Archive for February, 2010

RE: experimental wet pastel work

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

Here are a couple wet pastel paintings. I have done many of these wet pastel paintings. I was completely influence by Mark Englsih (http://www.markenglishonline.com/) when he did works with wet pastels. My first thoughts about the pastels was how horrendous are pastels. But I kept at it and now I feel pretty comfortable with pastels. It is a direct direct drawing medium and when you wet the pastels with a wide brush loaded with mineral spirits it becomes a very interesting method – runs, smears, color bleeding into other colors, lifting color back off and the painterly quality of the wet pastels is very unique. It can be very frustrating but it is a drawing skill builder! Thank-you Mark for all the inspiration.

RE: painting from college days

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

This is a painting of my friend Matt from college days, oh lets say 1975 or 1976. I think we painted each other several times – shortage of models. This is fairly large (30 x40) and was painted in oils. It is funny to see it again after all these years. Thanks to the SCADphoto for scanning my very old slides. It was, I would say, done alla-prima with no preliminary drawing except on the canvas. It was like many of the works from back then, begin and finish and hope for the best. I think I really liked the ultramarine blue and burnt sienna mixture. But I would guess that I had no idea about the colors other than they worked for me.