A NEW PAINTING BEGUN

The beginning of a new painting. This one is pretty grim, what else can I say. The title right now is "Legacy" or maybe "Dust". The children in front will be standing in a patch of dust with nothing but dust in their hands. Behind them, where the car is (the car is gone now) will be a lot of glittering accoutrements of our consumer age, with a fantasy castle on the horizon. The idea being that our generations have squandered everything leaving the new one with nothing but a legacy of dust. My two grand daughters posed for this. I have changed them a lot and I didn't want to make them depressed, so I didn't tell them what the painting would be about.

I'm thinking of the Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum.

SUBWAY - NEWS STAND

SUBWAY - NEWS STAND

A work in progress. I have gone back to the subway series. When standing on the platform, one looks across to the other side of the tracks. The people there seem to be in a different world, bathed in dazzling light but framed by the stark darkness of the tracks and the many support posts. I always wonder what their stories are.

I still want to lighten and brighten the people and darken the framing elements.

oil on canvas - 24"x36"

NEWS STAND 24"x36" - o/c - WIP

I have come back to this theme after quite some time. Below are a couple of paintings I did of the NYC subway a few years ago. All of these paintings are based on the F train which carries me between Brooklyn and Manhattan to Queens. 

BERGEN STREET - 24"x36" - o/c

I am thinking about adding to this series until I have enough to mount a show which I will call.

THE F TRAIN

JAY STREET - 24"X36" - o/c

And now for something completely different.

Here is a tiny 6"x6" painting that I completed recently. Not really an abstract work at all, but rather a magnified view of some kind of jellyfish as seen at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. I loved this place and found it impossible to tire of jellyfish and their mysterious, fluid elegance and beauty. So in a real color departure for me, I have been painting them using a lot of the blue that appears in the backgrounds of the aquaria there. In the sea, I suppose the back ground would be black, or that the jellyfish would not be visible at all.

As I said, I never tired of the jellyfish, or of painting them so now I have embarked on a new project of blowing this tiny fragment of one of them up onto a 3 foot square canvas. This is the initial stage. I painted the canvas blue with an acrylic base and marked it off with grid for easy transfer of the design. I have located all of the various design elements and indicated their general shapes and colors. I have a long way to go with repainting the blue in oils to give it depth and character (not to mention covering up the grid lines). Then the subtle and ethereal colors of the jellyfish membranes as well as its more solid forms. I don't care, in the end, whether or not anyone will be able to recognize this as part of a jelly fish. I just want people to recognize it as a thing of beauty.

Warm and cool colors

This is an interesting lesson in the way that warm and cool colors can affect one another. 

In this first example (oil on canvas - 14"x11") I made the tee shirt pink, since that was the true color of the model's shirt. I asked her to keep her hat on as a nice change from hair. But no matter what I did, the skin colors seemed washed out. Too much pink.

Having nothing to lose, I decided to change the shirt to a cool color. I chose blue because there is some blue in the hat and because the background was already green. The only change I made in the face was to lighten some of the highlights. It is amazing to see the difference. Now, I may darken parts of the shirt to break up that large monotonous area of light blue.

FAULT LINES - PEOPLE WITH GODS

I'm still working on this painting after a brief hiatus for the holidays. I am trying to decide which title is better "PEOPLE WITH GODS" or "FAULT LINES".

 There was always something wrong with the profile above and I couldn't figure it out. This is what comes of just making up your subjects without benefit of a model. So I turned to the internet and just googled images for "man shouting - profile".  There were plenty of good examples and I have changed him as you can see below.  The upper teeth are showing instead of the lower.  The neck is totally different.

But the biggest change is in the eye and the bones and muscles around it. And I have a long way to go on this.  But, I have learned the lesson. Never struggle with a human figure without a model or at least a photo.  Any color differences between these two are due to my inexperienced photography.

PEOPLE WITH GODS - in progress

I working on this piece pretty steadily, perhaps inspired by recent events. But I have been thinking about doing this piece for years and recent events are really no worse than so many events in the past. OK, I know that it is not fair to suggest that religion is the cause of all human misery but I don't think it is helping. This is my personal tirade about it.

PEOPLE WITH GODS

 A work in progress that I have been thinking about for a long time. The first picture is an oil sketch that I did a couple of weeks ago to work out my ideas for a painting that I am now calling "People With Gods". The second picture is a bigger version (36"x52") that I am working on.
While I am well aware that religion can bring peace, love and meaning to a lot of people, this painting is not about that side of religion. These three arguing men will be wearing small symbols that identify them as a moslem, a christian and a jew.  The red and black in the background will be explosions to represent the result of their conflict, while a group of shadowy figures trudge off in despair. Pretty grim, but that is the way I am feeling about things right now.