August 2020 Drawings. All shoes. All of the time. Except when they’re not shoes. A few of these were kind of experimental and sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t.
August 23, 2015
Finally finished this painting! At least I think it’s finished. I’m not thrilled with the lemons, but I’m pretty tired of them, so if they need revisiting, it will be down the road a little when I figure out how to fix them.
Just for fun, I made a gif of the process of the painting. It didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped – the colours in the individual photos were far brighter – but it does inspire me to consider doing time lapse or something similar of the next larger painting that I do.
August 16, 2015
Just a little playing around from Saturday night.
August 9, 2015
A couple of drawings in graphite and white charcoal on paper. I prepared my paper with an India ink wash to provide a mid-grey ground.
August 3, 2015
July 19, 2015
A couple of smaller pieces this week:
Joseph Joseph, Jul 13, 2015, Oil on Canvas, 12″ X 12″
The Joseph Joseph utensils were painted over an old acrylic painting that was fairly flat, but still had some lumpiness to it. My intention was to keep the brushstrokes rough and simple. I used fairly strong lighting on it and was painting practically in the dark. I didn’t realize until later how dark it really was. I was using quite a lot of linseed oil and had horrible issues with glare from my easel lamp making it a frustrating painting experience. And now I’m on a quest for much better lighting for my easel.
I took on the Mickey bottle stopper quite spontaneously. I had planned to paint some colour swatches of some of my blues with white and black and when I finished that, I just kept going. I recently bought a couple of 8″ X 8″ Gessobords from Ampersand to see what I thought of them. I restricted myself to Payne’s Grey, Titanium White and a bit of Mars Black. Again, my goal was to paint quickly to keep my brush strokes fresh and not get bogged down by detail. Not a bad result. Of course I could pick it apart in a second, but overall I’m satisfied with it. And I have decided that I much prefer the texture and springiness of stretched canvas over this hard, slightly textured Gessobord. I have one more of them and will try again – perhaps my opinion will change after another try.
July 12, 2015
July 5, 2015
“It never gets easier…. I try to remember that the job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it. To be birthed by it. Each time we come to the end of a piece of work, we have failed as we have leapt — spectacularly, brazenly — into the unknown.” – Dani Shapiro
June 14, 2015
Just a short little painting session with a little work done on the bowl.
susanne semchuk 