Painting
This year’s paintings
I said I’d do a painting every week, and have been. Here they are:
Two of these are oil which is new for me.
I’m an Oil Man
I’m an oil painter now. I never really thought I would be, but a couple of things happened to give me the opportunity and here’s my first oil painting in 15 years:
I’m thrilled with it. It’s much better than I thought it would be. In fact, I was so sure that I’d make a bad painting that I had to give myself a pep talk before painting it. I focused on the fact that no matter how bad it was, it’d be the best oil painting I had done in 15 years. It helped.
I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with the control I had in watercolors first then later with dyes and to give that up with a new medium was not something I was looking forward to. However I am enjoying the newness of it now.
I’ll write more soon about oil and the new options it gives me, how it makes it easier to show in a gallery, and my horror story of the last time I painted in oil. I started typing it all up, but it’s taking too long and I’ve waited long enough to post about this.
More soon
Breakthrough
I tried painting on watercolor-treated canvas and it worked. Hard to explain but canvas just feels more like art than the boards. I’m tempted to paint everything I ever painted all over again.
Update: added photo
Quick thoughts: more forgiving than the board, less bleed, backgrounds are snappier, modeling (form shadow) is possible, but requires more sheparding, need to know what I’m going to do in advance, but room for improvisation when I’m more comfortable. Hair is potentially trickier, but could be due to the fact I worked so much smaller than I’m used to (about a quarter of the size).
Paintings Week 2
This is what I did this weekend.
Biggest thing I learned is to remember to use the 1 inch brush
Wait for it …
JL
So in college I did five photoshoots. I should talk about all of them some time, but right now I have to talk about one. The model was a girl who I saw at a party my Junior year. I saw her for a few seconds and though it was a dark house party, she looked like she had a spotlight on her. She had purple hair and an amazing, regal, confident quality about her and I thought to myself “I would love to try and capture all that in a painting.” I blinked and she was gone.
Fast foward to my Senior year and I was at Chucks and saw her again. Turns out a friend of mine knew her. He spoke to her on my behalf and we set up a photoshoot.
She was amazing and the poses and expressions she had have influenced my subsequent work in the years since.
However, at the time, I sucked as a photographer. I was trying to get tricky and many of the photos are backlit. There’s no contrast. They’re a mess. For a few year I tried to do the best I could with the pictures, but eventually gave up.
I always felt bad about the shoot, not only because I missed an amazing opportunity to produce great work with such an interesting person, but because I promised her that I’d show her the photos and give her some prints, but got busy with graduating and packing up and never got around to it. I never forget promises like that, and later Facebook was invented, so I found her, wrote her, mailed her a CD of the shots which she got yesterday. Also – we’re talking about doing another shoot. I hope to have some paintings to put up here in the next few months that try and capture that unique quality of hers.
Meanwhile, here are some paintings I did from the shoot:
Inspiration
An artist who’s work I like was interviewed recently and said that they were inspired by the following people:
Karl Lagerfeld
Stan Brakhage
Kenneth Anger
Francis Bacon
Helmut Newton
Posting these here so they’re easy to find when I have time to research their work.
Last painting of ’08?
iPhone pic of finished painting, higher quality will be posted soon. Second attempt at the Frankenstyle.
Also, noteworthy, I made some important purchases today. I bought a starter set of oil paints, and some canvas to stretch to try using the dyes on untreated canvas. One of those will work and get me from boards to canvas
Source for my most recent painting
Here’s the orignal photo of Tanya by Tony Yang and here’s my painting.
Thanks again to Tanya for the idea and the nudge. It’s going to have a big impact on both my output and my style for the next few weeks.
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