I decided to restart Sarah Deaner’s portrait. Usually I’m against chucking and restarting, so I repaint often and try to persevere when things go badly. There seems to be a bias against doing this– somehow reworking too much takes away the painting’s “freshness”?  I don’t know if I agree with that, and certainly x-ray studies of paintings reveal that artists reworked things quite a bit.  The problem with reworking, however, is that with every subsequent layer of paint, the values get darker, so if you want to end up with something that is light in value, reworking might not be the best strategy. In the painting of Sarah, I wanted to blow out the value spectrum and exploit the range as much as possible, but the range was shrinking with every subsequent rework.  Why did I need to rework? I wasn’t very happy with the drawing, and I wasn’t working from the model at the painting stage, but rather working on colors from my imagination, and I rushed in without a good conception of what I wanted the colors to look like (a color study would have been useful before diving in), which meant I wasted a lot of time pfaffing and rethinking. Anyway, here is the new underpainting, which I started also in a different way which I hope will be more interesting than what I was trying to do before.

I’m about 80 percent done with a painting of Sarah Deaner. It’s bigger than this, but I was struggling a lot with the drawing, which I think I’ve resolved ok.

This is a prototype of an animation a designer and I are working on of my painting “Rachel in Profile” in the Young Artist Series I’m completing this summer.

My Elements of Visual Thinking Course showed their final projects over at City Arts Gallery in the Station North neighborhood in Baltimore last night. Despite the rain, the show was a success and looked beautiful. Here are some pictures.

The name of the show

DURING SET-UP:  Daphne Hung eating the largest burrito ever made.

Antonius dances like a beautiful butterfly during set-up, proving that people are having WAAAY too much fun.

Jia Wei is found on the streets of Baltimore and is transported to the gallery to put together her magical piece

People love Morgan so much that they’ll help scrub her tub.

Sarah Bolton is VERY present.

Lisa decided to turn her painting upside down from the first time she’d shown it in class.  The Fetal Pig is now flying.

Sarah Bolton and her flowers….Becky Basner and her dandelion weeds…

THE RECEPTION BEGINS: Ladies in LBDs.

Friends of the artists arrive.

    A man, in Lotus-Land.

Frankie and I are very sad.

And Cole Quinlan enters delta-sleep.

Morgan’s sister Kim and the Incomparable Hannah Brancato at the opening reception.

Diana describing her artwork.

Claudia Heitner talks about her process with a visitor.

The Koreans being, you know, Korean…..Sanskruta wow-ing the visitors.

Darling Devinator and Beautiful Bomin….

Morgan’s Mermaid Tank….

Yena discussing her work with a physicist.

Diana Lin as she sings Cole to sleep.

Adrienne and her work, and a visitor.

Jia-Wei’s “Untitled”.

Antonius’ spiritual work makes everyone who sees it dance like a butterfly.

THE ARTISTS! 

This is part of the portrait I did of Tarek which I started last July but never got back to.  It is one of my goals this week to complete it, and I think I’ll be able to do that, even though Life seems to be getting busier after the past three months of not being able to do much in the studio.  All these Artist as Subject portraits are supposed to include some high chroma element… I still don’t know what I’m going to do about Tarek’s portrait, but he comes for dinner tonight with his friend Jack who is a photographer, so I’ll talk to him about it then.

I finally finished Mario – I spent about a day and a half trying to get good reproductions and then I didn’t like the scanned image I came up with and just did a point and shoot really fast and that’s what I ended up going with.  The final image is on my website, but here it is again.

The last of Mario

I’m trying to get back into these short portrait sketches. Here’s one of Jack that we did for may be 2 hours in the studio on Wednesday. 

I’ve been taking a break from the portraits for a couple of days and decided to go downstairs and make a painting of my living room.  I hope to finish it tomorrow.

As one can see, I have been really lax about posting to this blog in the past, oh, year, and I know my traffic has really fallen, but I’m going to try to remedy that, so with the new year, I’m re-dedicating myself to posting more here and on facebook, etc.

I’ve been working on a portrait series since last summer.  If you can believe it, I was planning on finishing this series in the fall, but life happens, and models get busy, and I’m only halfway through now (I’ve got 9 paintings going at the moment, and I’m almost finished with the fourth one).

Here’s my painting of Mario that I’m working on.  I’ve been sick for the past couple of weeks, so I haven’t been working much, but I’ll post what I have so far.

I met Mario at MICA where I teach.  He is a recent graduate of the school, where he majored in sculptural forms, and his senior thesis exhibition was an amazing array of flutes that he crafted out of clay and other materials. I just fell in love with his spirit as he showed me and my friend his instruments which all played and sounded as striking and mysterious as they looked.  Mario posed for me over the course of a few days while he was back in Baltimore, even coming one day during Hurricane Sandy! Here’s a quick close-up:

Hopefully I’ll start feeling better really soon and can finish this portrait up before the new semester starts in a week or two!