Posts

Showing posts from March, 2014

Following drawing advice

Image
I followed Maggie Stiefvater's drawing advice . More or less. Only with some slight distortion for the final project - who needs values, after all? The 20 second value sketch took me 3 minutes, and the line drawing 5. The painting took me hours, not sure how many. More than two, less than five? And yes, I tried to find a raven to honor her writing, but morguefile (thank you mothdevil !) fed me crows instead, and called them ravens...

Painting three models makes me fauvist

Image
This weekend I got to join my friends Amy Wynne Derry and Margaret Owen in a painting marathon at Amy's studio. At the end I felt very much like I had spent the entire day running. We had fun, the artists painting these three models. The models, on the other hand, worked very hard. They maintained the same pose for much of a five hour period, and we all got to play. Many of the artists chose to work on just one model at a time, but not all. (One of Margaret Owen's paintings from the session, below)

Awakening the senses - meditation and painting

Image
I just came back from a weekend in New York with Sokuzan Robert Brown . We spent most of the time talking about sense perceptions, and he led us in a series of exercises to awaken the awareness of the senses. "Let the senses lead," he kept saying, and backed it up with various methods of noticing where the awareness goes when focusing on certain things - what happens to sight perception of the room when one has just put a bit of salt on the tongue, for example. Then he instructed us on ways of seeing paintings, letting the awareness travel to assigned ideas (dark, triangular, red, top left, etc) without ever moving your eyes from the center. The result of this last was a kind of amped up version of many Josef Albers exercises, or the measuring, drawing and weighing sketches I have always done of paintings I liked in museums. I came back uncertain of what I was going to paint, so I just went over old ground. Different than the last one...

Don't piss off the fairies

Image
Here is the color saturated painting of the study photo: I love it when painting is such fun. It helps to have Noel McLoughlin, PJ Harvey, and Tom Waits singing in the background.

Dancing with the fairies

Image
This is a study photo I put together for a painting I've been wanting to do for a while. Today I'm really feeling the middle land between life and death, which has a particularly verdant feeling because of being still relatively young. It feels very Shakespearian, like running through stone halls made green with moss, arm in arm with others, not brushing my teeth... Does that make any sense?

Emile the gnome

Image
Some days I have an urgent need to paint something, and then I just wander around for the rest of the week wondering: Hunh?

Subscribe

* indicates required