(IN)organic: oil on copper

Here's a fun one I did a while back. I took copper sheeting and nailed it to a 1x8 piece of oak. The copper is so soft that I just wrapped it around the edges almost like wrapping canvas. Then I took a scouring pad and went to town on it, roughing up the surface so the paint would adhere, and distressed the edges, pounding it with a hammer. I laid flake white down for the "paper", clouding it out as I went up. The technical drawing is a helicopter part, and then I placed the Lily over, going past the paper into the cloudy part to emphasize the natural/organic.

Place Setting

I should subtitle this one : "ellipses are hard to paint" Here is the still life I have going. I'm doing an entirely different set up from my normal work. It is in front of a window, so it's lit from behind, casting the whole scene in shadow. I have the underpainting and the first layer done at this point, with a lot of work to go. As I head into next week my primary focus will be getting my shapes right, and developing the airiness of the shadows. This is a neat challenge for me. 14x18

Bougereau Master Copy in progress

I started work on my fall paintings last week, and they are moving ahead rapidly. I've got three paintings on easels right now, a master copy, a still life, and a portrait that I'm doing from life. This is the master copy. I'm working from a poster-print of a William Bougereau painting. So far I've completed the first two stages of the painting. I did a tonal under painting in diluted raw umber on the canvas for my drawing, and then have done a simplified version of the painting, the block in , in straight tube paint. from here I will go on and continue to refine and fix in subsequent layers. The painting is 18X24.

Portrait of Dan Mitchell

I painted my father in law this summer, which was great because I seem to paint women most often, so it was a great change of pace. I'm going to have to re-post pictures, because I ended up fiddling with it a little more since I took this. It's 18x24, my usual oil on linen affixed to a board.

Master Copies

I've decided to start doing master copies to start learning more from master artists. I was going to order really high quality prints from The Art Renewal Center, but they ended up being really pricey, so I just ordered some from Allposters.com. My first is a 12x12 copy of Bougereau detail.

I'm working with a limited palette of white, black, raw umber, cad red, cad yellow, and ultramarine blue.

Portrait of my mother

Here's one I did a while ago, but haven't posted yet. My dad, about two years ago asked me to paint a portrait of my mother for him. He paid me with a shed. Of course my mom is a very busy woman and so it was at least a year after the shed was built that she finally came to sit for me.

Her request was that I paint her looking straight at the viewer, so that "the eyes will follow people around" Also, I painted it to correspond a portrait painted by my great- grandmother of my great-aunt Hannah. ( shown above, sorry for the glare)It is 16x20.

Here are a couple videos that my friend Sharon took while I was painting

Summer Atelier

This summer I attended the summer Atelier at The School of Representational Art in Chicago. The Atelier was two mornings a week, one with a model and one just to work on a still . I had attended there seven years ago and it was nice to see that nothing had changed and to reconnect with a few people.

Two unfinished paintings, each with approx. 15-20 hours of work into them. The zebra painting is 11x14 and the figure is 18x24. I should have been able to get it further along, but the model missed several days because of heat. The school is at the top floor of an old building and isn't air conditioned, not only that, the windows are closed and blacked out for light control and their is black fabric hung everywhere insuring that there won't be any air flow. But I'm a trooper and made it in every day and stood at my easel with sweat dripping down my back. Just to let you know how I suffer for my art, I also had to walk about 5 miles to and from train stations each day, uphill both ways barefoot,without a Starbucks in sight. Ok, not barefoot or uphill and I pass about a dozen Starbucks.