Still Playing

Portico, Nice. 8x10 inches, acrylic, pastel, pen and ink on Bristol paper.  I'm still playing with different ways of marking a piece of paper.  This one is inspired by a Ken Howard drawing from his book Inspired by Light: A Personal View

Still Practicing

Though I usually paint landscapes, I like the opportunity to paint from the figure.  This is a 16x12 oil on panel done earlier this week.

The poet John Keats wrote in a letter dated October 9, 1818: "That which is creative must create itself."  What I think he meant is that one can only learn by doing.  To get better at painting, one has to paint a lot.  Ken Howard quotes the painter Carel Weight: "Painting is rather like playing the piano, you've got to practice every day."

The Cow's View

This 9x12 oil on panel I did a couple weeks ago.  It's another in the Trees and Snow series though this time it represents the stony corner of a pasture.  I've been to this spot many times, but now for some reason the barbed wire fence has been taken down, so I was able to actually stand in the pasture itself, and look back to where I normally stood, on the other side of the fence, the cow's view, so to speak.  I tried to keep things simple due to the complexity of the view.

Another thought from Ken Howard: "If as an artist you are touched by a subject, it will touch others.  If you paint a subject just because you think other people will like it, they never will."

The Sense of Something

This morning I found myself under a bridge looking at the Hoosic River.  Fortunately I brought along some charcoal and a drawing pad so I proceeded to draw.

I've been reading the words of painter Ken Howard from his book Ken Howard's Switzerland: In the Footsteps of Turner:  "Painting is about getting the sense of something and you achieve this by absorbing how it actually works in nature."

Studio Oil

A view of the studio with my messy table in the foreground.  This is a 16x20 oil on panel.   Through the recent email update from the painter Randall David Tipton, I learned of the British painter Fred Cuming,  who has done some wonderful studio interiors over the years.  I've previously mentioned the studio interiors of Ken Howard, and I know that Fairfield Porter painted a number of them  There's a long tradition of painting studio interiors.

Studio Interior

In preparation for a series of studio interior paintings, I'm doing a bunch of pen, ink and wash drawings of the studio that I share with painter Thor Wickstrom.  This is the first one, a 12x9 drawing.  I've been inspired by the studio interiors of Ken Howard, and this studio may match his in terms of stuff, but there's no figure sitting in the middle.