Multimedia

"Coneflowers," digital

"Coneflowers," casein on panel, 6x8

A few years ago, as an experiment in art media, I did a series of paintings of purple coneflowers outside my studio. The idea was to compare using oil, casein, watercolor and digital methods to make a painting. Here are the four paintings, each done with differing materials.

I used Sketchbook and a Wacom tablet to paint the digital coneflowers. Otherwise I used traditional media and traditional supports. Casein and watercolor are thinned with water, of course, while oils require a solvent (turpentine or oms).

The results were interesting for several reasons. First, the digital image (top) seems comparable to the other images made using traditional media. Casein and oil paint each gave results that to my eye look rich with implied depth. The watercolor, while more transparent, also gave a visually interesting background. 

Seems to me that depending on subject and the eventual use of the painting, any of these mediums is a reasonable choice.

 

"Coneflowers," oil on panel, 6x8

"Coneflowers," watercolor on paper, ~6x8

 

Dog Cart

"Pushcart," oil on panel, 12x16, private collection

Manhattan is brimming with pushcarts of all sorts. You see hot dogs, chestnuts, falafel, and much more being sold on street corners from the southern tip to way beyond Central Park. This particular hot dog vendor was set up in the Financial District, near Wall Street. This particular work was done from a photo reference, considerably modified. 
 

Sherman Hill

"Houses on Sherman Hill," wc/ink, ~8x10

This watercolor and ink sketch shows a couple of very similar houses in the district of the city known as Sherman Hill. The name derives from Hoyt Sherman, a younger brother of the famous Civil War general, William Sherman, who built himself a large house there in the 1870s. Subsequently the house was expanded and became Hoyt Sherman Place, with a large auditorium, an art gallery, and other amenities. 

Fall Foliage

"Blue Heron Lake," wc/ink on paper, ~8.5X3.5

Saturday the sketch group went to the Raccoon River Park in West Des Moines, an enormous multi-use facility that features Blue Heron Lake, fishing, boating, swimming, softball, a dog park, and a lot more. I sat on the west side of the lake and sketched the opposite bank, where grasses and trees have just begun to show fall color. The day was perfect.

Ten Years Ago

"False Dawn, Union Square," oil on panel, 16x20

This cityscape is a view of the subway station entry on the west side of Union Square in lower Manhattan. The sun hasn't risen but its light is creeping over the horizon. To my eye the roof looks a lot like our popular concept of a flying saucer.

Spanish Lighthouse

"Almeria. The Light." wc/ink on paper, 3.5x5

This little watercolor dates from a few years ago. We sailed the Spanish coast and islands for about a week,  visiting small ports and savoring the food and wines. This is a view from our ship while anchored.

A Rare Pastel

"Egon, Dead," pastel on paper

Although I have a few old pastels from two or three decades ago in my files, I've done far fewer than my other works in oil and so on. This one floated into memory today. It's a bit rough, being one of my first pastel paintings twenty-five years ago. It's after a death photo of Egon Schiele, the young artist whose work was sometimes considered scandalous (he was even briefly jailed for some of it--click the link for a bio) and who died in 1918, before he was thirty, of influenza.
 

Autumn at Whiterock

"Autumn at Whiterock," oil on panel, 9x12

This landscape was done as a plein air work just about a year ago, at the Whiterock Conservancy. The October colors out there are simply luscious.

Wading

A new landscape, begun last summer as a plein air sketch and completed in the studio. The setting is a river in southwest Virginia. 

"Wading," oil on panel, 9x12

 

Art Center Sketch

This is a sketch of the Des Moines Art Center, from the northeast. Last Saturday many of our sketch group stayed at Greenwood Park, which is home of the Art Center. Architectural subjects are an interest of mine, and I've done a number of views of the buildings, mostly from the rose garden and other southern spots. 

"Des Moines Art Center," wc/ink on paper, ~13x5

You can see the Richard Meier building on the right side and the Saarinen building to the left. The latter was completed in 1948 and the Meier in the 1980s. I like the contrast and the seeming zoom of sidewalk into the center.

 

Morning, Afternoon, Evening

Painters in the past have done series of the same subject in order to delve into color, value and lighting--think, Monet's haystacks. A few years back I tried a few small series of sketches--usually three--in an attempt to do the same kind of study. The main point was to capture the light--color, intensity, shadow effects and all that--at different times of day, in oil paint. These were 6x8 gesso panels and there was a time limit of an hour, start to finish.

Ink

A bottle of pale blue ink fell on its side one day, so I painted it.
 

Silver Creamer

This casein sketch is one of a series of studies I did to learn the handling and other properties of casein paint. A silver creamer on a windowsill.
 

Clock and Two Bottles

And a Clock," casein on panel

This small still life is one of my first studio works using casein paint. Casein is a wonderful painting medium. This one enetered a private collection years ago.
 

Diner

"Nathans'," oil on illustration board

This oil is a view of a diner in Minneapolis.

Study and Finish

Like many painters, many of my studio works develop through a combination of observation, photos, on the spot studies, and so on. 

"MacDougal Street." digital sketch

Here's a digital study I did of  a street in New York. It's an intersection along Macdougal Street in Manhattan's West Village. The two places with signs are both famous for their clientele over the decades, including beatniks in the 1950s, and Bob Dylan a few years later. This digital study was done using Sketchbook and a Wacom tablet to explore colors, compositions, and so on. 

The resultant oil painting is considerably different, but clearly is a result of the study. The final oil is a tall and large work on canvas. As you can see, the color palette is considerably different, and the sky, background and pavement have been changed to suggest twilight. And of course the three figures have been significantly modified and repositioned.

"MacDougal Street," oil on canvas, 36x18

Feeliing Hot?

"February, 2020," gouache

This gouache painting from several years back looks frigid and is a sort of relief from what has been said to be the hottest, most humid month in history. It certainly felt like these past few days.

Summer on the Sound

"Dropping the Spinnaker," casein on illustration board, ~8x16

This painting is a view of the coast of  Puget Sound from a sailboat. Another sailboat has stopped to drop their huge spinnaker, the sail you sometimes see ballooning from the front of this type of boat.

This painting was done using casein, a kind of paint made using milk protein emulsified with linseed oil. It's water soluble, but once it dries casein is almost bulletproof. Like other water media--acrylics, gouache, even watercolor--casein dries very quickly, which is both an advantage and a hindrance. Quick drying means the ability to work over previous painted passages within a few minutes. But it also requires quick decision-making and good eye-hand skills too. 

 

West of Miami

This digital painting was actually finished about five years ago, but the message encapsulated in the image is still scary and seems even more possible, given the climate changes we've seen--the hottest year in history, more damaging storms, warming oceans (and coral bleaching), melting glaciers and melting of the Greenland ice. 

"West of Miami, 2050," digital painting, 2019

The implication, of course, is that as the sea levels rise, perhaps southern Florida will become a shallow sea. As the changes have accelerated, one wonders if it will be even earlier in this century.

At the Art Center

"The Pei Building," wc/ink on paper, about 3.5x9

Our Saturday sketch group stays in Greenwood Park, the setting of the Des Moines Art Center, once in a while. Back in May I sat in the park and sketched the Pei Building of the Art Center. Designed by I.M. Pei, the famous Chinese-American architect, the building opened in 1968. Its bare concrete and geometric forms are consistent with Brutalist architecture, a 20th century movement. The building was commissioned to provide ample room for monumental sculpture and large paintings. Its rear windows seem to suggest the architect's last name, but he claims it is a coincidence.