It’s raw and cold for a May day in NE Ohio. It feels more like March than May–rainy, gray, and windy. A woman asked me why I don’t spend more time teaching art on my website. Seeing my puzzlement, she added, “You write about technical subjects related to painting, but you don’t provide instruction on…
My work today on Spring was all blues: ultramarine blue-violet on the blouses of the outer-most figures; cerulean blue and black on the pants of the middle woman. Magnesium blue and Veronese green on the Bug. All cut with cool grays, of course. I love Old Holland paint; they’re my favorite, but they’ve priced themselves out of my…
Aboard the Betty Jane is another of the 48″ x 60″ canvases I recently wrote about. This painting is based on some photos taken during a fishing trip abroad my boat. The Betty Jane is still in dry dock; next week we start preparing her for the season. We have to scrape the bottom and apply…
I use several products manufactured by James Groves. Jim specializes in historical painting mediums and ingredients. I’ve tried almost all of his products and they are unfailingly excellent–world class. I use his 19th Century Copal Oil varnish and Siccatif Courtrai every day. Both ingredients are staples in my practice. By itself, the copal varnish is too…
I made progress on Euclid Avenue I this morning. Progress on the 48″ x 60″ painting has been slow at times. This canvas is from a stock of ‘professional grade’ canvases I bought some time back. The surfaces on these ‘professional grade’ canvases are very poor–execrable. I’ve had to spend a lot of time correcting them and still the…
Not so much flavored as customized. My medium is very drying, which I like immensely. I use it everyday but it has one minor flaw. When I’m painting a large area, my medium is sometimes too drying. One method I use to address this is to add some balsam, like Venice turpentine or Canadian balsam,…
I’ve been working on paintings that take a lot of time recently, such as the lower one in this photo. The drawing in the bottom painting was done with pencil and then fixed with ink. Everything was drawn several times. The drawing in the top painting was done directly with OMS-thinned paint over a neutral…
The Break is 40″ x 50″. I stretched a lot of 40″ x 50″ canvases last year and The Break is one of them. Some of the background is done, but the painting still has a long way to go. My medium dries very quickly, as I’ve written before. Its only limitation is that its fast…