December 9, 2019
figurative
“If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.” – Nadezhda Mandelstam
March 15, 2015
So I’ve started working on a commission based on A Crane Called Frank. And I thought I would play with some of the oil mediums to see if they might be something I want to use in this new painting (which I’m calling Francine at the moment). I tried out Galkyd, Neo Megilp and Galkyd Gel. And in the process this small storm ensued.
And here is the beginning of Francine. I’m just building the background now. Chances are very little of this will be visible in the final painting, but we’ll see. I just need to put on a few coats of clear gesso to seal it really well and I will be ready to go.
Lastly, here are a couple of drawings from this week. One from a figure drawing class that I’m doing – no, she did not have an inordinately large head, I just messed up the scale – and a small drawing I did during the week while thinking about folded paper in preparation to begin Francine.
“Puking clears the soul…”
September 21, 2014
Some artwork from quite a while ago that I am debating about painting over…
Just finished reading Leonard Cohen’s first novel, “The Favourite Game” and I really enjoyed it. Especially the passage below. And if you really want to know what puking has to do with school supplies, well, it’s not that long of a book.
“Puking clears the soul. Breavman remembered what he felt like. Fry’s Stationery, buying school supplies. Ten years old. The whole new school year coiled like a dragon to be conquered by sharp yellow Eagle pencils. Fresh erasers, rows of them, crying to be sacrificed for purity and stars for Neatness. The stacks of exercise books dazzlingly empty of mistakes, more perfect than Perfect. Unblunted compasses, lethal, containing millions of circles, too sharp and substantial for the cardboard box that contained them. Grown-up ink, black triumphs, eradicable mistakes. Leather bags for the dedicated trek from home to class, arms free for snowball or chestnut attacks. Paper clips surprisingly heavy in their small box, rulers with markings as complicated and important as a Spitfire’s dashboard, sticky red-bordered labels to fasten your name to anything. All tools benign, unused. Nothing yet an accomplice to failure.”
1994 and 1995 Revisited.
May 25, 2014
Nothing at all like Miró.
May 4, 2014
“Two and two do not make four. Only accountants think that. but that is not enough: a painting must make this clear; it must fertilize the imagination.”
– Miró, 1959
Just back from Vancouver and Seattle for a family vacation. In Seattle we had the chance to visit the Seattle Art Museum and their current exhibition “Miró: The Experience of Seeing” as well as other great artwork. And this painting has absolutely nothing to do with that.
“You can wake up now, the universe has ended.” – Jim Stark, Rebel Without a Cause, 1955
March 9, 2014
An assignment in the current painting class I’m taking – one I enjoyed in fact. I have to state up front that I didn’t actually draw the image, I transferred it onto the canvas from a photocopy of a photo of James Dean. But I did have fun playing with oil paint again. And the pervasive smell of linseed oil that still lingers. Below that is another little image resulting from a little playing with a new medium – Liquid Pencil. I quite like the text of the book page as a background and am trying to create something a little larger like that.