...and a dog.

I've been on a tear with this new series of paintings.  A few days ago I was looking around for another canvas to use, and saw the 30" x 30" painting I did of Theo the day our life model didn't show up (see my post on it here)   I liked the composition, but decided I'd just paint over it...  then I thought to myself, "why not just apply this new approach to that composition?"  And  voila!  here's the result.   Great fun!

Ok, now with guys...

While I was finishing up the previous painting, I decided I'd try another version with guys.  Here's how its coming... do I feel a series coming up?  The previous one was 30 x 30 inches, this one is 30 x 40.

Final version of the experiment

Here's how the women on the beach turned out.  I like it.  Since it was inspired by Kim Frohsin's work, a possible title might be  "Frohsin Skinny Dip."

Experimenting Part II

Still working on some new ideas. My goal is to flatten and abstract the figures, but maintain a strong composition that is still "figurative."  I ordered some dry pigment yesterday to work into my multi-media.  A possible title for this one might be "Frohsin Inspiration."  Still working on it, but here's the progress so far...

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...)

Clear Choice

...that's the title I've chosen for this new work.  Layers of transparent color built up the image of the face.  I like its strength.

Nice spread in Oriental

The Village Gallery in Oriental invited me to display work there, and as I blogged before, they accepted quite a number of pieces for their new additional space.  Today they called to tell me there was a nice write up in towndock.net  -  they did a nice job - check it out.

Here's one of my latest paintings that I just took to New Bern Artworks...