Today, I finished the underpainting for the new painting Girl in the Lavender Dress. I based the design on several photos taken around Cleveland’s Playhouse Square, so the painting is part of the Playhouse Square series. Girl in the Lavender Dress, after my second session, is on the easel in this photo. On the Square, another…
I’ve always approached painting as a process of carving away and revealing, the way I imagine a sculptor approaches sculpting. Not modeling but carving. I bring this up because this unfinished painting, Sub Rosa, is a pretty good example of my approach. There are many ways to talk about painting, of course. I used to talk about…
I worked on the drawing/cartoon for Down on Prospect Avenue for a week. In the top photo, I just finished tracing the cartoon, which you can see still stapled to the canvas. I removed the transfer paper to examine the drawing. If I miss something, I can cover the canvas with the cartoon and trace it…
Sub Rosa, the unfinished painting on the easel, is moving along. The underpainting is nearly done. The white-seeming ground visible throughout the painting is actually a middle-ish gray tone. Compare it with your eyes to the dab of white in the middle of the palette. Sub Rosa is based on photos taken during last year’s Festival…
It took all day to trace the cartoon onto the canvas for this painting. The new painting, Sub Rosa, is 44″ x 60″ and has seven figures in it. After finishing the tracing, I lightly sprayed the surface with fixative. I’ll start the painting tomorrow. I worked on the drawing for several days, as you might…
I worked on several paintings over the past few days. I also applied the ground to the canvas on the right-side of the photo. The tone is burnt sienna, raw umber, and white. I used to use warm grounds based on burnt sienna but lately I’ve used gray. So I am reverting to my earlier…
Main Street #1 is almost done; I can smell it. I plan on taking my high school-age son and some of his friends down to Main Street in our town and take a lot of photos that I can use in my designs. I like figures in front of the shop windows. Our town is…
It’s curious how problems can disappear. Sometimes when I take up a painting that I struggled with, the solution is blindingly obvious. How was it that I struggled? Today was like that with Victory Park I. I had struggled with some passages but today everything fell into place. I had a healing brush; everything was…