Oil on Canvas

“Art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take risks.” Mark Rothko and Adolph Gotllieb manifesto

| ssemchuk

August 1, 2016

Oil painting in progress of two lemons in a glass vase.
Two Lemons WIP, July 30, 2016, Oil on Canvas, 30″ X 40″

A little more progress on my latest lemon painting, and the completion of my July 31 Drawing A Day Challenge!

July 26
July 27
July 28
July 29
July 30
July 31
What I learned from my Daily Drawing Challenge:
  1. It’s the commitment that makes the difference – the commitment to post publicly on Instagram and the commitment to each drawing while I’m drawing it. I’ve drawn daily before without publishing and would often start and then scrap the drawing if I didn’t think it was going well. This time I didn’t have the luxury of time for that. Instead I kept going and figured I’d make the best of it. And some of those drawings are my favourites.
  2. I realized awhile ago that if my finished images look nothing like what I was working from, it doesn’t matter because no one else knows what it was SUPPOSED to look like. With this project I decided that even if the drawing clearly doesn’t reflect reality – as in it’s obviously not proportioned correctly, etc – that’s not actually irredeemable. It can still become a sweet little drawing if the character of line is interesting, and a bit of colour is added with care.

So my intention is to continue drawing regularly – but not daily. I am committing to three drawings a week published on Instagram and here with my weekly post. Let’s see what comes of this…

“My art may be conceived during a hedonistic Bohemian love-in with the muse…

| ssemchuk

July 4, 2016

“My art may be conceived during a hedonistic Bohemian love-in with the muse, but it comes into the world, like any birth, with labour. Always.”
Vertical Tulip, Jul 2, 2016, Oil on Canvas, 24″ X 36″
Vertical Tulip, Jul 2, 2016, Oil on Canvas, 24″ X 36″
Finished! I feel like this painting has taken far longer than it should have. It’s been a busy June. July looks like it may include a little more freedom and so I have taken up a daily challenge this month. For each day in July, I will create one small ink drawing and play a little with watercolour. I have almost zero experience with watercolour, but I do have this great little travel set of paints to use. So far, I am finding it … challenging. Perhaps by the end of it I will have gained some sort of proficiency. … or not. Either way, it’s something new. I’m posting the images to Instagram daily and will add them to my weekly posts here as well.

July 1
July 2
July 3
July 4

“On the internet no one knows you’re a dog.” – Peter Steiner

| ssemchuk

June 6, 2016

Vertical Tulip WIP, Jun 4, 2016, Oil on Canvas, 24" X 36"
Vertical Tulip WIP, Jun 4, 2016, Oil on Canvas, 24″ X 36″

I’ve started a new piece – I’m seemingly not straying far from my typical subject matter with this painting of a flower against drapery, but I am going to try to keep this more painterly if I can. I need to push my comfort zone and see what I can do.

A note on quotations:

I love quotations. I have collected them since I was a kid. I love how they lead me to consider new and alien ideas and old, familiar ideas from new perspectives. Something that I hadn’t considered until today was how labelling a sentence or two as a ‘quotation’ changes how we understand it. It adds a certain ‘weightiness’ to the statement – like an implication that these few words are the distillation of a lifetime of experience and contemplation that we are fortunate enough to be graced with. And that is why today’s quote appealed to me so much. I discovered it in my email inbox after I subscribed to the site WhoSaidThat.com. As I began creating this post, and following the quote to it’s source, I discovered that it was from a cartoon in The Washington Post. As funny as the cartoon itself may be, I would never have latched onto this one had I first discovered it in its original context. It was good there, but far better as a stand alone statement about the nature of the internet, and by extension, about the world itself – advice that I choose to live by.