Studio View





Here are a couple of photos from June 27, 2014. The photo on top is just the left side of the composite photo below. These are views of one of my previous studio spaces, which was in a large apartment, with a large living room. I moved there after finishing graduate school in 2010, and enjoyed the fact that the living room had the same working area, 14 by 20 feet, as I had in my graduate school studio in Morgan Hall. I put down a canvas tarp over the carpeting, stapling it into the baseboards at the sides of the room, and attached pieces of canvas, with clear plastic sheets on top of them, to two of the walls, to protect them from paint.

For lighting, I got cheap floor lamps from Target, and put daylight fluorescent bulbs in them. That system worked well for me, and I continue to light my studio that way.

Now I work in a smaller space, and have my paintings in storage.

When I first moved in to that studio I was working on large paintings, with groups of life size figures in landscape settings. But those paintings kept not working out. The range of variables was too much for me at that point. So I scaled down to smaller portraits, hiring models regularly to work from life. I enjoy the cool, subtle richness of natural light for working from life, and found it best to have the model sessions in the morning, when the light from the west-facing windows was at its best.

The winter of 2014 was cold and snowy, so when spring finally came it was wonderful. As soon as the weather permitted I went out landscape painting, almost every day, sometimes two or three times a day. I walked up the hill on 15th Street to the tailgating fields by the IU Stadium, quickly chose a view, and painted. I allowed myself to simplify the elements I saw as much as I wanted to, or felt necessary. The goal of the work was to capture the free feeling of the experience of being there, in an outdoor space that I enjoyed.

As my season of landscape painting progressed, I became more interested in trying to capture more of the specific visual elements of the scene. 

When the insects started waking up, some time in May, and kept flying into my eyes when I was trying to work, I decided to take my painting practice back into the studio.

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