Monday, March 29, 2010
Exhibitions, Exhibitions
Last year the goal was to exhibit my work to see how it looks on the wall with other artists. I did get into several exhibitions and was a good experience. I liked the way my work looked alongside all the others.
This year there seem to be a wealth of exhibits to enter, and I've been making the most of them. My Bookshelf and Back to You were in the Plastic Club Small Worlds Exhibition in February:
My Bookshelf was also accepted for display at the Off The Wall Gallery from April to mid-May.
Then Pitcher Posies, the flower painting I did in Vieques, was accepted for the Sketch Club Art of the Flower exhibition in March:
The upcoming Sketch Club Small Oil Paintings will be a large exhibition, and I've submitted a very different work (for me) done entirely with the pallet knife, Chimera, and a recent painting I did at the La Colombe coffeehouse that I called Study in La Colombe (I think I need better titles for my stuff):
And there's MORE! The Plastic Club is having a Black and White Exhibition. This will be huge, because it will also include photography, charcoal and ink sketches, the whole gamut. I'd painted my Night Bus in B&W some time ago so submitted that and also, for fun, an ink and charcoal sketch of the moon face I'd first painted on a paper plate, calling it Have A Nice Day Dammit!:
And then, the Cosmopolitan Club was looking for paintings of Philadelphia Scenes. So they will show my Wissahickon Creek and Rittenhouse Square through April and May:
Finally, the Student Art Show at the Pennsylvania Accademy of Fine Art is coming up soon, and I hope to enter one or two of the paintings I've been doing while studying with Elizabeth Osborne. That's an exhibition where I would feel privileged just to have a painting accepted for show!
So, consider it First Goal Achieved. I have sold a few paintings along the line, but none of this work above has sold - and not even the painting I donated to the church for their auction:
Guess that is another one of those goals that will stay in my list of future goals. Something to keep working for and learning about.
This year there seem to be a wealth of exhibits to enter, and I've been making the most of them. My Bookshelf and Back to You were in the Plastic Club Small Worlds Exhibition in February:
My Bookshelf was also accepted for display at the Off The Wall Gallery from April to mid-May.
Then Pitcher Posies, the flower painting I did in Vieques, was accepted for the Sketch Club Art of the Flower exhibition in March:
The upcoming Sketch Club Small Oil Paintings will be a large exhibition, and I've submitted a very different work (for me) done entirely with the pallet knife, Chimera, and a recent painting I did at the La Colombe coffeehouse that I called Study in La Colombe (I think I need better titles for my stuff):
And there's MORE! The Plastic Club is having a Black and White Exhibition. This will be huge, because it will also include photography, charcoal and ink sketches, the whole gamut. I'd painted my Night Bus in B&W some time ago so submitted that and also, for fun, an ink and charcoal sketch of the moon face I'd first painted on a paper plate, calling it Have A Nice Day Dammit!:
And then, the Cosmopolitan Club was looking for paintings of Philadelphia Scenes. So they will show my Wissahickon Creek and Rittenhouse Square through April and May:
Finally, the Student Art Show at the Pennsylvania Accademy of Fine Art is coming up soon, and I hope to enter one or two of the paintings I've been doing while studying with Elizabeth Osborne. That's an exhibition where I would feel privileged just to have a painting accepted for show!
So, consider it First Goal Achieved. I have sold a few paintings along the line, but none of this work above has sold - and not even the painting I donated to the church for their auction:
Guess that is another one of those goals that will stay in my list of future goals. Something to keep working for and learning about.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Shanks does Smerconish
On Wednesday I attended a demonstration portrait study: The noted Philadelphia portrait artist Nelson Shanks was painting the talk-show host Michael Smerconish, for an audience of some 300 people over about 3 hours. It is always magical to see a strong image take shape on an empty canvas, like watching a photograph develop in a darkroom but under the artist's active control.
Shanks was working at an easel, of course. But to show the process to 300 people, a camera was focused on the canvas and the image projected to a large screen. I took a series of photographs throughout the process, mostly of that large screen. That distorted the colors a lot, of course. I tried to compensate for that with my photo editor, but you will see how much more "alive" the direct shots of the canvas are, compared to the screen-derived shots. In any case, here's the sequence:
After studying Smerconish intensely for a few minutes Shanks begins by blocking in the painting, working rapidly. He is using a rather transparent color that will disappear as he continues to work on the painting.
Then he begins filling in a middle color, laying it in rather thinly. He is concentrating on the larger areas, and leaving a lot of detail to be modified or worked on later.
During a break, I was able to look at Shanks' pallet. Large, neutral (woody) color, covered with a glassy material. He has a rainbow of paint that he works from, and lets little mountains of them develop at the edge of the pallet, adding just a little fresh paint to the top for a new painting. I'm told that is in the style of the "Old Masters," thereby keeping track of the colors and kind of providing an inventory of what should be there. Perhaps also providing an emergency supply of color that might be needed, (although I have never been successful in trying to use paint that has dried on the pallet - it clumps up and makes ugly globs on the canvas). You can see that he mixes only a little paint on the pallet and indeed, he works very thinly.
He has lots of brushes on the pallet, but seems to use only a few while he is sketching or painting the portrait - mostly only two. He does wipe them on a rag frequently, when he wants to change color.
Shanks was working at an easel, of course. But to show the process to 300 people, a camera was focused on the canvas and the image projected to a large screen. I took a series of photographs throughout the process, mostly of that large screen. That distorted the colors a lot, of course. I tried to compensate for that with my photo editor, but you will see how much more "alive" the direct shots of the canvas are, compared to the screen-derived shots. In any case, here's the sequence:
After studying Smerconish intensely for a few minutes Shanks begins by blocking in the painting, working rapidly. He is using a rather transparent color that will disappear as he continues to work on the painting.
Then he begins filling in a middle color, laying it in rather thinly. He is concentrating on the larger areas, and leaving a lot of detail to be modified or worked on later.
During a break, I was able to look at Shanks' pallet. Large, neutral (woody) color, covered with a glassy material. He has a rainbow of paint that he works from, and lets little mountains of them develop at the edge of the pallet, adding just a little fresh paint to the top for a new painting. I'm told that is in the style of the "Old Masters," thereby keeping track of the colors and kind of providing an inventory of what should be there. Perhaps also providing an emergency supply of color that might be needed, (although I have never been successful in trying to use paint that has dried on the pallet - it clumps up and makes ugly globs on the canvas). You can see that he mixes only a little paint on the pallet and indeed, he works very thinly.
He has lots of brushes on the pallet, but seems to use only a few while he is sketching or painting the portrait - mostly only two. He does wipe them on a rag frequently, when he wants to change color.
After the break, this is what the sketch/portrait looks like:
Continuing:
and --- The Final Result:
Yeah, the guy is a Master!
Friday, March 19, 2010
In Memory...
Nell Kirkland Johnson, 1924 - 2010
Nell Johnson was one of those special people who you feel privileged to know, and who you never forget. I was on a different kind of vacation - for me at least - when I met her in New Orleans where we had both gone for a watercolor course. It must have been in the mid-80s. This was a lark for me, as I had no experience with watercolors beyond splashing some color on a few sketches now and then. Nell, on the other hand, was accomplished - made beautiful paintings, and made it look so easy. She was the star of the class. I came to find out later that she had been instrumental in starting the Georgia Watercolor Society, and had been its President for some years. She had a comfortable, beautiful home and studio full of her paintings in Tifton, Georgia, and she taught both adult and children’s classes there.
Nell was truly a Southern Lady, to the core. Impeccably but comfortably dressed, witty, warm, and with the abundance of the charm that just melts through the shell of the hardest Yankee curmudgeon. She dealt daily with crippling orthopedic problems, but without ever allowing them to interfere with her generous hospitality.
We remained only in tentative, infrequent contact over the years. But she found me on Facebook recently and we talked by phone maybe just a month or two ago, She was still charming and her voice was strong as she invited me to again visit her in Tifton. So it is with sadness that I received a card with a reproduction of a painting of hers on the front, and the following message dated March 13:
Leroy or Lee -
I’m Nell’s daughter and I know you have tried to contact her recently. It has taken me some time to go through her mail and I found your 2/11 note to her. The address was incorrect and so there was delay in getting it.
Mother died the evening of 2/14. I don’t know when you last talked with her, but her health had been an issue for the past few years and she really got worse, late Dec/early Jan. She’s been on O2 for almost 3 years because of probable lung cancer. The past 6 months she stayed in her apt at Maple Court in Tifton with full-time sitters and we got Hospice services stated just the week before she died.
Mather hasn’t really painted since moving to Maple Court in the fall of ’05. She did attempt to teach a small class of residents at Maple Court, but that was infrequent.
I know Mother found you on facebook, but not sure if she communicated with you or not.
- Buttons Johnson
Nell, I am glad in can hold you in my memory, but my world is diminished in your absence.
Friday, March 05, 2010
More development work...
There is no class with Osborne next week (spring break - already!) so I've brought my paintings home to continue working on them.
I'm wondering whether it is useful to continue posting on how these paintings develop - maybe this is becoming too repetitious? I am also thinking of the dictum "Don't let them see you sweat." Well, in posting all these twists and turns as my paintings develop, all the sweat is right here, on display. On the other hand, I did intent this to be a diary of this specific course, and so it is.
The Landscape Nude: I've recovered from the horrid Blue Layer that I had applied, but now the blue is too light and I'll have to repaint that yet again. Also need to add some definition in the bottom left quadrant. At least, I did a slight glaze on the lady's thigh and so managed to cool it down a bit. But meanwhile it is hanging on my wall now, and I do like it!
Painter: I've changed to color of her sweater to a very intense red - Osborne's suggestion - got rid of the blue on the back of the easel stand, and added some contrast behind her head. All good changes. Now I need to work on the gray - maybe darker and more into a lavender hue to set off those other colors. And of course, add a bit more definition to her features. This painting has been really fun to work on.
Flowers: I'd submitted two pictures to the Art of the Flower exhibition at the Sketch Club. One, Pitcher Posies was painted in Vieques while I watched how Doris Peltzman creates her fabulous flower paintings. I don't really like the painting much, it is just one more of a million flower paintings - ho hum. The other, Consuela, I thought was more interesting, sticking the flower in the ear of a rather distainful woman. Kind of tongue-in-cheek. But it was rejected. At first I thought the jurors simply had no sense of humor, but have since heard that the first thing the jurors did was to discard every painting that had a human being in it (one with squirrels was accepted though). I still think they lack a sense of humor, although the squirrels may disagree.
Today's Excitement: Electrical parts are being delivered this morning, and this afternoon a contractor will be here to install track lighting in my apartment/studio/gallery. This is the last really major thing that I needed to do after I moved in here last November. The living room has been 'way too dark, and the displays on the walls have been lost in dingy murk. All that should now change - hooray!
I'm wondering whether it is useful to continue posting on how these paintings develop - maybe this is becoming too repetitious? I am also thinking of the dictum "Don't let them see you sweat." Well, in posting all these twists and turns as my paintings develop, all the sweat is right here, on display. On the other hand, I did intent this to be a diary of this specific course, and so it is.
The Landscape Nude: I've recovered from the horrid Blue Layer that I had applied, but now the blue is too light and I'll have to repaint that yet again. Also need to add some definition in the bottom left quadrant. At least, I did a slight glaze on the lady's thigh and so managed to cool it down a bit. But meanwhile it is hanging on my wall now, and I do like it!
Painter: I've changed to color of her sweater to a very intense red - Osborne's suggestion - got rid of the blue on the back of the easel stand, and added some contrast behind her head. All good changes. Now I need to work on the gray - maybe darker and more into a lavender hue to set off those other colors. And of course, add a bit more definition to her features. This painting has been really fun to work on.
Flowers: I'd submitted two pictures to the Art of the Flower exhibition at the Sketch Club. One, Pitcher Posies was painted in Vieques while I watched how Doris Peltzman creates her fabulous flower paintings. I don't really like the painting much, it is just one more of a million flower paintings - ho hum. The other, Consuela, I thought was more interesting, sticking the flower in the ear of a rather distainful woman. Kind of tongue-in-cheek. But it was rejected. At first I thought the jurors simply had no sense of humor, but have since heard that the first thing the jurors did was to discard every painting that had a human being in it (one with squirrels was accepted though). I still think they lack a sense of humor, although the squirrels may disagree.
Today's Excitement: Electrical parts are being delivered this morning, and this afternoon a contractor will be here to install track lighting in my apartment/studio/gallery. This is the last really major thing that I needed to do after I moved in here last November. The living room has been 'way too dark, and the displays on the walls have been lost in dingy murk. All that should now change - hooray!
