A pretty good Alibi

The actual boat in Huntington Harbor on which this painting is based is in horrible shape. One can barely read the name of the vessel because the paint is so faded and chipped on the stern. But I liked the lines of this old timer and the audacious design of her name.

It's more better now

I think I've made it 'more better' as my kids used to say when they were little. But it's still not there yet. This is why people call this 'Slow Art.'

The thing about sketchbooks

Keeping a sketchbook is like having a jogging routine. It keeps an artist in shape, literally and figuratively. I went through some years buying sketchbooks but not putting much in them. You really have to get used to carrying them around with you. Then you have to get used to opening them and making marks there...

A great deal of what I do in a sketchbook is what I would call stealth sketching. That is, the people I'm drawing are not aware of what I'm up to. The guy above was sitting about 15 feet from me in a Starbucks while he read a tabloid paper. The young woman was farther away on another day in the cafeteria on the lower level at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The baggage train was observed out a plane window as we sat out a delay at an airport in Alaska.

The thing about all these subjects is that you get used to drawing pretty quickly and economically because you don't know when someone is going to get up and walk away. Or, as is frequently the case, they just shift and alter their poses enough to make things difficult.

Many life drawing classes have a routine in which they begin with very short poses. some as brief at 30 seconds. I like starting with poses that are somewhere between two and five minutes. After a few rounds of this moving to a ten minute pose seems like you've got all the time in the world.

I like drawing on simple white paper with a soft (2B to 6B) pencil. I like the pencil soft so that I can use the smudgy quality of the graphite to some effect in the drawing. A small piece of chamois helps.

I fill up a sketchbook about every four to six months and the books I've been using in recent years now fill up the better part of a shelf. I still join other artists on the weekend at the Art Students League in New York to draw from a model on weekends but it's important to me to keep going during the week as well. Some days ten or fifteen minutes is enough.

But without it, I feel my rendering skills begin to atrophy.

Half-finished

A gallery in Michigan expressed interest in my work and suggested I prepare a group of paintings for this summer. "Anything having to do with boats and the water," the dealer told me. He had been attracted by the seashell paintings I've done, of which there are many. But I thought about what he said and thought I ought to do more boating landscapes and seascapes.

Somewhat surprisingly I've had difficulty building up a backlog of these kinds of paintings. I had three and was working on this fourth but a friend of my wife bought two of them before Christmas.

This one is 12 by 9 inches and entirely made-up, except for the perspective of the rowboat itself which I took from a photo of Huntington harbor. The setting and background are off the top of my head.

This is a Belgian linen that is primed with clear acrylic so you see the color and texture of the linen as you work the painting. I have no idea whether this has any archival soundness but it makes for a great tone under the painting.

Things I want to do with this painting as I try to finish it: I want to manipulate the color of the rowboat away from the monochromatic sand color that dominates at the moment. I'm thinking an opaque pale bluish gray overpainting with some of this sand color peeking through in places. The weeds in the foreground need to be more specifically delineated but I'll leave them for last.

Paper or Plastic?

Do you know Yupo? I've just discovered this modern, space-age miracle.

"Oh, is that the Japanese paper that's really plastic?" someone asked me at the Art Students League in Manhattan last weekend.

Yes, Yupo is 100% polypropelene and although it takes a bit of getting used to, it does seem marvelous. I got a pad of 10 sheets of smooth finish, 74 lb., 11 by 14 inch sheets from Utrecht Art Supply for about $20.

The great thing about Yupo is that you can reuse the sheets over and over until you have a masterpiece on each sheet. If you're not happy with the results, just dampen a cloth and wipe it away. You've got a brand-new sheet ready to start over. Since it's not really paper but plastic, the surface does not degrade when you wipe off the painting.

My wife commented that the sheets seem awfully bright white (unlike the impression given here by my photo). True enough. The label says "suitable for all watercolor techniques." But unlike paper, Yupo doesn't buckle and curl when wet.

My recycling center

Some years ago, I switched from using turpentine to Turpenoid, an odorless version of the same thing. Then James McElhinney at the Art Students League pointed out that "just because you can't smell it doesn't mean it's not doing harm."

So I switched again after reading some of the warnings about solvents on the Gamblin website. Gamblin advocates the use of odorless mineral spirits which I have now been using for several years.

The nice thing about OMS, as it's often called, is that it's 100% recyclable. At the end of each painting session I pour the OMS into this funnel and the dirty OMS sits there and gradually decants itself from the paint particles which settle and even partially solidify at the bottom of the bottle. After sitting a while you can pour off the OMS into your palette cup and reuse it.

So I'm not breathing bad vapors and I'm not pouring toxic stuff down my drains. Al Gore would be so proud of me.

New toy for spring

Were you ever so excited about a trip that you practiced packing for it? I guess I'm that way. My wife and I are renting a big old house on Little Cranberry Island in Maine at the end of May. My brother will come with us. You leave your car on the mainland and take the ferry to the island. I've been practicing packing my art supplies. I want to make sure I have everything I could possibly need but I want to travel light nonetheless.

The smaller, newer box sitting on top there is a thumb-box. You can't quite see it but there is a thumb-hole cut into the bottom. Those brushes are tucked into the thumb-hole for the moment.

I'm a sucker for these kinds of things. The flat palette is a tray that slides over the tubes of paint. The box lid has a slot for a 6 x 8 inch canvas panel on which to sketch.

The older, paint spattered box on which it sits is called a pochade box. Pochade is a French word for paint sketch. The french impressionists got painters out of the studio and painting outdoors. But they couldn't have done it without the American invention of the tin paint tube.

That older pochade box was made of recycled wood by a handyman in Canada from whom I bought it over eBay some years ago. But pochade boxes require tripods. And I'm thinking I could use something even smaller and more compact.

Last year I saw this new thumb-box deeply discounted and I grabbed it, but I haven't had occasion to use it yet. It's made by Jullian, the French outfit that made the first portable sketch easels with collapsible folding legs that the impressionists used in the 19th century. Those so-called French easels are big and somewhat heavy, but, yes, I have one of those too,

This thumb-box gets eight tubes of paint so I have to be judicious about what I choose to take along. Right now I'm sticking to two versions of each of the primaries, plus a red/brown and a white:

Ultramarine Blue (Williamsburg handmade paints)
Cobalt Blue (Old Holland)
Vermillion Extra (Old Holland)
Perylene Crimson (Williamsburg)
Burnt Seinna (Old Holland)
Italian Yellow Ochre (Williamsburg)
Indian Yellow (Gamblin)
Quick Dry White (Gamblin)

The Portrait Project

For lack of a better name, seven of us are calling this the portrait project. We study at the Art Students League in Manhattan on Saturdays (myself, Claudia Monaco, Helene Balzarini, Michael Elsasser, Kurt Tatum, Myung-ja Chun, and Kevin McCaffrey) and we have joined together in a project in which we will each paint self-portraits and portraits of at least two others in the group. We each drew a random portrait assignment and we will each also paint (or draw) a portrait of at least one other in the group.

Most of us met six years ago while studying in Sherry Camhi's figure and anatomy class at the the League. We are all roughly middle-age and most of us returned to fine art after working on the fringes in areas like advertising, design, art direction etc.

In these two cases, I sketched the figures in charcoal and then began the underpainting in terra verte, a weak green pigment. I'm working on canvases primed in a neutral gray. In the case of Claudia's portrait, as is often the case for me, I found the charcoal drawing in some ways better than this underpainting. The charcoal makes her look younger than she is, but seems to capture the contours of her face better.

The first glazing for each of these two is a mixture of a great deal of yellow ochre with just a bit of vermillion. According to Jonathan Janson, this is the color Vermeer used for his skin tones. Janson's Essential Vermeer website is a real treasure for those who enjoy Vermeer and Rembrandt. He also has a self-published book, "How to paint your own Vermeer." Although the book has a good deal of valuable information, one quickly sees the pitfalls of self-publishing and why we need editors to keep authors on track. (Sequences of entire pages are repeated, sometimes only a short distance from their first appearance.)

Problems I see with the two portraits above: I need to keep my eyes in the self-portrait from becoming too cartoon-like. Claudia's portrait needs a background and more of a setting.

The members of the portrait project have given themselves a year for this project, after which we will begin to look for a venue in which to exhibit.

My contribution at faculty meetings

That's Dr. Paul Mihailidis, top and Dr. Kristal Zook, bottom, both members of our journalism department during yesterday's faculty meeting in the school of communication at Hofstra. Neither were asleep at the time they were rendered.

For the record, neither was I.

Wasn't sure I'd get control of this

I wasn't sure I'd really get control of this one. I had sketched the image in so roughly in charcoal that I wasn't sure I could get the complicated relationships of the shells right. But last night, after having set this aside for at least a month or more, (I've lost track) I was able to come back to it and get it to a point where I might be able to get excited about finishing it. It's large (for my studio, anyway) at 30 by 40 inches. A nice Belgian linen, which I like for the irregularities in the weave, stretched over a heavy set of stretchers.

This is the underpainting. It's an old master technique that really simplifies things: Get the drawing done in a monochromatic color scheme and then, when you have that done to your satisfaction, glaze the color over it.

I usually do this under-painting in burnt umber and Gamblin's quick dry white (really just white with some alkyd mixed in to speed what would otherwise be a slower than normal oil.) Lighter colors always take longer to dry, and especially the whites.

This time, in addition to the burnt umber, I used a second color made by Old Holland, called Extra Sepia. True sepia is a color made from the inky secretions of the cuttlefish, a very 19th century kind of color. I didn't think this was really true sepia but I looked on the label and found to my surprise that the color is actually a version of bone black. This is another 19th century color in which the color was arrived at by burning animal bones.

If you find that kind of creepy, go look up the color that was known as mummy. Guess what they used to make that color!