Just now, I’m interested in multiple treatments of the same subject. I make drawings (cartoons) and transfer them to multiple surfaces. So far, I’ve limited the process to two instances per drawing. When I do an ambitious drawing perhaps I will expand to three or more treatments. This photo shows two versions of a small winter…
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…
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 &…
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…
Cezanne, I think, told a young artist that the best way to learn was to draw and paint the stove in his studio. I think this is excellent advice. If you can draw the mundane, you can draw anything. There’s a catch, of course. What the hell is mundane? No one has answered that question, as…
These two recent pastel drawings are on canvas. Primed canvas is an unusual support for pastels or charcoal because it’s not absorbent enough. Pastel chalk falls off too easily. I originally intended to use these canvases for paintings. I had actually started painting on the larger of the two (the gray area in the lower left),…
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…
Drawing is the heart and soul of art. If the drawing is strong, you have to work hard to screw up a painting. If the drawing is weak, you have to work hard to just produce mediocrity. I’ve gone through periods during which I did more drawing than painting, especially when I was young and painting…