Cape Street-24x30

Cape Street

24x30

Headed to Rowley Gallery, Cape Cod

contact me for details

Wellfleet morning light. Cant wait to get back up to the cape and paint. leaving soon!

Wish You Were Here-30x40

The new and revised Wish You Were Here. I lightened (and warmed with yellow ochre and orange) the sky and water, added sparks of pure color sparodically and warmed the light side of the trees and grass. this is truer to my concept of the painting which by the way looks very little like the photo reference. to see that scroll down a few posts.

 

this ones headed to Atelier Gallery in Charleston.

You can still bid on this 16x20 silent auction piece I painted a few years ago. its been leaning on my studio wall too long. I want somebody to take it home.  any reasonable bid accepted. Shipping is $15.
 email me your bid before midnite Saturday.
NOTE: no NC, SC, Key West or Cape Cod folks please.

 

Wellfleet Shapes-12x16

Wellfleet Shapes- 12x16

above is what I'm using for reference for this painting. it was a plein air study from last year on the cape.

 

today I started playing with an acrylic underpainting with cape cod underpainting colors, to speed up the painting process. I don't really like having to wait for two days to start putting down the topcoat so I'm using an acrylic underpainting like Dan Nelson uses. I was painting the sides of my gallery wrapped canvases with acrylic all week,  and liked it because it dried so fast, so I thought this might speed things up in the studio, production-wise. whats nice is I will go back in in a few minutes and darken and and/or add rich color on top of this without having to wait till tomorrow. one thing I see I need to darken is the tree to the left behind the buildings. right now its to light in value and too red (warm), Its the value of white in shadow like the buildings to the left. NOT good! Good thing is i'll be able to fix that and it'll be dry in minutes and I'll be able to paint green on it tonite with oil. 

 

I love slapping the acrylic around with huge, crappy brushes. it keeps the painting loose and I'm not "rendering" it but thinking this shape with this value and this temperature.

 

I use to paint acrylic underpaintings a few years back, but it dried too fast outside, so I abandoned it. now the question is will I underpaint one way big in the studio and another way small, plein air?

Hmmmmmm....

 

after much reading then and now I think the key is to paint the acrylic super thin, so its not shiny. then the oil can adhere to it fine.

Wish You Were Here-30x40

 

Wish You Were Here

30x40

 email me for price and availability

Don't forget the silent auction for Overlooking the New River 16x20, is on till Saturday at midnite. Highest bid will take it no matter what that may be.
go ahead and make a bid!
remember- ONLY non NC, Key West, SC, and Cape Cod folks can participate.

the image is one or two posts down.

Edges and Masses

 

these two pics are close-ups of a painting on the easel today. 90% done just wanna tweak a little after I live with em a few days.

 

note to self: remember how you did this cloud, sky and trees. cloud mass soft and fuzzy, nice color harmonies with the shadow side violet leaning red. shadows on trees are blues and reds with green scrubbed in to change the mass to read green. tree lights are orange with yellow green scrubbed in. skyhole- blue was scrubbed over darker pink and turquoise and light blue scrubbed into the bottom half. sweeeet.

 

less worries about being literal with the photo which is hard for an ex illustrator/sign painter. like the greens scrubbed over the rich blues and violets, red/violets, and letting bits of the rich color peek out.

 

all I'm concerned these days are the differences in the masses and less about the reference material. can feel the style shifting. there are very very few places of neutral paint tho' it reads as if there are. the eye is doing a lot of the mixing versus me doing it.

Overlooking the New River-16x20

This ones been in and out of the studio for several years now and its time to do a silent auction, a very popular thing i do on here from time to time. been a while since I did a silent auction so here goes.

going to sell it to the highest bidder that sends me an email in the next week. no kidding. bidding will end next Saturday night at midnite

whats the most you wanna pay for this. send me a bid!

 

its 16x20 on stretched canvas

no Cape Cod, Key West, SC, or NC bids please!

 

shipping $20 in U.S.

 

Overlooking the New River-16x20

I just pulled the below painting out of the finished pile and painted some of the cape school colors back onto what I considered a dull painting. wow, I juiced it up already. more realistic stuff will go on top of it when this is dry.

 

this blog will be invaluable to me in the future as I'll be able to go back and look and my evolution as a painter. I can see paintings from my very beginnings and watch as my style, technique, etc. changes from year to year and concept/vision to concept/vision.

I've always been very interested in the "process" of painting. don't really care what the painting is of, as much as how I paint my vision of it. at first it was about seeing the light ont these objects in its most honest environment, which would be plein air. then it evolved into how to capture the sparkle of that impressionistic vision. now its seems to be more about painting large (either inside or out) and having fun with the shapes even at the expense of "reality". more about the surface of the canvas

ive always had a tool in my toolbox that I called "de-volving" the image, but it was a very underdeveloped muscle. in these big ones my vision is much more expressionistic and personal using the plein air study and/or photo as a launching point. so I'm strengthening this de-volving muscle lately.then once I get the feel for what I want I sling large brushes loaded with varying degrees of opacity around (thanks dan!) trying to lose lots of the forms into one another.  then I think I'm trying to bring back the focal point out of that. dreaminess has, and I imagine always will, always been part of my painting equation. I go for that seconds-before-you-wake-up-from-a-dream look. just the beautiful, most important shapes, colors, and delineation.

this week ive been de-volving paintings I thought were finished. I went back into them with rich out of the tube color to bring back a lot of the snap they had on day two. the process of painting covered up the part I like the best. so I went back in and put that in. then i'll act like its day three. if I keep doing this to what I considered finished paintings, i'll have to stop posting them so soon. gotta go back and delete three of these what I thought were done deals, from the blog and replace them with the todays "finished".

a close up of adding reds and blues back into a dull painting! funny thing is I didn't think they were dull last week when I finished them!

 

i'll go back and get rid of about half of that red (and orange) you see in the grass. i'll keep just enough for that spark I get if I don't paint too much green on the surface or its not dry enough to cover without mixing (graying) on day three. which I invariably do tho' I don't want to. I'm beginning to see that layering over dry paint is the key to doing this. so much for all my stuff being alla prima anymore. oh well.

 

on the boat painting at the top of the post I added orange to the light side of the grass, pink back into the water to the left of the glare, pink in the roof, translucscent lavender into the bost and shed, and orange all the way around the edges of the shapes. i'll then go back and paint over about half of that to get rid of it where its 'obnoxious'.

 

keep your fingers crossed for me!

Sittin' Pretty-24x30

 

Sittin' Pretty

24x30

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wow! look a the looseness of this one. drips, scrubby strokes, large brush frenzied controlled chaos, one stroke bravura brushwork, thick thin, scratches (thanks for the scratch technique Dan N)

 

Time Standing Still

24x30

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more coming off the easel. has been a really productive week. I'm in my groove. here's what the average day looks like. wake up and eat, then play some steel drum in the morning. block in a canvas or two. eat lunch. work on paintings in varying stages of completion in the afternoon. take a nap. more easel time till supper. more steel drum practice and a little more easel time. a little marketing and setting up workshop stuff on the computer. late night snack ( I know awful right?) who cares! then bed about 1 am.

wake up do it all again. getting about five large paintings done a week not counting some smaller ones here and there. the paint seems to flow out all by itself when you get a life-rhythm like this going on. I think the start and stop lifestyle I sometimes lead is counter productive to serious quality painting. painting isn't like painting a house where its mindless putting on of paint 100% of the time. painting pictures is 10% putting on of paint and 90% spent thinking about how you want to put on the paint. you have to be in the right frame of mind to do it effectively?

work in progress day two

The Acadia Maine workshop is officially a go! still seats available if you want to paint on gorgeous Mt. Desert Island on the upcoming Labor Day holiday (the best weather in maine). just contact Acadia Workshop Center and tell Gail you wanna attend. you wont regret it, I promise!

 

 

forgot to shoot pic of day one on this monster sized painting but it had a crazy out of the tube orange for the dirt, orangeish/pink for the sky and purples and violets for the boats and shed in shadow.

 

on day two, I went over all that dry paint (key to colorful paintings-no mud) with a less saturated mixture of yellow ochre and orange with gray in it. then I put a less saturated purple down and got a few variations of value in the boat. green grass in shadow and grass in light. then I went over the sky with a pretty saturated manganese/cerulean blue and then i scrubbed in a slightly lighter value of yellow/yellow ochre mix into the bottom half of the sky to warm it up. I might leave the sky as is as I'm pretty happy with it (in present context) as is. dirt might need some cooling off and graying down but its a really good underpaint color. like the pinkish roof on the little shed to the right of the bow too. might leave it as is too. liking the white reflection but i'll probably add some warmth to it

 

the glare is going to be the star of the show so i'll give that area a lot of thought and painting time.

 

Tip

spend more time on the focal point than anywhere else on the painting (inch for inch)

Wish You Were Here-30x40

Wish You Were Here

30x40

email for price and availability

 

finished this one up today. after looking at the photo on here tho, I'm going to soften the  the front edges of the clouds a little. they look a little too "puffy" for me. I'll blend the front edges and get a lost and found effect that will take care of that. other than that its done. I like the looseness and color especially. something I've been focusing on in recent months.

Today and Forever-24x30

 

Today and Forever

24x30

email for price and availability

 

fresh paint! been on a painting binge here lately. I'm excited about the work, so it makes me want to get in the studio and be productive. finally the big ones are as loose and colorful as my plein air studies. not to mention, its great to be in the studio when its 95 degrees out with 95% humidity. plein air is no fun in those conditions.

 

today the hurricane is bearing down on my beach town. I don't see anybody boarding up anything so I'm thinking like everybody else that it wont be that bad. the only sign of panic ive seen so far is one lady coming out of the grocery store with half dozen gallons of water. see that kinda rubs me wrong. if everybody did that the shelf would be empty really quick then nobody could get even ONE and they might need it worse than she needs six. I don't know, I might catch flack on that. been watching too much Curb Your Enthusiasm lately. the hero of the comedy is always pointing stuff like that out and everybody ridicules him for his opinions. hilarious.

 

hope you like the painting even if you don't like my take on the water hoarder!  :)

Early Morning Skiff 2-16x20

Early Morning Skiff 2

16x20

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I took a bunch of paintings to galleries lately and you always get some you really liked back in return.

 

like orphans who keep getting left behind at the orphanage, some of em are good kids. sure they've got their little flaws but I cant understand why nobody wants to "adopt/buy" them. so I say, must be something the buyers just cant overlook. so I threw this one on the easel to see what could be done after not looking at it for the last 12 months (tho its actually a few years old)

first thing I decided to do was wash warmth all over it with a glaze. it looked a little too cool to me. I'm thinking the original was probably closer to the original light key but the electric company doesn't care about that at all. they want my money for lights this month. I gotta sell this puppy. ok I'm exaggerating but I cant help but keep playing the starving artist role ive perfected all these years.

then I took out all the paraphernalia on the boat and the boat numbers. strengthened the trailer and fooled with the shadow (darkenening the value) under the boat and made some darker shapes in the background trees adding some warmth (and some blue) to the shadows and made better shapes on the ones I thought were awkward. will anybody notice? doubtful but I think its like....if you don't comb your hair its not so bad but if you don't comb your hair, brush your teeth, or put on a clean shirt, its the cumulative effect that'll kill ya. the less little things ive got wrong with this piece the better it'll look overall.

hopefully, another painting saved from the brutal and violent "sand down" day that happens when I'm in a funk. haven't had one of those in a while, so I'm due.

Mid Tide2- 18x24

 

Mid Tide2 

18x24

email me for availability and price

 

 

I like this one from Swansboro. what a great shape the little creek makes right? and the color of the light is very summer morning-ish. hopefully you can feel the humidity in the air too.