Leroy's Art Blog

Friends of Patricia (and mine too, now) have rented the Landsdowne Theatre and Coffeeshop for Monday evening, the 31st. Marty and Elliot have been flying around the world in recent years chasing solar eclipses. They will be showing their travel videos for all the people who have been interested in following their exploits. There will be friendly people, live music, and general milling about. I volunteered to add my collection of Lunar Paintings to the occasion.

By now my Collected Lunar Paintings look like this, hanging in my apartment:



Marty and Elliot thought that idea was fine, but reminded me that they are chasing SOLAR eclipses, not LUNAR eclipses.

Whups!

So I decided that in the week remaining I would paint a series of panels that feature a solar eclipse, and then I could provide a CELESTIAL display for the occasion. Thinking about depicting a solar eclipse turned out to be an interesting exercise, and it sure has kept me busy all this week. I ended up painting six panels, and worked on them all at the same time so that the colors would be consistent from one panel to another.

The style continues what I did for the Lunar Paintings, definitely a change from the figurative work I had been doing up to now, and even from the abstractions I was playing around with earlier this summer:








As an aside, any discussion of “color” stresses the importance of how much the appearance of a color depends on what it is next to. That shows up so well in this sequence. The foreground is a dark green, overlapping a light green. In the first and last panels, the light green almost disappears and the dark green is predominant. But in the middle panels the opposite is true. They are exactly the same shades of green throughout.

Labels: eclipse, luna, lunar, moon, oil painting, solar, sun

This alternative version of "our gentle handmaiden" is currently greeting visitors at the front door to my apartment. Don't know why, really. But I like her, and I think she is a good antidote for that ubiquitous Happy Face.

OK, here's the other "little fun piece" that completes my submission(s) to Philadelphia's Art in City Hall exhibition PAPER WORKS:

Philadelphia City Hall sponsors art exhibitions from time to time. The deadline for digital (jpeg) submissions for their next one, PAPER WORKS, was August 14th. I made it with a piece specially designed for this show, but it was touch and go to pull it together in time.

It was clear the City wanted more than just a painting or drawing on paper. Specifically, the prospectus called for "A celebration of works that utilize paper as a medium, including: art books, paper sculpture, paper-mache sculpture, assemblages, collages, constructions and installations: not just works on paper."

Well, that was a challenge! I'm an oil painter, so what could I do to join this so-called celebration of paper constructions and installations? The answer came to me like a flash while I was half asleep, riding the train to visit Patricia in Media: Paint the four phases of the moon, picking up on the classical nature of the moon as feminine (with the sun being masculine), and somehow arranging to present them in sequence. I would paint these on paper plates, and instead of just painting the shadowed surfaces of the moon black, I would indicate the shadow as black hair using paper mache constructed from paper serving napkins. Voila!

While I was doing the painting, a neighbor discarded the perfect lamp for me. I salvaged it from the trash for its SQUARE lampshade, patched a few holes, and I had the ideal support for the 4 moons. I tried mounting fan blades on the shade and using a heat lamp to make it turn, but that didn't work at all. However putting a fan, like from a hair dryer, under under the lampshade worked great.

So here is the way it turned out, with the required "artspeak" Artist's Statement that describes the work (NOTE: This is the first time I've tried to upload a video into this blog. Hope it works. I think it may take a minute or two to get itself together before it starts.):



With that work as a centerpiece, I also submitted two other less grandiose paintings, an earlier study that I did of Luna, and then a little fun thing (that I don't seem to be able to upload at the moment):

Labels: art in city hall, kinetic painting, luna, moon, paper mache, paperworks

The Abstract Workshop I was taking with Kassem Amoudi at the Main Line Art Center is complete now. Amoudi teaches at the Penna Acad of Fine Arts and a number of other places, like the Main Line Art Center. I still don’t have a great interest in abstract art, but taking this course has been a useful experience. It has freed me up a bit to think about different ways to apply paint, and to just let things happen. And I have gained some appreciation of this art form - ultimately I think my work might go in the direction of combining abstraction and realism together in some way. Dunno.

The other thing is that this workshop was my first attempt to use acrylic paints. I found that I don’t like them - probably because I cut my teeth with oil paint. The acrylics in pure form dry too fast, even on the pallet, and if you dilute them they get all thin and watery. I’m sure this is largely a matter of technique and familiarity, but I like all the blending and the buttery feel of oil paints.

Amoudi really promotes the idea of starting an abstract painting with no object or goal in mind. Just let it happen and play with it as it develops - and think Outside the Box, to use that hoary, timeworn cliche. Although I am not enthusiastic about this approach, I really can bear to look at some of the things I came up with in the Workshop, that I rather like. (And then, of course, there are also others that I have painted over already.)

Anyway, to start off. This was my very first attempt at an abstract painting. It features lines of unintelligible script, and that seemed fitting, since what was happening on the canvas was equally unintelligible to me:



Then, this one started with red, white and blue bands. Then I saw another painter making lines by squeezing paint directly from tubes. So I did that too, and added a splash or two of color and let it drip some. Dripping seems to be a much-used technique in the abstract world. Feels like a cliche to me, though.

We were at the shore over a weekend, and I did a sketch on the beach. I wanted to catch the way the horizon got lost in a beigey haze of sand and spray so you couldn’t see where beach ended and sky began, although the perspective lines of beach, dunes and houses and water all led to the same perspective point. I thought it looked rather abstract, and decided to develop the idea as a painting in the Workshop. So:



Amoudi didn’t like this sort-of beach scene because I’d started out with a specific idea I wanted to develop and he says that makes it stiff and uninteresting. I guess I sort-of agree with him, but I think it still has possibilities. I may work on it some more. I’d thought it might end up with some color bands, sort of Rothko-ish, but it didn’t go that way.

Finally: I actually like this one, and I’ve added it to the hallway gallery outside my apartment. That dark base color covered an earlier, particularly ugly abstract attempt of mine. That had left it with a vague snakelike figure that then became the base of the added lines and color splashes, here.