which I now see as a partial mistake- though the blues do look all the more complex for the change.

Keeping up Appearances

2010-11-15T21:17:00.006-05:00

I'm trying to keep up with the studio log here in a consistent and timely fashion. I'm sort of succeeding.
So on to the news:
Horn Head is finished!!

Here's the final progression:

I need to get a better photo of this, but as it gets darker earlier in the evenings, the window of good light for photographing gets smaller. Overall, I am happy though and I am particularly pleased with the drama I managed to create in the sky and the sheen off the grass.

On to the next one:

I love what I was able to do in the areas where I had gone back into with the light under painting. So I threw in some more under painting- in white and yellow.

I toned down the multi-colored aspect of the sand a bit, to make it easier to affect shadow and highlights. I am still trying to build up the background sky and sea, without losing the atmospheric quality.

Here's the little wood panels:

I tried to get this one more jewel-like and detailed. It's certainly looking better than it did last time I checked in.

As for the other, I made a huge change:

It's going to be a study in blue now.

That's it for this installment....

Offshoot

2010-11-10T21:58:00.011-05:00

So, as I wrote in the last post, the small abstract works led to a new, larger try at similar pieces.

These panels are 12x12 and I figured to start with two.

I wanted to do something autumnal with the colors- when I stared these the leaves were peaking and falling outside. The one that features in this photo is a sort of study on fallen, dried leaves and the other is a more vibrant look at the ones still turning color.

Here that one is.

Here it's getting a little patchy.

And trying to get a luminous color built up.

They looked pretty good together at this point.

Too many colors came together here. The red through green color spectrum is waaaaay too rainbow.

The colors are working well here- sort of pale and dreamy. I like the horizontal strokes along the bottom but don't know how great they are for the overall composition.

So I pulled out most of those oranges and yellows that were causing the trouble here and still I am unsatisfied. Maybe it was the blue?

I love color build up here but I am not very fond of the strange pagoda structure that came together on the left there.

Getting broader.

Colors getting broader here again.

The rainbow is gone! Hoorah!

The thing on the left works well now but I am not wild about the lavender on the bottom.

There's still a lot of work to be done on these two but I'm optimistic about their course now.

Smalls

2010-11-09T17:21:00.008-05:00

So remember that little series of abstract wood panels?

Well I've been thinking about them a lot and how much I enjoyed doing them. They're one of my most successful forays into color study. So I got a bunch more of these and here is a two set.

I decided to work in the same palette again, since I found it to be really versatile and worth exploration. it's also a nice foil/break from a lot of what I'm usually doing in the landscapes.

This is a little more tawny than the previous set; which seemed like a good idea. I also tried to follow the wood grain a little for compositional inspiration.

I started these about a month ago so there's been a lot of movement on them.

I like the little graphic notes that developed on the first panel's lower half. I also started to make an attempt at activating the space with bolder color- I pulled in interesting blues on the first and that nice scarlet on the second.

And then things got really busy. I also have them switched for this photo- that was entirely incidental and a mistake, actually. A lot more graphic marks stated to accumulate and that scarlet spread. Browns and greens also made it in here in a big way.

Here, the one on the left looks pretty good. It's developing nicely and the interplay between the graphic lines and sectional composition is exciting but harmonious. The one on the right is lagging.

To take a better look at this, I tried to open up the space with broader swaths of color.

I also did that here, but kept that lovely bit on the right intact. Also the orange on the bottom is really gorgeous.

This is messy. The blue doesn't fit, the shapes are clunky and unconsidered (in a bad way, as opposed to a natural way).

Things were going well.....

And then I kind of threw it all away. I covered too much too fast.

Also not a good development.

Mess!!!

So the tale so far doesn't have a good ending. It became busy and overdone and then I took out not only the difficult aspects but the good ones too. So not I will take a break from these for a bit, let them dry out and look critically at how I can improve on the situation.

There is another note to this tale- I started another pair of related paintings, which I shall discuss in my next post....

Playing Catchup

2010-10-31T18:03:00.005-04:00

I am shamefully behind again. To start things off: I finished the Roussillon Painting

This is a pretty decent photo of the final painting. As I said before- it isn't perfect but I am satisfied with it. It was something of an experimental piece in terms of subject and style, and I'm not sure it worked but I had fun.

The Horn Head painting is working very well. the way that I've reconfigured the cliff face on the right is finally reading properly.

Here I think it is very close to being finished. Both the sea and sky need more work but the foreground and the tower are finally looking good.

Here's the New Beach painting too.

A lot more color snuck in here but I'm glad of that- it's enlivening the whole scene, as is the increase in stronger graphic lines.

The path here isn't lying flat here though, it's sort of popping up awkwardly. I'm struggling here with getting the whole scene to stay hazy and atmospheric. I wan to keep building up the greenery and the foreground but if I do the background haziness starts to look divorced and disjointed.

Loose Ends

2010-10-19T18:20:00.005-04:00

So here's pretty much everything that I've been working on. There's a lot of catch up to do here.
First, Roussillon!

The male figure looks a little weak and thinly painted. He wasn't sitting properly in the space.

So I started to rethink it. I worked on the shadows and loosened the figure up a little.

And then the figure got really solid. I don't know that it's perfect but I think I can live with it. Also the tree is really doing its job.

As for the moss garden:

It's finally finished.

It's not perfect but it is finished. Better photos to follow.

And the Beach Painting- the first large scale historical work.
Here are the sketched I did when laying out the piece:

The second one really gets the vision across. I want the view to be tunneled down that clearing and for the ocean to seem so far away. The painting is set in Massachusetts in the 17th c.- I want the bounty of the wilderness to overwhelm and the sense of estrangement to overpower.

Here is where it's at now. The whole 'corridor of foliage' thing isn't working as well as I would like. I think I need to buckle down and get some good graphic lines defining the spatial relationships started. However, the sea and sky still look far away.

Inbox Full

2010-10-19T17:43:00.006-04:00

So I've been terrible about updating lately. Here is the progress the new Horn Head painting has made since I last wrote- which has been extensive:

I've been moving fairly slowly on this piece because I don't want it to lose the more luminous, lucid colors in the foreground. I'm wary of it getting flat.

it took me a while to get all of the new white under-painting covered and then to bring in some more diverse colors in the grass. here I'm also dealing with making the sky into a cohesive piece.
For the next few shots I'm going to forgo the commentary- it's all about letting layers and areas of detail build up.

So I started to diversify the colors in the sky and the water. the cliff face on the left remains a persistent problem though. Also, the composition was starting to become a real problem. The tower is inert, the grade of the land is too extreme and the little cliff looks cartoonish.

So i started to rethink things- I needed to reevaluate the composition.

And I had to take a closer look at the structure of the tower.

So I put a lot of work into the foreground.

Since that wasn't working too well still, I made a study to work things out in a less permanent manner.

I had to pull out the tower in order to take a more critical look at the cliff-side. The immediate foreground is working well with the new brighter, more solid colors. And it's early, but the new color scheme for the exposed cliff works so much better.

While the foreground it working very well here, the sky and sea are far too patchy. Looks like I'm not finished yet.....