New experiments

I've been playing around with some ideas for a new series of paintings.  It started back when I took the workshop with Kate Worm (see earlier post) and I've been developing it in drawings.  This week I've been working on developing a painting...  it's still a Work In Progress (WIP), but I like the direction its taking.

I started out with a rather ordinary group of figures, kinda on the beach, and I was working to "jazz it up" a bit.  Here was the start, where I was adding the lines of waves through the bodies to try to abstract it a bit:

Then I started wondering how I could push it even further.  I was thinking back to one of my classes at ECU with the professor who was the hardest, but also made you think the most, Ray Elmore.  In his class we played around with collage work-ups before the painting, and I experimented with layers of images, one over the other.  I did some fun work in his class.  So, that gave me the idea of trying to overlay some of Kim Frohsin's paintings (see earlier post about her too) to add some level of abstraction and interest to the painting.  As of the end of the day today, here is where I am with it.  I'm excited about this new direction and think it will push my work to the next level.  How many figures can you make out in the painting?  (Remember to click on an image to see a larger version of it...)