Category Archives: Painting

I skipped drawing this week to make a bunch of oatmeal bowls.  I’ve started a new website called myoatmealbowl.com, and I don’t have any ware to sell.  I’m expecting to put a few items up for sale soon and maybe in a couple of weeks or a month I’ll have some regular items available.  If you check out the website, please take the short questionaire on the “contact” page.  In the meantime here are a few pictures I photographed recently of some drawings from years gone by.  Both of these are Conti drawings on paper, actually cropped

down from full figure drawings.  The painting below is of my VW Van that I used as my rolling studio apartment in in the late seventies.  The van was named ‘Faith’ and it seemed sometimes that faith was all that kept it rolling.  But keep on rolling it did until a tired and slightly

intoxicated bar waitress cut across the parking lot at a diagonal on a foggy night after the disco had closed and crashed into me. And spilled my drink, I might add.  It was technically totalled but I managed to keep it rolling for a few months more till I left for San Francisco.  I sold the van to a friend and put the engine in a little red VW beetle and headed west.  Which reminds me…here’s a picture of San Franciso from El Cerrito.

Here we are back to Friday after Thursday and another watercolor to view.  I’m making plans to go to the new Gauguin show in DC next week.   Couple of us artist fellows on a day trip.  I saw a big Gauguin show about twenty years ago and apparently this one has a different focus.  We’ll see.  In the meantime here’s a sequence of the figure study I did last night.  I took a slightly different approach by building it up with very faint washes.  It worked pretty well and I’ll probably work this way more often.

The whole page was washed with a very pale yellow. To get the paper wet and to take away the stark whiteness of the page.  This picture shows lots of shadows created by the multiple ceiling lights passing my body as I leaned over the painting to take the picture.  The shadows are kind of interesting, too.  I think.  This was full sized sheet of Arches paper.  I covered the whole sheet with a pretty large brush and did the drawing with a medium sized sable brush…dipping into a small bowl of tinted water.

I was pretty happy with the way things were going at this point.  I put the bench the model was resting on in using more or less the true colors.  The background is still just yellow…the shadows in the photo are creating the illusion of some subtle color washes.  Nice idea but that. not what was happening.  I ended up placing the figure a bit low on the page, which isn’t terrible, but I’d have prefered it to have been half an inch higher.  I sort of skipped ahead to this final version.  I ended up using some dark lines to draw in some of the features.  Notice the background is now created with some actual painted washes rather than random shadows.  I  had a great time painting in the background.  It’s all fun!

Clearly, I’ve been slacking off on the blog.  I guess I’ve become overly dependent on pictures and when I don’t have any to show, I feel un-prepared….a picture being worth a thousand words.  Today I have some pictures from Thursdays figure class.  I decided to focus on the head.  I didn’t make any attempt to create a background with any narrative content…just to provide a space for the figure to exist in.

I started out with a pencil sketch that took about fifteen minutes then put a few colored washed over to establish the main themes of the light:  Yellow for the light source, red for the figure and blue for the background.  Themes that more or less remained true through to the end.  This didn’t turn out to be a very good likeness, but I like the clean fresh quality of the colors.  I sometimes go a bit muddy.  Which is ok with me, usually.  Here’s the finished

piece…on the left.  Somewhat cropped on the top.  On the right is Gerry Valerio setting the pose.  Gerry has been running this group for quite a while. Probably ten years.  I did the job for a number of years before that.  Before me, Steve Perkins and Bill Wells before that.  Somewhere way back in the early mists of time Moe DeLaitre did the job…I’m not sure, but I think she may have originated the class.