Looking at Work in Grayscale

Lee Kaloidis, whom I've referenced a few times in this blog, has created a Flickr album of his Whale Songs series, showing it in grayscale as well as in color.  He says:

I'm posting the Whale Songs in gray scale so that I have a record of them. But also because studying paintings in gray scale is fundamental to the way I work and why I do so much work in black and white, and anyone who's interested in my work should know that. Throughout every painting session I'm studying gray scale photos of the piece as it develops. I know if a piece is articulate, balanced, well-constructed, legible, and engaging in gray scale it is fundamentally sound. Color is a strange thing and is a little like money in that it distorts clarity of vision and judgment, and so it is good, IMO, to be able to remove it from the equation in order to assess things at a distance that is free from the distortions of the sensational.

I would not say that a painting can't be successful if color if it is not successful in black and white, but it does seem like a good tool for looking at your work in progress.  Seeing your work minus the strong language of color allows you to see things you won't see otherwise.  This is similar to seeing your work from a distance, through a camera lens, or on a computer screen.  It gives you a different view, which can be revealing. 

I just did a few grayscale versions of some 8"x8" print/collages to see how they looked:

Happy Thanksgiving and Holiday Weekend

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the United States. This is not a real blog post; I'm just showing off a new piece that takes Monoprint Collage in a little bit of a new direction for me.

10"x10", Monoprint on Paper

Actually, there is no collage in this piece, just monoprint with a gelli plate, and paint.  I have a few spaces available in my Monoprint Collage workshop on Whidbey Island in May.  Have a lovely holiday weekend!

Donate to Heifer International

Heifer International's mission is to work with communities to end world hunger and poverty and to care for the Earth.  They do this by providing livestock animals; empowering women; providing basic needs such as clean water, shelter, cook stoves, etc.; supporting sustainable farming efforts, all in their unique Heifer way...  See how it works here.

I am offering a downloadable set of twelve greeting cards, with images of my work on them, for a $15 donation to Heifer.  ALL proceeds from the sale of this card kit go to Heifer.  You will download a zip file with the twelve images and an envelope template, sized to be printed on 8.5"x11" paper.  Last year we were able to donate about $1,000 for livestock and other resources to Heifer International.

Twelve images on greeting cards, downloadable, for a $15 donation to Heifer:

 

The UN-Gallery

The UNgallery is a hybrid of print on demand and a bricks and mortar gallery.  Read about it here.  I am one of the "founding artists", which just means that I am one of the artists they are starting out with.  I have nothing to do with the founding.  You can buy prints made on canvas, metal acrylic, or "magic block", which is a 6"x6" piece.  Most of my pieces are sold as prints much larger than my originals. 

Check out my gallery here.

Click on an image in the gallery and you get this.  Then you can share it anywhere, or mark as a favorite.  OR, click "Buy Photo" in the upper right, and you'll be given options.

Here you see the print size options in metal.

Back to browsing the gallery.

 Check out the other artists at UNgallery as well.  Or if you are in Key West, go look at their bricks and mortar space!

Hey, I'm in a Magazine!

Here is a pretty interesting online magazine, Inspirational, that features a handful of artists, each with a portfolio of images.  I am featured in Issue #7, but check out the other issues as well.  You can see the lists of all the artists in each issue, and there are some of my favorites, plus artists as yet unknown to me.  You'll notice Seth Apter is in #7 as well, and many of you may be familiar with him.

Inspirational is indeed a great source of inspiration.  Happy reading!

New Online Class (and an update on the Five-Minute Paintings)

First, the Five-Minute Paintings.  I made a little progress on a few of them.  Nice to have so many to work with, I can just play around.  It's just like Big Fat Art.  Here are some before-and-after images of works in progress.  These are all on 19"x25" gessoed paper.

On this one I pretty much just enhanced what was there with artist quality paint and a bit more of the water soluble crayon.

Enhanced a few areas, then covered over some using a brayer with white paint.  No idea what happens next.

I dripped the blue paint (latex) over the orange area, after painting over the orange quite a bit.  A few other things, and I'll keep going.

This one took many turns.  It's probably the most developed of the five-minute paintings, and I'm not sure where it will go next. 

Now, for the new online class (drum roll please..... or ukulele noodling):

Beyond the Color Wheel: Advanced Color Studies

This is for those of you who know basic color theory, color mixing, color vocabulary, but want to take the study of color further, and develop your own personal color "voice".  The class is a little different from the others, in that the lessons are sent every two weeks.  Six lessons in all, but over the course of twelve weeks.  This gives you time to get deeper into each lesson, reflect, and absorb. 

It begins on February 10, and, as usual, enrollment is limited.  Click here to read description and sign up. 

And Even More Five-Minute Paintings

Another session of Five-Minute-Paintings produced the following.  Many of you wanted to know what happens next with the paintings.  Good question.  I want to continue each painting, see where it goes, but try not to loose the fresh, spontaneous quality.  So here is the plan:  I will post these paintings again after I've worked on them more.  I don't know if all of them will make it to anything resembling "completion" - in fact I am absolutely sure that not all of them will.  But I'll work on each one and see what happens.

#6

#7

#8

#9

#10

#11

#12

#13

I did these with a 3.5" brush - from the paint department of a hardware store - and interior latex paint for the BIG colors.  Red, green, magenta, and quinacridone gold are all "real" paint from Golden.  I'd bought twelve different intense colors of a good quality interior latex paint, in quarts, eggshell finish, to see what it would be like to use in paintings.  It definitely makes me feel freer, less precious about the material.  It has a nice consistency - like fluid acrylics - but it does have to be stirred before every painting session.

Anyone trying this themselves, please let me know how it worked for you.  If you have a blog or web site where you can post it, include the url in your comment. 

More Five-Minute Paintings

The Five-Minute Painting is a way to loosen up, not get knit picky, and See What Happens.  In intend to use this exercise in some of my classes in 2016; I think it'd be really fun in a group - see what others do with the same parameters and time limit.  In 100 Drawing, Paintings, and Explorations, I will try this on 9"x12".

These are all on decent paper: Canson Dessin Drawing Paper.  I think they are all gessoed.  And I'm using my usual paints (both Golden Fluid and various tube paints), graphite, watercolor crayons, etc.

#2

#3

#4

#5 would not upload properly, but it's not my favorite anyway.  You can see it on the video.

The Five-Minute Painting

I wanted to explore the idea of doing a painting in five minutes, or rather, to see what would happen if I tried to do a painting, 19"x25", in five minutes.  It did not have to be a finished painting, ready to frame, but the idea was to create a strong visual statement in that amount of time.  I normally work in many layers: painting over whole passages, changing direction often, then tweaking a LOT.  So the five-minute painting is a distinctly different approach. 

This video is mostly unedited, and the camera does not encompass the entire paper I'm working on.  I have a bunch more of these which have a better view, and which I will post at various points.  But thought I'd share this first one, despite its flaws.

First in a series of Five-Minute Paintings

I will fill you in more about the concept behind five-minute paintings in a future post.  Just wanted to get this out.  Just to be clear, this is five minutes of painting without the slightest idea where I'm going with it.  Definitely a practice of being In The Moment!