The nursery down by Lake Hodges shut down about a year ago. They lost their lease. I thought there might be a painting in this, so I rode my bicycle onto the nursery. Sure enough, I got chased away by a mad farmer in a pickup truck, but not before I could take a picture of this abandoned shed. On the left you see a bit of the lake. To the left of that would be the I-15 freeway bridge. On the right, in the background, is the Sonata housing development, where we live. Indeed, there was a painting…
A few months ago Chelsea published a photo she had taken on a weekend outing on her Facebook page, titled Top of the World. I took one look at it and saw a painting opportunity. This is the result in 30 by 24 inches. I didn’t ask for her permission to use it. I shamelessly stole the motif. Well, we can call it:
We left some onions on the kitchen counter and one of them had shoots. I painted them on a 20 x 16 board – first time I tried that. The glass bowl was challenging, and so was the light. My photography skills and equipment are also not up to the job. But here you go:
While blog surfing one day, I came across a nature blog focused on the Appalachian area at Joan’s Nature Journal. There was a photograph of woods in late fall that inspired me to create this painting. It’s a large painting, 4 feet wide and 3 feet high. There is not enough wall space at the house, so it will probably end up at the office once it’s dried, varnished and framed.
Now that the painting logjam is broken, I am moving right along. Trisha’s sister lives in Mexico on the Yucatan. She took a photograph out of her living room window, which inspired this painting:
Licorice – a dense rubbery candy that is usually made in black or red strips and flavored with licorice
Licorice
After creating paintings for Chelsea and Devin a few years ago, Trisha challenged me: “When do I get a painting?” As I always do when that happens, I ask what they want.
“Something abstracty.” [Trisha’s favorite artist is Chagall, that’s where this comes from]
“Abstracty? I can’t do abstract, sorry. I need something more specific?”
“How about a still life with good bottle of wine and a glass. Maybe some cheese….”
That’s how it started. Glass is good, hard. I have done a wine bottle once. That’s a self-portrait in my Glendale, Arizona apartment in January 1980 with a port bottle on the shelf behind me. And a half-filled glass would be hard.
And this started the longest, hardest painting I have done in all my years. January and February 2010 saw no painting activity. I did a layout using photographs in March while Trisha was out of town on a trip. I was hoping to get it done quickly while she was gone. Wrong. From March until December, the painting was just an outline on the easel behind my desk that was clearly not going anywhere. But I knew that if I removed it “temporarily” to get my creative juices flowing and started another painting, the chances that I would NEVER get back to it were great. So I didn’t allow that. Finally, in December 2010 I decided I didn’t want to be stuck forever and I’d finish.
Perseverance paid off, and I like the outcome, even though I could not get the colors in this photograph match to true vibrance of the original – which is the case in almost all photographs of paintings.
The wine was a 2003 Cabernet Savignon of The Montelena Estate. This is, for wine connoisseurs, a very good wine. She had saved it for a special occasion. I laid the cork next to it. The bottle and the glass are on a cutting board that Chelsea made in shop class when she was in school, which we use all the time for bread cutting and serving on special occasions. The stack of books to the right also has meaning. The four books on the top come from the library of Trisha’s father who passed away in 2004 whose memory she holds dear. The thick, tattered volume is The Household Physician by the Brown-Flynn Publishing Company of Buffalo, New Edition, 1926. It provides for some hilarious reading. The book on Chagall is one I gave her as a present. It’s a coffee table book of Chagall paintings.
Everybody asks: “Why the licorice?”
I put a few strands of licorice there because I felt that it would be very hard to paint them, and because Trisha loves licorice. Buy her a big bucket from Costco and put it there on the counter, and you can see her become a slave – to the licorice.
That provided for a personal connection and finally the title of the painting.
It took me a year, longer than any painting I can remember that I actually finished and didn’t abandon.
There you have it. I am done. I can finally move on to the next.
I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is by far the largest art museum I have ever visited. I had done some significant walking before getting there, so I was already handicapped when I arrived. I am not exaggerating that I could spend a week there, 8 hours every day, and probably not get through it. There is so much, from ancient Greece, to modern American painting, to African art, the list goes on and on.
I spent most of my time seeing the European section. They have an amazing collection of Rembrandt paintings. Of course, then there are many of Degas, Picasso, van Gogh, Gauguin, Manet, Monet, to name just a few. My favorite painting of the entire museum is this one:
Van Gogh: Wheat Field with Cypresses
I am in awe when I stand in front of a masterpiece.
During my trip to Madison, Wisconsin last November I took a walk around the university part of town and a yellow storefront struck me as picturesque enough to take a snapshot. Later I went home and painted this picture:
I just went back 8 months later. Now it’s summer, and as I walked past 320 W. Johnson Street, I almost missed it. The yellow storefront has been painted, the doors are replaced by steel doors, and a Mexian restaurant has moved in. It looks completely different and it would never occur to me to take a picture of it and paint it.
I walked to the other side of the street to get another shot from the same vantage point as the photograph that turned into the painting:
While at our house for Thanksgiving, Devin and Jessie used my studio and collaborated on their first joint oil painting, inspired by Gustav Klimt’s Tree of Life. Here is the result:
Devin and Jessie: The Tree of Life
And here are the artists, with the coach in the background, watching over them:
When I was in college, studying art, I used say that orchestral music was one of the most complex forms of art, since it required so many participants for a work of art to be created, including the composer who dreams it all up, the various orchestra instruments and their players, with lifetimes of practice each, the conductor and the theater where the concert takes place. That’s a lot of coordination.
In comparison, a lowly painter like I can just paint something in his painting corner and hang it up on a wall.
Here I found another kind of art which is completely new and entirely different from anything you have seen before, applying many different skills, from planning, storyboarding, drawing, painting, photography and online publishing, with an amazing amount of man-hours of work.
See for yourself and check out BluBlu. Make sure you have 8 minutes of time and click on the arrow to run the video.
