Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Stages Of Work In Process - Artist: RobBob


I love this little gif because it shows how the artist was able to maintain the same structural form of the face after he began adding paint over his charcoal drawing. The charcoal drawing beneath established the architecture of the face (emphasizing plane changes) which allowed the artist to then lay colors of the appropriate temperature, value and hue on those established facial planes to reinforce the sense of space and form as he painted.

Stages Of Work In Progress - Artist: Stephen



Here is a little gif that I made to show two progressive stages of a painting. There can be a long developmental process in a painting and working up layers of paint and interweaving brush strokes help to create form and a nice variety of edges, ranging from those that are hard and crisp to those that are lost and become undetectable in transitions from one color to another. This painting is developing a nice range of edges, especially the blurred edge on the back of the head where the hair is about to meet the neck.



John Models With A Smoothie


The other day, our model was a little late so John threw a stool up on the counter with a warm bright light beneath it and modeled for us while he had his lunch. This is the kind of stuff that makes his class so fun and worth attending. John is great at improvising and the unexpected elements always make for great paintings.

Work In Progress


















Thursday, March 26, 2015

Rilke



John shared with us some of Rainer Maria Rilke's work in order to discuss the nature of being an artist. The poem at the top comes from Rilke's Possibility of Being. The second photo shows pages four and five from Letters on Cezanne. When discussing "This is the Creature," John said that everyone interprets poetry differently, but he can see this as being a metaphor for the process of an artist. Here are some other thoughts he mentioned while reading the poem to us.
-Creating the possibility to create art
-Making something unmade
-Giving birth to something that the normal paradigm will not care for
-Too much self disclosure scares the unicorn away

See what insights you gain about yourself and the process of making art as you read these sections and create work in the studio.

Pixel Paintings


(photo above)








(photo above)



















These are a few paintings from a project started at the beginning of the semester. The assignment focused on a rigorous process of color mixing. The students were broken into groups of three and had to create an interesting photograph of a member in the group. Next, the students pixelated their photo in Photoshop in order to create a grid system that they could paint from. Each of the three students had to paint the photo in a different way: one in black and white, one in the photo's original colors, and one with a limited palette of their choice, such as a pair of complimentary colors like blue and orange or yellow and purple. Hopefully the others will be finished soon so I can put them up as well.





Recent Work







When in doubt, just do this.



Thursday, March 12, 2015

Mediums and Solvents


Earlier this week in class, some of us were discussing the way in which we like to use solvents and mediums to thin our oil paint. Our discussion led to the stability of paint when only using solvents to thin it. Everyone has their own preference for working with oils, but if you aren't sure how or why to use mediums and solvents, here is a good summary from Greg Kimsey and two videos from Douglas Farrick. Farrick's first video is about mediums and the second one has good safety information on solvents. Last, if you're really geeky and want to know about the molecular activity happening in oil paint and solvents, there is an article from the Smithsonian Libraries titled, "Oil Paints: The Chemistry of Drying Oils and the Potential for Solvent Disruption."

Oil Painting 101: Mediums - ART by Greg Kimsey

How to Create Oil Painting Medium(s) - YouTube

Artists Painting Solvents - YouTube

https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/20489/11.Tumosa.SCMC3.Mecklenburg.Web.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y



Thursday, March 5, 2015

Visual Research


The class is starting to prepare for their final project and these are the steps/requirements that John has outlined for the project.

1. What is your image?
          Find an image that you would like to work from and determine the size of your surface. Each student must have 3 to 4 manipulated versions of their photograph. John suggests altering your photo in photoshop with filters such as the 'artistic cutout' filter or the 'pixilated mosaic' filter to eliminate and simplify information. This will help you deconstruct the images and things you see in a deeper way.

2. Define your palette.
         What is your goal for the final image? What kind of aesthetic do you want to explore? The type of palette you choose can help you reach the aesthetic goal you desire and will help communicate a mood and unify the image. We've discussed the Zorn palette quite a bit, but there are so many out there to choose from or that you can create on your own.

3. The final image must have evidence of your altered photos. 
          The image above shows John's process for creating visual research. He has taken a photo of a baby and then manipulated it in several ways - photoshoping, sketching and printing, drawing over his printouts with charcoal, collaging on the printouts, painting and collaging together. He has placed all the paintings he is working on and all the images he is working from together in a group so that he can analyze the types of visual trends that are occurring. By working on several paintings at once and then bringing them together like this, he is able to recognize a visual language, let each piece inform the other as they are created, and let the altered images inform the final work.

Can't wait to see what everyone develops!




Monday, February 23, 2015

Drawing into paint






































Here are some snapshots of a little bit of the work we've done in class so far. Most of the paintings displayed here were made while observing a model lit with strong, colorful light. A few of the paintings were made from black and white photographs. We have been using acrylic and oil paint and have also been working with large and small surfaces.

John challenged us to create a small painting with brushes that were too big. This forced us to make bigger and more general strokes to create the planes of the face. John also encouraged us to draw over our painting as we worked on them to reestablish the underlying architecture of the figure. You can see some of those results showing through beautifully in this series of images.