Long Day's End

Long Day's End oil on canvas. 30w x 40h inches.  This is another painting for my solo show at Modified Arts this November the opening on the 3rd Friday November 20th.  It's based off of a photo I took on Market Street in San Francisco.

It's been a lot of fun returning to oils.  Over the summer with the studio just shy of 100 degrees with little humidity, it's been nice having a longer drying window.  Now that the Fall is finally here, I may need to switch over to faster drying mediums in order to get everything finished in time for the show.

Study for In a Lonely Place

Knocked out a study for In a Lonely Place last week. I'm still not completely content with her face, but this study has brought me much closer. I will be repainting that portion of the big piece starting tonight.

I have also been working on more abandoned/desertscapes. At the moment I'm working very hard not to pigeon hole myself. I have so many seemingly disparate ideas and directions at times, but it may simply be a case where I don't see the connections at this moment. In short, there is a connection, a thread that runs through everything and if I self-censor myself I'll never get to see it.

In other news! I will be part of a exhibit in October at the Tempe Center for the Arts called "Green and Gray".  More specifics to come, but I will have four large abandoned/desertscapes in the show.

The Uncertainty Is Always There - In Progress

Here's a progress shot of The Uncertainty Is Always There acrylic and collage on canvas.  I've been using a subdued color palette lately instead of just black and white.  I like the added depth and playing the warm deep browns off of the  cool dark blue/greys.  It just feels more dynamic to me.

The title for this piece comes from the uncertainty of our times and the uncertainty I feel at times. It's the ghost that seems to always haunt us.

I've been entering into juried exhibitions and it will be a while until I know the results for a few of them.  It's kind of nice though to have the work from the last show in the studio on my shelves to look at while I'm painting more work.  It's interesting, but paintings feed off of each other.  My hope is that these paintings will dovetail into each other better. 

Fraction

Finished Fraction, oil on canvas 12x12 inches on Thursday night. My first completed oil painting in 15 years. Thankfully, Gamblin's new solvents and mediums don't trigger my asthma as badly as traditional turpentine and damar varnish do. The drying time of alkyd resin is a little bit different, but the window for the drying time in comparison to acrylics is nice.

I don't think I will be abandoning the act of painting with acrylics, but it's nice to have options, depending on the piece.

I opted to do a detail from Preoccupation. It's interesting, but sharing my work on Instagram (@jhowardpaintings) has enlightened my process a bit. Due to the forced square format I often shoot details of works in progress rather than the full piece. Sometimes I actually like the details better than the whole piece.

Now that the show is up at Modified Arts - "Lost in Transition" October 17th to November 16th. I'm still busy in the studio, just taking some time to play with new medias and techniques. Need to have a little fun before I get back to work on the next major body of work.

The Little Comforts of a Busy Day

Finished The Little Comforts of a Busy Day, acrylic and collage on canvas, 12 x 12 inches last night. My hope is to get two more 12 x12 inch works done for the show. The title comes from the gentleman's baggy of convenience store items. It seems like when I'm working tons of hours that sodas and candy bars really hit the spot. They're the little comforts that help me get through my busy day. 

Dreaming of Empties

I completed Dreaming of Empties and All Your False Projections this morning and will be delivering them along with Lonely Outpost up to the Lanning Gallery this afternoon. It will be a relief to get up North and out of this hellish heat for a few hours.

I have been purchasing some new brushes/tools for these paintings namely the Catalyst series from Princeton http://princetonbrush.com/catalyst-blades-acrylic.html. These are fantastic for achieving really nice impasto techniques. They really make a nice addition to my current textures.

Lonely Outpost Completed

I just completed Lonely Outpost. This last weekend I headed out to White Sands, NM for some fun. I also took some time to photograph several abandoned gas stations, motels, and cafes that were on the way.  There are a few good ones that I didn't see until after I flew past the freeway exit ramp and sometimes the only chance to turn around was 10 to 20 miles down the road. Next time...

When photographing one site over the weekend it occurred to me that maybe this new body of work isn't really that much of a divergence for me. When I consider that my artist statement states "that my interest is in capturing the ephemeral nature of our existence", "exposing the fragility of our existence" and "the effect mankind has had on the planet".  I can't help, but feel that this new body of work does all those things.  Granted the environments are not the urban environments I usually paint, but the message remains the same.  I'm just fleshing out my artistic vision a bit more.

The new body of work is also allowing me to explore some different color palette ideas.  I have always enjoyed when film and television directors have used color filters to mute the color of a film or cast a distinct hue on all of the scenes. It will be interesting to see how this influences the more urban works.

Another day, another painting

I just finished up on Tired of Waiting and send an updated photo to the gallery.  I quickly approached the point of where each brush stroke I applied to enhance the work was doing quite the opposite, which is usually my indication that it's time to stop.  It's so easy to over work paintings.  I'm glad that with age I've become more aware of when to leave a work alone, but sometimes I still manage to overwork things.

The little thoughts that...

I finished Little Thoughts (above) and Always Caught in the Undertow (below) last night.  I find it interesting how different the mood of these two works are. Little Thoughts is very lucid and present in comparison to Always Caught in the Undertow's water logged state of consciousness.

   

It seems even more odd to me; when I consider the fact that they were both created simultaneously.  It's said that paintings reflect the artist's mood at the time.  I have no idea what to make of it if that's the case considering that these two works despite similar palettes are so different.

Little Thoughts was titled based on the fact that the skater waiting to cross the street is either double checking that his wallet is still there or skipping to the next song on his iPod while waiting for the light.  I suspect that it's skipping to the next song.  I know that it is very common for me to skip songs while waiting at lights when I'm riding and the back pockets work the best - at least before I purchased an iPod Touch.  Life seems to be filled with an endless supply of little thoughts that can sometimes influence our lives more than we think.

After finishing work on the others I bounced back to the Chinese market piece.  I haven't thought of a good title for this painting yet.  I have noted that there is a great deal more underpainting required for the night works.  It's really coming together nicely.  I'm glad that I caught more vignettes of city life during my last trip to San Francisco.  My focus has usually been on buildings and the movement of people on the sidewalks, excluding the interactions at market stalls and restaurants.  Maybe that's the change within my work I've been craving.  Simply a change of focus to capture the energy of the city in a different way.  I'm convinced that I will never be satisfied with whatever the current body of work on my easel is and will always endlessly strive to produce the next "big thing" never knowing what that could actually entail.

The Weight of the World

I finished The Weight of the World last night not long after my last post. It was one of those moments where I was working and I simply looked up and realized it was finished after I shored up the linens up above the figure.  I proceeded to start work in earnest on If I Only Could below.

With the speed in which this latest batch of paintings are flying off my easel I feel like I should take three months off from painting more often. It's  been like kinking up a hose for a few seconds and then letting go. I should finish If I Only Could this afternoon and I'll go ahead and start the next painting. I'm really in the zone right now, so I'm simply going to keep it going. I have three more works figured out, so I'll need to break this weekend and get going in the sketchbook and continue designing "The Unknown Lovers" series. The working title has shifted. I may not give the series a formal name. The works are related, but their supposed to function as stand alone paintings.

A Bad Day to Hang Laundry

I just finished A Bad Day to Hang Laundry.  I feel the painting really fits the mood of what the next body of work will be.  It's a small painting 12x24 inches, but it packs a punch.  I'm planning on performing a lot of small works for my upcoming show in September at the Lanning Gallery in Sedona, AZ.


This painting is the beginning of a large series of connected works that work together as well as individually.  I like to think of a body of work like a musical album.  The songs can be sold as singles, but together tell a story or establish a  definite mood.  The working title of the next show is Escape Plan.  I'm going to focus in on gritty portraits of individuals in different urban environments that are either attempting or desire to escape their environs, predicaments, other people or themselves.  

Above is the original sketch for A Bad Day to Hang Laundry and it's companion piece that I haven't named yet.  I guess it would be BDHL 2, but I'm not sure if I want to go 1,2,3, etc with this series.  The theme for this series is a tale of a boy and a girl who walk down the same streets, go to the same bookstores, restaurants, parks, and other places; yet they never meet.  I guess star crossed lovers that are perfect for each other if only they could meet.  I can hear Morrissey crooning now, if it were made into a short film. I guess a little bit of the inspiration for the series is the fact that my wife and I went to the same high school, but didn't meet each other until the second semester of our freshman year in college.


I'm not sure how the series will play out.  I'm just going to sketch, paint and repeat until I feel the series is done.

Redefining Nazareth

Today I had to strike out some of the work I'd done in the last couple days to redefine the center of the building and the store fronts. I can tell already that it will make for a better piece in the long run. Even back in art school I was blessed with a healthy philosophy, that there could be no sacred cow areas of a canvas. Yes, there are times when there is just a beautifully rendered portion of the canvas, but it just doesn't work with the whole. I have caught myself spending hours trying not to paint over it only to strike it out for the benefit of the canvas as a whole. All in all, I'm glad that the delivery up to the gallery was put off until Sunday. It has allowed me to not rush and make the right decisions for the painting. I'm still shooting to finish it by tomorrow afternoon. 


I have to admit that I have a tendency to set tight deadlines for myself from time to time. I guess after years of being a graphic designer I like to have a due dates to work towards. Right now I have lined up three more juried shows that I'm going to perform work for, along with doing more work for the gallery and putting a body of work together in order to make a show proposal to some University Galleries. Truthfully, all are self imposed to a certain extent. Without the deadlines I find that I get work done, but not as much work done as I would like to. I don't know why it's taken me so long to realize that working long hours to meet deadlines makes me happy. I've cursed deadlines for so long - only to realize they're a blessing in disguise.

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.

Final Painting for 2011

Just finished my last painting for 2011. It's called Escape Plan. I'm going to submit it for a show called Gothic along with a two other works. I feel this work will fit in with the show's premise well. I've always been a bit tormented by the fact people consider my work dark, but with this painting I've went ahead and leaned into it a bit. 


I've actually become more comfortable with being considered dark. The conclusion I have reached is that I am a Alfred Hitchcock or Rod Sterling when it comes to doing my art. When I think about it though the world is really a dark place and I don't think there are many that would argue that we're not living through some dark times in some respect. Although, a quick glance through the history books leads me to think that times are always dark for one reason or another. I guess it's all relative.


2011 for me was a year of up and downs, but ultimately more up than down. I built the studio and my gallery sales have been great this year, so I can only feel thankful and forget any of the downs. With any luck 2012 will be great year for all.  Happy New Years!

The Great Outdoors

Plein air painting is not something I've ever tried.  Well outside of when a few art professors would have us pack up and go outside or when I was in life drawing sketching people at coffee houses and around campus.  Back then when our professors had us head out it was most often with complaint.  In our defense going outside with your art boxes and drawing boards was a bit cumbersome at best.  Maybe we were just wimpy and spoiled art students back then.

I have to say that I really enjoyed painting outside with my sketch box easel.  Yes, there were horse flies, various kinds of bees, bugs I'd never seen before and mosquitoes - it was fantastic and liberating.  I'll have to do a lot more of it.

Now, I have a feeling the paintings that resulted from this camping trip and future trips will most likely not end up within a gallery show.  I figure that they're completely out of my normal subject matter. Not to mention my usual color scheme. With that said my paintings are my paintings.

I gifted the piece first shown Morning Moon depicting the moon over a meadow to our friends who took us.  They had a wonderful tent trailer with just enough amenities to make camping life easier without taking away the roughing it aspect a way a mobile home or a fifth wheel may have.  It offered a good place to escape the rain storms that passed through two of the three nights we spend at Hawley Lake.  It also had a propane stove that hooked to the outside and a built in water tank for a simple pump sink.  Of course it was finding a tree or using the out houses and going without a shower for a few days.

I went camping a lot as a kid and I know my mom and my stepfather were definitely purists when it came to camping.  I know when we'd head up they'd grip about the people with tent trailers and RV's. Often stating that "they weren't camping". With that said they had the giant tent, tarps, portable propane stove, portable toilet, portable shower and a truck with a camper shell to fall back on with serious rain.  In other words they had all the amenities, without towing them behind them.  Frankly, I liked my little loft tent bedroom off the wet ground after several hours of rain. I still swatted mosquitoes, flies, and various crawling and flying creatures, dodging humming birds and bees. Felt like camping to me.

Something on the Windowsill

Just finished the Something on the Windowsill series along with Go Home yesterday morning.  There was only a little touch up and painting the sides after an almost all Friday night painting session.  I then loaded up the new work along with what remained from the Modified show and headed up to Sedona to the Lanning Gallery. They loved the work, which was a big relief.  

Now it's the final stretch for the Sedona show.  I have two weeks really, so painting six to eight canvases might not be the best use of my time.  I think I'm going to focus in on painting four medium large paintings and hitting them out of the ballpark.

I started working on my sketch for Allegiance which will be a 24x48" canvas. I've used a photo I took in Downtown Portland, OR of the front of some embassy or hotel.  I can't really tell from the photo.  It just has the hanging flags off the building that makes me think of ticker tape parades.  I know some are going to read political leanings one way or another.  The flag is, well a politically charged symbol after all.  In this case I'm using it, because it's an incredibly strong image and will make a fantastic painting.  I leave the viewer to decide where my politics lay and maybe just maybe, the painting will be about where their politics lay rather than where mine do.

Missing Time

Missing a bit of a space of time there.  Just the final rush to get everything done for the Modified show.  I thought I'd taken a few photos along the way, but couldn't find them on the camera, opps.

This is a new piece that I started before the rush to get things done for the Modified show.  I'm figuring out what I'm doing for the figures now.  I'm going to put a little bit more color into the next batch of work.  I have roughly twelve to sixteen paintings to complete for the Lanning Gallery in Sedona.  They will be mixed in with work from the Modified show.  Once I had everything up on the wall I realized that it was a little more intense than I meant to be.  Honestly, I've done these works in such a thought stream that considerations of the pallet weren't considered, which is how it should be.  Nonetheless, I don't think it would be a bad idea to throw in a few works with some strong color to lighten the mood a little. The humor relief within a Greek or Shakespeare play.

I do think the almost monochromatic body of work currently at Modified is stunning.  I've heard a few remarks that it's a bit dark.  I can only nod and not think too much about it.  The work was created very quickly within a pure thought stream.  I really left the subject matter to my subconscious mind and consciously just painted like there was no tomorrow.  There's a lot of interesting stories within these paintings.  I can't wait until I can stop and decipher what my subconscious is telling me.  Usually, the work is prophetic in some sense and is telling me things about what I'm thinking and feeling that's buried beneath the surface.  Don't worry I'm not going Freudian on you guys.  I do believe the mind does bury things on us at times and it might even just be a result of being so busy rushing around doing things that we don't have much time to sit, be alone, and reflect on our feelings about what's happening in our worlds.