At the end of the day

Exhibiting at the Salmagundi Club

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, the Salmagundi Club is a grand old artists' organization on Fifth Avenue just below 12th Street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. It's a couple of blocks north of Washington Square.

The above oil painting of my wife is there in a juried portraiture show along with works by other notable artist members.

Gary Erbe's trompe l'oeil painted collages

I went into NYC Saturday to drop off a couple of paintings for two upcoming shows at the Salmagundi Club. If you don't know this grand old place, you should stop in for a visit. It's one of the oldest art organizations in the country. The club occupies a townhouse built in the 1850s on lower fifth avenue just a few blocks north of Washington Square. The building has been used in a number of movies, most recently the club library was used in "The Good Shepherd." But I'll save all that for another posting.

Saturday was the last day of a wonderful retrospective exhibit by Gary Erbe, an artist one might describe as a hyper realist, in the tradition of William Harnett and John Peto. But unlike those 19th century masters Erbe often works quite large. You can see a great many of his works on his website but there's nothing quite like seeing them in person. Some are very large indeed.

One theme that fascinated me was a series of paintings of abstract collages. The textures of papers overlapping each other are minutely examined and delineated in paint. But what makes these works unique is Erbe's reverence for the abstract, perhaps a rather unusual quality for one who works so hyper real.

I was fortunate enough that when I saw this exhibit that Erbe himself was there and we chatted for a few moments. I told him that I was flattered to see two newspaper front pages done long ago at Newsday (where I was director of design) were included in one of his largest paintings ("Subway Series"). I assumed that he had included the Newsday front pages because he lives on Long Island where the paper circulates.

"No," he said. "I live in Hoboken."

He had simply included those newspaper front pages because he thought they were particularly graphic. And so I was flattered all over again. Erbe may be as charming as he is talented.

Erbe's website: http://www.garyerbe.com/

Finished

Finished. Signed. Small differences between this image and the previous posted. Are they noticeable? Perhaps only to me.

Progress is our most important product

Glazing underway. A bit more to go. And lighter areas replaced with more opaque mixtures. It's kind of a shame that the most fun part of the painting is the part that goes the fastest. The glazing is far and away the most satisfying stage of the painting but it tends also to go very quickly, even allowing for drying time between glazes.

Some painters seem to get lost in applying multiple glazes. Titian was said to have done thirty, forty and fifty glazes in one area to achieve a single optical color effect, if we can believe stories from his studio assistants. (He is also said to have painted a great deal with his fingers, but that is another story.) I have not found that more glazes are always better. What is true is that the glazes should be whisper-thin and built up gradually. Sometimes I apply the glaze and then take a cloth and remove perhaps 90% of it, leaving only the remnant of the glaze that has retreated to the crevices in the texture of the linen.

There is a temptation to apply all the color in a single glaze the thickness and consistency of the surface of a candied apple. But the end result is not so good. Believe me, I've tried.

New and large

36 by 48 inches -- that's fairly large both for me and for my little studio. On a medium/rough linen weave. I love the texture and the scale. Monochromatic underpainting with color glazes in a glossy alkyd to follow.