Artist Studio
During my break from classes I went on a long cruise, played with my dog and did very little painting involving new ideas and new concepts, I worked mainly on finishing and resolving works that had accumulated over the previous several months. It has been my habit to paint a lot of work during a
I have been working on color and texture impressions of landscapes from my recent trips, dating back to my several trips to Botswana, most of these expressions are from the point of view of looking down from and airplane. I am in love with desert textures and colors and find the dry ancient contours to
40 x 30 Acrylic “Rockies on Fire” After a recent trip to Colorado this painting just sort of happened as an impression of the heat and fire that was all over the mountains. Fires were springing up from North of Denver to Pueblo. I try to paint abstract landscapes without a plan but just evolve
These three images hang horizontally left to right and it really is just a color exercise. It is based on Hans Hoffman’s theory that you can create three dimensional reality on a two dimension surface with color. The strong colors seem to float in front of the Naples Yellow ground. I hope you like them.
Here is a recent Acrylic that follows in my series of paintings that are conceptually about looking down on the beautiful “American Landscape”. Really it could be any landscape but I feel like this one is one of those Texas Gulf Coast shorelines. The painting is on canvas and measures at 16 x 16
I wanted to let everyone know that my painting “Chasing OJ” which I finished a few weeks ago is in the winter group show at the Studio Gallery in DC. I really like this painting it is 40 x 30 inches and it truly needs a new home. I hope you can make it to the show and see why I like it so much. Steve
Spring snow 12 x 12Spring Snow 2 12 x 12 Acrylic Across the Valley 12 x 12 Acrylic Building Clouds 12 x 12 Acrylic
30 x 40 Acrylic on Canvas “Chasing OJ”
Take out several pieces of paper and tape into sections, choose three colors and I want you to use a big brush with no preliminary drawing. Begin applying the paint with broad passages of color, leaving white paper around the colors and as shapes inside the color passages. Be very primitive in your composition and
Continue Reading “Creative Jumpstart: Practice Color and Form”
It is amazing after all the years of painting fairly competent watercolors how hard it has been for me to make a comfortable leap to acrylic paintings. It might be thought that I am struggling with abstraction more than I thought I would. I never gave much thought to difficulty in representational work I was always pretty good a making up creative subject matter from memory and designing a pleasing and interesting composition but with abstraction, the intellect is being challenged and I am looking for a language and metaphor that works for me. I haven’t found the key yet but as with all things I will keep on painting and soon the painting will appear. As it was so aptly demonstrated by the great abstract expressionist “the painting is the subject.”
today I worked some more on the acrylic paintings I put up the other night as you will see they begin to change considerably as I work on them I am pretty happy with both although I know I will continue to work on them.
I am working on a couple of new works and I am posting the one painting in progress to show it to you as I get it moving towards resolution. I really have no actual composition plan I am just working on it trying to make it happen as I go. It a little similar to the action painters of the ’50s and ’60s the painting subject was the painting, not some subject that you brought to the work. I am also posting 2 small black and whites which will be the studies for a new series of big black and white pieces.