Turpentine diaries 9/24/17
The unfinished painting The Press is 40″ x 50.” I’ve used RGH’s walnut-ground flake white for a couple of weeks and I like it more and more. It keeps its body even when thinned to the constancy of gouache, such as the white shirts in the painting. I plan to write about preparing canvases soon.
Some watercolors
Odds and ends. Today, I finished the landscape (somewhere around Monterey) and worked on the figure with the striped shirt (my wife Kathleen). It still needs work. Both are watercolors. The pen and ink drawing of the figure behind the landscape is on bristle board. My watercolor kit. The bottom drawer contains watercolor tubes. I
Turpentine diaries 9/16/17
Along 4th Street is 40″ x 50.” The surface is very good and the painting is moving well. When the surface is solid, I do less re-painting and things go faster. I’ve written about how much I like RGH’s Extra-fine Flake white. That white is ground with safflower oil. I’ve also been using walnut oil
Turpentine diaries 9/9/17
The studio is busy just now. The drawing is a study for a large painting I’m preparing to launch. The figures, except for the right-hand two, are prominent in the new painting’s design. I plan 2-3 more figures in the large painting. ‘Large’ in this case means 4.5′ by 5.5′, The drawing is pen &
Two paintings today
I used to think speed is important in art making. Speed relates to spontaneity–some say–and spontaneity guarantees authenticity, if not creativity. While spontaneity is important in art making, it’s not fundamental. Even if you insist that spontaneity is essential, you can’t make the same claim for speed. Speed is simply irrelevant. Another important idea for
Turpentine diaries 9/4/17
I started working on the painting on the easel, Along 4th Street, yesterday. I’ve had two long sessions on it, but it still needs a lot of work. I’m careful about cutting off figures by the canvas edge. One of my teachers, Pearlstein, is well known for cutting figures. He used the device to
Turpentine diaries 8/27/17
The finished painting on the floor in this photo, Dare, is another painting of my son Keith standing in front of an earlier painting with him as the subject. Dare is 24″ x 30.” The large, unfinished painting on the easel, Picnic, is the last painting from my batch of poor-surface paintings. And it’s the
Turpentine diaries 8/20/17
I finished drawing the cartoon for this painting yesterday and spent the morning transferring it to the canvas. You can see the transferred cartoon in this photo. I spent the remainder of yesterday and all of today working on the new painting. In this photo, the gray ground is still visible throughout the painting. Booth at