Smile



Today’s image is a detail of a commissioned portrait that I did in 2009. I had almost forgotten about the painting, until I discovered this photo on my external hard drive. The portrait was painted in acrylic, which interests me since I am now working on some paintings in acrylic, my first time returning to the medium in a few years.

Acrylic is a challenging medium, if you are used to working in oil. It dries quickly, and is less highly pigmented than oil, so the colors are comparatively muted. I worked almost exclusively in acrylic for a few years, from about 2005 to 2009, after I discovered that I was allergic to the alkyd medium that I was using to make my oil paint dry faster. My palette tended toward muted colors, even after I returned to oil painting (using non-toxic linseed oil as a medium), and I am now thinking, for the first time, I think, that it could have been the acrylic paint itself that lead me, at least in part, toward the limited value and color range in which I worked for years. In recent years I have been expanding this range.

I enjoyed the surprise of discovering the image of my commissioner’s late father. And it turns out to be Fathers’ Day today.

I painted my own father, who passed away in 2003, as a young boy in Family. This was one of a series of paintings I did in 2010-2011 which were based on old family photographs. It is nice to see this detail of the painting again.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Am I Doing This?

Image
Why Am I Doing This? I have decided to write a blog about art and travel. Things that I like to think about, and talk about, tend to fall under these categories, so it seems to make sense. Why am I doing this? One reason has to do with something that contemporary artist Vincent Desiderio has said about art making in general, that it is a process of self-enlightenment for the artist. Bo Bartlett, another major contemporary artist, with whom I had the good fortune to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, spoke of an idea that I think is similar: making art is a way to wake up. But art serves the viewer, as well as the artist. I hope that this blog, like my artwork, may be interesting and useful to other people. I am working to link this to my Facebook account, which will, I hope, help more people see it. This calm little interface on Blogger that I am now using is more to my taste than is the dense web of information that a Facebook page has to offer. So if I
Read more

Birthday

Image
This is a detail of a painting I am working on. That rectangular shape is the start of a birthay cake. My mother made a cake for me when I was three or four, at the end of the 1960's, or five months into the 1970's. There is a photo of me sitting at the table in the apartment my parents were renting on Montgomery Ave. in Ardmore, with my mother standing nearby and another young person, who I cannot now identify, looking off to the left. The photo is square, the original Instagram, but black and white, not murky 70's color.   In this painting I started painting the cake and the white table cloth in green because I felt like it. I wanted to have my feeling supersede any intrinsic requirements the subject may have presented, for the sake of my ongoing connection to my work. Sometimes when this allowance is made surprising connections are made, or depths are revealed that feel true to the subject. And sometimes the self-satisfying decision can just express my feeling, whic
Read more

William Brymner, Girl with a Dog, Lower Saint Lawrence

Image
This is a sketch from William Brymner’s painting Girl with a Dog, Lower Saint Lawrence, from 1905, and a reproduction of the painting.  The piece caught my attention during a visit to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2017. The subject matter was unusual. A girl sits on the sand, or dirt, wearing what I guess was everyday dress in 1905, and holds a stick in front of her dog. Is she restraining the dog from greeting the viewer? Or is she protecting the dog from us? In the painting she has an expression I would describe as angry or frustrated. I find that my sketch adds more sadness. In the original work she faces the viewer more directly. In the painting she is connected to the land by similarity in value and color, and is held down by a horizontal land form in the middle ground. In my sketch I lightened the light on her hat, separating it from its surrounding values and perhaps connecting it more closely to the sky. I like the comma in the title, separating the protago
Read more