As I get older, my memory gets better and better–I remember less and less. 😉 One thing I am really good at it is forgetting. Forgetting is a most useful skill, I find. I worked all day on a small painting and finally put down my brush from mental exhaustion. Then my eye caught this…
I’m a little tired this evening so I’ll keep this diary entry brief. Fork, after 4-5 sessions, is moving out of the under-painting stage. I restrict the under-painting to thinly-applied darks and local colors, which preserves the drawing. I spend a lot of time on the drawing. Other news: I plan a video review of…
Bah! I am grinding my way (trying to anyway) through a volume of Clement Greenberg’s essays. In case you haven’t heard of him, Greenberg was once considered the preeminent writer on post-war American art. Greenberg’s writings are filled with hilarious pronouncements hurled from the Marxist Olympian heights. As a champion of the Abstract Expressionists, he…
I completed the under painting today for Fork. Fork is 54″ 66″. Even if you’re not familiar with my blog, you can probably see that the painting is still a long way from the finish line. The lights nearly everywhere are from the thinnly-covered gray ground. Next session I start the over-painting; adding full-bodied lighter…
Regardless of where you are in your career, you will do well to establish a baseline for your oil-painting toolkit. The baseline provides a powerful framework that you can use to analyze materials and techniques. At some point in your journey, you begin to question the received wisdom that guided you at the outset. This…
A reader said he tried sun-thickened oil on my recommendation but it didn’t demonstrate the handling quality that I’d claimed for it. Sun-thickened oil has the happy quality of maintaining body even when thinned, or so I claimed. My correspondent said his paint was rather more transparent than usual; he’d expected the opposite. First, as…
I finished the underpainting today for Portrait of a Man Wearing Sunglasses, my second session with the painting. The painting is 32″ x 48.” Simple composition. Unlike last week’s Fork, I transferred the design to the canvas with a cartoon. For Fork, because it’s so large, I drew directly on the canvas then inked over…
I had good painting sessions with Fork. The painting is so large, 4.5 x 5.5 feet, that I started painting portions of it before I completed all parts of the drawing. Today I completed the drawing and pushed the under painting farther along. There are 12 figures in the narrow space and even though they’re…