work in progress

My Studio Space

Faucet Alla Prima, 24"x30", Acrylic on Paper

Rocks

Man on Great Bay Beach (in progress), 24"x30", Acrylic on Paper

I enjoy the way the rocks are functioning as illustrative marks move in and out of the crevices between the rocks. I tried to delineate the changes between rock to rock without too much change in value and the use of mainly expressive lines with India ink. There was a point in time where I began to darken in too many areas and the tone began to read as muddy. In order to work some clarity back into the rocks I began to layer thin gesso back over the rocks to maintain the linear structure of the rock.

Added skin marks and hair

The man’s body has swift washes of ink in order to block in the muscle structure that composes his back, leg and foot. He has an intense farmer’s tan which can be seen in the shift between the tone of his neck and upper back. I went in with dark scratchy marks to describe the depth of his roots underneath the tufts of his white hair.

And then some hits of color

I chose carefully to use color in a selective palette in order to lead the eye through and around the composition. The pops of color on the boat were painted in in order to emphasize their structure and tie them to the water in the background. There is an interesting push/pull happening between the water and the figure in the foreground as he sits in front of it. The shorts have a hit of orange to suggest the figure’s longing after the distance and looks out of the picture plane in order to further demonstrate that longing.

Detail of Shorts

Sarah in the Shanty (in progress), 24"x30", Acrylic on paper

The selective use of color is an effort to lead the eye around the canvas and draw special attention to specific areas of the painting. I chose this photograph to work from in order to emulate the work of Zak Smith in my own version of the style. Zak uses linear descriptive black lines with selective color in his portraiture and sketches.

I began with an under drawing done in pencil then moved into an India ink wash to capture information with bold marks. I enjoyed working with the fabric and patterns of items in the background and jacket that suggest areas of the composition and provide points of departure for the eye to travel in space.

After most of the information was blocked in I began to work with the skin tone in the face which got fussy at some points. I went back in with thin white lines to hint at the planes of the face. The mark making jumps around at different places in an effort to experiment with looseness of marks and direction of application and show the shift between surface texture of the objects. I am enjoying the gradient in the hair tone and the contrast between marks made and tone washed through the area.

The area of clear plastic sheeting draped as insulation underneath the rafters needs some work yet to get the feel of the draping and the tautness of the material. There is some fabric-like quality with the luster of the highlights.

Is it already spring break time again?

Great Bay Beach, 2'x3', Acrylic on Canvas

This is a painting from a photograph taken in St. Maarten about this time a year ago. My work is mainly based off of photographs taken while I travel. I want to communicate my vision of how I imagine memories to look in narrative form. I aim to display the memory and capture the atmosphere of that memory combined with physical elements from the photograph. This was a photograph a young girl on the beach with this intense beautiful backdrop of Great Bay Beach in Phillipsburg. The important moments in this painting are the linear elements and my working toward a more hand drawn quality to the canvas as opposed to my previous work.

Through the process I found myself fighting and going back and forth from old techniques and trying to strike that balance. This painting flopped in the midst of that because it got too heavy and overwhelmed the space, and ultimately did not achieve what I wanted it to.

As I started out I was disappointed with myself by being stubborn and laying down all of these layers of paint on top of drawn elements trying to cover up as much of the drawing as possible. I fell back on this comfortable way of painting that I have been working at for the last several years in acrylic washes and struggled to show those drawn elements. Every time I laid down a drawn line I had to force back this compulsion to cover it up with paint. It took me several days before I realized what I was doing and by then the marks were covered up with this dense unforgiving paint.

As I mentioned before, my work consists of these memories that have been recorded by photographs but not actually captured. I work with the memory in my head and try to convey that through the emotion I felt and the atmosphere as well as the physical elements of the photograph to synthesize what being there was actually like.

This particular memory from St. Maarten, overlaid as this beautiful tourist attraction with vibrant colors by vacation and cruise and dark, mysterious place to live. There was this little girl that I watched play. She was completely unconcerned with the kitsch vacation and immersed in this calm curiosity with the beach and waves. I tried to capture the feeling of separation from the rest of the scene that I saw in her and that thing that everyone envies after children for.