Work Continues

The work continues.  The soundtrack has changed as well. Each painting has it's own soundtrack while I work on them.  I sometimes know what that will be and other times I find out.  Finding the right soundtrack results from trial and error.  If things aren't happening easily and the flow isn't there or just seems funky I switch playlists. Sometimes an entire body of work has a shared soundtrack.  There are also works that only allow me to listen to a single EP or LP over and over.  Afterwards I will not listen that band for a while afterwards.

This painting is filling in quite nicely.  I don't think I'm near the end anytime soon, but I want to complete it before next weekend if possible.  I don't want to chance loosing the energy of this painting and want to carry it into the next pieces quickly.  Next weekend I will sit down and start sketching for the next few works.  The plan will be to add drawings into the mix.  I've always loved to draw and sometimes my drawings feel stronger than the paintings that come out of them.  In this works case I feel that the pencil drawing, pen and marker drawing and the painting each stand on their own being different and a continuation of an idea without loosing any of the initial dynamic qualities.  I hope my luck continues  with the rest of this body of work.

Return of Fall

The Fall has returned and painting is getting back up to full swing.  This is the painting of the drawing in the previous post.  It's going rather well.  The windows are going to be very intricate, so there will be a lot of time involved in rendering them.  I have a several photos from Portland that depict the sun from the back of buildings or reflecting off the glass causing the buildings in the photos to appear to just fade to white.  I thought I'd depict that effect within this work.

I have always felt like my paintings of buildings were portraits and this one is very much an example.  I've decided to leave the people out  of this painting.  I was thinking of the early morning hours or maybe the hours of the day when everyone is at work and some streets are all, but deserted. I am also letting the lighting effect portray a person fading to white - slipping away.  Somewhere between the ghostly sky and the physical material world. 

I'm going to be painting a lot of buildings this time around.

Open

I've been out of town a lot lately, so I've been spending time drawing.  In full honesty though I feel a great deal of creative work and discovery can happen within an artist's drawings.  I feel that the mood of this particular drawing reflects the mood I'd like for the next body of work to possess.

The Gift

Just finished Beer & Wine.  I kept the title simple since the building in the foreground is Best Market Beer and Wine. I opted not to make the sign completely legible. I worked some color in, but still kept a fairly monochromatic pallet throughout.


It always amazes me how the beginning of a new body of work is filled with an awkward sense of uncertainty about direction.  I sit and stare at the canvases and question the color pallet of the work and internally debate on which techniques I'm going to employ and how the works will relate to each other and to the previous body of work.  With the last body of work I departed from my architectural focus on urbanity and was a great deal more figurative. With my collected fodder of photos from my vacation I'm returning with full force to the architectural bias, but I'm not sure if that's the focus I really want.  I've been very busy putting my photos together.  I have several pieces that will be very tall that start at the top with the sky directly above the viewers head and proceed downward to the street.  There will be a sort of fisheye effect to the perspective and this really excites me.  I also have some compositions I'm working on that will have the same effect only on a horizontal axis for freeway interchanges and bridges.  I'm struggling with the question if to continue with the heavily collaged abstract backdrops or to opt for more textural rendering.


There's always so much to think about, thankfully.  I guess it is a luxury to have "the gift" of having these dilemmas considering I could simply have no ideas at all.  Currently, I just have to figure out which roads I'm taking. Oh, and deal with the fact Phoenix is having an extended summer and my paints are drying on the brush before they even touch the canvas.  


Once I have the new studio I'm going to experiment with air filtration and or exhaust systems to see if working with oils during the hot and dry months will allow me continue working during that part of the year.  I love working with both oil and acrylics.  I have to say that many of my collage techniques would have to go to the wayside when working with oils due to the fact that oils are very acidic to raw papers and fabrics. I might opt to collage materials and then seal the surface really well with varnish then work with oils on top of the acrylic surfaces. The huge advantage of working with oils over acrylics when working with the figure is drying time.  Just the greater window of being able to blend and smooth areas is a huge asset when working with the human form.

Dry

Working on new works.  I have three in progress and only working titles.  Above Beer and Wine and Vanishing Horizons.  Honestly, those titles will change as soon as the canvases tell me their names.

It's been a long hot summer.  I returned from my vacation in August with close to a thousand photographs for fodder for my paintings.  It's been a lot of work to just go through them all, crop and start combining all the panoramic type shots (vertical and horizontal).  I initially started a really large canvas, but decided it would be better to complete a bunch of smaller works and get into the rhythm first.  Besides the gallery wants new works and I'm set for a October delivery of some works.  I'm not sure where this month has gone though.  It has just flown by going through my photographs and planning paintings.

Portland

Back from my long road trip up the Coast of Northern California to Portland, Oregon and then back down through Idaho, Utah and through the Vermillion Cliffs back home to Phoenix. While in Portland I spent the day working on paintings at my friends tattoo shop and giving art lessons.  I went ahead and performed the same work in pastels, watercolour and acrylic to demonstrate the different qualities and advantages of different media.  It was a blast. I also finished a painting (above) that I started the previous year's visit.


I really miss Portland, Oregon.  Someday I hope to live there and return home there from vacations rather than the other way around. Some how Portland has the buildings I love with an abundance of pedestrian traffic.  Oddly, enough when I take photos I end up with only the buildings.


This time around I decided I would take several series of photos in order to collage them.  When I paint these there will be an interesting distortion of the perspective that I feel will oddly be more true to the reality of how we experience the world.  Funny how this is a case where technology is actually influencing the work. I also took a lot of photos via passenger seat which yield interesting results.  

Silent Refrain

Just finished Silent Refrain (top).  In essence it's a maquette.  I have actually started using the small works more and more as studies for other work or simply experiments to explore color and compositional ideas.  Silent Refrain is indeed the study for a future large canvas.  I have a lot more studies to do though. Morning Coffee is on the other hand more of a color experiment and the color ideas of Morning Coffee served as the framework for Silent Refrain.  It's all very cyclical.

Now that the summer is here and the body of work for Modified and Lanning Gallery is complete I can focus on the next body of work.  Meaning lots of quality time in the sketchbook and street photography trips.  Oh, not to mention picking up a few dozen novels and watching lots of movies.

I will be exhibiting at the Lanning Gallery for the month of July with the opening First Friday July 2nd - 5-8PM in Sedona, AZ.

Click here for more info:
http://www.lanninggallery.com/Subjects/exhibits.htm