New Year

Just finished up November this afternoon. The painting really does capture the feeling of that day I was walking around in Bisbee, AZ in the rain. There is definitely a bit of a foreboding/haunted feeling in this painting. It's nice to have the first painting of the new year completed. I've been working on this painting all week along with sending out portfolios. I've also have submitted this piece and two others into a juried exhibition. My fingers are crossed that my work will fit into the show. These last two works have been a lot of fun to paint. In both I've played with the idea of allowing the background to recede into the mist allowing the foreground elements to be darker and more detailed.


I'm going to lighten the palette up a little and give this effect a try in some other works this upcoming week. Tomorrow I plan start a new work entitled After the Rain based on a sketch I started earlier this week. It will be a smaller piece. I also plan to get busy in the sketchbook to draft a series of works after it and continue on with the Crowds series.


Last night's First Friday Reception was really nice. I ran into a lot of old friends I hadn't seen in a while. I also had some great questions on the drawings. The most frequent question was regarding the lack of a background, which took me by surprise. Admittedly, when I started creating the series I went with my gut and didn't even consciously think about the fact I was omitting the background. I think I started drawing a background into the first drawing and erased it out, because it seemed to distract my eye from what was important - the figures. It really did mess with some folk's concept of what a finished drawing should look like. I also noticed many were taken by surprise that they were drawings and not a prints or photographs.