A Partial Eclipse

Eclipse has been kind of a fun piece to work on from the very beginning.  The balance between textured relief elements, obnoxious colors, and quirky imagery has held my interest.  Here is a shot when it just had the first layer of line work completed.

Followed by some colors...

...and a little more line work.

Visually it (the first layer) was doing what I needed it to do.

Unfortunately, it was just the first layer which made it not dense enough visually to earn a gold star seal of approval from me.  More needed to be done to it...like haze it over and then jam a bunch more stuff on it.  When in doubt, add more ingredients.

Now it's all been hazed over and it's time to put on another layer of imagery.

After the line work dries, I start to add some color.

There is still some painting to be done on this, but the overwhelming majority is done.  However, it is that last little bit that can make a huge difference.

I basically just want to enhance the interaction between the warm tones of the yellow disk against the coolness of the blue band along the bottom.  My first step is to add a robusto blue to the bottom.  Booooom!

Then I mess around with the warm tones/yellows.

Paint a few relief elements so that they begin to interact more fully with everything else going on throughout the piece.  Before being painted, they were subdued, if not borderline wimpy.

Now I would say it is done.

Next time we'll check in with the Tasaday...

The Early Stages Of Eclipse

Eclipse is yet another piece I am working on for my upcoming show at The Figge Art Museum this Summer.  Time is rapidly dwindling away.  There will be several pieces in the show that have a relief city scape-esque motif to them.  The relief elements actually take a fair amount of time to construct, so it's time to call in some back-up.

A few big days in the studio with help from the 4'-Assassin (about 16 hours worth of work between the two of us), and we had...

...this!  Bear in mind this is just stuck to an essentially random canvas that washed up on my shore.  I will soon cut it loose and attach it to a larger canvas....

...like this one!

After my base layer of colors dries (I allotted over a week for it to dry), I add my first layer of lines.

Now for some color!

I have a some line work to add and a couple to touch-ups to do, but by about this time next week, this sucker is gonna get its haze coat.  Then it will be time to plot and scheme about what I'm going to paint as the second layer.

Pop Culture Palimpsest opens in about two months.  You can read more about it by visiting The Figge Art Museum's website (HERE!).

Spaghetti No. 3 (The First Installment)

Another piece I'm working on for Pop Culture Palimpsest is currently being called Spaghetti No. 3.  Since there is an excellent Italian restaurant directly below my studio, I'm 99.99% sure the title came from the label on the side of a box of pasta I saw.  That .01% of me thinks I could be mis-remembering that incident.  Either way, I saw a note in my sketch book for the title/idea 'Spaghetti No. 3', so I'm going with that for the time being.

The central disc/halo/mandala was one of the pieces I shipped down to Suriname back in 2015.  It is finding new life in Spaghetti No. 3. (You can see some of its early stages by checking out these two posts regarding The Suriname Adventure (FIRST POST and SECOND POST)).  The base canvas is also finding a new life -at one point it housed a piece from my Dialog Series.  I'm pretty sure it was the bag of fries piece.

Now it is reborn as Spaghetti No. 3.

Once the figure is in place, I add the carved wooden letters along the bottom.

This sketch is from one of my matchbooks I snagged awhile back.

I threw in the image of the sketch to show how sometimes what is happening on/with the canvas/composition necessitates modifying the original image.  Between the seam running down the side of the canvas and the fact that I didn't want the arch/oval to take up any more space in the composition, I sliced of the right hand side of the oval and pushed the 'Orders To Take Out' text outside of the original composition.

A couple more shots of the line work.

Next time Spaghetti No. 3 get some color.