Clouds

I feel guilty for not posting anything but I didn’t attend Ted Reed’s Painting class today.

I was flying in from North Carolina into Baltimore, Maryland. So I thought I’d post this picture I took.

I don’t remember the clouds having these deep violet colors when I took the picture. I haven’t been adulterated or changed. These are straight off my camera. Aren’t the colors beautiful?

I love clouds. One of the things I miss the most about New Mexico is the thunderheads in the summer monsoon season. You’d watch all day as these billowing masses of clouds built up all day long and then would release their precious rain around 4pm. It was wondrous.

I remember reading years ago that they were looking for the perfect thunderstorm to use for a recording of Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite. They recorded it in New Mexico so that should give you an idea of the wonderful storms that took place there. I have that CD somewhere and it’s plastered with warnings about the probability of blowing out your speakers if you have it turned up too loud.

I was afraid of storms as a child, but my Father told me the noise and lights were the results of the angels bowling. I was never really afraid of a storm again after that.

Hope you enjoyed the picture.

 

Uh-oh

I was cruising through some of the art blogs I like. At the blog a : frustrated : artist I came across a link to a quiz that tells you (tongue in cheek) what type of artist you are.

Apparently, I am Vincent Van Gogh or his reasonable facsimile. Err before the ear thing. Actually Van Gogh is not a bad artist to be.

When I was younger I really didn’t care much for his work. But, in the 80’s I got a chance to visit his museum in Amsterdam. It was a revelation to me.

I’d never seen a Van Gogh up close before and I hated how his work looked in reproductions and photographs. I fell in love with his work on the spot and he’s the reason I started wanting to learn oil painting (I had always sketched and I was painting with watercolors at the time). Hs Iris and sunflower paintings were gorgeous.  I remember seeing a painting of a field that was golden. Not sure if it was Wheat Field with Crows.

I’d like to go back and see Amsterdam and see the works I looked at before.  Since I can paint (somewhat) it would be interesting to see how much my reaction to his work has changed.  I remember liking (but not loving) the painting De Nachtwacht at the Rijks Museum.  I also remember loving this smaller painting that showed a man laying down (or dead) from the perspective that your eyes were near his feet.  I can’t remember the name of the painter or the artist though; the colors were jewel tones like you found in the Renaissance paintings.

Simon Schama did a series for PBS called Power of Art that opens with Van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Crows.

So here are my results. It does make me a little sad I didn’t score closer to Artemisia Gentilleschi. Hopefully, if you live in the Metro DC area you were able to see some of her work on display at the show Italian Women Artists from the Renaissance to Baroque which ran from March 16th – July 15th a the National Women’s Museum of Women in the Arts. The show was phenomenal and very wide-ranging!

You scored as Vincent Van Gogh, You are a tortured artist in the stereotypical sense. However, your genius is what will get you through the tough times and your success is assured after your demise. Vincent Van Gogh 75% Cecily Brown 60% Piet Mondrian 55% William Blake 50% Willem DeKooning 45% Bob Ross 45% R. Crumb 40% Artemisia Gentilleschi 10% What artist are you? created with QuizFarm.com</a

Eggs et al

It’s been a long week. Still waiting to find out whether I have to work for part of the day tomorrow.

I decided to cheer myself by posting an older painting. I was still learning how to paint and I was drooling for one of Duane Keiser’s egg paintings. It seemed like I would never get one so I finally decided to paint some for myself.

Sadly, three good eggs gave their lives so I could paint them. It was weird but every one of those slippery suckers jumped off of whatever support I carried them on (after I was finished with the paintings). Lucky me I had tile floors.

This is one of my favorite paintings. It is 8″x8″ and it’s unframed. I painted it from life~in northern light no less. Something which made my teacher in New Mexico very happy. I still have to figure out the color correction part with my photo editor. In person the background is more green-gray than gray-blue.

I will be all over the area this weekend. I let a friend from art class take my slot this Sunday, she was delighted and the teacher, Ted Reed didn’t mind. So it’s a win-win, I hate the thought of a slot going to waste.

Registration opens Monday so I will be in line at 4am (yes you read that right) to sign up for Rob’s class at the Alexandria Art League. I will take his evening class which is painting, I can’t do another 5-hour class. Of course having said that I have to say that I will also be signing up for his two workshops next year, both on anatomy. I thought about signing up for the portrait workshop but that seems like overkill.

Why get up at 3:30 to sign up at 4am? Because his classes are impossible to get into. I guess the first time I registered and got in from on-line was a complete fluke (I’d registered from New Mexico).

ciao

Duane Keiser’s Found: Project

The founder of the Painting A Day Movement, Richmond artist Duane Keiser, has started an interesting experiment, called Found:

In his blog, A Painting a Day Duane has invited us to collaborate with him in the creation of art.

One of the many satisfying moments I have as a painter is when someone brings me something to paint. Aside from the kindness inherent in such a gesture, it is satisfying to me because it means that, at least for a moment, they saw a fragment of the world through my eyes. Some object points them to my work and they can almost see how I might paint it. Indeed, in some sense the object is already painted because the person who brought it to me had some notion how it would look on canvas– they become painters even if they never picked up a brush.The first painting at the Found: Project is a gentle quiet painting of a skeleton key.Although I have no way of knowing how many items he’s received, I know that there was something in this key which matched Duane’s criteria and viola

Duane has invited us to participate in the creative process by sending him items to paint that are ‘oddment’ size (it can fit in the palm of your hand). Of course there are some ground rules, and you have to allow for the fact that what fascinates you, might not fascinate him.

The simple idea that he’s asked me to use my eyes; and that he gets to see the world through my eyes is so exciting.

Currently there are two paintings that he’s completed at Found. In order to explore this idea further I am going to make a few assumptions. In his rules, Duane states that the person who send in the item has the first opportunity to purchase the oddment.

Amherst Avenue Key by Duane Keiser

Because this painting is in the collection of Ms. Irene Aston Ziegler, I am assuming that the person who now owns the painting submitted the item. Although I have no way of knowing how many items he’s received, I know that there was something in this key which matched Duane’s criteria and viola.

When discussing the result of the collaboration, Duane states:

My painting may end up looking very different than the one they had in their mind but the initial interest in it, the shared vision of its potential as something worth painting according to a shared painterly aesthetic, is the same.

So now I am curious. Did Ms. Ziegler see the key this way when she sent it to Duane? What drew you to the key and did Duane capture it? Did he see and subsequently capture the same things you saw?

When I first saw the painting I wondered if the gleaming light on that silvery metal was what drew her to the item or was it the solid weight of the key?

I’d also ask Ms. Ziegler a final question. Now, having seen Duane’s painting of your key~ how has viewing his painting shifted your perceptions of the key? Did he captured something you hadn’t considered?

I guess its the idea of how much does one individual’s observations affect another’s is what interests me the most about this entire project.

This is the second painting that Duane painted at his Found Project and to me it’s subject is not as solid as the gleaming key.

Pussy Willow by Duane Keiser

I believe Duane captured the wonderfully soft and ethereal quality of subject. This is another gentle quiet painting. I love how he left the base incomplete, as if to suggest this is here now, but soon, soon it will be only a memory.

Addendum, Duane’s answered some of these questions in this entry in blog On Painting

Dues Ex Machinima (World of Warcraft)

This is probably my favorite machinima. If you’ve never heard of machinima its where creative people use software to capture video images from a computer game (e.g. World of Warcraft, Halo) and add either voice dubbing or music. There is a website called Red vs Blue that was extremely influential in the development of machinima.

This song (Here Without You~ by 3 Doors Down) always makes me very sad. I remember listening to it when I was deployed in Iraq around Thanksgiving 2003. It always brought tears to my eyes then and it still does if I stop and think about how things were back then.

I used to play World of Warcraft (WoW), a lot, a real lot (as a friend used to say). Sadly, since I’ve moved to Virginia I simply haven’t had the time to play. As they say ‘RL pwns WoW ‘. If you’ve never played WoW I doubt this would make much sense to you, but so just watch it and enjoy how they are trying to tell a story using game generated imagery and music.

If you are interested the crib notes are:

• There are Horde and Alliance- before the expansion the factions hated each other
• The couple are human and very happy
• They are busy killing monsters, she attacks a undead warlock, the ‘lock kills her
• Human man attacks the ‘lock the human dies too
• Human male wakes up alone and as an undead and very alone
• (undead) Human male is upset and searches for the ‘lock who killed him
• He finds the ‘lock and after a fight kills the lock but is still alone
• The undead males have the best dance in the game and the Night elf males have the worse (think village people on steroids)

Here is the link for the original video.

Friday Night Drawing Class

Drawing class tonight. I am having a lot of difficulty with this class because I am trying to learn what Rob and his assistant Marjorie are trying to teach me and things don’t seem to be making a lot of sense right now. I keep thinking what I should be doing is listen to them demo a particular method and then I try to draw the model using their techniques.

I am trying to not work too small or too detailed. Even though this is a drawing class we’re working our drawings similar to how you’d construct an oil painting. and it frustrates me to no end since I am trying hard to integrate what I can do with what they are trying to teach me. It’s weird but when I watch the demo and really listen to what he’s talking about and then work the way I normally do; if I remain conscious of what he discussed it turns out well. When I attempt to do exactly what he did or I get too wrapped up in a precise instruction/technique it goes south pretty quickly.

Tonight out model was a white male named Jiri. I think he’s eastern European but it’s difficult to tell. When you look at him straight on it’s difficult to really see the beauty of his bone structure. Tonight I was to his left at around 40 degrees. I was kind of disappointed at first because there weren’t a lot of interesting shadows. But the nice thing was you really got to see his jaw line, nose, eyes and lips without the distraction of the shadows. Jiri has the kind of lips you see on a DaVinci Madonna or a Greek statue. They are very different from what we consider as beautiful lips today but the structure was so interesting. He had very deepset eyes and a prominent nose and it’s the eyes that really got me in trouble.

I simply massed them in because I was worry about getting too caught up in the structure (prominent brow/deep set eyes and heavy lids) and it got fairly off kilter in the drawing. I did the same thing with the ears but thought screw it and ruthlessly edited. When Rob saw the ears he loved them (I was brutal and they were not beautiful but they were true to Jiri and you could really see their structure), not so much for the eyes.

At that point I only had 15 minutes left so I started sketching his eye in a corner of the paper. Once class was over I showed that to Rob. He really liked the eye and told me that’s what I need to do to the main drawing. So tomorrow I will chamois out the eye and start over. I joked that I should cut out the one eye and glue it over the eye. My poor drawing.

I guess what I really got out of tonight was watch the demo, try to absorb one aspect of the lesson, and at least for the initial lay-in edit ruthlessly and be bolder.

Here is a copy of the DaVinci preliminary (he used chalks, charcoal and some paint) I am working on. So far I am about halfway finished. I am only using the verithins but it’s slow going. After looking at it Rob said I was about halfway there-I have some editing to do on it (adjust the nose and it’s shadows, rework lips and darken the darks).

Just in case you were wondering….

For class we use either prismacolor verithin pencils or chalks/conte crayons in black, white and sanguine (tera cotta color). We draw on specially prepared paper- you do this at home and bring in your prepped sheets for class, I use Frankfurt cream paper that has been prepared in the following manner:

• Prepare a watercolor wash (use yellow ocher, raw sienna or what ever color you prefer) -keeping it fairly light
• Prepare 1 part amber shellac with 5 parts denatured alcohol, mix and store in airtight container (you can buy these materials for under $10 at Lowe’s or Home Depot
• Apply a wash of watercolor, this will be your ground color and allow to try
• Apply coating of shellac/alcohol mixture and allow to dry
• Keep the shellac, alcohol, and shellac/alcohol mixture safely out of reach of children and don’t forget it’s flammable!

The color of my wash looks similar to parchment once the wash is applied and has dried. You can go darker but remember this serves as your midtone in your drawing so it needs to be fairly neutral. If your drawing the figure I’d suggest the ocher since it looks similar a skin tone. Another color you could try is for more French academy (ala Proudhon) affect by trying a blue-grey instead of the ocher.

A friend recommended I make the following disclaimer on my work. Unless otherwise stated, I own the copyright on all the art work (oil paintings, oil sketches, drawings, and photographs). You do not have the right to download or link the art in this blog without either correctly attributing it to me or asking my permission. Seems like most folks would know that but you just never know.