Ok, so technically this isn’t an experiment except for the fact that I’m using some shading external to the outlines of Jen’s face to soften and round the forms. Otherwise, this is just straight pencil work. I had to include it because Jen is such a good sport at letting me show all of my ugly experiments that use her. This is what she actually looks like.

Finally we have a piece that looks like Jen. This one was done very high key, with me doing modeling in aquarelle pencil over the top of dried washes and then accentuating with a brush pen.

Here’s another, experimenting with the blocky underlying washes and various colors of fine linework over the top of it. Poor Jen looks ancient here.

In this piece, I was experimenting with the angularity of the brushwork and its interaction with the underlying pencil lines.

My wife gets used as a model for many of my artistic experiments. I have to thank her, because often, I’m not looking for a flattering, or even and accurate likeness. I’m playing with styles and experimenting with effects and techniques. Anyway, this week, you get to see the results of some of those. Most of them are not flattering, but the most accurate ones I’ll post on Thursday and Friday. The one above is me experimenting with fluid linework.

Still Life with Weathered Bottle, 12×16″, oil on canvas panel.

Well, this is another experiment, I’m playing with the space perceived in the canvas, and with flat shapes and hard edges. I’m pretty pleased with how this turned out, but I consider it more of a “proof of concept” painting. I intend to apply this technique/style to narrative and figurative paintings. We’ll see where it leads.

In other news, please note that I have a new link at the top for classes. I’m going to be continuing the Art Bootcamp that was begun by Rob Howard of the Cennini Forum, and adding a drawing course and plein air course to the offerings. The first class will take place in July, and I’ll have one a month through October. See the link and website for details.

Second day of work on the painting. The subject is somewhat limited, because there’s very little range of motion for her most of the time. However, I’m not sure if that’s just my self-imposed parameters getting in the way of something more interesting, or if I need to stick with this line of inquiry until I suss out whatever interesting bits might be there. The hands and arms are working well, I think. The repetitive forms really give a sense of the motion and space while becoming abstractions. Other parts are much more static, but that’s how the subject behaved…

Hmm….

More to come later.

Third study from my wife working.

This is the first day of working in oils. Some interesting things are beginning to happen, especially with the hands. This is by no means a completed painting. I plan to work on this for several days in a row, constantly layering bits of observation over one another to hopefully realize two goals: one, to distill the figure into a concentration of observations, (which will hopefully reveal more than a single-image picture) and two, become an image that pops in and out of illusionistic space to create the simultaneous sensations of realism and a flat abstract surface, which should play with the perceived “depth” of the canvas in a new way.

More in a while…

The second ink study. Tomorrow, the beginning of the first painting.

Here is the first of two ink sketches of my wife working during the day. This is pretty satisfying because the ink flattens out into abstraction easily and starts to play with the concepts I have in mind.

Some more sketches as I try to figure out this new direction I’m moving in. The first image is a series of sketches done at the local library, with bits of people that were visible to me ranging across my field of vision, gesturing and changing pose. The second image is again from the night at the ICA. The sketch on the right of the page is three poses of a well-heeled woman who had a very interesting silhouette. This sketch in particular begins to become something more than just a series of gesture sketches, as the overlapping images begin to form rhythms of their own. This is a quality that I’m after.

“Even a thousand-mile journey begins with one step.”

These are quick sketches I did while waiting for my wife at the ICA in Boston. While these are basically gesture sketches, I’m trying to do them in series to capture the motion of the guard as he moves through the space in front of me. You’ll also note that the brevity of the lines used to capture the poses forms a record of my observations of him: what lines and forms were important to me while trying to capture the feel of the pose.

I love realism and have always been drawn to the craftsmanship of a brilliantly executed piece of rendering.

But as I grow older and experience more art, broadening my views while refining (and therefore narrowing) my taste, I come to realize that while the well-turned line will always have a special place in my heart, it is something that has been done by some of the finest artistic minds in history. Done for a very long time and done very well.

With Hockney’s book on the influence of optics on representational art, it becomes obvious that the camera has taken over, nearly supplanted, the way that humans perceive what they see. And while a camera image appears “real” to us, because our eyes are lenses as well, a static, two-dimensional image is not how we see the world.

We see the world in motion. In fact, scientific studies have shown that without motion, we don’t see anything: our vision is a construction of the differences in moment-to-moment images as the lightwaves stimulate our retinas and our eyes perform constant saccades to keep the information flowing. If our eyes stop moving, the world fades to grey.

Not only are our eyes moving, but everything alive is also moving in front of us. And while some artists in the past have tried to address or rebel against the camera-image of art (Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and Cubist works began to look at the problem) in my (limited) experience, few have tried to translate the dimension of time into their canvases. This is something that interests me very much.

What I hope to explore with the following series of artwork is the following:

1) an image of figures moving through time and space;

2) a utilization of “realism” layered and juxtaposed in such a way as to become an abstract image that distills the motion, atmosphere and “feel” of the subject into a pattern of color and shape which plays not only with the two-dimensional surface of the canvas, but also the viewer’s perception of the illusion of three dimensional space “in” the canvas;

3) a record of the interlocking exchange of the motion and movement of the subject with the motion and movement of my observation of it.

Images of my beginning experiments tomorrow.

Bicycles, 18x24", oil on panel.

I think this painting might be done. I wanted overall to have a very loose feel to it, but to have little areas that were sharply realistic without sacrificing the texture of the paint and brushstrokes. I plan to pursue more in this vein.

I’d love to get comments and critiques from those of you reading, so please, take some time and let me know what you think.

I’ve been doing some experiments with watercolors over the last two days, but nothing is quite ready for prime time just yet. I’ve always known that watercolor takes a great deal more planning to execute than oil, but I still wasn’t quite ready for how hard it would be to do an accurate plein air in watercolor, especially without a portable watercolor studio. Anyway, so I’m thinking of doing an oil tomorrow, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, James Gurney had an interesting piece on his blog a few days ago about how he welcomed in a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses to sit for him while he sketched one of them. That was followed up by a brief interview with James over on Simon Owens’s Bloggasm. Check it out. I think that this is really one of the nicest ideas I’ve heard of in a long time.