It's A Boy

Well, this was a pleasant change from all the wall textures and chain link fence. I'm generally more happy with the figure's upper body than I am with the legs, but overall I'm quite pleased with the results given that it was rendered almost entirely from my imagination (hence the inconsistent lighting effects).


It's a strange thing, but I suspect that all the technical emphases of our first year drawing and painting classes instilled a reliance on photographic references that I haven't been able to shake. Whereas prior to art school I could generally just draw freely from mind. I guess that's why it felt so nice to kind of ad-lib this little section (with more to come).


I still have to render about a dozen or so intertwined trailing characters in translucent glazes so this painting is far from done. Originally, I planned to do three panels, but I'll be fortunate to complete two. Volume of work is my biggest concern right now but I'd rather hand in one excellent painting than two or three half-assed pieces.

Tools Of The Trade

A snapshot of my painting table, complete with overused/abused paper palette and the two miniature brushes that I have rendered 85% of my painting with. No wonder it's taken so long.

Heavy Lifting

Behold the labours of the past two months. A bit depressing considering how little way I've come and how far I've yet to go. But it is the most layered and detail-intensive painting that I've ever attempted.






You can follow my overtly pedantic process from the buildings in back to the foreground wall to, most recently, the nightmare that was the chain-link fence. Incidentally, I absolutely hate rendering architecture.

p.s. For those that know it, yes, the imagery was referenced from La Cancha. I tried adding the "Ole" graffiti but it looked pretty terrible.

Mission Statement

So I'm about one third of the way through my final semester at art school and desperately trying to bring my final body of work up to speed (hence, the lack of posts -- sorry!). This project is basically a thematic continuation of last semester's work, dealing with issues of loss and emotional displacement in the context of the transition from youth to adulthood.

Preliminary sketch on wood panel

Basically, I'm painting a series of panoramic narratives, each of which will depict a boy with a soccer ball conquering a legion of his own imagined foes. It's a pretty clear and shallow reflection of my infatuation with the recently ended World Cup, and I am desperately hoping that the final product won't look like a Nike ad, but the subject matter is both personally relevant and visually accommodating to the type of language that I want to use.

My life, circa 1991

The one condition I did impose was to confine all of my compositions to a strictly two-dimensional plane -- not as a conscious decision, by any means, but more in how I instinctively visualised the idea. I suppose it harks back to memories of my boyhood iconography: living in a two-button world where the only driving factor was to get Mario from the left side of the screen to the right. That's something that wouldn't make sense to a lot of my more academic teachers, but I look at these old NES games and see a beauty in that kind of honest visual simplicity, and I look at my recent work and see evidence of this aesthetic lineage.

Photo taken in Boston Commons (01/10)

I also think this framework is a perfect vehicle to explore the dynamics of human movement, which is probably a more longstanding artistic interest of mine. As someone who typically frames only one or two people at a time in an image, I'd like to really explore a more intricate and fluid composition of interacting characters in this series of paintings. Something akin to the complexity of Renaissance painting, which is generally something that I tend to steer clear of.

Nicolas Poussin's "The Battle"

On a more technical level, I'm trying to layer my acrylics in a series of thin coats to produce a well developed transparency effect, what with the juxtaposition of the child's imagined elements against the reality of the physical setting. It's pretty cliche, but one of my bow-down-and-worship-him contemporary influences is the painter/illustrator James Jean. The image below, for example, is a perfect demonstration of the kind of hard-graphic-on-soft-paint look that I want.


As it is, I'm still battling the first of three planned paintings. I've hashed out the basic underpainting and am currently fleshing out the background (something I really, really dislike doing ... rendering architecture). But after uploading them to my computer I realise that all the photos I've taken are pretty terrible. This post is long enough anyways. If you got this far, wow, I'm impressed.

Green Grass And Blue Skies

Some examples of the unconventional sports photography of Hans van der Meer, the primary artistic influence on this semester's major work. His linear composition and emotionally detached narratives are both elements that I would like to emulate in my painting.





As a nice little bonus, looking at this collection of photography has inspired me to shoot for the first time since I returned from the United States at the beginning of the year. I'm currently halfway through yet another roll of good old fashioned Ilford XP2, though I've also got some 200 ISO slide film sitting around waiting to be played with.

Facing The Music Like A Graduate of Juilliard

Just trying to hammer out the idea behind my upcoming major work before this break ends. In a perfect world I'd be able to hash out my composition, gather all the specific imagery, and prep all my materials so I could hit the ground running and start painting when school starts. But I am still tossing up a number of concepts. Today I'm feeling something along the lines of:

+

It's tempting to go for another series of linear panels, but I'm feeling pretty high on the challenge of a single, epic, Guillaume Bresson-type oil painting. As much as I loved working with acrylic last month, I really want to get a handle on photorealistic oils -- something I've never been able to achieve. This is going to be my last semester at art school and I want to go out with a bang so I figure I might as well roll the dice.

Men Become Boys and Boys Become Men

Here are those last three acrylics. In the end, I was only half a day over my intended five-in-five timetable. Not bad, not bad.




I'm quite pleased with how this project turned out -- in fact, it may have just convinced me to use acrylic for my final semester's major work. Food for thought, I guess.

Three Days of the Condor

Three down, three to go.

The head on this guy looks a bit potato-ish; I might have to re-touch that face. I'm also not too keen on that hand on the right. The blue vest was giving me nightmares but actually turned out alright. And though you can't really see it in this crappy photo, I must say, the light on that arm on the left -- amazing! Even a blind dog finds a bone once in a while.


The splotch on the background is an annoyance that I will have to deal with later, and one I know will lead to much cursing.

No Known Survivors

Here's an update on the second project that I'm trying to sandwich into the tail end of the semester. I started these six canvases a few months ago but they've since undergone some serious renovations. To be honest, I'm just having fun getting reacquainted with acrylics and banging out these G.I. Joe portraits. For some reason I find it 1000x easier to do photorealistic renditions with these paints than oils. And it's a nice bonus to not have to worry about chemicals or wait a day between layers.



I'm currently on a painting-a-day schedule since everything's due next week but it's not as bad as it sounds because, despite the time crunch, it's been quite a pleasant experience. I actually think that self-imposed pressure has helped, too, at least insofar as making me a bit more subconsciously decisive. It's kind of like when I drive to school -- since there's only 1 hour parking and I have to go out every so often to move the car, I find that I'm much more productive in terms of what I squeeze into every 60 minutes.


Anyways, that's all I got so far. I'll try to post as I go and take some better photos (those backgrounds are actually completely flat and tonally identical).

Burning' and Lootin'

First work: done.

Not that there isn't more to do on this one -- the tones on those signs should be a little more consistent. That baseball player needs way more black on his upper body and shoes. I could probably work a bit more on the panel transitions. I definitely need to figure out how to hang these panels (D-rings?)



Sadly, it's a numbers game now. I've got two weeks left to finish my other much more neglected major work. If there's time, I'll address these issues as best I can. Compromise is such an ugly thing.

It's probably still too fresh to decide whether I like this piece or not. I can say that I don't love it. But maybe that's because I can't help but think about the concessions I had to make to my original idea of having these portraits be life-sized on door-sized panels of wood. I wish there was a way to make this happen, but I'm not even one of those people that can re-visit a work to touch it up, let alone recycle the same idea.

Haterade

Two down, with a third about 3/4 done and the last two prepped and on deck.


Some lingering issues:

1) That text really irks me. I'll wait till all five panels are painted and then re-do it all.

2) I didn't notice at first, but my studio neighbour astutely pointed out the abrupt transition between the panels. Again, I'm going to wait till I've got everything done before adding some cross-panel drips to smooth it out a bit more and add a bit of visual continuity. (Thanks, Nick)


On a side note, whilst prepping my remaining panels with a yellow undercoat the baseball player I'd painted earlier turned out as pictured. Dig that soft look. People have been telling me to include it in the sequence but I think homogeneity's an important part of this project. Maybe if I had a mulligan I'd steer the whole thing in that direction, but it's surely way too late now.

Amsterdamage

Detail from one of the panels that I'm working on. This particular piece could use a little more yellow/peach in the upper left but other than that I'm keen to start painting the figure.


I've currently got six of these panels for a proposed 2x3 grid. For this semester, realistically, I think I might be able to squeeze in an extra two or three for either a 2x4 or 3x3 grid. But I could totally see this as an ongoing work (at least rolling over into the next semester). I'm thinking 20 to 30 pieces at least, gradually moving on to more progressively damaged and de-limbed figures. We'll see, I guess.

Knowing Is Half The Battle

Exactly two weeks since my last post and I am determined not to let this blog die. A lame excuse, but I have been having some issues uploading images on my up-and-down internet connection.


Here's some tonal underpaintings for one of my projects (my first foray into acrylics since the unfortunate mess that was foundation painting). I deviated from my initial proposal somewhat and instead decided to focus on the stilted posture and plasticised expressions of these six old G.I. Joe action figures. They're both endearing and alien to me; comforting and lonely. The backgrounds definitely need to be flattened a bit more but so far I am liking where it's headed.

I'll keep you posted -- promise!

Narcotraficantes

I haven't actually liked anything else that Joe Carnahan's done but I quite love "Narc". It's gritty, intense, and raw, and that's exactly how I want to paint.



I had a clear vision for the backgrounds of my five panel piece (see previous post) as a flat and ambiguous space, but the inability of my brain to think in abstract terms has produced a bit of a muddled mess.

In my previous painting experiences, I have absolutely loathed what I have been making until, at some unexpected and unpredictable interval, the lightbulb clicks and everything ends well. So it's really just a matter of pushing through the self-hatred until this epiphany unfolds. That's what I like about painting -- you can keep on slapping down colours till the thing goes from ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly to magic.

Behind Every Disney Character Is A Chain Smoking Animator

First of all, apologies for the increasingly delayed posts. Since I typically dive right into my paintings without doing any real prep work (apart from gleaning some photographic source material) and because of how long it takes me to actually paint, I find myself in these long stretches of time where I don't feel like there's anything worth showing.

Final concept board

With that said, I have currently embarked on a new project that, for the first time in a long while, has pushed me outside of my conceptual comfort zone. It's a sad fact but since I've studied at art school I've become utterly dependent on drawing from reference. The emphasis on anatomical precision and formal qualities has killed the fearlessness with which I used to just draw. With this project, however, I've returned to the basics, and as difficult and frustrating as it's been at times, it's been just as fun rediscovering my sea legs.

Unused sketches

Basically, I'm doing a five-panel series of full bodied portraits on 90 x 60 x 1.2 cm particleboard panels featuring character archetypes of the things I dreamed about becoming when I was a kid. Each will hold a sign that, when read in sequence, will spell out the phrase, "Not all dreams come true." I guess it's pretty melancholy but I wanted to make a piece about the sadness that exists in happy memories.

On a side note, I actually wanted to be a mailman because they got to ride a motorbike, but it wasn't as universal (or cool) as the other archetypes in the lineup -- hence, Evel Knievel. I thought about replacing him with a cop but that felt a little too real world for the vibe I was going for.


As a consolation prize for my tardiness, here's a page of sketches for the other project that I've got going this semester: a collection of six square canvases depicting G.I. Joe action figures that I used to own, posed and damaged in rough emulation of war-wounded veterans.