Leaning towards Abstraction

I'm sure many artists can relate. Sometimes you get an idea in your head and just can't shake it, and finally it doesn't matter what's currently on the easel, you have to set it aside and get that thing out of your head and in paint.
I experienced a bit of that this week.  The poor tractor painting has been on and off my easel for over two weeks, it came off again a couple days ago. I kept having in my head the idea of pushing abstraction even further while staying representational and using knives.  It's no grand idea, but it seemed like it might be a new development for me, so I couldn't wait.  I took the tractor painting off the easel and took a small painting I did years ago but was in an older impressionist style I don't really do anymore and painted the same thing over it but with knives and thick paint while keeping in mind to make it as abstract as I could but still recognizable.

Dreaming of Autumn

Like I said, this one is small, just 8" X 6".  I kept the same name "Dreaming of Autumn".  When I painted the original version it was August and it had been an especially hot and dry summer.  While I love summer I was feeling a need for a break and so I took a break mentally by painting an early autumn scene featuring a colorful field and aspen trees in the background.  The reference photo I used was taken at a rest area on the Monte Cristo road (state highway 30) in Rich County Utah.

I think I like where this is taking me, I'm sure there will be more experiments to come, maybe even a larger version of this painting eventually.

Oh, what about that tractor painting?  Here's a work in progress photo.  As you can see I'm using brushes, not knives and keeping it more impressionistic than abstract.

Tractor painting WIP

Finally Returning to an Old WIP

I couldn't believe it when I looked it up, it really had been since June 2015 since I worked on that painting.  Yep, I started a painting almost 9 months ago and put the project on hold soon after.  I could have sworn it was late summer when I took a "break" from that painting.  The WIP has even been sitting on the small table next to my easel the whole time.  I finally decided it was time to rectify this situation and finish this beast.  Rather than divert you to links that are nine months old I'll recap those old WIP posts here and add one new one.

This painting is a little more complex than my paintings usually have been so I did more than just a typical thumbnail and made this small but somewhat detailed pencil sketch to plan the painting.  It almost seems like some kind of badge of honor nowadays for an artist to proclaim that they do no planning and just jump in and go where the muse takes them.  I suppose there may be some artists that are talented/gifted enough to get away with that but I can't help but think that they might get even better results if they put some thought into their design, or maybe they do and just want to create some kind of artist mystique but really do plan more than they claim.  I don't know about other artists but I feel no shame in admitting that usually my best paintings are well planned first.



This is usually the first step in making one of my paintings, though not all paintings get a full pencil underdrawing but those this complicated do, and as you can see the design has been refined somewhat as well.  This gives me another design iteration before the paint hits the surface.  After the underdrawing was done I applied a coat of yellow ochre diluted with glazing medium.  This layer serves two purposes.  First it seals the gesso and the drawing.  By sealing the drawing the graphite won't smear around while painting and by sealing the gesso the moisture won't be sucked out of my paint so readily and it will spread easier.  Second it gives me a tone to work against rather than a stark white surface, however I wish I had gone a bit darker with my tone on this.

Unless I'm painting with a palette knife my first layers are transparent.  I like to find my way into the painting by gradually layering transparent paint and even use optical mixing by layering different colors over each other.  Yes, most of this gets covered up opaque layers later but it's part of my process, it's part of my journey through the development of the painting.  I never intentionally mix water into my paint, I always use glazing or gloss medium to dilute it and make it transparent.  My experience is water tends to make the paint chalky or cloudy, or at least not as vibrant as it is using mediums.

This is the last WIP photo I posted last June.  You can see now I've added some opaque layers, still gradually finding my way into the painting.

Here is where the painting stands now, or rather where I left it last June but I never posted a WIP of this point before. Here you can see I've started refining shapes and adding details however that may be a bit premature, I'm guessing at most I'm only halfway through this painting now.  I'm committed to finishing this thing up though so fresh updates will be coming shortly.





Pastel Truck WIP

What's that?  Pastel you say?  Yep, that's right, I dug the pastels (dry pastels that is) out and started a new painting.  I'll get back to the "Passed it's Hay Day" painting soon enough but for now I had the urge to get dusty.  I've never tried to do a truck painting with pastels, in fact it's been since last summer that I last painted with pastels. 

Since I expected this to just be a quick, "just for fun" sketch I dug out a failed painting and cleaned it off so I didn't have to prepare a new panel.  Turns out part of that old painting will work with this new one.  Also it turned out I was enjoying myself so much that I decided this won't be just a sketch.  Here it is so far;



The background hills were more or less in the old painting as was the tree/bush on the right, so a little bit of the work was already done for me.  Soft pastels are known for their vibrant color so I tried an experiment, I worked from a photo that I had converted to greyscale which meant the colors were totally up to me!  Once I got started I totally forgot that the truck in the photo was actually green with some red parts and instead painted the whole truck red with some orange accents.  Ya, I know the light version of red is pink, but pink always looks dull and chalky to me so I used a yellow-orange instead. 

I had so much fun with this tonight this could signal a return to pastels for me, we'll see.  First I need to finish this painting.  It does need some adjustments to the drawing but I think I can wrap it up in one more session.  Right now the painting is 15" X 17 1/2", I think in the end I'll probably crop it to a standard 12" X 16".

FYI, the truck is a 1953 or 54 International, I found it in a wrecking yard in Nephi, Utah.

WIP - Golden Marsh

I started a new pastel painting today.  It's been a while since I've done a pastel painting larger than 8x10, this one will be 16x12.  This painting is based on a photo I took last Friday in the same spot as the first photo in my last blog post. The composition is practically ready made by nature but there were a couple tweaks I wanted to try and so I did a thumbnail sketch to test them;

As you can see I just used a plain old HB pencil. I moved the horizon up higher and tried to connect the darks a little better.  I decided to move forward with the underpainting;

I decided to try using watercolor for the underpainting, something I've never done before.  Watching my Richard McKinley video the other day motivated me to get all "splishy splashy" with my underpainting.  Normally I just use an alcohol wash over a thin layer of hard pastel.  I enjoyed this process and I think it may have made for a more interesting setup for the painting than I normally get, so I'm sure I'll use this technique again if not often.  I only put out a few colors since I was going for a near complimentary color scheme.  I wanted to keep the colors focused on violets and oranges since that is what the final painting will be.  I've found when I get real adventurous with color in the underpainting I just end up covering it all.  As McKinley says, "the underpainting is the set up for what goes on top."  If the underpainting is so incongruent with your idea for the final painting you end up covering it all up, what was the point in doing an underpainting?  I did underpaint the sky with yellow ochre, for some reason I usually like to do that for skys on a sunny day even if it will be mostly covered in blue.  The support for this painting is Uart 400 sanded paper mounted to foam board.

It's early in the game but I'm feeling pretty good about this one, I beleive it will be a winner



WIP #7

It's been two weeks since I last posted.  Part of that is laziness, part of it is the fact that last week's update just wasn't that interesting.  I am making progress but this painting has a few sessions to go yet.  Here is the latest;

Here is a detail of the area I'm currently working on.

Hopefully I'll be less neglectful of this blog in the future.  I plan on posting photographs from my hikes and travels as well in the future.  I also plan on spending more time at the drawing board and easel, hopefully I have more than just this monster painting to post about soon. 



WIP #6

Another week another update to the big painting;

And a detail shot.

This is turning out to be quite a journey.  At first glance it doesn't look like I've done much.  I haven't gone hardly any further down the board but I've done a lot of refining of that areas I did last week.  Always experimenting and learning as I go!





WIP #5

I had another session on the big painting this week. Two hours go by really fast when you're painting with a friendly group.   One of the things I love about acrylics is the ability to layer within a couple minutes vs a couple days as with oils, (or weeks).  I take advantage of this ability a lot with acrylics. You'll see in the the newly painted section of the painting that some areas are more finished than others.  Some only have the initial layer, scrubbed in transparently and other areas have two or three layers and are still looking unfinished. Finished areas often have ten or more layers.  Admittedly, some of this layering is by necessity with acrylics being less opaque than oils but I find it often a more fun way to paint than wet into wet, though I often use that technique as well.  Wet into wet takes a little bit of planning and working quickly with acrylics but it is possible.

Close up.



WIP #4

I have two in progress paintings to show today.  First up is the one you've seen the last several weeks.  I finally have a full session of color.  I started at the top and kept the colors on the cool and desaturated side and the shapes a little less distinct since the top of the painting is also the farthest distance back from the viewer.

Here's a detail of the area I worked on;

I think some of the evergreen tree shapes could use a little more work, some of them are a little too symmetrical and regular.  Prior to that night's painting session I printed out a copy of the photo of the monochromatic version to remind me of my value plan, it was very helpful.  It can be easy to get lost in color and forget about values.



WIP #3

Just a quick post today.  I just got back today from class in which I finished the monochromatic underpainting for the painting in the last post.  (I missed last week due to coming home from work with a raging headache.) 

Several people have commented that I should leave it monocrhomatic.  It is tempting but I'm so sure it will look even better in color that I spent the last few minutes I had in class and painted in the sky and some of the dark recesses in the trees.  So what do you think, does it stand alone as a monochromatic painting?



WIP #2

I needed to start a new painting for my Wednesday night class with Susan Jarvis since I finished "Autumn on Beaver Creek".  Susan's classes are what I'd call "Open" meaning you paint what you want and she helps you as needed. I decided to finally try a painting I've had in mind ever since I made a sketch of a tributary creek in Little Cottonwood Canyon last year, you can read about that here.  My painting won't be quite the same as the sketch, but rather taller and more narrow and bringing in more of the scene. 

I decided to try painting this one on an Ikea table top.  That's right, a table top.  These table tops are very inexpensive, ($5.99 when I bought mine) and measure a little under 20" X 40" and are over 1 1/2" thick.  They are quite sturdy and can be hung similar to a gallery wrap canvas.....without framing.  I prepared my table top by first puttying over the screw holes in the back for the legs and then sanding the putty smooth. I then applied a sealer/primer over the back since it appears to be made similar to MDF fiber board and so like MDF could possibly absorb some moisture out of the air over time. Since the edges and the front were coated in a melamine type plastic I didn't see any need to seal those but I did sand them with a fine sand paper to provide tooth for the acrylic gesso that I  applied in three coats with a fine foam roller.  This is how I prep my MDF panels as well, it gives what I feel is the perfect texture for painting landscapes.  I actually didn't gesso the sides, I primed them with a spray primer and then spray painted the sides and back with a black satin enamel.  I don't plan on carrying the painting over onto the sides of the board so the black painted sides will become a separation of sorts between the painting and the wall when hung, similar to a frame.

This particular subject is quite complicated with many shapes involved so I decided I'd do a monochrome underpainting to make sure that it all works well as a composition before committing it to color.  The acrylic paint in my Sta-Wet palette was kind of a jumbled mess anyway so I mixed it all together and added some ultramarine blue to darken it and ended up with a color similar to burnt umber.

I sketched out the composition first using a round brush, just catching the significant edges of the major shapes.  As you can see I ended up redoing the top section of the creek a couple times trying to get a pleasing and realistic effect.  I'd already started to block in the shapes as well since I didn't get the idea to take WIP photos until this point,

More blocking in

Now I've blocked in the top part of the stream.  You'll also notice I went back into the upper right area and reworked it a bit.  I decided to bring out the tree trunks more and adjust the foliage some.

I struggled a bit with how to fill the area in the middle since I stretched that area a little to change the composition to have the creek end up higher in the painting.  This could prove to be even more of a problem during the color layers but all my sketching experience will help. And just like that class was over.  In two hours I only got to a little farther than the mid point of the underpainting.  The night just flew by. 

utah landscape art