The Muse comes at the last minute…

This is a painting from a few years ago. My gallery owner suggested I do a painting of the Sugar Bowl, an old landmark restaurant in Scottsdale. I set up my easel and started painting but the muse seemed to ignore me. I had a rather sub-par painting about done when I realized some shadows started making some interesting shapes on the facade which got my juices flowing. I made a few quick strokes and took a photo before the light slipped away. I finished it in my studio and this was the result. It was purchased by the wife of the owner of the Sugar Bowl and I’m told it is hanging in the restaurant.

Granaries in Mesa

No story or explanation, just a plein aire painting of railroad stuff and a granarie. I like the composition.

The Big Sleep…or…The Big Burn

Some paintings just paint themselves. In this case, what started out as one of those times developed into a much more adventurous endeavor.

The Loyola was a wonderful old theater in my hometown of Westchester, a suburb of LA. As with the Globe in a previous post, I took some pictures back in the late 70’s. A few years ago, I finally decided to start a little study. It turned out to be a rich experience of color, paint strokes and nostalgia. 

It sold quickly at my gallery to a couple from Northern AZ. Soon after, they moved to the damp West Coast. (They settled in Marina del Rey, about five miles from the location of the Loyola!) About a year later, the buyer came back to the gallery explaining that the painting was pealing off the backing! They were very respectful but said they either wanted their money back or for the artist to repaint the painting on a more permanent ground. So I began repainting. Everything was going along swimmingly until I tried to hurry up the drying process before I painted in the final elements. As I often do, I put it in the oven, raised the heat to 170, turned off the heat and let the painting sit in the “dryer”. All was well til my wife came home, decided to roast some vegetables, turned on the oven to 400 to pre-heat (without knowing there was something in there) and then got busy with something else and forgot about it. I came in from my studio a few hours later, as I walked into the house I could smell something wrong and found my painting to have a not so wonderful toasted effect.

So I started for the third time. This one should have gone easily but I kept fighting to keep the spontaneity the first painting had. In the end, I was pleased with it, sent it to the patrons and they were thrilled.

About this same time, I did a demonstration at my gallery in Scottsdale where I began another painting of the Loyola, a little different view. The demonstration went well and I thought “with a little more work back at the studio, this could be a swell little painting”. However, when I got home, I couldn’t find it. I drove back and sure enough, it was laying in the middle of the busy intersection of Goldwater and Scottsdale Blvd. I had left it on the top of my car.

New Year's Color

Happy New Year. Having been busy with festivities and some illustration jobs, I’ve neglected my blog, along with some other important things. Which brings me to the subject of today’s post. One of my New Years Resolutions is to post more regularly. Being self employed, I struggle with knowing what I should work on. I often find myself with 3 or 4 paintings or ideas that I am wanting to work on, self promotion that I need to do, keeping my illustration work up, updating my digital skills, posting on my blog and a host of other projects and demands. It is not uncommon for me to dither about what to do, finally decide on something and after a half hour, start worrying about another thing I should be doing and start on that and then wonder if that is really the best use of my time . . . at the end of the day I have wasted most of the day switching gears and sitting trying to decide what to do.

So! here is my solution!

One of the values of scheduling so tightly like this is that I can concentrate on one thing and not worry about other things, knowing that I have scheduled time for them. I know, this is pretty boring, but I thought the schedule with all the color looked so cool, I would show it to you. I’m curious if other artists have the some problem and if so, how you deal with it.

Street Scene Studies

A couple of studies for a street scene. These are done using an old Art Center practice; a limited palette of black, burnt sienna, yellow ochre and white. This gives a neutralized version of each of the primary colors. It works well for doing value studies with a little color.

Sargent in Phoenix

I went to the Phoenix Art Museum on Wednesday to take some pictures of a John Singer Sargent portrait.

A story is told of a journalist who made arrangements to come and observe Sargent paint. The journalist came and sat to watch what he thought would be a flurry of flailing brushes and paint. Instead, Sargent would look carefully, mix up a color on his brush, raise it to the canvas and hold it there for a few moments without making the stroke. He would do this a few times and then finally lay on a beautiful stroke. The journalist thought Sargent was teasing him, until he realized: that's how careful Sargent was to get the right color, value and intensity in each stroke. That's what I like in this painting, the beautiful transitions of tone that portray the light falling over the form-without obscuring the brush strokes! No smoothing out. Each stroke is perfectly modulated in it's value and hue creating the beauty of form plus the beauty of one stroke of color against another stroke of color. 

Jean-Leon Gerome. When I was in college, he was held in derision as a promulgator of the stiff academic tradition of the French Academy which opposed the Impressionists. Regardless of what one thinks now, this painting shows tremendous skill in composition, values and story telling.

Finally, a painting by Walter Ufer, one of the early Taos Artists. Ufer's paintings intrigue me because of the luminosity in the form shadows. He puts so much reflected light into them that they often become as light in value as some of the areas that are illuminated by the initial light source. That is usually considered a bad thing but he pulls it of by controlling all the other values and changes of hue. As a result, there is an interplay of figure/ground that doesn't often happen in figurative/realist work. The B/W version below makes this even more apparent. Notice the masterful arrangement of values. In some areas, the figures are lighter than the surrounding shapes, darker in others and same value in still others. (James Gurney calls this the Windmill Principle and gives a good explanation.}

Evolution of a painting

Back in the early 80's I went back to my hometown of LA and spent a few days walking around downtown shooting slides (how I miss Kodachrome). In those days, many of the wonderful old theaters were still in fairly good condition. Among others, I shot this image of the Globe.

For years it sat in a stack of slides always beckoning to be painted. I finally listened and a few years ago did this little study.

Finally, a couple years later, I began a full size painting. Here are some sequential pictures of the process. 

Things were going along fine until I decided the marquee needed to be larger.

Later, I felt the letters spelling GLOBE  were too tall.

Making changes like these can sometimes cause real problems, on the other hand, they often add a richness to a painting that doesn't happen when every stroke seems to be just right. I felt this one turned out pretty well.

Here is a link to see how the Globe has faired in recent years.