I can't believe it's 2012 already, I hope everyone had a great time these past few weeks. I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has supported my artistic endeavors all of these years. To all of you who pushed me to keep going, thank you for your support, your kind words of encouragement, and for purchasing my work! Lauren and I went to the always warm Nicaragua for Christmas. We spent a couple of weeks with my family, visited with many good friends and did a bit of traveling around Nueva Segovia. Our time in Nicaragua went by too fast but we had a great time. Here are some pictures from the visit: A new addition to my town's park is this "interesting" fountain, a tribute to the pirates who sacked Ciudad Antigua in the 1600s. It has become a classic photo op for the town, so Lauren and I had to get our photo taken there too.
Thank you for your visit, have a Happy and Healthy 2012!
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It's been so long since last time I posted here, I need to get better with this. Here are some commissioned paintings I've been working on lately:
These are some of the paintings I have for sale at Teal Gallery, a great new fine art gallery opening Tuesday November 1st. Their website is still under construction but it should be up in a couple of weeks.
Teal Gallery 42 Oak Street, Roswell, GA 30075 Open Tuesday - Saturday 11a.m. - 6p.m. Sunday and Monday by appointment. We are in fall mood now, Lauren and I have started hiking again on some great trails near Atlanta and we are enjoying the cooler weather.
We've had some rain lately but today we have a perfect blue sky, the leaves are changing their summery green for warm, bright colors and pumpkins are showing up pretty much everywhere you look (porches, front yards, lattes). I will be bringing in some of these fall colors to the painting I am currently working on (Shown above). The picture above shows the underpainting, a thin application of burnt umber and turpentine. Once this has dried, I'll bring the colors in. Starting a painting in this way covers the stark white canvas, making it easier to judge the colors and values when bringing the colors in. I'll keep you posted on the next step... I am very pleased to announce that I am now represented by Teal Gallery, a new Fine Art Gallery opening this month in Roswell, GA. The owners are putting some finishing touches on the gallery space and it will be up and running soon. Teal Gallery will offer original art by several artists located in the Southwestern U.S. Here are a few paintings I've been working on lately: The sunflower in this painting showed a good deal of perseverance. I purchased a packet of Mammoth Sunflowers at our supermarket back in the Spring and planted them at the end of our driveway. A few of the plants suffered at the incisors of a hungry animal (those little bunnies did not turn out to be so cute after all!) when they were just inches high. One plant survived its broken stem and while the unaffected sunflower plants grew like crazy, this little broken plant kept fighting growing up just a few millimeters each week. A few weeks later, I had about a dozen plants over two meters high with huge, beautiful sunflowers following the sun the end of the driveway and one tiny sunflower hanging out there below all of the action. The little sunflower lasted longer than any of its larger mates. I had long forgotten it until it was time to cut down the dead sunflowers. The broken little plant had made it! This seemed to me a sign that I was to paint the tiny "mammoth" sunflower. (I had tried to create a painting from some of the larger sunflowers, but I didn't like how it turned out.) It may not be perfect, but I am happy with "Sunflower with Tomatoes". Another one of our home grown tomatoes with some hydrangeas. I've done a few hydrangea paintings now and I really enjoy painting them. It's pretty challenging and it takes a lot of time to paint them, but it's fun to work on, and they are beautiful flowers (sorry, Madonna). This small painting came together after our neighbor brought me some sacuanjoche flowers from the two plants she keeps on her deck. Lauren had just purchased two pears the day before and I was inspired to put the two yellows together in a painting to experiment with tone value.
If life gives you gourds, paint them. A few of months ago, while working in our small backyard garden my wife and I found a couple of suspicious plants. They looked similar to the cantaloupe plants that were growing a few feet away in another bed, but we hadn't planted anything in that spot. We thought these unidentified tendrils could be melons, squash or pumpkins. We decided to let it grow and see what it developed into. A lot of watering and some weeding later, we had beautiful (inedible?) gourds. I didn't know what to do with them but paint them. At first, I thought I would add a few gourds in a large still life, but these gourds had such beautiful lines and patterns that I decided to do a couple of paintings using just one gourd setting it up in different positions. As I was about to start the third painting, I had the idea of filming the process. I have seen many painting tutorials on Youtube and I wanted to try it out for myself. As this was my first attempt at filming the painting process, you'll notice some glitches. For my next video attempt, I'll be more careful with camera placement so my head doesn't block the canvas. I hope viewers can get the general idea of how this painting was created from start to finish, with the exception of the first step of drawing on the canvas (I had already completed that step before I got the idea to video the process!) Here's the video, if you can't see it click http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acKxQF_z-jg to watch it on YouTube. |
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