Little Italian Dog. 6x8 inches, oil on panel

Happy New Year !

May Leonard Cohen be resting in the arms of angels...

and -- "May peace and peace and peace be everywhere" --- The Upanishads

Drawing Class Christmas Cookies: 3x2 inches, royal icing on sugar cookies

Another year under the belt.  These are my offering to the drawing group Christmas bash, at which there are multiple models to draw from and plenty of food and drink. Ah, Los Angeles...

Mug shot 106: Casper (Oil on linen, 16 x18 inches)

Although I have not posted at all since May I have been painting consistently but wiping most of them.  This one though is a commission and I used real linen and worked larger, life size -- so I knew I had to  take the painting all the way to the finish line.  That  sort of altered the way I tackled it.  Also I did a few preliminary oil sketches to get familiar with everything and  had a wee bit more confidence when I got down to business.  I just loved his face, his  level gaze. And the plaid, the plaid!

Portrait of A. After a Bad Haircut, Mugshot 105 (12 inches square)

This one was touch and go. A.had just got a bad haircut and was very upset, crying, and her nose and eyes were red and swollen. I was immediately in a hurry to get it down ( and yet not seem heartless)  but keep her in her engorged state as long as possible.

Mugshot 104: Portrait of the Immigration Lawyer (12 x16 inches oil on panel)

This is the nicest guy ever, the guy you would want to be your lawyer if you HAD to have one. He attends  the same drop in life drawing session I go to, and agreed to let me shoot him under the model's light -- which as you can see is extreme from the top down, a very friendly situation for painting. There was a painting on the wall  behind him which I took out and then put back because  -- well, this guy can really draw and yet is a lawyer, and I think all lawyers should have to take some life drawing classes along the way and learn to see human beings with some tenderness, and when I am dictator.....
But really, this painting is all about the plaid shirt.

Mugshot 103: Protrait of G. (As Frida) 8x10 " oil on panel

This is a second painting of an earlier photograph from 2 summers back, may not be the same pose, but same sitting. 4 Italian women took me to see the Kahlo show in Rome and I asked them to dress up as Frida (afterwards) and I shot them to paint. This was based on Ellen Heck's Forty Fridas show - heartbreaking beautiful.  I found painting the women much more difficult than I thought -- I didn't quite have the skills to get what I wanted, and what I wanted was a good Ellen Heck. I am laughing to realize that now. However I have continued to paint them and slowly they are coming into my own version of them. This is G., a proud beauty. There was so much definite pink and green in her skin because of the lighting -- we were in front of a balcony of course, with the sunshine streaming  into the darkened room -- and then I had to figure out how to lay the pinks over the greens and vice versa and preserve each color but match tone.  Really interesting technically to do, and fun to try to get it.

Still Life With Plates, 36 inches square, oil on canvas

This started out in realism and finished itself in abstraction, my old home.

I  have a thing about plates, dishes --- I love them. Also fun to work biggish  again, to really swing the arm and use fat brushes and palette knives and work in a frenzy, collapse into a chair and evaluate for a couple of hours. Realism is  a different way of working (for me so far), a lot of technical stuff (and some of it crap I think, but which?)  needs to be established and then I think, transcended. Oy, I don't know the answers.

Mugshot 102: The Italian (12 x 12 " oil on panel)

Well, I have been doing a lot of painting but no posting because I have been taking a class with Joseph Todorovitch and learning new stuff, therefore I've been in that in-between place where nothing is any good, nothing really resolved because, well, the whole experience rocked my world.
I recently decided I would finish everything up, starting from the left off place of not knowing what to do, and just taking the whole thing gently but firmly to its logical end. New stuff seeps in somehow,  but it's the old bicycle thing, all the parts working smoothly without wrenching effort, and then you're simply riding, fantastic
Do more painting is the thing to do, and make more of an effort to paint for pleasure. So in these paintings next up,  it's what I did for fun.

Mugshot 101: Mario/The Nose

I've done this motif several times, trying to work my way through it, to learn about the space, color, landscape (aaaugh!) clouds, lots of new things, but fun things. This still isn't what I want...I wanted something that is  more abstract and modern in regard to color and space. Still this was fun to execute. And I can see better what the problems are that must be dealt with in the planning stages. Upper one is mine and the lower is by Piero della Francesca, known in Italy as "The Nose". Correct title is: Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro, c. 1485.

Mugshot 100, Tessa in the Bath

This was a quick sketch at the end of the day.  I used big brushes and lots of paint and medium and worked like a house afire and did not let myself put the  details or highlights in until the very end, also tried to get the big spaces covered right away, including the background. Now I know to get my background color in early, otherwise I have color troubles, things don't relate. In this one I wanted the stark white of the bathroom behind her so that overall the painting is quiet, bathroomish. She was crying hard because her sister was taking up too much room in the tub, so her eyes are red and she is aggrieved. It was really fun to paint...I'm getting faster, finally!

Wait a minute.....

 I just realized I have hit the 100 mark so I went back to find my first mugshot, and here he is, done July 2011. It is a complete mystery to me how I assimilated whatever was necessary for me to be able to paint the one above.... It isn't that I didn't try hard for this one below - in fact at every step along the way I concentrated and gnashed my teeth and thrashed about, tried to ask the right questions so I could get the answers I needed, took classes, looked at painting, stretched as much as I could, painted as much as possible,etc, and did not feel much better about the results. Apparently if you stick at it though, the information enters you. I can think of no other explanation. I regret that I feel it necessary to say that I know I am not  now arrived at any high place, but even I can see the difference between these two, and I'm encouraged!