Tag Archives: realistic

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.

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.

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:

The Lion ~~ Baltimore Museum of Art

I like to paint and draw sculptures, castings, molds and the like. It lets me focus on form and value without the distraction and mystique of glorious color. This majestic Italian lion from the BMA sculpture garden was great fun to paint.

painting of a stone lion sculpture displayed at Baltimore Museum of Art

Italian Lion, Baltimore Museum of Art. Original iPad Painting. 1:1 aspect ratio. 2017.

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Agapanthus

I’ve always loved the blue agapanthus.  The last time we were out in Oakland visiting our son and his family, I spied this one in the street median.  I snagged some of its seed pods and this image.  It’s a bit rough, but I like it anyway.

Agapanthus. Original iPad Painting. 1:1 aspect ratio. 2017.

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Water Babes II

father and son walking on beach

Father and Son at the Beach. Original iPad Painting. 4:5 aspect ratio. 2017.

And another father-son in the water!  What’s sweeter to behold than a parent and child at play?

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New Exhibit of Selected iPad Art in Medical Offices

I am delighted that my neighbor, Dr. Charlotte Jensen, has invited me to exhibit some of my paintings in her offices, C2M Chiropractic, in North Bethesda, MD.

Dr. Jensen is displaying some of my iPad paintings, printed as giclees on high quality archival papers in archival inks.  In addition to a series of veggies and flowers recently showcased at Brookside Gardens, these landscapes are part of the new exhibit.

The prints are scheduled to appear in Dr. Jensen’s office gallery over the next year.