"Inhale, Exhale"

18x36", acrylic and mixed media on canvas

I started experimenting with turquoise and found that it's a powerful color! I kept having to return to the area where I painted it and try to cover it up. Eventually it calmed down to the point where it's just present. Meanwhile, this emotional painting emerged. 

Also, after taking the picture and cleaning it up, I suddenly see new things in it. Do I change them? Leave them? I think I'll live with it and see what happens.

"The Game"

(Not available.)

30x40", acrylic and mixed media on canvas

One weekend a couple of years ago, when a few of us were touring wine country, I surreptitiously took pictures of people. This came out of one such picture. I think my two favorite things about it are the way that the focal point is way off center, and the eyes behind the sunglasses, which I invented and which came out surprisingly well!

"Abstract Figure 2"

14x11", oil on canvas board

This was another fast painting done in class. The straight edges and lines come from using a color shaper, which is sort of like a palette knife, but softer. Someone in class wanted some additional color, so we added a scarf to the pose. Maybe I should have titled this "The Striped Scarf" or some such.

"Abstract Figure 1"

14x11", oil on canvas board

This was a fast painting I did in an abstract figurative class that artist and teacher Michael Azgour taught at the Pacific Art League. So, in class we would have warm-ups and exercises, of course. In one we would have only a limited amount of time to fill the entire canvas. Then, in this lesson he also suggested that we add a geometric shape (in this case a grid) and use elements of it to abstract the figure. I'm not sure I integrated the grid and the figure, but it did keep my painting looser.

This is painted from a live model, and there is an immediacy that I like, and the rapid brush strokes (and some pencil scribbles) worked. In this case. You often end up with dimensions that are way out of whack. I assume that the better you get, the more often you get accurate dimensions. But even very experienced artists say they do a lot of throw-away paintings. Or paint-overs, I guess.

"Figure With Shadow"

8x10",  oil on canvas board

This is another one of those paintings that I like, but I don't quite know why, and it's not a good likeness. But it has something. I think there's a freedom to it. I'd recently been looking at my Nathan Oliveira book, and an abstract figure occurred by and by. It does have a few things I normally do, like all the scratches for texture, and juxtaposing green and purple. 

"Not Yet"

30x30x1.5", acrylic and mixed media, SOLD

This one has soul. There's some stillness to it, and discomfort. And some mystery.

I seem to want to make three kinds of paintings: small still lifes that are also skill builders, abstracts, and abstract figurative, as with this one. A few people had trouble figuring out what it was at first, but that doesn't bother me. It just feels right.

"Shadow Puppets"

6x6", oil on canvas board 

This is the next in my series of figs that I used to learn to paint in neutrals. When I use neutrals, they seem to come out dark. I might have to think about that. There's a bit of palette knife work here, too, as with the prior one.

I've been thinking about neutrals, and the most neutral color is grey. But a warm grey is brown, so grey and brown might be just cool and warm versions of the same neutral. Strangely, while the best-known color palette (there are many) divides colors into three primaries, there seem to be only two neutrals. I think it's because the three primaries contain one cool (blue) and two warms (red and yellow). It you neutralize blue, it goes cool grey, of course. But if you neutralize red and yellow, they both go brown. Now, they're a little different, but much more similar to each other than they are to neutral blue. (I haven't run into this in any books. So maybe I don't read enough, or this is whacked.)

"One Left"

6x6", oil on canvas board 

I did a series of figs as a part of learning to paint in neutrals, so I also needed to find some bowls around the house that had the neutral coloring I wanted. One of the hardest things about figs is getting that blush on them. It's surprisingly blue! But the hardest part of this painting was getting the near edge of the bowl right. It kept wanting to look like really thick ceramic. There's some mild palette knife work here, too, and I like it. I'll have to do more.

"Going Solo" Redux

6x6", oil on canvas board 

I decided I needed to focus more on neutral colors. So I started redoing a few recent paintings that had too much of a kind of baby room look. (Nothing against baby rooms. I just want to paint a variety of styles.) Above is the redone painting. Below is the original (which appeared earlier on this blog). I redid not only the background, but I also brightened up the flower petals. The flower does glow a lot more.

Strangely, this points to one of my painting idiosyncracies. I like mud. (Well, I also like bright colors.) But mud makes a great supporting player. It really highlights the main character, which, in this case, is the flower.

"Uncultivated"

18x24x.75", oil on stretched canvas

I did this awhile ago, following the suggestions in Steve Aimone's amazing book, Expressive Drawing. You can find another painting that I did earlier in my blog, where I described the system. Like that, this is another funny little painting where I like it but I'm not sure why. I think I like the pure energy of the thang.