Daylight

Waited for daylight to show the progress. I don't feel the light has been right in the studio at night for accurate photos.  Spent time working in the details of the bridge and more glazing into the sky.  Today will be a busy day.  I'm working out the final sketch for the Steel Bridge piece and will start that today.  


Unfortunately, I'm going to have to spend some time refurbishing my gate replacing the 2x4s with 2x6s, changing out the slats and the locking mechanism for a more heavy duty slide bolt.  Two weeks ago someone kicked it in, but didn't take anything in the yard. I figured it was just a drunk with anger issues or teenager having fun.  I repaired it and wedged a concrete block at it's base for extra security and thought that it was just a fluke.  Tuesday night while I was out in the studio working late someone attempted to break through the gate again.  I grabbed a hammer and stepped out of the studio door yelling "Who's out there!!!!"  Shortly after I heard running and the dogs barking at them two doors down.


It has unnerved me a bit.  I have a tendency to work late at night into the early morning hours.  It's when I'm the most creative and have a tendency to perform three hours work per hour when I break into the grove.  Painting is a lot like surfing in that respect. The last thing I want is to contend with an unwanted visitor or the fear of one.  I've worked out on the patio for years without issue, so hopefully this is just a passing phase due to bad economic times.

Layers

The commission has thrown it's share of curve balls at me. I kept on looking at the bridge as I collaged and reworked the sky and the perspective just looked off. It has taken hours of working and reworking, but I'm finally comfortable with the perspective.  I hate the delay, but I hate the idea of letting a work with a faulty perspective leaving the studio a good deal more.  Now the piece is about midway through where I'm adding artifacts and then obscuring them and then adding more.  Building the textures layer by layer and varnishing between layers to create the luminosity.

The sky is becoming a very important factor in this painting and it's a little more painterly than I usually get.  I've had this concept of a dark stormy sky as the backdrop to the bridge in my mind. An uncanny liken to a seen photograph burned into my mind actually.  I thought it was a photo I saw on the web while performing the visual research for the painting, but I've come to the conclusion the photo of the bridge wasn't something I'd seen in waking, but rather while dreaming.  This after a couple of hours of trying to find it again and only seeing photos like it, but not it. I do that often.  Many times in my sleep I will see a painting or the subject matter as clear as a photograph and the memory is so vivid that I believe it was actually seen during my waking hours.  Well the sky isn't perfect yet, but I'll nail it down this weekend. In fact I should be in the glazing stage of the painting this weekend, so I'll be starting the second piece of the Steel Bridge tomorrow night.  I plan for this to be the final rendition of the Steel Bridge.  I've painted it now three times and this will be the fourth.  I believe 6 Days while being a great piece begot this one.  I haven't decided if I'm going to bring the yellow sky back into it.  I'm feeling a bit film noir at the moment and digging the dark grayscale vibe.  I may have to pop in a Hitchcock film in this weekend.

Studio Update:

I've fully moved out of the old studio and have been working on the new studio while working on the commission.  My Brother-in-law and I built my painting rack/loft (4 x 15' approx), which freed up a lot of space in the studio and eliminated even more clutter.  I'm getting to where I don't work well creatively with clutter, so figuring out where things go and keeping the studio clean is imperative to being able to create. The neat freaks of my past would rejoice if they were here now. My studios in the past have imitated Francis Bacon to a watered down extent.  Now it's as spartan as Jasper John's studio.  Maybe it was always a size issue.

The painting rack is really beautiful in of itself.  I lucked out that my brother-in-law is a lot stronger than me, because the two layer 2"x8"x15' beams with the boards joined by carriage bolts weighed a ton.  He had the muscle to put them in their joist hangers with me supporting their weight on the opposite side. It was good too to have another brain to figure out the construction specifics as well.

Along with building the painting rack I purchased and constructed a shelf from Ikea to hold my paint jars and a cart for my collage materials.  I think that will be it for the projects for the moment.  Need a small reprieve from construction projects and some time just painting.

Monday

Spent a the evening hammering out the arc of the bridge.  It's been tricker than I thought it would be.  I guess the test will be if I walk into the studio tomorrow evening and if I feel satisfied with it.  Other than that I've been trying to figure out if a flourish motif or different large text elements would enhance or detract from the overall composition.  I'm leaning to the side of using subtle collage elements with a focus on texture and distressed paper elements. Just a little readable text here and there, but very minimal.  The sky will become more dynamic with time.  There are a lot of drips that seem to really work that I have to be very careful to preserve, which should prove to be very challenging as work continues.

As work continues I'm working really hard to keep a certain mixture of focused and blurry elements within the piece.  I feel that when you look at a structure as large as the Fremont Bridge it's more of an awareness of the totality of the structure while you focus in on different elements.  When your focusing in on the rivets of the frame the distant shore drops out of focus and the opposite is true when you focus in on the distant shore.  It's how we truly see and experience the world.

Fremont Bridge

I began the Fremont Bridge painting this weekend.  I don't know the title yet, but I'm sure I'll have a title by the end of the week.  It's been interesting going through the photo references and figuring out the piece.  Some of my best photos don't show the water beneath the bridge and for some reason that has been really important to me.  Other photos show the water, but don't show the whole bridge or the they're perspective isn't extreme enough which is also important.  So really the painting is a composite of these different photos.  I care more about the psychological feel of the work rather than the straight forward depiction of reality.  I guess I'm not much of a realist. I feel like the mood for the piece is already set, so now it's just a matter of going with the flow.  It even has a soundtrack.

I'm still in the process of moving stuff from the old studio into the new one.  It's been going painfully slow.  Most of it's just a matter of figuring storage systems out and getting them built in the new studio.  I'm strongly against simply piling things in and cluttering the space.  It's already starting to feel a little jumbled, because not everything has a place yet.  I'm sure it will all pan out.

6 Days and The Bridges Commission

I finished 6 Days tonight, which feels really good to have the first finished work within the studio out of the way.  It's a really interesting work considering that it started as a print piece for last year's print show.  Some how if felt right to take it all the way into a finished painting rather than letting it stay a print piece. I changed the title of the work along the way. Ironically, I feel this work is almost a sketch for the 50 x 70" canvases above.

These two canvases are the Bridge Commission.  I took Friday off, so that I had the whole weekend to build them and finish 6 Days up. On the left is going to be the Fremont Bridge piece and on the right will be the Steel Bridge. I just finished priming the Steel Bridge piece, so the studio reeks of the wonderful smell of gesso. This will probably be the last rendering of the Steel Bridge for a while.  This will be the fourth work I've painted.  I'm going to mix this one up a little though and use a different photo reference.  On my last morning ride in Portland the day we departed for home.  I photographed a barge pass underneath.

Thanks to my friend Shawn I have a ton of photos of the Fremont bridge to choose from. It's going to be hard to narrow the reference photo down since there are so many good shots.

Getting into the groove

Starting to get some momentum with the painting and starting to figure out where everything needs to go in the new studio.  It's odd when I think of it, but it took me eleven years to figure out how to organize the old studio.  I have a bit of a jump since I've spent months sketching out where to put things.  It is different when you finally moving in though.

Revisited

Spent a little time working in the new studio this weekend.  There's still some loose ends before I can formally move in and truly get to work.  I'm like a kid who can't sleep the night before the family leaves to go to Disneyland.

I'm working on one of the print pieces from last year's print show.  I'm bringing Remembered completely up to being a finished painting.  It's really a bit of a study.  I'm waiting to hear the word "Go" from the gallery on a 48 x 72" commissioned painting.  I'm going to go ahead and paint three canvases of three different bridges in Portland, Oregon and let the client choose and simply show the others.  In the past I've created three versions of the same composition, but in this case I don't want the works to be as closely related.

I figured that reworking Remembered into a full painting would be a good way to get into the groove.  The paintings will be in either a horizontal or vertical format.  It might be a case where all three are horizontal and my photo studies for all three bridges can lean that way.  I have painted the Steel Bridge three times counting Remembered.  Last summer when I was in Portland I took a panoramic shot of the bridge with a barge passing beneath.  I think this study will work really well at this scale horizontally and it's a orientation that I haven't tried yet.

I find the thought of painting a series of three works simultaneously in the same space really exciting. I can place one on the north wall and the other two on the west wall.  To think that without the new studio I'd have to use my patio to paint them one at a time.  It's just... wonderful!