Branches and Brambles

This is what I consider an 'art project'. By 'art project' I mean something, an idea,  that I do just to see how it'll turn out; an experiment. The idea behind this piece came from those images you see when you have your eyes closed: in this case an abstract pattern of short dark lines against a light background. I made it less abstract when I painted it. To do this type of thing, you should be a lot more patient and attentive to details than I am, but on this scale, the sloppiness is pretty hard to see. Anyways, this was done in the standard way I do branches: I shape them by painting the background after I do the branches rather than paint over the background.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Squall Weather Revised

I've spent hours on the waves without a great deal of satisfaction. I find it hard to get waves both interesting, and logical. This is last night's revision: rather chaotic, but I suppose, logical enough given the weather conditions.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

Impressions in the Mist 4

I'll be candid and admit that this is a landscape, which I swore off painting for this month. Oh, well. It's more or less a doodle, and so it tended to fall into a familiar pattern since I wasn't thinking too hard about what I was painting. I used a small brush and twisty brush strokes, so that the brush ended up with only two or three bristles, the flexible modeling medium I use to add texture to the paint is pretty hard on my cheap brushes.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Squall Weather

Yesterday's Sunrise on a Calm Sea was even too understated (boring) to me, so I repainted it last night and this is the revised painting with a new title

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

Sunrise on a Calm Sea

I had a rather large Thames barge with red sails in this painting this morning, but in the end, it looked too crude. You'd need to be able to paint all the little glints and shadings of light and equipment: it can not be imagined or gleamed from thumbnail photos.  I went with my usual understated look instead.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard 

Luggers at Sea

I've abandoned the disreputable impressionist style of painting for straight up classical painting. At least today. Lesson learned today: if you want dramatic boats, you have to paint stormy seas. I didn't paint wild seas, so I had to make my luggers rather placidly sailing along. Oh well.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

In the Wake of the Inchcliffe Castle

Decided to try my hand at nautical painting. (Hey, it's a separate genre from landscape painting...) Took down 'The Best of Sail' to have a look at how Jack Spurling painted the sea and sky and went at it. I had to abandoned my large brushes and impressionist style, but that's what these days are all about: experimenting.  The title is a nod to Guy Gilpatric's Glencannon series, a favorite.

12x24" 30x60cm acrylic on hardboard

Impressions in the Mist 3

No way to spin this one. It's a landscape. The problem for me in doing any other type of painting is that it seems like an art project. 'Now class, today we're going to paint...' Oh, well, I'll keep trying to paint anything but a landscape for a few weeks yet. No promises, however.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

The Still Life Number 6

Just playing around with paint today, trying not to paint a landscape. This is the type of painting that might well be painted over tomorrow as it's pretty blah.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Four Blade Lugger

Another installment in my science fiction/fantasy 'Archipelago of the Three Lovers' series. I won't bother with any explanation, a general one can be found with the earlier installments. Right now I'm just trying not to fall off the wagon and start painting landscapes again... (after only a week).

12x24" 30x60cm acrylic on hardboard

Impressions in the Mist 2

This is painted over the two girls in velvet dresses. I tried to fix the cockeyed eyes of the last version but things did not go well, and it was a lame picture anyways, so I just painted over it. I'm not sure this is a keeper either, but I may decide enough is enough.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Riverboat in Moonlight

I can't pretend this isn't a painting of something, mostly smoke. An ode to Turner.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Girl in the Velvet Dress 2

Yesterday's was too dark and got darker as the paint dried, and as I predicted, trying to fix it, didn't work. This is painted over that one, It's just an art project. People are not my thing.

16x12" 40x30cm acrylic on hardboard

Girl in the Velvet Dress

Way too dark, but when I get a face that sort of works, I've found that I'm wise to settle for what works rather than try to get it working better as that is always a disaster. This was originally a 24x12" panel, but I couldn't get her arm right, so we got out our jig saw and eliminated the bottom 8". You're not missing anything.

16x12" 40x30cm acrylic on hardboard

The Still Life Number 5

This one is kind of a mash up of The Still Life nos. 1 & 3. Basically what I did with both this one and no. 1 is to paint something over the stains of the scraped off paint from the earlier efforts, and then go back and lightly paint over the parts of those stains that remain after adding the new painted elements. Most of the old painting is painted over in this case, but there are still elements here and there.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

The Still Life number 4

Sailing pretty close to the forbidden edge of landscapes, but it's pure abstract, unless I give it a name to hint at what it might be imagined as, which I won't.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

The Still Life no. 3

I was looking out my window this morning trying to come up with an idea to paint while watching the sparrows who have taken over the bird houses on my grape vines flirt about on a frosty, misty morning and decided, 'Hey, why not"? Sparrows and grape vines... As you can see, I lost the sparrows: no way I could (or wanted to) paint the sparrows in a manor compatible with the grape vines, so that only left the grape vines on a frosty morning. I think it's enough.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

The Still Life no. 2 revisited

I guess I couldn't resist after all. Basically the flowers were not abstract enough and I came to feel that they needed more of a context. I like using picture frames as a backdrop because 1. they add a contrasting geometric shape to the composition and 2. I get to paint a painting in a painting.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

The Still Life no. 2

Had to keep myself from filling the empty space in this piece. Usually I put a corner of a picture frame in my still live paintings, but I want these to be as abstract as I can paint. I can't paint pure abstracts, but I'm trying to make sure I don't try too hard to make sense in the paintings.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

The Still Life no.1

As promised, a floral abstract, or what ever. It's an abstract.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Autumn on the Moors Last Revision

That blue sky simply wasn't going to cut it. And the foreground got too busy as well. This is it.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

Autumn on the Moors (revised)

This morning I decided that I'd managed to get the sky into a very static, characterless state, and seeing that it makes up most of the painting, this was not good. I went with a blue sky, which is not really my thing, but did it anyways, and had to lighten up the moor a bit since it was now a much sunnier day.  Tomorrow we'll get out of the landscape racket. Maybe.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

Autumn on the Moors

This was the painting I was working on yesterday when I decided to be come an abstract floral artist. Tackled it again this morning, and this will have to do. I still think I need a change: tired of painting variations of things I've already painted. We'll see what I decide to paint next.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

Impressions in the Mist

I really wanted to paint an abstract floral because I've rather run out of ideas for landscapes, but I guess I ended up with an old familiar scene once again. Oh well, maybe next time.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Cherryblossom Vines and Feather Lizards

Another addition to my Archipelago of the Three Lovers series. (These 12x24" pieces have been piling up...) Besides I needed some color to balance the karma of yesterday's greys.

It's a science fiction series of paintings and/or abstract paintings with a slight nod to being something, your choice. 
Anyways, imagine three planets (the three lovers) in close orbit around a point in space. They're close enough together to share an atmosphere and occasionally scrap by each other knocking bits and pieces, plants, animals and people off into this shared atmosphere and these rocks then hang suspended like motes of dust within the shifting gravitational pull of the three planets. This is the archipelago, drifting 'islands' in free fall in the space between the worlds. I seem to remember an Edger Rice Burroughs book with twin worlds and a shared atmosphere, but I think three worlds would work better. I usually some sort of winged boat in, but decided the Feather Lizards would have to do.

12x24" 30x60cm acrylic on hardboard

November Rain

The title says it all.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Fall Colors in Lansworth

Well the weather has finally turned to good painting weather: rainy, windy, snowy, so I'm painting. I've got some ground to make up since I've been rather neglecting my work lately to ride my bike in November.

Little new here: just using a lot of extra acrylic medium to get a little richer texture otherwise it's a familiar Lansworth street scene.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Rowboats in the Park Yet Again

Can't seem to leave this idea alone. I'm using a cropped version of an earlier piece on this theme for my ipad wallpaper and I wanted to try and make a similar one that needn't be cropped. This is close, but not quite.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Moon Over the Downs

The original idea was to use an almost featureless grey sky with a moon in it: something I'd seen on a recent bike ride at twilight, and use it in a scene similar to the last several. The actual scene had a line of trees on the horizon and a marsh in the foreground, and I was looking to do something like that. But the trees seemed too familiar, and I liked the idea of a featureless horizon, and the glint of the moon on water, so this is what I ended up with. I'm not into painting pretty pictures these days. I'm into seeing just how much I can push minimalism without sacrificing mood.

18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard

Sunset Along the Bike Trail

I painted  this piece today to mark reaching the 4,000 mile mark (6,400km) riding my bikes this year, mostly along the abandoned railroad converted to a bike trail. Ten miles in the morning, and again in the evening, and if I'm bored, another 10 -14 mile ride mid-day. It adds up.

I actually used a photo I took (below) as reference for this piece. Not my usual practice, and as you can see, I took my liberties. For one thing, I could not find that orange, so I toned everything down.  And as you can see, this is very much a sketch. I feel that if you're going to paint realistically, you've got to be really good. I'm not that good or that patient, so I have to make sure people realize I'm not really trying to paint realistically by being very unrealistic. Of course, most people don't like that, but oh, well.

12x16" 30x40cm acrylic on hardboard

Well the differences in color sort of bugged me, after I posted the painting, that I decided to see if I could fix it . What a disaster. I've had to redo the whole painting several times just to get the painting below. This is why I hate to do commissioned pieces - and won't anymore. Meeting a specific target, in this case my own, and making it good enough for me, the customer, and the price is just too stressful. I'm not going to do this again. I'm just going to make things up...