Spanish Armada

Here's my latest painting, the first of two portraits for my final project. A while ago I promised my housemate that I'd make a painting for him before we left. And with our semester about to end I figured I better hurry up and make good on it. So here it is, from the preliminary paint sketch ...


... to the final thing.

Gitano, 120 x 60 cm
Oil paint on canvas
Painted November 2009

I wanted to go for a softer, more painterly look and while I am generally pleased with the result I also feel like I've lost a lot of what made the way I've been painting recently so interesting. It just looks so ... average, I guess. Maybe that's because I'm not technically proficient enough to blow anyone away with this kind of classical approach. I think that my next painting will be a bit more gestural; hopefully a happy balance between the painterly styles I've been playing with. Below is a rough sketch that I just did on the canvas:


Not sure how "realistic" I want it to end up looking. But the image is a phone photo of my housemate rocking it out on Guitar Hero.

Fastbreak

Here's the initial paint-sketch I worked off of. I always start my paintings as if they were line drawings, which I guess explains why I end up with a relatively graphic look at the end.


Here's the final piece after a few more adjustments. My bloody camera still isn't capturing the colours on the back wall which is fairly annoying, but oh well, what can you do.

Do It For The Kids

My latest painting. Sort of a thematic continuation of the last one I did. At least insofar as the subject matter is similarly derived from a movie still (i.e. a scene from Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men). Again, I wanted to supplant the importance of the image's original context with a greater sense of painterly atmosphere and narrative ambiguity.

Untitled, 150 x 120 cm
Oil paint on canvas
Painted November 2009

This is the largest painting I've worked on to date. It was a lot of fun having so much space to move the brush around, but of course that also meant that I had to fill it all. A couple of nagging issues -- I had trouble rendering the female character's face given that I wanted the emphasis to be placed on the body language in the piece. I'm thinking that I'll go back in and add a little more darks to it. Likewise, I still have to properly render the hand just to the right of the central figure's head. At the moment, it looks like a minced hamburger patty.

While I'm griping, I'd like to also add that this isn't the greatest photograph in the world. The back wall isn't quite that acidic looking in real life; it's a lot cooler and more subdued.

Ah, well. I'm going to go back to the studio right now to fix all this. So hopefully that'll mean that a follow-up post is shortly on the way.

Tardy

This is getting to be a bad habit, but once again I'm going to apologize for the inconsistent posting. I actually finished a painting for a crit today but there's one area that just irks me and I don't want to post any pictures up until I fix the bloody thing. Yeah, I'm a little bit anal.


This here's a test run for a silkscreen that I made a couple of weeks ago. For some reason I never posted it. I haven't played around with it as much as I want to but eventually I'll run the thing in a variety of colours over some painted grounds.