Monday, May 10, 2010
Summing up...
The semester is over now. No more classes with Elizabeth Osborne. I feel a bit regretful about that - she is such a nice person, and I feel that I learned so much from her. I've completed that standing nude now. So three paintings came from her class - all of them in a very different style for me and larger than what I'd typically been doing before. I like all three of them. I don't expect to continue painting in this style, but I have learned a lot from it, and it will surely inform my work from here on. That's a nice feeling.
Here are the three paintings, more or less in their relative sizes. To complete the standing nude the white stripe was added and then toned down, some of the script was reduced a bit, a slight pattern introduced into the cloth along with some assorted tweaks here and there. The deliberately illegible script is from Robert Henri's discourse on the relationship of a model to [her] background.
Of course I have been doing a few other things along the line, too. A future Plastic Club exhibition will be based on self-portraits. Since I've really only done one and that was back in May 2008, I thought I should see what I would come up with now, as a straightforward head shot. So here it is - I think I managed to get my bulbous nose and dome of the head pretty well, and the beard is OK too.
Then, my friend Sheila has set up a 501c3 organization to provide some great art programs to school kids in Upper Darby, called Sunshine Arts. Check it out - she has a great home page on her website. She has a fund raising event coming up, and wanted some art work to sell. I gave her a few things, and also did some sketches with some watercolor added. They are done loosely, and I'm curious to see whether they find interest (ie, buyers) at a fund raiser like that. Here is what I put together for her, working mostly from some of my old sketch books:
