Category Archives: Figurative

A figurative and an interior collage, for more fun

I wandered off on my own again and created a collage based on a photo from ‘back in the day’ when two of my little sisters, Susan and Mary, were swimming in the back yard pool (pre Hurricane Camille). I’ve always loved that photo and had earlier done a fairly abstracted version on the iPad. After my collage class, I decided to do a second version using the paired color technique I’d learned from Rotem Amizur.

A hard thing about this method is that Rotem encourages us to use whatever papers we still have on hand, rather than painting new ones that hew more closely to the reference underlying the image we’re trying to create. Here, that hot pink on the two girls is jarring, but . . . whatever.

I’ve been trying to paint more interiors lately, so I decided to try a collage construction based on the view of our living room from the kitchen table. The first cut was pretty dreary, so I layered up the background with a bright pink. Granddaughter Maya was around as I was critiquing the first version and she too agreed I needed a hot pink wall in the background, rather than the lavender I had already used.

Living room in wonky colors and with an imagined painting on the wall beyond the windows.

Catching up with collages posted elsewhere.

With more apologies to my Facebook friends who’ve probably seen these before, I want to post some collages I produced during a zoom-based workshop with Rotem Amizur, a fabulous Israeli artist. Key tasks included painting two contrasting layers of acrylic paint on each of a large stack of paper; selecting three or four sets of lighter and darker papers to represent light and shadow in different areas of the reference photo; and then cutting and arranging pieces of those papers to interpret the reference image in a collage. Here are two sets of paper selections I used in a couple of exercises:

Rotem had us select a couple of ‘old master’ paintings to use as our references. I started with a portrait of Matisse, followed by his portrait of his wife. I did one of Matisse and then a number of variations of Mrs. Matisse, some looking at the reference image or an earlier collage and others relying on just my memory of what Mrs. Matisse looked like. It was fun to get wilder and more abstract with each iteration, as we had to come up with a focal theme that didn’t duplicate an earlier collage.

And here are a few progress shots, showing the method of pinning the paper pieces, which were glued to each other in the final stage.

This was an exceedingly fun and challenging workshop — so good that I took a second one from Rotem a few months later. See the next post!

Summer 2022 ~~ and our Art Exhibit at Oasis Gallery ~~ has come to an end.

This past Spring, the Oasis Gallery invited the Seven Palettes (some of my art buddies and me) to mount a live exhibit at its Washington Metro location in Bethesda. Our exhibit ran from Monday, May 2d to mid-August 2022. Understandably, the show didn’t get much traffic, given Oasis’ use of zoom classes during the Covid hiatus, so I thought I’d post one last look at the paintings I contributed to the show. You can see the work of the other artists at the link above.

Love and Loss

A dear friend recently commissioned me to make a portrait on my iPad of her friend and her dying spouse. It was a challenge to capture the obvious love and tenderness of the woman and her husband. Despite my hesitation to share such a private moment, I’ve been encouraged to post it, as it may be touch others in a good way.

Goodbyes near the end.

Inspired by the Masters

It’s a time-honored tradition for artists to deepen their craft by studying, copying, transcribing components of, or gaining inspiration from old and newer master painters. In various zoom classes over the last months, I’ve had occasion to do that kind of work.

An abstraction of a Titian nude:

After Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’. Oil on Linen. 9.5 x 16.

An abstraction of van Veerendael’s A Bouquet of Flowers in a Crystal Vase.

After van Veerendael’s Bouquet of Flowers in a Crystal Vase. Oil on lInen. 9,5 x 13

Modern subject (Cuban art students studying on a busy boulevard on a Sunday morning) in the style of Vuillard’s paintings of women working.

Cuban art students at work, after Vuillard. Oil on linen.

More Pandemic Art ~~ a challenging composite of personal memories.

Over the last six months, I’ve been zoom-studying with artists otherwise out of reach. Here’s the final project of a recent class with Ed Praybe — a composite of several separate images arranged into relatively natural composition. It is based on an image of my mother Annette, taken in her twenties, a photo of my six sisters and me, taken years later as a reference for a group portrait lost in Hurricane Katrina; and several photos of our Biloxi home, also later destroyed by Katrina.

To make it work, I had to adjust the relative scales of the elements and imagine a consistent light source across the whole scene. . .

The final image:

Composite of family home, mother, and sisters. Watercolor on Paper. 14 x 11.

The 4 images that provided the underpinnings of the composition:

My DC Place ~~ new watercolor

Here’s a new watercolor based on a photo I took while driving along Massachusetts Avenue in DC a couple of years ago. It captures part of our capital’s essence. Painting it was an imperative.

I used a limited palette of 2 reds, 2 blues, and 2 yellows, plus black.

My DC Place. Watercolor on paper. 7” x 5”.

A Quick Gouache for an Exhibit Cancelled by Covid!

With my painting buddies, the Seven Palettes, I was to mount an exhibition a year ago at Oasis Gallery, Westfield Montgomery Mall, Bethesda, MD. Covid killed that so we got to work and ‘hung’ a digital exhibit online. Here’s one of the gouache paintings I had done for that show. It’s a bit too literal, but I figured some mother or grandmother might like it!

At the playground. Gouache on Paper. 2019. 8″ x 11″.

Informal Watercolor Sketch of Granddaughter

My 3-year old granddaughter and I were painting together during a recent sleepover. She was very engrossed in her art, studiously dragging her wet brush through EVERY block of color before applying the resulting ‘mud’ to her paper. Rather than fret about the growing mess on the palette I decided to paint a quick sketch of her as I looked down on her efforts. Did another quickie the following day from a different angle; different clothes made her look older. . . .

Day 2, Concentration. Watercolor on Paper. 8″ x 10″.

Practicing the Knife!

Bernie Dellario tasked our zoom-based art group with painting a fairly complicated scene using only a palette knife. The idea was to force ourselves to simplify. I selected a photo that I’d taken at a Nats night game, courtesy of friends Doug and Toni. I loved the vibrant colors, the dramatic lighting, the sharp green grass, the movement of the crowd and vendors. . . .

Here’s the painting and references. A note for composition buffs: For a bit of extra drama and clarity, I combined positions of orange hands from the two photos. I also omitted the wonderful yellow foul marker because it would been too much for a small square painting. . . . Maybe I’ll do a larger version some time so I can add that color into the mix.

At the Nats. Oil on Arches Huile Paper. 10″ x 10″.