acrylics

New Artwork: Convergence

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Here's a new painting I just finished; I started it during my La Pedrada de Noemi residency, but I didn't get a chance to finish it there so I've been working on it since arriving back home.  It's actually the first painting I began while on residency, so given that you might wonder why it took so long to complete - the answer is that the support is an aluminum panel, and I've never worked on aluminum before.  What I wanted to do on the aluminum kind of clashed with what the aluminum wanted me to do with it, so we had a prolonged battle.  I didn't want to prime or even sand the aluminum, because I feel like the whole point of painting on aluminum is the luminosity of the material.  But not priming it meant that the paint wouldn't evenly stick.  I feel like I eventually came out the victor, though!

The painting is acrylic on aluminum panel, 18x14", and is titled Convergence.  It features a luna moth (Actias luna) atop a barrel jellyfish (Rhizostoma pulmo).

New Artwork!

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I just completed a new piece of artwork - the second companion piece to Pilgrim.  I had intended to do at least two from the start, but it took a while to find the studio time to devote to the second piece.

In this one, I wanted to achieve a real sense of depth in my relief without being cartoonish.  My aim was to maintain the possibility of illusionism from some angles - particularly that of the shallower sections.  With Pilgrim, there is a relatively shallow relief over the entirety of the sloth's body.  In this new piece, the sloth's body contains an area that is solely painted with no relief at all and then extremely shallow through rather bold relief.

I'm considering titling this one Outreach.  It's Quick Cure Clay and acrylic on basswood panel, 12x6x1.75", 2018.  Due to the dimensions of the piece, it shows up quite large below; if you click on it though it will open up in an overlay that depending on your monitor and settings will probably be smaller and more of a gestalt.

Below you can see a couple in-progress photos of the relief work before I applied paint.

Exhibition Photos from La Maison Verte Residency at the Jardin Botanique de Marnay-sur-Seine

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Here are a few images from the La Mason Verte June 2016 Artists in Residence Exhibition I had in the Jardin Botanique de Marnay-sur-Seine.  My exhibition was entitled Garden Lore.  The door, obviously, is permanently installed, and was about 20 feet away from the display area I used for the rest of my pieces.  Note how the garden staff tidied up the door's surrounding area for the exhibition and added a permanent sign with my details on it!  Two of the photos below (the ones with a bit of an apricot tint) were taken by photographer Abril M. Barruecos.

La Maison Verte - Artwork 7

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My seventh piece at La Maison Verte was my intervention in the garden - my conversion of the water-pump door into a piece of artwork.  The door is 41x31x6" and is a mixed media installation including the original door materials, a poplar plank and back braces to replace the rotting base, 3P Quick Cure Clay, acrylics, screws, epoxy, and satin polyurethane.  It's titled Genius loci.  The piece is meant to be permanent, but of course the eye stalks and tentacles of the snail are relatively fragile so they may break if visitors to the garden are not gentle with it; that's in keeping with my overall message about the environment.  Nature provides us with so many rewards but in turn requires some human consideration and restraint.

Below is documentation of the project from start to finish!

And finally, a panoramic view to finish the post off:

La Maison Verte - Artwork 6

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I was bound and determined to finish a sixth piece in time for the exhibition in the Jardin Botanique de Marnay-sur-Seine, and I did it just in time!  This is 3P Quick Cure Clay and acrylic on an 8x8" birch panel.  I'm calling it Climber. 

La Maison Verte - Artwork 5

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Here's my fifth piece!  It's 3P Quick Cure Clay and acrylic on a 8x6" birch panel.  It features one of two indistinguishable (apart from dissection) species - either Arion ater, the black slug, or Arion rufus, the red slug - enjoying one of the many rainy days we've had here in France.  I'm titling it As Right as Rain.

La Maison Verte - Artwork 4

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Here's my fourth piece!  It's titled Floating and is 3P Quick Cure Clay and acrylic on a 16x12" birch panel.  The whole thing is super shiny because I used a gloss varnish to seal and protect it, but I managed to get some images that aren't quite so glare-filled.  I also ended up gloss varnishing The Slightest Disturbance as well. 

La Maison Verte - Artwork 3 Progress Pics

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I was much better about taking progress photos for this piece!  Here are some images documenting my process on Under the Bonnets.

La Maison Verte - Artwork 3

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My third piece is pretty much done!  It's titled Under the Bonnets and it's 3P Quick Cure Clay, balsa wood, and acrylic on a 6x6" birch panel.  

La Maison Verte - Artwork 2

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And my second piece - again, I may tweak it further, but it's taking longer and longer between tweaks...

The Slightest Disturbance features a Rana ridibunda or the synonymous Pelophylax ridibundus and is a mixed media relief piece made out of 3P Quick Cure Clay and acrylic on a 6x8" birch panel.  

La Maison Verte - Artwork 1

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I'm not certain this is completely finished yet, but it's close.

This piece is tentatively titled Every Side is North.  It is 3P Quick Cure Clay and acrylic on a 6x6" birch panel.

Puffin Painting #1 - Byssal Bird

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And here's the finished first painting!  It's a conceptual, experimental piece - those are real Atlantic blue mussel shells (Mytilus edulis) adhered to the panel; I beachcombed some while I was in Iceland and was quite interested in their coloration and form and how I might use them to break the picture plane.  I wanted to explore ideas of illusionism, perspective, shaped or irregular canvases, cast shadows, organic versus architectural form language, and intertidal zone ecosystems.

I'm titling this painting Byssal Bird, and it's a mixed media piece with acrylic, watercolor, Atlantic blue mussel shells, and epoxy on a 16x12" basswood panel.

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Puffin Painting #2 - Littoral Layers

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I'm almost done with the first puffin painting - the one I gave you a sneak peak of - but in the meantime I'm potentially done with the second; I've been adjusting it over the past couple days and I may go back into it again, but here's where it's at now.  If I do go back into it, it'll be for minor changes at this point.  I'm typically pretty bad about taking progress photos (particularly in taking well lit/consistent lighting source ones, so please excuse the slight lighting changes in the thumbnails) but I'm trying to make more of an effort to document my processes.  

I'm titling this one Littoral Layers.  The final piece is graphite, charcoal, and acrylic on a 16x20" basswood panel.  I typically do start with a line drawing (after preliminary sketching, of course), but then in paintings where I add to the natural support media for the background, I usually paint in the beginnings of a background before moving on to the foreground elements and then go back and forth until there's a resolution.  This painting was different in that I really developed the foreground elements before addressing the background, though after that I did my normal switching back and forth routine.

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New Series Started - Puffin Paintings!

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I've started a new series of paintings on the juvenile puffin, Toti, that I met at the tail end of my residency in Iceland in 2014.  Toti was a puffling that failed to launch and imprinted on humans, so he is now a permanent resident at the Saeheimar Aquarium.  I wanted to start on these pieces sooner, but better late than never.

Here's a sneak peak of progress on the first painting!

Golden OPEN Acrylics

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I am not a fan of using normal acrylic paint in a fine art context.  Obviously other artists use them well, but I find they dry way too fast and permanently for my liking and additives like retardant and unlocking sprays don't do enough to mitigate that.  I've always loved watercolor paints, and also am quite fond of oils, so I used to think I just wouldn't work with acrylics and that'd be that.  

Then I started doing short-term artist residencies.

While some of my residencies had subject matter perfectly suited to watercolor, others had subjects that seemed to call for a more heavy-bodied paint... but the timeline of the residencies meant that oil paints wouldn't dry prior to transportation.  I happened to have been gifted a full boxed Modern Colors set of Golden OPEN Acrylics at the 2010 College Art Association (CAA) Conference from a very nice representative, and so while on residency in 2014 when faced with one of these subjects that wanted a more substantial paint, I tried the OPEN Acrylics out.  It was a revelation.  These acrylics feel like what I always wanted the medium to be: they dry much more slowly than normal acrylics but much faster than oils, and yet still have the ease of normal acrylics, too - they can be thinned and cleaned up with water.

My previous dislike of acrylics was so strong that it took a while for this new world order to sink in, but there's really no denying it now - OPEN Acrylics are one of my favorite mediums.   

This is not a sponsored post.

Nau Côclea Residency - Artwork #4

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This is acrylic on pastelbord which is a clay ground textured with marble dust granules.  Due to the high heat here, most of the time the snails spend sealed inside their shells to conserve moisture, but on the summer solstice the rain brought several of them out and one explored my left thumb for quite some time.

Titling this one Balancing Act.

Nau Côclea Residency - Artwork #3

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Here's an acrylic and watercolor on aquabord.  This one is titled Spirit.

In the first donkey painting, I used acrylic for the donkeys and watercolor for the background/foreground atmosphere.  In this piece, I used both acrylic and watercolor in the body of the donkey in order to achieve the various levels of opacity and translucency as well as watercolor for  background/foreground layering.

Nau Côclea Residency - Artwork #2

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So if you've been thinking I've been a bit slower production-wise on this residency, you're right - I've been experimenting in mixing acrylics and watercolors and also trying out some new support boards and there's been some trial and error in figuring out how to combine them all together, plus acrylics are a slower medium for me than watercolors.  I think I'm onto something, though.  

This is acrylic and watercolor on claybord.  I'm titling it Perspective.