Days Past

Days Past (Fremont Bridge) is almost completed.  I'm just putting in the final details and going through the ritual of just sitting and analyzing the work. I took the photo this morning out in the sun to capture the colors better.  I use color corrective daylight bulbs in the studio and it seems like that throws the digital cameras off a little. 


Remember a Day has been the tough one.  The pallet for the painting is so subtle.  There are lots of yellow, brown and blue tones within the white that just get lost when photographing it.  My photos from the last few mornings in the daylight have done a better job of capturing it. The beauty of this painting is that as the light changes during the day into night different elements of the piece will be fade in and out.  It will be a different experience for the viewer depending on when they're viewing it.  Most of my work is this way, but this piece is just more so. I'm told often by my collectors about how they notice something new and different about their paintings everyday depending on light or their mood even after five years of owning the piece.  For me that's what it's about - creating paintings that are living. 


Update: Tonight I started a new piece.  It's going to be called Thursday Afternoon it is 24x36 depicts a busy sidewalk with people crossing the street in the background. I will have photos tomorrow evening.  It's nice to be working on something a little smaller.  It's funny how fast things set up on a small canvas after two months of working on two really large canvases.  I think large canvases require and increase in speed to achieve results.  I know they swallow up hours of work like nobody's business.

Lighting

Almost there and now I'm getting really happy with the Fremont work.  It's been a really hard piece and I'm not really sure why.  Most likely it's simply a fact that some paintings are just more challenging than others.  The irony is that the paintings that pin me to the ropes are the very works that make me grow as an artist. I might choose to perform a few works that will take it easy on me before I take on a hard piece again.


Lighting and the photographing of the works has been a challenge.  The funny thing is that the paintings will look different under different lighting and I purposely paint them under different lighting conditions for that very reason.  I figure when they hang on the wall of a home they will be seen in the morning light, the white glare of the afternoon, the warm tones of the evening and then under various home lighting during the night.  I figure if I paint under all these conditions that I can adjust so the paintings should look good no matter what hour it is.

The Devil is in the details always. It's the small reference to the welds, the wear and tear from countless storms on a paint finish that make a bridge come alive.  It's also just the pure build up of paint of roughing things out and then doing it again that infuse the canvas with the history required to expose the spirit within the canvas.  Sometimes it's about an artist getting frustrated one day only to walk in the following morning to realize that what he was all worked up about looks fine and the said artist was simply tired from working all day.  Truthfully, if I don't get frustrated(commonly the result of working too hard) with my canvases I don't feel like I'm working hard enough. I know with Remember the Day (Steel Bridge commission piece) that I painted myself entirely into a corner.  It wasn't until I dreamed of painting the two canvases and using heavy gel medium to sculpt the letters onto the surface and obscure the design motif that it clicked. Now I have a technique that's going to drive the work of the next show.

Push and Pull & Lots of Masking Tape

The Fremont Painting was a bit opposed to the idea of being finished this weekend, but that shouldn't come as a surprise really.  Not the first canvas to have a mind of it's own and I doubt it will be the last.


Most of it has been really working out the perspective and making sure that key details of the bridge are there.  I've been painting things in, out and then back in again and in general pulling the bridge out of the sky and water.  There has also been a great deal of just looking.  I'm at a place where I have a lot of areas that are perfect and need to be left untouched.  I'm sure the piece will be finished this week it's just a matter of shoring it up carefully and being laid back enough not to mess up the finished areas.

Work Continues

Work Continues on the Fremont piece.  I spent most the time adding glazes to the water and further solidifying the bridge.  Figuring out the perspective has been probably the hardest part of this painting outside of figuring out the balance between collage and painterly elements.  I think it's there as far as perspective.  It's finally correct.  In the morning I'll solidify it some more.  This last session really brought the Fremont closer to completion.

One Down One to Go

One down and one to go.  The Steel Bridge work is finished outside of one more coat of varnish and figuring out it's name and signing it.  The Fremont isn't far behind, but is going to be another day or so.

It's really nice that both works are uniquely powerful in their own ways.  The Fremont work has a really nice skyscape that differentiates if from all my current works of the last eight to ten years.  My skies are usually filled with collage elements and just elude to clouds rather than out right depict them.  It marks a new strategy that will be used in the upcoming body of works.  The Steel Bridge has a very graphic feel within the bridge that contrasts to the more painterly approach used within the rest of the work.

I can't wait to employ the strategies of these works into the paintings of the upcoming exhibit.  It's going to be a really fun summer.

Rainy Night

For all practical purposes the Steel Bridge work is finished.  I'm going to varnish it and then see if there are any loose ends.  It has been a wonderful four evenings with the temps dipping into the low 80's to 70's.  Tonight's rain really helped.  The humidity keeps the paint from drying so that I can blend larger expanses of paint at a time.  Most of my work was in detailed areas, but it still helped having a longer blending window.

Tomorrow night I will be working on the Fremont Bridge work.  I will be using the same mixture of black, grey and white graphic details.  This is a case where the one work informed the other work.