Pepper shaker

12/21. Pepper shaker, oil on linen panel, 4x4 in.

Thought I'd go back to something other than produce. This was incredibly hard, and I was surprised it turned out ok.

We're off on Sunday to see family (the East Coast gang) and it seems I'll probably be without Internet access for a while. I'm bringing my paints though, and might actually produce something but who knows. I'll add more to this post perhaps when I get back.

I wish everyone and their families a very happy Christmas - yes, not a happy holiday or winter break or season's something or other. It is, after all, the Christ-mass that the holiday marks and for which most people have scrambled to get gifts and cards in the mail in time, even if they don't personally agree with any of it. I wish plenty of nuts and a tasty orange or two in the toe end of everyone's stocking! See you soon....

Clementine and orange

12/19. Clementine and orange, oil on linen panel, 7x5 in.

A quick post to get caught up, then back to drawing. (Aren't my titles descriptive?)

Tagged!

I’ve been double tagged! (Does it mean I have to do this twice?) Thanks to Alvin Richard and Jason Waskey for allowing me to reveal some odd facts about myself - some of it previously secret! But first, the rules as I've lifted them: 1) Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog. 2) Share 5 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird. 3) Tag 5 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs. 4) Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog. All right, then:

1) I secretly hate to draw. I have never filled a sketchbook in my life. Which means I seriously need to do it more, like maybe at least as often as I’m painting, especially because I wish I were a fraction as good as my ultimate artistic hero (though I don’t mention him much), Edgar Degas.

2) I used to have this fantasy that I’d one day discover Degas was really my great-great-grandfather/-uncle or something.

3) It will be a long time before I can say that I’ve read most of the books I own. Partly because I read horribly slow and partly because, as I always like to be in the process of reading any book, I used to pick up several others while still in the middle of one, only to get stuck in all of them and giving up on the one I’d set out to read in the first place. I still try to have a book going at all times, except nowadays I can get through it before taking on another, and the number of books read is beginning to grow. Not long ago my wife asked me where I’d been finding the time to read, and the answer is: in the bathroom, a few pages at a time. TMI?? (The comedian Jeff Foxworthy said recently about his newest Redneck Dictionary that it would be less likely to sit on a coffee table than on the back of a toilet. Well, in our home it could easily share the porcelain with something by Kafka, Camus, or Chris Hitchens. Sorry, Chris.)

4) I have a desire, perhaps not secret, to learn to play bagpipes - Scottish first, then maybe the Irish – perhaps as a step towards fulfilling the dream of someday, somehow, starting a pseudo-Renaissance-age/pseudo-Celtic/rock band that incorporates period pipes and a shawm and gittern and flute (and maybe a Japanese shakuhachi) and some violas da gamba and such things. Ok, forget that. Band aside, I know I would have to spend years tooting on a practice chanter before even picking up a full set of pipes and, well, it only makes me have more respect for anyone who even tries - I may be wrong but it seems it would be harder to sort of just "get by" on bagpipes than on other instruments.

5) I’m always secretly on the lookout for multiple shadows in movies - I mean, when it’s obvious that an outdoor scene is really a set. A person in sunlight normally would cast a single shadow, yet once in a while you’ll see maybe four or more faint ones. This is common in TV shows, but I began to notice it a while back in a lot of movies too - older ones, especially Westerns (never mind the absence of bullet holes or blood) - and now I can’t stop looking for them. Check it out for yourself!

Now here are some people I’d like to tag:

Paul Schmid
Connie Kleinjans
Paul Keysar
Allison Sommers
Vince Nguyen

Orange

12/17. Orange, oil on linen panel, 4x4 in.

I gave myself the problem of what to do with an orange that is almost perfectly symmetric in shape and lit from above, within a gold on gold theme. And I wanted that reflected light at the bottom to not just glow, but burn.

Red pear

12/16. Red pear, oil on linen panel, 4x4 in.

I've been working on sketches for an assignment which have been a struggle for some reason (see also #1 in the upcoming "tag" post), so I'm still behind in posting. I skipped painting the other night but managed to do one last night as a break from drawing. But about this piece: I thought the shift to green in this section of the otherwise red pear was interesting.

Clementine #2

12/15. Clementine #2, oil on linen panel, 4x4 in.

I've been using Indian yellow to punch up the yellows and oranges a little. I suppose using cad. red light or cad. orange might get similar results, but the subtler transparence of Indian yellow is much nicer than the overly intense blaze you get from an opaque cadmium. And although you can make a decent orange by combining cads. yellow and red together, they are never intense enough - the reason being that opaque colors only call attention to the amount of paint that's there, while transparency keeps the focus on the hue and the light, at least giving the effect of more intensity (if not actually increasing it). So I've found that by throwing some Indian yellow in the mix I can reduce the use of cadmiums quite a bit, and get a clean color that isn't too hot.

Clementines #2

12/14. Clementines #2, oil on linen panel, 5x5 in.

Sorry for my absence. Our computer got "sick" with pop-ups last week and was moving at a snail's pace, so I didn't go online much except to attempt some last minute shopping (maybe all my personal info being stolen multiple times in the process). But I've been painting, and now that I hope things are normal again I may be able to catch up here.

Clementine

12/12. Clementine, oil on linen panel, 4x6 in.



It seems as though everyone has painted a peeled clementine at one time or another so I thought I'd try as well. Again I photographed the very beginning stage and it shows how unpredictably I start to work sometimes - I was a little sad that I had to get much thicker with the paint.

I took a break last night from painting and instead wrote some of the thoughts I'd been having lately (after which I meant to post this piece but I didn't get that far). To the previous post I feel I should add that those "other" ideal qualities to strive for in painting were only the ones that came to mind the most easily to me. Also, in having the opinion that I do I might only keep myself from attaining the level of discipline needed to begin mastering those other qualities. Yet, I believe all of those things will just manifest themselves more and more with time, simply as a result of being productive and acting on inspiration, being viscerally receptive to paint's little accidents.

I must surely come off as offensive any time I suggest simply that some painters are a dead master's wannabes (I think they would easily outpaint me, as true wannabes have incredible discipline). Now couldn't someone say the same about me, based on everything I've said about Bonington? Yeah, maybe I'd give a body part or two to paint as well as he did, but if I suddenly could I still wouldn't reproduce his way of "seeing" and be attracted to the same things he was, composing pictures the way he did. Especially as I have my own quirks, as do most painters. And of course most aren't wannabes (and, like me, have wide ranging influences), yet there are so many who try real hard to turn into the next Sargent, say, and just become indistinguishable from all the rest. Well at least they employ a consistent "style," so who am I to say anything?...

Onion #4

12/11. Onion #4, oil on linen panel, 4x4 in.

I attempted to paint roughly, scumbling and scratching a lot, to match the skin of this onion. It was dry and dirty in places and unappealing, but it seemed to radiate all these clean colors which I don't normally see in onions. The first bold mark I made was the transparent crimson edge at top, and once I put some green and purple around it it felt alive like a slippery koi in a pond.

This isn't the best painting nor the most instructive experiment, but in it are some interesting things. I've been thinking a lot lately about why I paint (and why I'm so glad to be painting again after so long) and what it is that's so interesting about doing little studies which don't deviate much in composition. Maybe this goes for most other oil painters who aren't concerned with the avant-garde (there's no such thing anymore), but for me it's simply got to be the nature of paint and the experience of color on the eyes, the almost musical play of pigment floating luminously next to, around, and beneath airy veils and dense tapestries of color. I wish I could describe it more eloquently. Although I wasn't yet ready for the journey at the time, perhaps I had decided years ago as Markowsky was encouraging us to exploit it in painting class - but especially when I first saw paintings by Bonington in a book - that my goal should be to find the balance between transparent and opaque. That's all.

By this I mean: not to dance around that point, emulating Velasquez, where at a certain viewing distance the image comes together and is no longer a chaos of disparate strokes. Nor strive for Rembrandt's light, or some "secret" process or medium of his - he had none, just skill and patience. Nor, as I've started to realize more and more, attempt to "transcribe" nature the way Liszt condensed Beethoven's giant symphonies to be played on a piano - though that's not a feat to laugh at. Sure, all of these things together are ideal, but I just want to be there when the little mysteries in the paint reveal themselves. Like when oil mimics watercolor and changes back again. Bonington made paint sing - his sketchy pieces still kill me after all these years (and I'll have to scan some pictures from a book next time to justify my obsession, since you can't find any good examples anywhere else). Sargent did it too - but I believe what I'm talking about isn't what his wannabes today are emulating (flashy brushstrokes that sculpt a face or a hand or the lapel of a jacket with as few notes as possible). Well ok, add that to the list of ideal things, as Bonington was a master of economy too.

But those things are all human things, the craft side of painting, like the way a chef puts the food in little stacks on a rectangular plate and drizzles the sauce over it in graceful zigzags. Or like the way a carpenter shapes the wood. Bad comparisons perhaps? Before constructing the joints or "plating" the food, there are the different woods, the ingredients of a dish, and their wondrous qualities. So, although I have a lot to learn about the craft of painting, what's always more interesting is what the paint does to me and not what I can do to it.

Bunch of parsley

12/10. Bunch of parsley, oil on linen panel, 4x5 in.

I took the first photo when I realized I was working in a new way, that is I used a cool color to rough out the form (very rough) and stain the canvas - I don't know if it was simply because the dominant color here is green or if it was a subconscious experiment - but the surface seemed to have infinite potential once that amorphous shadow was sketched in. In some recent pieces I had thrown in some bluish-white at this early stage to get some of the "air" along the edges, though not here because the parsley isn't a solid form with a turning edge. In this case the blue went into the bulk of the parsley, more as an effect of the light than atmosphere. But I found as I went along that it was good to have the initial rough stage as a foundation, something to play off of for subtle space around the parsley. Normally I had used a brown all over for blocking in shadows etc., even in the broccoli piece, because I was so used to it.

(One of these days I might try something else novel, that is go to bed early so that I can think and write in the morning and am not like a zombie with a blog.)