Showing posts with label color. Show all posts
Showing posts with label color. Show all posts

The Chair

The Chair. I'm reminded a bit of Joseph Kosuth, but only slightly.


This particular chair is often occupied. At this particular moment, it is not. What you're seeing is the middle of the first session of a portrait, during one of our breaks.


Welcome to New York. Thanks to Lyndsey for agreeing to take a turn as a subject. Painting the portrait of a photographer is pleasant evening.

This first stage was an exercise in proportion and composition. Stage two is scheduled for this week, where we'll hopefully settle in on local color.

Sorph and Bobby at the Sunrise Festival

Sorph and Bobby at the Sunrise Festival. From the Sunshine sketchbook, June 2007.

Purple Flowers Waving in the Wind

Purple Flowers Waving in the Wind. Imagine an outline of every purple flower that this plant has ever produced. Place each outline on top of one another. Every new flower would add another iteration, eventually approximating an ideal shape.

Picture that shape.


(Did you catch the Yoko Ono allusion?)

101 Blues

101 Blues. Fabric. Pencil. Pen. Ink. Marker. Paint. Plastic. Chewing Gum. A rainbow of blue.

Maryte in the Park

Maryte in the Park.

Watercolour and pencil on paper. June, 2008. Angel.

We were in Angel park, except that it's not really called Angel Park. What I mean is that we were sitting in the park which is located close to the Angel tube station, the one with the war memorial. It was one of the first sunny days of the summer.

Girl on Concrete Wall in White Dress and Black Jacket

Girl on Concrete Wall in White Dress and Black Jacket. We (Ewelina and I) were looking for the sun. Nothing good on the Southbank. So, we crossed over the Thames river. Passed Big Ben. Crossed the street. Settled in a little park across from Westminster Abbey.

Then, the sun found us. And it was nice. Until about 7pm.

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The Empty Chair

The Empty Chair. Camden. A coffee shop. An empty chair. Lucy. A watercolor sketch for a painting. Or, a watercolour sketch for a painting. Geometry of the form. The form in geometry.

As I was painting, a well-meaning woman came over and started asking me questions. About my watercolors. About my watercolours. About my pens. About my drawings. And it was a bit annoying. A bit rude. And she should have waited for me to take a break. Lucy was posing hard.

Note to people: it's better to not to disturb artists engaged in the act of creating. Wait until they take a break. Otherwise, you only get one word answers. Had she waited, I would have loved to talk. But,...


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Girl with Blue Necklaces

Girl with Blue Necklaces. The oil painting of Meral sitting on the couch. It's much easier to paint someone when you've done your homework:
Meral
A Cardboard Painting of a Woman
Meral, Discontent in Green Jacket at Brighton
Coffee and Complicated Thoughts in a Red Chair




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paintings.drawings.arithmetic.

Second Letter to a Lost Love

Second Letter to a Lost Love. I really, really enjoyed putting this letter in its package. The people in the post office liked it too... I also included chocolate. and sprayed the pages with cologne. Dior. Fahrenheit 32.

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paintings.drawings.arithmetic.

Two Tiles Forming a Decorative Arch (From Turkey)

Two Tiles Forming a Decorative Arch (From Turkey). At the Victoria and Albert museum in South Kensington, I went drawing today in the Islamic Middle East section. On Friday, I'm flying to Istanbul. Well, Zurich first. Then, Istanbul. Consequently, I have decided to start a new sketchbook, tentatively titled: Istanbul.

Islamic designs can have so much symmetry. Since I don't erase (even when drawing with a pencil), I was very conscious of maintaining a well-defined symmetric balance to this pair of Turkish tiles from the Anatola region of Turkey.


By the way, those portable museum drawing stools are not so comfortable.

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Girl on the Floor

Girl on the Floor. Laura is from Budapest, but we met in the Outer Banks of North Carolina (you may recall that I once called the Netherlands my European Outer Banks. But I digress...). It was 2003. But, I didn't tell Laura that I had already drawn in this style way back in 1996. I didn't even realize it myself until I was flipping through some old sketchbooks. If you look closely enough, you can see a painting of Laura lining the wall's of Detroit Transit Railroads rehearsal studio.

Voyage Countdown Video Trailer

Voyage Countdown Video Trailer. Contains absolutely no drawings from London. Instead, a collection of thoughts, phrases, pictures, and places from the spring and summer of 2006. New York, Washington DC, friends, enemies, bottles, whirlwinds, the list of people to whom I gave over 200 paintings at my going away party... I drew numbers from a top hat (so as not to introduce favorites) to decide who would choose when... It's fascinating to compare the order of the draw (and more interestingly, the order of the choose) with my own estimations of a paintings strength...

Love Smells Like Flowers

Love Smells Like Flowers. I was wandering through the American Portrait Gallery, in Washington DC. It was 2006. Encountering a dozen new ideas about American folk art, and art in general, I made notes.

A Wrench Beside A Bottle Perpendicular to the Ground

A Wrench Beside A Bottle Perpendicular to the Ground. Get it? The bottle is parallel to the floor, but perpendicular to the ground (the canvas).

The Long Dark sketchbook begins with drawings from the night of August 13th, 2006. The last drawings I made in Richmond, realised the day before my original departure (I later decided to move my ticket back a week).


Notice the connection? You may also notice the flipside of my self-portrait, drawn on the same night).

A Cardboard Painting of a Woman

A Cardboard Painting of a Woman. Lesson #5: Preparing the Ground.

Last week, Meral painted the cardboard white. We were using time wisely while waiting for the basecoat to dry on her official portrait.

Then. We worked on the couch pose a bit more before putting a coat of blue on the cardboard for good luck.

Last night, I needed to warm-up before putting in the next stage of color on the portrait.

So, I used the cardboard to make a quick sketch of Meral. It was a nice way to reintroduce myself to my pallete. At first, she hated it. But, then I fixed the drawing. Now she likes it more than the "real" picture.

You may recognize my red chair. While painting last night, I realized how beautiful Meral's portrait was turning out. Which is when I fell through the seat....

The Spiral Id at the Sunshine Celebration

The Spiral Id at the Sunshine Celebration. Actually, the Sunrise Festival. It was June, 2007. I was camping with Sorph and Bobby. The morning I left, I got up too early. With loads of time, I could finally draw. It was the beginning of the Sunshine. (in between the Necklace and the Lost Summer).

What I can't tell you is that Bobby had just won an award at the Sundance movie festival, that Sorph had written an article for my band, that we were strangers who agreed to meet on the field of a new spring. And I was still trying to shake the weirdo out of me. That there was one sunrise which was more than I had ever known:

"The yellow sun consumed and turned me pink as I floated into everything. Liquid light grew soft and warm across the horizon until one line became an ellipse of my vision. And when my vision could no longer exist, there was no green, only pink. Only energy.

In the overtones of the light I was everything, the primal life, the foundation. In my survive, there was no one, only my own eyes. And my palette changed into true color, depth in dancing transparency.

When form returned, we were clean. In the horizon, beyond the sky, beyond the return, there was no burn, only peace." - from Adventures in an Instant, a postlude to Sunshine

This was the drawing which led me to think of symbols, and the incorporation of an abstract symbolic language of primitives as a method of defining form.

Sketchbook: The Necklace Video Trailer

Sketchbook: The Necklace Video Trailer. The week started innocently enough, a Sunday stroll through Camden Markets on a beautiful day. I was looking for a necklace, but wanted the right one to find me... I think that necklaces have to match your internal energy. Needless to say, I couldn't find anything until the right one was mailed to me from Amsterdam one month later. Made by a fairy, and a gift of friendship, I had no idea what I was getting into when I signed up to stay for a mere two-day layover in Noodjwick...

Graciously added to this fantastic list of online sketchbooks!

Happy Mother's Day, Here are Some Flowers

Happy Mothers Day, Here are Some Flowers. My junior year in college (1998) saw me with access to a painting studio. And what better way to say Happy Mothers Day than a beautiful painting of flowers that will never wilt? There was a shell yellow Asian vase, intended as a gift to my girlfriend, and a collection of yellow, green, and purple petals and leaves. I took this picture over the winter holidays at the tail end of 2007. Home for a few days, for the first time in 18 months, I was impressed with myself for leaving so many beautiful paintings. Many, I saw for the first time...

Four Bananas

Four Bananas. Sunday, August 12th, 2oo7. Cloudy, Bright. I just got back from New York today. We (Jenya and I) took four bananas on the bus from New York to Richmond. Mine were brown from too much contact, so I threw them out. Bananas certainly have a nice form, but I hate to eat them when they get too slimy.

This is drawing (page 11) from the Lost Summer sketchbook.

Red Apple on a Yellow Table

Red Apple on a Yellow Table. We had come back from St. Albans, it was cool and the freshness of the summer evening felt great. Everyone wanted to go out. I wanted to stay in. So, I drew an apple. Pen, gouche, and pencil.

Page 6 from the Lost Summer sketchbook.