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

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