An update on my tempera portrait. This is the result after the first glazing. I will add more glaze, thickening the sweater and adding a very light bit of color. Also the hair will receive the same treatment. I will also adjust any areas that need shapes modified, highlights, and odd bits of color for interest.
Laura, Egg tempera with oil glazing, 8"x10"
I went to the reception for the Faculty Art Show at North Georgia College this evening. It was good to see all my friends. The show was very good and photographs, raku pottery, fiber-art, sculpture, drawings, paintings, prints and sculpture were included. I'll try to get over and take some photographs for my blog. Have a lovely evening.
Hey kids! Sorry about the short hiatus. I have been helping my wife and her brother do some long needed repairs to their Mom's home. Two weeks of exhausting work and the requisite recovery from a strained back. But, thanks for stopping back by. I have posted updates to two pieces I've been working on.
Crows, Charcoal on Paper, 8"x10"
The charcoal painting is coming along nicely. The charcoal makes wonderful blacks. The edges can bleed into nice blurs of transition. The paint, at this point, is being applied with a healthy dose of solvent making it quite translucent. I am going to have to add some alkyd medium for the drying time is way too long.
Laura, Egg tempera on canvas, 8"x10"
The tempera is going on layer over layer. I wish I were a watercolorist, I can see the potential for having facility with applying the paint in competent washes rather than fidgeting the paint as I do. Anyway, have an interesting weekend and all you Moms have a happy Mother's day.
As I said in a previous post, I will turn sixty this month and it is with mixed feelings on my part. I'm not sure what the cause of this is but, the decade of the oughts was somewhat turbulent for me. The decade started with my Pop having health problems which started a general decline for he and my Mom and both of them passing just after mid decade. I have no siblings so looking out for them fell to me in its entirety. I would have liked to have eased into it but that was not the case and I always felt I was two steps behind.
Laura, Charcoal on paper, 8"x10"
During this time I had decided to finish my undergraduate degree also, my work was always in flux, feast or famine, getting paid or not. Work is work, enough said. School was a strange mix of love and loathing, of feeling out of place. Being around twenty somethings really made me feel my age.
So, here I am, through with the oughts. Throughout my life every ten years or so I have reinvented myself and that time has come around again. Its more of an evolution than a metamorphosis and I have no idea how it is going to go but I am getting a little excited. It's always interesting.
So. here to the teens. I hope you are looking forward to them as I am. Have an interesting weekend.
Here are two projects that are in the queue for me. The first is a composition that I am doing in tempera with oil glazing. This is the first of many layers of tempera and the color will build up slowly. I go a bit against tradition so, hang on and see how it goes. It is the same composition as the charcoal drawing in my post 'Back in Black.'
Laura, Egg tempera on canvas, 8"x10"
I have posted this charcoal drawing that will become a painting I intend to do using charcoal and oil medium. I would like to take advantage of the beauty and visual vitality of the charcoal and the translucence of the medium as a glazing over the charcoal. I thought I would use white chalk with the charcoal but, in the end I will probably end up using titanium white oil for the highlights. I will start the project by laying out the drawing on a canvas on chipboard panel. The panel will be fabricated by mounting a primed canvas on chipboard with acrylic medium. I will then execute the first stage of the drawing in charcoal and as with the tempera, fix it with a coat of shellac. From that point I will add depth to the drawing with glaze and more drawing. I'm doing my favorite thing here, groping blindly. If you have done something like this, please chime in with a comment or leave me and my readers a link. I will post progress photos along the way for both pieces as well as more charcoal drawings. I'm still learning from them.
Crows, Charcoal on Paper, 8"x10"
I will leave you with a little appropriate music for a composition with crows.
Have a good evening and a lovely spring week ahead of you.
I do admire the figurative work of Richard Diebenkorn, He produced figurative work for but a few years after doing dedicated abstract paintings. Then, he returned to abstract work and did no more figurative work. Oh, the delightful figures he produced, beautiful blends of abstract and representational themes.
I was born in April 1950, on the crest of the Baby Boom. Now, I am facing one of those milestones that gives one pause. We Boomers have a significant history in that we are the bridge generation for the age of Rock and Roll, the Space Race, and the Era of Environmental Awareness among other significant historical and cultural events. This is all pretty well documented, Vietnam, Woodstock, Apollo 11, et. al., each time a journalist has a touch of nostalgia. Beyond that though lies a significance in that our parents were the World War II generation, a generation that grew up in the Great Depression and then fought a great conflict of moral imperative. The downside was that they thought they were right about everything, little wonder we were rebellious. On the upside, most of what we are is a product of them beyond the misery they gave us by being our parents.
My dad was born in 1921 and was drafted into the army in 1942. Bill Haley as in Rock Around the Clock was born in 1925. Jack Kerouac was born in 1922 and Alan Ginsberg was born in 1926, the writers credited as the nucleus of the Beats. Timothy Leary, the psychedelic guru of the sixties was born in 1920. Malcolm X was born in 1925. More of what we are is a product of our parents generation than just our physical selves. It's a pointer to the fact that our story flows more like a river than like the cars of a train.
Masquerade, Charcoal on paper, 8"x10"
Today's drawing has nothing to do with all of this but, turning sixty is a bit unsettling which in itself is a bit unsettling and touch of youth seems appropriate.
On the Road, an American Romantic notion. Since Jack Kerouac wrote his novel in the early fifties, driving, being out on the road, is an ingrained part of the American psyche. It's reflected in our culture. Television in the nineteen-fifties brought us Route 66, about two friends roaming up and down the iconic highway that runs from Chicago to Los Angeles. Also, the song by Bobby Troup, Get Your Kicks on Route 66, celebrated this same bit of Americana. In the nineteen-sixties, television brought us Then Came Bronson with Michael Parks as a disillusioned journalist (who wasn't disillusioned?) who buys himself a bike and takes to the road. Of course the sixties were the heyday of being on the road as The Easy Rider rode off to 'look for America,' Humbert and Lolita rolled across the country staying in seedy motels, and the rest of us were Hitching a Ride. The nineteen-seventies expanded the scene in novels such as Michener's Caravans, which took on the road global. The list can go on through the eighties, nineties and the oughts.
Maybe it goes back to the frontier west, the wagon trains and the wandering cowboys. Or, maybe its the independence, the anonymity, that is the allure. An article in the New Yorker commented on On the Road and Lolita and how there was a normalness to travelers that would look odd in a normal settings such as a middle-aged Humbert could travel with an adolescent girl and not raise a question that, in any other setting, might.
Rachel, charcoal on paper, 8"x10"
So. let's celebrate the highway and revel in the romanticism of the idea. I'm working on pieces that draw on these ideas for their inspiration and want to hear your ideas of these native romanticisms. Have a good evening.
