Homage

This afternoon I spent time copying a painting by my friend, Jack.  His style could not be more different from mine. He often works very large, mostly in acrylic, and always from imagination.  He strives to spontaneously capture the effects of light upon the landscape. 

I almost always work from my own photos, or from life. I tend to paint people or objects, rarely landscapes.  I rarely invent any subject, and seldom use such a light palette.  But I like his work, admire his willingness to invent as he goes along, and appreciate his generosity with criticism and advice.  He was leading a class this week in which he encouraged students to use large brushes, and bold strokes, so I decided to see if I could come close to his style.  Except I worked in my quiet studio, using my recycled mat board and water mixable oils and cold wax medium.  Not so bad, even though the idea was his, not mine.  Sometimes it helps to try out other subjects and styles, and it stirs up the "little gray cells."

At least I hope so.

Playing With Pears

I've been playing around with some old exercises from Robert Burridge.  He does workshops all over the USA, and I've taken two of them.  In his workshops he always uses acrylic, since it's nontoxic and dries quickly.  But instead of using acrylics, I decided to play with his method of painting pears using a little patterned collage paper and water mixable oil paints. 

None of these little paintings are especially impressive individually, but I like them like this, done in a series.  Each one has a different pattern in the collage paper under the pear.  So each is similar, but a little different.

I also liked using up old materials.  Here I used old leftover mat board cut to a 11x14 inches, or else old watercolor paper ripped to the same size and coated with gesso.  It irks me to waste materials, especially when I'm just playing around. All of these can go right in a pre-cut purchased mat, no fuss.

Updates

It has been more than a month since I've posted here.  Most of my life has been centered on health issues.  I had a biopsy on a suspicious spot in my abdomen that happily turned out to be benign, so the plan here is to forget about cancer as much as possible until my next checkup in June.  My hair is growing in and looks sort of radically stylish, and I think the nerve damage in my feet from chemo is improving, little by little. 

With the scary health concerns on the back burner for now, I've been doing more of what I enjoy, reading, getting outside, and playing around in the studio. This little eight by eight in inch oil was actually based on an online demonstration. The idea of the demo was that its easy to use large brushes on small paintings.  I went out and got myself a no. 18 bright brush (similar to a flat but with shorter bristles) and gave it a go.  To tell the truth the big brush was only for the background; the details on the orange were done with smaller brights, sized 10 and 12.  Still, it was a way I don't usually work, and following the steps on the online demo was interesting.

Other than these things, I'm looking forward to getting my cataracts fixed this month.  Little by little it is getting harder to see in low light and drive a night, to say nothing of reading subtitles on foreign films.  And when we go on our Caribbean cruise in April I want to see as well as possible.