Black Rock

This is Seneca Creek at Black Rock Maryland. It was a very nice warm day for painting. A few bluegills spalshed around in the shallows.

Some new sketches

work in progress

Here is my next work in progress. The stretcher I put together Friday; it measures 43" x 48". This is another in the series of abstractions I've been doing lately. I've titled the piece, City Blocks. The titled comes from an old toy I once had as a child by that name. City blocks were a predecessor to legos and snapped together in a similar fashion. The forms that I mapped out on the canvas reminded me of my old toy so I choice that for the name. You might be able to see the light penciled lines for the composition of the piece; I'm sure this is going to take quite some time to complete but I'm pretty enthused so far.

Logs at the Bottom of the Pamunkey River

I finally finished this painting (I've been posting the progress on my other blog). It is 4' by 4.5' in size. I'm reasonably pleased with the results. I wish the photo could pick up the green shades in the picture but it doesn't. The tints of permanent green seem washed out in the photo. Nonetheless, This painting has fueled my interest to keep going with this motif for awhile. I like the fact it has slowed me down with completion of my work. I think I was doing my pictures way too fast; the extra time spent is worth the effort.

Re-post

This re-post was the last in a series of geometric abstract paintings I did last fall. I became very disappointed in my recent bar scene painting and re-stretched the canvas and have started over with a new abstract painting (nothing much to show yet). I titled this painting, Ode to Sheeler since the large table top glued to the panel reminded me of Charles Sheeler's paintings of locomotive drive wheels. I could hang the painting vertically and I think I'd rename it pendulum. My titles come after the fact and have very little bearing on the work. Maybe I should name them number one, two, three, etc., or something like that.

work in progress

I finally got to work on my painting. This a continuation of my earlier post -a work in progress-and I am reasonably pleased with what I've done so far. Even though this is a naturalistic painting, portions of it utilize abstract paint handling. I find sometimes you have to just about destroy and area then bring it back before you get anything worthwhile when painting in an abstract/gestural style. Anyway, the faces on my figures are handled fairly tightly; probably because I was uncertain if I could pull off just a mere suggestion of a face, so I modeled the forms a little bit.

Green Lake

I made this painting a little less then a year ago. It had been sitting behind some other canvases I no longer felt were good paintings when I unearthed it the other day and reconsidered my opinion about it. I now have it hanging on my wall. The painting is 36"x36" (why I work with a square format so much, I can't explain) and the image came straight from the imagination. If I recall correctly, there are several abstract paintings underneath this one. Large amounts of the paint here have been troweled onto the surface using a house painter's broad blade; the thick impasto adds flatness to the color areas and shapes. I love painting this way but it makes me nervous because you can't imagine the amount of paint you go through globing up so much pigment on the canvas. I buy the large 225 ml tubes of Daler-Rowney oil paint because they are cheap, or else the large Winton tubes but even at their lower cost, impasto painting still runs up quite a bill. I've never found commercial house paints to be very useful in this regard since they are too runny and their quality is extremely questionable. maybe I can add some sort of substance to the pigment to thicken it and extend the paint but I haven't researched that yet.