Something different for me.
This ink drawing teeters on abstraction, which is what I love about it.
Its pleasure comes from its gesture and the purity of black and white.
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My understanding of the title, a balance of simplicity and complexity creating elegance. Jun, the model and composer that I painted here carries these qualities, as does his music.
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In many ways this is Mel. But in so many ways it’s not. While on vacation, with a few days off from painting, I was itching to work. We sat down across from each other, Mel on the couch under a lamp and I just across from her on a living room chair, watercolor block on my lap. I was excited to get back to the materials and really had no interest in formal accuracy, nor the outcome. My focus was on feeling . . . the feeling of how the brush, loaded with pigment and water, goes down on the paper, the kolinsky hair spreading, releasing a pool of color. The forms that I ended up creating are Mel’s but so much of me is here too, sculpted into this portrait.
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This week at Drink and Draw, we hosted Fatal Booty, roller derby doll from Yonkers NY.
Vasac, 7B, has the most beautiful light that encourages the most incredible and vivid colors.
These watercolor sketches are done in the spirit of the afternoon, casual and blurred by the drink specials.
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Dear Skull Balanced on a Deck of Cards. 16×20, Watercolor.
I wish I made more of the deck of cards. We were all sitting on the front porch, painting, talking art, and enjoying the Catskill vista, but lunch was only moments away and the girls needed the table upon which our improvised still life was set.
I find that staying fluid can be difficult and I work hard to understand what makes me feel cemented, rigid, and anxious. The chorus of self evaluating voices doesn’t help, nor does the tower of art books that I use to measure myself, nor does the loud ticking of my life clock. But here, concentrating on mixing and arranging color notes brings my purpose into a simplified focus and dulls the din of past and future.,
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Stephen Gardner, Chairman of Drink and Draw at 7B.
What a spectacle!! All the brilliant color bouncing from Steve’s portrait. The color notes behind him are various items found in a bar, bottles, beer taps, and neon. It’s a rich environment and a great place to set up a studio for the afternoon.
Double click on the pic.
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How often do I feel the stress of the continuously changing, refreshing, updating, and broadcasting nature of the current culture we share and participate in. Spending an evening studying this classic beauty (both woman and painting) by Sargent (of a friend Flora Priestly, as well as a possible “crush”), is grounding, and a needed supplement, reminding me of the vital currents that are missed in the need to keep up, stay on, hang on.
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Something different about this approach, this touch. Aida pointed it out, saying the marks look more “wild” than usual.
I agree. Even the composition is more wild, for me. This week I’m going to test it out as a painting.
Double click and take a closer look.
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I’ve been sitting on this painting for a little less than a year. It’s a full-size portrait of a friend and model. It was the first large scale portrait I had done and I haven’t been sure of what to make of it. Over the year I’ve had it up on various walls, under various types of light, as well as hidden away in the back of my studio and apt. I still don’t know how to feel about it. Yesterday I finished a second large scale portrait of Jun, which is helping to give me perspective on this one. I shot this painting leaning on a table in my home, its’ latest locale. I didn’t crop out the lantern top because it helps give a sense of scale and promotes the fact that the painting is an object. The reason I call it Madame X, I will keep to myself. So there it is.
Madame X, 2011, 40×50
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