Gerber Daisy and Plums

I intentionally wanted it fully and completely pink and in reality it is even pinker!

Cruiser in Shades

This is a commissioned painting for a wedding gift.

Also finished The Forgery of Venus, a real painter's novel, I don't come across many of those.

Lots of info about Velazquez, too, such as: he was a social climber who was very interested in getting ahead at court; he only did 150 painting in his lifetime; his understanding of drawing was so thorough that often he began painting without preliminary drawings; and most interesting to me, his paint was very thin, even runny and lots of the linen showed through. This must be why you can't see brush strokes much. I looked at his dogs this weeks, there are many of them, and they are all done very simply without much detail and with very soft edges. And so I took what I could from that, it was helpful.

Timed Painting 4: Karma

Karma again, this time on black gesso with her hair to one side. I am halfway through Michael Gruber's The Forgery of Venus (riveting read, protagonist a painter!) which is about Velazquez. It is a psychological/ metaphysical/ science fiction/ art mystery and there are naturally some Italian art terms in it including "sprezzatura". This means studied carelessness according to the computer dictionary, but I think the word has no sense of affectation to it, it means the lack of laboriousness and resulting ease because the subject is so thoroughly understood. Of course I am beating to death the perfect effervescent word here, but when painting is not overworked and you have somehow caught the thing, it is such a triumph! In 30 minute paintings there is no chance to overwork, they are always fresh, even if they are wrongly painted.

Timed Painting:Karma 3

Yet another 30 minute painting of Karma. She had rope of red hair pinned on her head. Unpinned, it fell to her waist.

Timed Painting:Karma 2

Another 30 minute painting. Because of a strong back light, she had a very complicated light pattern on the front of her body with only a little sliver on the left breast fully lit. It sort of makes a design pattern here rather than making a body feeling mass -- however, interesting to have to get all those grayed colors down fast. Still loving the sense of bulk though.

Timed Painting:Karma

This is my favorite model, I am over the moon when she shows up. She is so paintable.

It was a 30 minute pose. When I look at the painting the next day, it seems that the strokes are so few and the painting is so small, how could it have taken that long -- but when I am doing it I am going like a house afire and always irritated that the time is up. So much has to happen before the paint even goes down though....I have to figure out what part of her I want and then get the parts connected and then decide on and mix the paint and then get it down. Well, this is no big deal, it's the same for everybody, just that it has to happen fast, so it's amazing to have anything coherent at all. The fact that there isn't time to think is maybe the best and most valuable part of the exercise, because I am frequently surprised by what I did.

Mugshot 46: Halloweener 2

Here is another sort of head dress. This is one of the boys in my neighborhood on Halloween, at twilight. I gave out candy for photos on the street. I would like to figure a way to have the portrait more formal and yet not.... Maybe what I mean is, I want to paint like Velazquez, which I do, I do.

Mugshot 46: Queen Mariana of Austria (2) after Velazquez

This was the painting I was really wanting to copy because it was mostly black and grey and only the face was treated with luminous color. I think this must have been a study for a final portrait as so much of it is abbreviated, for instance the bodice is just suggested. And that hair! It looks like coiled intestines stuffed into a head dress. Most everything including hair is a combination of ultramarine blue and raw umber. I had forgotten what beautiful browns and grays can be made with them. The skin was this pale I swear! I worked from a 2x3 inch image from a museum postcard. Learned so much!

Mugshot 45: Queen Mariana of Austria, after Velazquez

Boy o boy, this was really fun. I have loved Velazquez's paintings of this queen and her splendid hair and I learned so much doing it, it was like a little workshop. There is a child's portrait I have been wanting to do but couldn't figure out how the wrinkle-less cheek would be treated, and it was all there in the portrait. I did it once using my regular palette and couldn't get the color right (I mean it's not really right anyway, but way too far off) so I wiped it and slept on it, then the next day realized I could get the color with the earth tones that V. undoubtedly used, raw umber for one. I also used Indian yellow for the skin, it was so much more delicate than yellow ochre. As a matter of fact, the skin was all yellow, red and blue - the eyebrows were straight ultramarine and white. Of course I am working from a copy in a cheap magazine, but so what. This was a great experience, I can see why copying paintings is so valuable.

Mugshot 44: The BMW Man

This is definitely the best zipper I ever painted.

Mugshot 43: Halloween

I have a Velasquez in my studio - not a real one, of course, a Chinese catalog of his work with all the copy in Chinese - opened to a painting of the Spanish Infanta, with her hair done in the most rapturous architectural shape, and then white plumes with red bows attached to it. So I was just thinking...children with headpieces, hmmm...and thought I'd have a go. I can see that the thing to do is to copy the painting to really understand it, so I am preparing a canvas. I'll see if I can find a photo of this painting. One of the interesting things about V. is that you can't see any brush strokes. At all. I don't know how he achieved this - there are directional marks of paint but no typical strokes and no edges, either. On this painting I tried to have no edges, really that's difficult to believe when you look at it, it looks like all edges. And so to work.

Mugshot 42: Worried Man

I suspect this is another iphone photo, but still pretty good to work from.

Mugshot 41: Another Popple

She sent me some good photos to work from so I had another go. I don't know what it is she's

holding in her hand, some sort of machine with an antenna.

Mugshot 40: The Splendid Linda Popple

Linda Popple sent me these pictures so that I could do her mugshot. Her own mugshots are very lively and interesting, please stop by and see them: Click here.

Mugshot 39: J. from an iPhone

This was from a terrible iphone picture, maybe taken in the dark. It was very blurry, which was a help really, because there was a lot of detail I couldn't see and so I couldn't get hung up on it.

Purifying Mask, Value Study

One last one with strong value shift on the face. And as ears are a favorite thing of mine to paint, it was fun to have a shell pink baby one and a brown boxer's ear on the same head.

Value Study:Purifying Mask

More grappling with values. I am following an exercise from Catherine Kehoe's student painting collection posted on her teaching website, Powersofobservation.com. Although the directions were not stated, I could see one group of portraits done with very close dark values and one group done with lighter values. I went back through my photos to find something dark, and it would have been better without all the white, but as it was I found it challenging. The lower portrait is done by a student, I think Jamie Baldwin is the correct name. Those student paintings are wonderful.

Cowboy Hat

I went back through my cowboy hat pictures to find some photos with pronounced value differences. Since I have a painting session once a week with a model, I can see that it is ever so much easier to work from a model (with strong lighting) than from photographs. I don't know if I can rope my possible family members into this mindset.

Lemon on Oriental Rug

This is after Robert A. Johnson' s Pear on an Oriental rug. It's a great DVD, I recommend it. One of the most valuable things he discusses is how to keep a painting from being overworked and yet have a high degree of finish. I am not so interested in having a high degree of finish, however all the issues he addressed were interesting and helpful. Also, the way he put the paint down was wonderful - there nothing like seeing it done to help you get the idea.

The Lemon Trials.....

I am about done with this lemon thing, however....it has been interesting. I have been looking at a DVD about Robert A. Johnson, a taping of a workshop I think, and of course he shows a whole new way to paint and also a palette with some colors I haven't used before, so there is lots to play with. In this painting I used for the first time terra rosa, which when mixed with ultramarine makes a very civilized blue grey, even going to a rich black, which is behind the lemon. In the DVD he works on a still life in a much looser way than I am used to, but I like the play, the give and take of shaping form that is gradual rather than getting it in stone on the first go. The paint intermingles more this way too. He can even speak intelligently about painting in general as he is doing it, which is impressive. He mentioned the difficult but important goal of being able to paint without thinking, my kind of guy, and also said this was a result of lots and lots of painting. I found considerable consolation in that, because as long as

you keep painting, well....it could happen.

Lemon on Pink Cloth

Another exercise using a white ground. Also I used hog hair filberts on this, a couple of small ones and a medium. The paint goes on differently and has more of a drawing quality to it when I use these brushes. The brights and flats force a plane and I like this too. I feel I shouldn't be drawing, though. It's probably all in the head, how you see the shape of the space and then get that down with the brush. Just thinking out loud here... Van Gogh's paint and the way it went down is generally with a smallish brush and there are lots of marks which follow the form. I love the vitality of this! Oh, and the feel of the paint, with ridges and valleys and scumbling, still apparent after a hundred years. You can get more paint down with that hog brush, for sure.

Lemon on Orange Kimono

The back story: a good painter friend mentioned looking at Diebenkorn, the forms, space, etc. and so I picked up my own book and spent some time looking at the way the color flattened the space, even when there is minimal modeling. I love this idea when it works, the perfect tension of the color and the picture plane, everything pressing outward in dynamic balance, if such a thing is possible. So I tried to set up that situation using a single bright lemon with enough other color and pattern that would cause it all to hang together in that "fresh but inevitable" manner. Regardless of the success of this painting, it is a direction I have been going in for a long time and still find thrilling and natural to my view of the world. Just how to combine it with a mug shot.....how to use the modeled figure with this degree of abstraction. Oy.

Also -- Happy New Year! Thank you everyone for your support and encouragement, I appreciate it enormously.

Jean

Lemon on Blue Stripes

I have come back from L.A. with a sack full of meaty weirdly shaped lemons with big leaves attached! If I don't paint them, the leaves will soon fall off and I'll be full of regrets, so I might stick at these for a bit and have a rest from the mugshots, with which I am still obsessed. I am also reading the book Man With A Blue Scarf, On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud by Martin Gayford, and there is the most discussion about Freud's process of painting I have ever seen in print. He didn't give interviews much and didn't do art talk. Gayford' s book, however, has lots of their casual conversation. I was very surprised to find that LF doesn't tone the canvas at all, leaves the naked blaring white of the canvas there and then proceeds to work very slowly from the top down, as if he were doing a paint by the numbers picture. And it is very slowly, as long as a year or more on a single painting. When asked by Gayford why he left the canvas white, he said, because it seems more difficult to get the values with the white and this made him work harder at it. (I always try for the easiest way.) So on this one I left the white ground to see what difference it made. I wanted to be certain to get a deep enough value on the white stripes in shadow, so I really paid attention to this as I was mixing. I can't yet see if this is a meaningful improvement, probably too small an exercise.

Mugshot 38, Putin

I found this photo in the New Yorker magazine along with a big article about Putin. It said he has had lots and lots of botox in his face. It is VERY smooth....

Double Portrait, Purifying Mask

These are two of my possible family members roped into the mask project.

Mugshot 37: Halloween

Happy Holidays!

Dog in a Boat

This dog really was in a boat. It can be a conceptual piece as well as realistic.

I am finishing up Christmas paintings this week and can't post everything without ruining surprises, so I feel like a blog slacker with so few postings. My nose is pointy from the grindstone though.

Baby Lucas

This is a commissioned painting for the Dallas family who rescues sick dogs and gives them the most luxurious life imaginable. I should be one of their dogs. Lucas is a parti Pomeranian and is the newest addition to the family of, I think, 8 dogs.

J. and L., Double Mugshot 36

This is the final answer.

Mugshot 35, The Acupuncturist

Ok, back at it. This is another stab at the shadow vs. light issue. Actually the painting is much redder - more red? can't remember how that is written, but maybe because we finally finally have rain here and there is little daylight, it didn't photograph correctly. Small price to pay for rain.