Texas Wildflowers

Ai yi yi.

It's blue bonnet time again, and they must be painted. So I tried some more robust color combinations and crammed all the wildflowers together in my thrift store loving cup. More exploration.

30 Minute Nude

This is another good model. She is absolutely perfectly still, AND she remains smiling the entire pose. Also, she has a very distinctive elongated head which is shaved on the sides, cut very close in the back and top front, and for the crown(!) a top knot of dreadlocks bleached to a very pale yellow. I always mean to get that top knot in the painting, but frequently, like this one, the adjustments that I have to make for that long head and face force the top of the head off the panel. Oh, but she is fun to draw and paint!

Rose for Pamela

This is a commissioned piece for another birthday present.

Mugshot 49: Possible Family Member

I have had this photo for awhile, thinking how I would go at it, than finally I had the idea. I didn't want it to be prettified or babied, hence the brown background. I have had a bad cold during the painting so there have been lots of stops and starts, never a good thing, but I kept at it even when it was clear it was overworked, just to finish and see what I could do with it. The child is very serious in the photo, and I wanted to get that. Also, of course, the luminous skin. I think a large part of getting beautiful skin is using lots of thick paint, which makes skin on all its own. I didn't accomplish this, somehow I forgot about loading up the brush. Anyway, I'll have another go at it when I'm using all my cylinders. But I did like the positioning of the head in the space and the size of her, that was the most successful part.

Larry's Bouquet

This is a little painting for the birthday of my friend and neighbor, Larry, who grows loverly flowers and then he and his wife let me have cutting privileges in their garden. They are the Veuve Cliquot of neighbors.

Mugshot 47

This was a straight forward attempt to just get a likeness! I finally got it though after a few wipe downs. Mostly the likeness just appears without too much agony if all the shapes and darks are correct, but sometimes, if I can't get it fairly soon in the process, I can't see things correctly any more. And then I want to put my foot through it.

Blue Bottle #2

Another go at the fish oil bottle. I set this up as a color problem also, using the complement of blue, orange, and an analogous color to it, pink. Sometimes I can make things work in the set up and I can't quite get it in the paint. This sort of works overall though, making an orange painting with some blue in it. Soon, the reverse.

Blue Bottle #1

This blue bottle is the fish oil bottle I have been saving to paint, and I've been looking at in the studio for a few weeks, thinking, I will have to get used to it first and do a get acquainted painting. I also made a gold foil box to use in set ups for some reflective surface. I learned a lot on this one, particularly with edges and color.

Chicken Leg on Paper Towel

This is a raw chicken leg, but the lights... they sort of cook it as you go. This makes for much more interesting colors in the flesh, but also promotes thoughts of becoming a vegetarian.

Black Pansies, Pink Box

One more black pansy -- I had a smallish block of time for painting today, and so another little one.

Pink Cyclamen/Orange

This is a plant brought back from the dead. I have been trying to get to it to paint before it got any more complicated. Those pink heads bunch up into an unrecognizable mass really quickly, then there are all those patterned leaves to deal with. They are strange and beautiful, though.

Black Pansies in Little Vase

Nice to do a quiet little one after all that cowboy, gun-totin' stuff.

Son of Cowboy, Magritte Spoof

This is the large painting I have been working on. The top one is mine and the bottom one is Magritte's Son of Man. Mine was commissioned by a friend and will be used on a poster calling for art work for a juried show here in Texas in late spring. It was all my friend's idea and I was very happy to be an accomplice. I'm so looking forward to seeing the work that comes in.

Timed Painting 5: Best Nude

I am currently working on a larger commissioned painting, a spoof on a Magritte, so I am posting some timed exercises. This one is my favorite of all of them, 50 or so, and this is how it came about: I was in a Jennifer Balkan class and it had just begun, but for some reason everything was out of synch. My position was wrong and I had to move, my French easel was unstable and I had to keep trying to adjust one of the legs, my new position was under some spot lights that made so much glare I couldn't see the paint or the panel, I had forgotten the brush I wanted and had to make do with another worse one, the class had already got 15 minutes into the pose and I was behind and really shook up by all this. And yet somehow, I managed to get the feel of her in crude way that I love. Love! I did it almost blind, just feeling my way through it. I have all these nude paintings up in my studio loo from floor to ceiling, so I see them frequently, and still I like it best.

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.