Discussion of current works on the easel.
When my daughter was very young, with a very serious face she asked, “Daddy, why do you hold a big stick in your studio?” To a child, the most question-provoking thing about the studio was my homemade maulstick. You can see my maulstick in this photograph. It’s resting against a 40″ x 52″ painting (the…
Utrecht flak white continues to surprise me with its good performance. Considering its modest price, it’s a good value. I am using it throughout this painting titled The Fair. It covers well and handles crisply. When thinned it retains strong covering strength. An excellent flake white. I ordered another tube this morning. I’ve just started…
I am painting three new canvases that fit the bigly category. Big for me, is 4′ x 5′ or thereabouts. In the preceding weeks, I was drawing bigly too–working on the drawings for the new work. Here is a studio shot of the three biglies. Two of them are 4′ x 5′ and the other…
I started a small oil yesterday. I transferred the drawing, or cartoon, to the canvas as I had earlier to a sheet of watercolor paper. You can see from the photo that both formats are of the same size. The watercolor paper is pretty good. I might finish it with watercolors, gauche, or a mixture…
Yesterday, I wrote about how scale affects paint handling. A figure on a 6-inch canvas is painted differently than the same figure on a 6-foot canvas. Pretty straightforward but a lot of artists get stuck in a ‘one size fits all’ approach. There’s also another way that scale determines my approach–figure scale. The main figures…
Scale plays a big part in how I handle a painting. By scale I mean the size of the canvas. A single figure on a 6-foot canvas requires a different treatment than the same figure would on a 6-inch canvas. I didn’t understand that early in my career, but as I worked on paintings up…
Sometimes when I draw, like in the oil sketch in the middle of this photo, I grab hold of things quickly and stop before the moment passes. Other times, I enjoy what I’m doing so much I don’t want to stop. Looking, seeing, and knowing on and on. SO WHY STOP? There is no end…
The drawing is transferred to the canvas for the new painting I’m calling The Entertainer. The Entertainer is 40″ x 50″. I applied the warm ground with a rag. I was careful to keep the ground thin so that the drawing shows through, as you can see in the photo. There are 12 figures in…