Flying Buttresses

Stats: "Roark" 30x15x.75 oil on canvas
Playlist: French and Brazilian music
Beverage: Dark and Stormy with curiously old ginger beer. Mental note: It is a new year. Buy new ginger beer.

Yes, I named a painting after the main character in The Fountainhead. Although this painting is really taken from a photo I took of the flying buttresses at the National Cathedral, when I finished it it reminded me of the cover of the book The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. I always liked the main character, rogue architect Roark, so I thought the name was appropriate.

This painting was designed to allow me to play with my interpretation of composition, light and color of a classic architectural element. I have always loved flying buttresses. What kind of a term is that, anyway? Aside from whatever the word's etymology does to attract my attention, though, I like the fact that they create unique lines from behind which light pokes out in an interesting fashion.

I wanted to show that the sky at the top of the cathedral's hill can get stunningly blue, and that the building itself turns pink in certain lighting. I used my palette to accentuate these features, which led to a green-less palette. I also insisted on painting this entire thing in one fell swoop. I started the blue background only 30 minutes after painting an orange wash over the entire canvas, so none of the layers of color are unique to what I had mixed on my palette. Each color took something from underneath. I suppose that also lends a post-industrial, anti-communist, freedom of expression sheen to the piece that Ayn Rand would be proud of. Every layer is built off of a foundation of rusted iron ore (transparent iron oxide orange), to give it a new, expressive life. It also makes for a pleasant evening and quick work.

I will be doing more quick work this weekend. In preparation for my upcoming Open Studio, I want to return to my roots and do five 8x10 floral still life sketches. Two pairs will be positive-negative images, and one is a commission for my mom to go with Pink Tulips. I intend to spend 45 minutes on each. Stay tuned!

Seasons

Seasons I: Winter



Stats: 18x24x.5 in. oil on canvas
Playlist: Shostakovich
Beverage: Water

Seasons II: Spring



Stats: 18x24x.5 in. oil on canvas
Playlist: Khachatourian, French music, Jack Johnson's September Sessions
Beverage: Water

After purchasing a digital camera last November I have been steadily compiling images from life over the past few months, with the intention of putting them onto canvas. These two paintings of a series entitled "Seasons" capture Winter and Spring. I painted both of them on identically sized canvases with a transparent iron oxide red wash to make the blue of the sky pop. I wanted to finish one yesterday, and the Winter piece only took about an hour total. So I thought, alright, time to move on to the tree blossoms! That took longer. But it was still worth it. They're relatively simple, almost like sketches, but they depict what I wanted to show.

Speaking of which, here are my original photos from which I painted these two pieces.



Winter was taken outside of the National Cathedral during one of the blizzards we had this February. I snowshoed over to the Cathedral in the middle of the blizzard, climbed onto a snowbank outside of the Cathedral grounds, and took this photo of an icicled lamppost. Yes, I snowshoe.



Spring was taken on one of our nice sunny days in April while walking to a friend's house for lunch. I stood under this blossoming tree in the Rosedale Conservancy, an estate/dog park. As you can imagine, allergy season is upon us in DC. This piece, and the simplicity of the composition, was also inspired by some watercolors of cherry blossoms I had recently seen at the Japanese Festival. I wanted to show contrast between the blue and pink colors, and simplicity of composition rather than depth.

My next two projects are going to be the Cathedral, which turns pink just before sunset every day, and an abstracted version of the Cathedral's flying buttresses (my all time favorite architectural term). After using a brush for the two Seasons paintings I am going to try to depart from that texture and use exclusively palette knives.

I've been painting for my own inventory lately but that doesn't mean I am not taking orders. Please feel free to request pieces. In the meantime I am hoping to have an Open Studio with the ones I'm currently working on some time in May. I'm taking donations of finger foods and bartenders for that event, as well.

Vrksa

Painting: Vrksa
Beverage: H2O
Playlist: "Painting" (see below)

It has been a little while. I have been working on commissions and will be posting them shortly as well. Over the last month I focused a lot on the technicality of painting, and this resulted in some interesting color mixes. I have fallen in and out of love with both brown and gray. One thing that Georgia O'Keeffe did when she was re-starting to paint was do everything in gray. I tried that. It's done. I moved on.

I wanted to go back to something more fast and fluid, like the "Snow Shadows" painting. It keeps growing on me. So I was in yoga the other day (my body still hurts) and we were focusing on twists. Our opening moving meditation was very tree-like. We were standing moving our arms up like branches, twisting to the right, returning to center, then twisting to the left. It reminded me of looking up at giant redwoods in California, when you can see the sun shining through the branches and they are so high up.

And the outline of the tree against the sun is a deep dark purple against a bright yellow. So I painted it. I did this whole painting this afternoon and opted to keep it simple with the palette knife. It doesn't look as fluid and blended as "Snow Shadows," but rather it looks like some sort of African batik print. I don't know if that's because of the palette knife or the difference in consistency between the yellow and purple (self-mixed) paint. I will keep experimenting.

Concerning music, the inspiration for painting this today came from karaoke last night. Some friends and I went out to Clarendon for karaoke and there was oh so much 80s and 90s music. Absolutely "frat-tastic" as one friend would say. As someone who lives on the other side of the Potomac I felt very out of place. I also desperately missed my own music. Which, on this playlist, is (on shuffle):

Smile - Lily Allen
Daylight - Matt & Kim
Boom - Anjulie
Je veux te voir - Yelle
Sexy M.F. - Prince
Time to Pretend - MGMT
Play - Kate Nash
Bourgeois Shangri-La - Miss Li
F-cking Boyfriend - The Bird and The Bee
Lisztomania - Phoenix
Work it Out - Jurassic 5 and Dave Matthews
Dreams - The Cranberries (sang this at karaoke!!!)
Fever - can't remember artist
Say Aah - Trey Songz
1901 - Phoenix
Kids - MGMT
Where do you go to my lovely - Peter Sarstedt
I Get it In - Omarion
Money Honey - Lady Gaga (also sang poker face at karaoke... brought house down)
Sealion Woman - Feist
7 - Prince (amazing)
Chillin - Wale & Lady Gaga
She Wants to Move - N.E.R.D.

Carmenere

Piece: Carmenere Series 1-4. Four 12x12x1.5 in oil on canvas.
Playlist: variable
Beverage: Carmenere

I have finished, and finally photographed, the first four pieces of my Barcelona antique tile series. To be honest I can't remember what music I listened to while painting, or whether the wine was a Cabernet Sauvignon or a Merlot. Even so, it was a fun little project.

I took the designs from four single tiles, out of four different motifs, and reincarnated them on canvas with shading and brushstrokes and such. The designs come from late 19th/early 20th century Barcelona. Reworking them in brushstrokes was an interesting challenge. I started by prepping the surfaces, making sure to mix the background layer with the first thin layer of paint so that it has more dimension and age. I drew the designs first on paper in colored pencil to get the design and the proportions correct. Then I drew the basic proportions with charcoal on canvas. Finally, I mixed the colors and put paintbrush to canvas. I added in shading to give them some more dimension, and to make them look like something other than just tiles.

The two most valuable parts of this exercise were color mixing and design-drawing. I have definitely come to believe that using less charcoal is better, since it's annoying to clean up after! And as for color mixing, this was the most important part of this series for me. The colors used in the antique tiles are very unique, and the play between them is rather unusual. That is why I put these four very different tiles together, and chose them in the first place. I am looking forward to taking some of these colors to some new abstract and abstracted architecture pieces I'm working on.

TBD whether I will do more of these. I seem to have other, more appealing ideas lately, and much less time.

What Color is Light?

Snow Shadows



Stats: 12x12x1.5" oil on canvas
Beverage: Coastal Estates Cabernet Sauvignon
Playlist: Olympic Men's Figure Skating Free Skate

Yesterday my friend took me to see the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit entitled "Abstractions" at the Phillips. I had seen an exhibit of hers before at the Calatrava in Milwaukee, but that one was more comprehensive and PC. While it did show her landscapes from Lake George, NY and Santa Fe, NM, it rather glossed over her relationship with famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

The Phillips did not disappoint. While this exhibit focused nearly entirely on her prolific abstract art, it also displayed some of the art photos Stieglitz took of her. These mostly naked photos contributed to her reputation as expressing abject sexuality in her abstract paintings, when in fact they are meant to represent the emotional interpretations of what O'Keeffe saw in the natural world around her. Much like the eye gathers and refracts light, sends it upside down into our brain, and somehow our brain re-interprets the information right side up, O'Keeffe's abstract art takes what she sees refracted on her soul, and re-displays it as what she feels when she sees things.

I like this interpretation of abstract art because I often see things, or imagine I would like to see things, in a more colorful, vibrant way than they exist to most people. That is why I will always tell you that the Schultz's house is blue. It really is.

That is also why when I explored around in the snow after our blizzards last week I did not expect the photographs I took of the play of vibrant light and deep blue snow shadows to do justice to what I saw. Did you know that all white light that we see is white because it is a combination of every single color that exists? Did you know that all black is the opposite - the utter lack of light and color?

My friend and I both left the O'Keeffe exhibit with our hands over our eyes, as though viewing any other art would tarnish the feeling we had, as though we had just drank a refreshing glass of water on a hot day. I went home, turned on the Olympics, and interpreted my own colors of the snow, per the composition of a photo I had taken, onto canvas. Voila!

Blizzication, Cont.

My entire city has been shut down since mid-day last Friday. It's Wednesday. We just got our second blizzard in one week and have officially surpassed the previous (1899) record for snowiest winter ever.

25 plus mph winds and a cold ruined my plans to cross country ski down my as-yet-unplowed street today, so I stayed in and tackled a new project. I'm doing a series of antique tile designs from Barcelona, and here is the first one that I completed:



I'm calling it the Carmenere Series, after the bottle of wine I've been slowly but surely making a dent in while painting. The reason is simple. I love old tiles, and have fond memories of picking up shattered pieces of glazed tiles on a beach in Spain. I picked up a book that categorized antique tile designs from Barcelona, and thought, "I can bring these back to life, put them together on a wall, and make art!"

I've started with four. Contrary to what you might expect, I am not recreating the full tiled design, but rather am painting one tile out of several different tiles series, and hanging them together as if the whole original design were up-ended. I'm almost done with two more, and stay tuned for the first four. Ideally I'd like to do 12 (3x4), but of course that's expensive and a lot of work. Let me know what you think about this design as it unfolds so that I have inspiration to continue (or know when to stop).

Tomorrow, if the city is again shut down, I will have another new painting - an abstract painting based on the play of shadow and light in the snow.

Blizzication

There are at least 23 inches of snow outside of my apartment and it's still coming. It will be a productive weekend - probably a very long weekend - so stay tuned for more frequent posts as I paint away between snowshoeing trips!

I've recently finished another abstract commission called Hogue. It is a 36x24 inch vertical oil on canvas designed for someone's bedroom, and I came up with the design while laying awake in bed. I wanted it to be something calm but inspiring, like a good dream. In some ways the pastel colors are comforting, but in other ways the insistent use of complementary colors is energy-inducing. I first designed the purple background to be light blue, with purple shadows to give dimension to the orange spheres. However, my client said that she preferred a purple background and I'm glad she does. I think a light blue background would have been too overwhelming a contrast to the orange spheres.

When I first painted the purple background I painted it much darker, and had to go back over it with a lighter layer. It gives depth to the end result, but took a lot of paint!

Some lessons learned:

1.) Be careful of the color saturation that you mix at night, without the benefit of natural lighting. I tend to mix too dark, as I did with the initial dark purple background layer.

2.) Pay attention to your materials. If you need to "mix in" green and yellow highlights remember that paint dries and you can't do it next week. Do it right away.

3.) Symmetry. Liberally ground the colors by using warms and cools, and complementary colors, in a geometrically consistent way so that the color creates the composition and ground the painting. You can see in the details how I mixed in yellows and blues - the colors in the orange section - strategically in certain places to balance the background geometrically with the foreground. Vice versa, I also liberally added purple into an orange corner to ground the composition.







Painting: Hogue
Playlist: French Music and the Grammy's
Beverage: Hogue Riesling (very, very sweet)