My friend Brad Teare, art director at the Friend magazine (he's also an accomplished painter with a good blog) asked me to do a cover for their October issue. He said they wanted something that looked a little more urban than their usual pastoral settings. Also, that I might include something about the season.
The Friend is a publication of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (of which I am a member). For their covers, they assign an illustrator a month and let him or her come up with five or so ideas and they choose which one they want. It's not real often that I get that kind latitude. Thanks Brad!
Here is one of the reference photos I took of my grandkids.
Claire Counihan, AD at Holiday House, asked me to do a cover. It's a book called Parched. The world has gone through decades of drought and is dried up, except for a domed city built by some of the surviving people. It has it's own biospher. This is the work in progress.
Between illustration jobs and teaching, I haven't had much time to paint. So I've started doing quick half our sketches of the sunrise looking east from my neighborhood.
One of the cooler buildings in downtown Phoenix is Circles Records and Tapes. It was originally a Studebaker showroom, built back in the forties. Inside the round glass front was a turntable floor that would go round and round with cars on it, showing them off to the passing public. A good example of streamline deco design, of which there is not much in the valley. Sometime in the seventies, it became a record store. Unfortunately, with the changes in the music industry, Circles finally closed in 2010. The building is still there but is threatened by the fact that the owners have not registered it as an historic building. You can read more about it at Modern Phoenix. This is a small color sketch I did from a photo I took a couple years ago.
I'm currently working on a piece for Yankee Magazine. Lori Pedrick, the art director, calls me about once a year to illustrate what is usually a wonderfully written personal essay about New England and the author's connection to some aspect of the landscape. The current one is about mending a fence.
This is the piece, about 75% done.
The first piece that Lori commissioned from me was for an article "A Fierce Yellow Light". The author told of her affection for the maligned Norwegian Maple.
Finally, this landscape was for a description of the end of Autumn and the "coming of another kind of beauty".
Thank you to Lori and Yankee for good assignments. I'll post more of my Yankee paintings later.
Some years ago, the night before a head painting workshop I was holding in my studio, the model emailed and said she could not come. After a few minutes of vengeful thoughts, I called the daughter of a family friend who I had wanted to paint for some time. She said she would be happy to model. She was only 17, had never modeled and did a superb job. I called her back a week later and shot some photos, one of which is the basis for this study.
Gouache with pastel
I found the New Windsor Hotel shortly after I moved to Arizona in 1982. It's been the subject of quite a few of my paintings over the years.
The first in the mid 80's.
Shortly after that I became busy with other kinds of art work and didn't do much city painting until the 2000's. This was the next version.
Shortly after that, the building was painted a brighter pink color. However, I subdued the pinkishness in this little version here.
Finally, I recently painted this study. It's different from the others in that I worked from the west facing facade as opposed to the front. The late afternoon summer sun is as much the subject as is the building.
The New Windsor has been a good old friend.
