Cleaning up the studio, a painting in progress, and some art books in the works

The year 2011 arrived with blinding speed. In fact, I have a little trouble wrapping my head around the idea of 2011. It is a year past epic milestones of science fiction. No flying cars, no glittering Nehru jackets to wear. For that I am grateful. I am one of those people fascinated by artist's studios so I am sharing some recent pictures of the studio Valerie and I share together. As always, click on the image to enlarge.

The above view is looking towards both my easel and Valerie's writing desk. Thanks to Fairbanks Antiques I was lucky enough to get a decent music stand to put my gramophone on and stash some of my 78's inside. Makes the studio feel larger. In the corner are paintings of Charlotte including my latest one from last October. Below that are some of Valerie's Victorian fashion illustrations. I can't remember if they're from Godey's or Harper's.

 This is a view from my easel looking over towards my drafting table where I work on the collages. The painting on the easel I had started at least a couple of months ago and was going fairly well. It's based on a photograph I took of Valerie.  The painting is on cold press watercolour paper and like much of my other work is a combination of coloured pencil and acrylic. The mood of the painting was originally more wistful, but took on the more melancholy aspect after the death of my cousin Amanda whose future career in the arts ended before it even truly began due to a automobile accident. I have been thinking of doing a commemorative painting of Amanda but right now it is too painful to contemplate. In the corner over the drafting table are more paintings of Charlotte and some images that I find inspiring including my little reproduction of the Gainsborough painting I wrote about previously.

This is the studio looking towards the fireplace from the edge of the drafting table over to the French doors. My favourite painting of Valerie hangs over the mantel along with some of my early photographs of her. Piled on the mantle are my James Lane Allen books and along with some of my other treasured Victorian era books. The lovely Christmas tree is Valerie's handiwork. In the corner, Barnabas Collins maintains a melancholy watch over a renaissance lady on top of the bookcase.

As we come around full circle, more books, a music corner with my Edison Amberola 30 cylinder player, a steampunk AM/FM cassette deck in the form of a Edison Home Phonograph courtesy of the Thomas Radio Corporation. The closet stores paintings, art supplies belonging to both Valerie and myself. My favourite painting of Charlotte hangs on the door.

Upcoming paintings:


At the moment, there are two paintings in the pipeline. The lady listening to the gramophone and a small painting of an embracing couple. The latter painting is feeling a bit stuck but other painting is going well. I'm reviewing recent sketches with a view towards picking out my next several paintings. I've also been giving thoughts to my next set of collages but want to get at least two or three paintings finished before I shift the focus back to collage.


Art books I am working on:

It's been in the thought process for a long time, but I'm finally making some progress towards doing a couple of books featuring my paintings and collages. The first book will be an overview of what I hope are the best of my paintings and collages as well as including some of the sketches. I'm contemplating perhaps having a section on how I, as a colour blind artist work in colour. A lot of the photographs I've taken of my paintings over the years will have to be rescanned to improve the quality for print. Many of the web images do not enlarge well.

The second book will feature only my paintings of Charlotte over the last thirty years.  Unhappily, this project will require my rephotographing much of that work. About four years ago, I had photographed nearly everything to use in a future project. I had made a slideshow movie with the images and had hoped to use them in a book later only to lose them when my computer died. The back up CD I made has yet to be found.

The first phase of this project will be to purchase and install the software I've identified as an affordable page maker.  I intend to publish the books through Lulu.com when they're ready. I tried using their "portfolio" maker but found it too limiting. Bear with me as I have multiple irons in the fire.

Here's hoping that 2011 will be a very productive year!

The long inadvertant silence ended

I was a little shocked when I saw how much time had gone by since my last post.  After my last collage was finished, I thought I'd take a little time to revive my late grandfather's 1968 Plymouth Fury VIP and Valerie and I would build an upstairs room in the attic during my vacation from the day job. Reviving the Fury went comparatively fast, home remodelling longer than anticipated. Below is a picture of the Fury and then on to the new collages I recently completed with some notes about the most recent Paris Artwalk.

 click on image to enlarge

Material left over from the last collage, From Her Voice Came The Music of the Centuries inspired two more collages to make a triptych of sorts. The original image is below followed by the two new pieces.

From Her Voice Came The Music of the Centuries, collage, 11x14 inches

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My Longing Came In Music Soaked Memories, collage, 11x14 

inches

Click on image to enlarge

I Know Now Who I Once Was
collage, 11x14 inches

Click on image to enlarge.

While I like viewers of my paintings and collages to come up with their own stories when they look at my work, I have my own stories in my mind as I make them. With the set of collages above, I sort of imagined a kind of Wilkie Collins meets steampunk tale in which a Victorian woman using some sort of tinfoil phonograph recorder reaches deep into the past and revives long dormant memories and longing.

It Was Then I Realised I Was Too Late, collage, 11x14 inches, Click on image to enlarge

In this image, a young man stumbles upon a scene in which one man seems to be channelling energy to another through some device he wears on his head as a woman stands transfixed in contemplation. I have no idea what this is about. Possibly the man wearing the device is a mad scientist and he is controlling both the woman and the other man. Or perhaps, the woman is in collusion with the device wearer. Or something else altogether different.

From Her My Thoughts Could Not Turn Away, collage, 11x14 inches, Click to enlarge image

The final collage in this entry was sold at the Paris Artwalk last Friday. I was just barely able to get this collage photographed as I had literally just finished it that morning and had not expected to sell it at the end of the day. The composition is as much accident as choice. The man's face had been partially cut off in the enlargement process but it also is what inspired the composition altogether. While listening to an cylinder phonograph, a late Victorian gentleman recalls the one love he could not forget.

There will not be a separate post on the Paris Artwalk as I usually do because for some reason I did not take my usual photographs of the set up and the visitors. But, having said that, it was still a most excellent Artwalk even though I was a bit off the beaten path. I'm now showing at the Paris-Bourbon County Public Library where I used to work. The set up was in the courtyard outside and even though it was terribly hot that day, still had a good time. Valerie wafted bubbles down High Street and her daughter made a small sandwich board out of one of my promotional posters and waded through the crowds on Main Street where most of the Artwalk took place. We were one block over with a few other participants. I spun gramophone records and while I did not have as many people as I normally saw, I got more people actually interested in the art resulting in the sale of the collage. Valerie had made some experimental steampunk necklaces that incorporated miniature copies of some of the collages. Of the ten she made, she sold four. 

I find it interesting that when I got a little off the beaten path, I broke my Artwalk sales drought. Everyone at the Paris-Bourbon County library was just great and I thank all of you for hosting a former co-worker. Look forward to being there in April!

Painting in Progress-conclusion

Click on any image to enlarge

With this installment we end where we began, the model's face because I want every element of the composition to pull the viewer back to her face because without her, this becomes a rather odd landscape instead of what it actually is, a meditation on whether to live a life of light or of dark or to put another way, a life of happiness or melancholy perhaps a blending of both.

In the close up above, I had started out with using coloured pencil as an underpainting and then going over it with a thin mix of acrylic. In the previous blog, I was not happy with the way that looked so I went over the paint with a new layer of coloured pencil and used the pencil to blend areas as well as to lightly indicate shadowed areas. The lower lip was partially painted out and corrected. The eyelashes were also done with coloured pencil along with loose strands of hair drawn over the painted areas. The combination of the pencil and the paint bring the face up to the same level as the rest of the painting. The pencil alone was too thin to give her the same weight as the rest of the composition.

 Other touches include foliage at the lower left of the painting and the finishing of the pathway to the colonnade in the daylight portion at the top. Some additional texturing was included in the wall and column. At some point in the near future, I will probably pull this painting out of the frame and work on the ivy a good bit more as I am not totally satisfied with it but at some point have to stop working on the painting I started two and a half years ago. Below is the(for the moment) finished painting:

A Painting in Progress--part one

Finally, I get around to writing a blog about a painting in progress from a technical standpoint. This is a painting of a friend of mine who is standing at a doorway between day and night. The majority of my work is done on canvas but I still enjoy working on Arches hot press watercolour paper mostly in the 140 lb weight but prefer 155 or 300 lb hot press when I have it.

Paintings done on watercolour paper are quite different from my canvases because I work with both coloured pencil and the acrylic together. The coloured pencil provides a sort of underpainting and a lot of interesting texture in its own right. I used to work only in coloured pencil using solvents. I don't obliterate the coloured pencil with the acrylics. The acrylics are often used as a transparent glaze over the coloured pencil. If I keep the acrylics thin enough, more coloured pencil can be added and the layers can build up between the pencils and the glazes.

click on image to enlarge

In the view above, one can see that the painting is started with a drawing in pencil on the paper. I work out the figure, the clothing and the overall composition of the painting before adding the first layer of colour. The area behind the figure which represents Night started as multiple layers of indigo blue that are blended with isopropyl alcohol using a small cloth to work the pigment into the paper. This gives it a nice grainy texture but it wasn't dark enough so I mixed a batch of ultramarine blue and burnt umber into a thin glaze and went over the area again. While the initial glazes remained thin, I added an additional layer of the indigo blue coloured pencil to keep the grainy texture present. After about four layers, I stop.

click on image to enlarge

In the close up view above, look at the top edge of the painting you can see where the coloured pencil and the acrylic glazes spill off the edge. I'm debating with myself whether to extend the composition all the way to the top of the sheet or leave it as is so it fits a standard 22x28 inch frame.

To the figure's left is a wall of a building. The wall began with layers of yellow ochre and golden brown before thin glazes of yellow ochre acrylic were applied. I kept it rougher so that the wall would appear aged. At this stage, I am not too concerned with the edge of the wall. That will tighten up somewhat as the texture of the wall takes on more depth. As the painting progresses, it will become more apparent that it is some kind of stonework with vines and ivy and other foliage on top.

click to enlarge

To the left of my friend's face, the texturing of the wall behind the column is more apparent. Her hair is a mixture of the golden brown coloured pencil and glazes of yellow ochre with some sienna brown coloured pencil added for depth. The face is a mixture of light peach, carmine red, sienna brown, indigo blue and white.

Acrylic paint is the Winsor and Newton Finity series and coloured pencils are either the Prismacolour brand or Derwent watercolour pencils.

The painting started out attempting to use a photo I have of a young girl standing at a door that opens into some kind of structure that is part of a Victorian photo studio backdrop but scale it up to adult proportions for the figure model I wanted to feature. Scaling up the proportions caused other problems that I wasn't ready to solve so I kept the column the girl was leaning on and discarded the rest. Perhaps in a future painting. Either way, I wanted to explore the idea of standing on the edge between Day and Night which I'll take up later as the painting is finished.

I'll be glad to answer any technical questions as I can. I don't believe in keeping technical secrets when it comes to how I do my paintings. What I've learned from others I find a way to make my own. I would expect others to make their own anything I share.

Over the coming weeks, future posts will take up where this one leaves off in recording the progress of this painting. I actually had started it in the autumn of 2007 and it seemed that it needed a long gestation period but now it feels like it's coming together now. Sometimes what seemed hard at the time will make me wonder why now when it seems so much easier...