Smaller sea shell this time

I fear I may be better at starting paintings than I am at finishing them. Or maybe it's just that I have a tough time starting just one painting and working on only that one until I finish. I like getting a number of them going at once. That way if I stall out on one there is always another work in progress on which I can keep working.

Even when I worked in the much faster medium of watercolor I worked this way, sometimes getting as many as seven different paintings going at once. With oil paintings you can just put them aside, for months or years , before coming back to them.

Sometimes the stalling out lasts for months, sometimes for more than a year. The last large one I did (see post headlined, "Finished") was one such case of stalling out. I got stuck in the drawing stage and put it aside for some time. Begun in April, put aside for two months. Then I was able to move it along but still avoided the most complicated and, I thought, tricky part of the painting (the part where the large shell holds the smaller shells. Once I got down to it, it wasn't so difficult and after drawing that part in monochrome on the linen the painting moved almost too fast.

The above painting is more an interior than a still life, which is rather uncharacteristic for me. But I did a drawing of a similar dining room chair (another dining room and another marriage, actually) nearly twenty years ago when my sons were very small, in part because even then I really liked the curvy lines of such chairs.

The blue under-painting will serve as a complimentary color to the surface and true color of the wood and furniture which is more in the orange/brown range.

Stretching canvas, then and now

I've been stretching my own canvases since the 1970s. In art school back then nobody -- I mean NOBODY -- bought a pre-stretched canvas from an art store. It wasn't some sort of purist philosophy. It was all about money. A pre-stretched and primed canvas was a ridiculously expensive proposition. And it wasn't that we were poor students either. It really was, comparatively speaking, quite expensive.

So we learned to stretch our own. Somehow I managed to get along without a pair of canvas stretching pliers. Because I went away to school I didn't even have a regular pair of pliers at first. For a number of months what I did have were very raw knuckles. Eventually I got a pair of conventional pliers and things got easier. I think the only thing I ever used was good old "cotton duck" canvas which I then primed myself with acrylic gesso.

In recent years I have come to prefer linen as a surface on which to work. Many artists say that they prefer linen because it is archivally more resilient. While that is true, I just think most of us artists are more sensitive to some real textural differences that are of more immediate appeal. Linen is less regular; it has little flaws where the fiber is thicker or perhaps knotted. (Experts will have to forgive my ignorance of the exact nomenclature here.) But that is exactly the quality I most enjoy about linen.

With the proliferation of art supply companies, there are quite a few that sell pre-stretched and primed linens and canvases of varying sizes. I took a close look at the pricing and came to the conclusion that if I bought the materials and did the stretching myself I might save something like 42 cents over the cost of a store-bought canvas. Perhaps the art supply companies are making the most of cheap labor in Cambodia or Viet Nam. But there doesn't seem to be a way to beat their prices in any of the mid-size or small formats.

With larger canvases, it's a different story. For one thing it's more expensive to ship larger canvases even if the manufacturing cost is low. Here at least it still pays to stretch your own.

The secret to successfully stretching a smooth canvas is to work from the middle outward, alternating long and short sides. If you do this correctly, your wrinkles will migrate outward away from the gradually expanding taut area in the middle. The linen being stretched in these photos is stretched on a 36 by 48 inch frame that has been cross-braced. The stretchers and cross-bracing came from a company called GalleryPro and I bought them as I buy a great deal of my art supplies online from ASW (Art Supply Warehouse). I find they have a great selection and nearly always the lowest price I can find. And, no, I'm not paid for that endorsement.

I now have honest-to-goodness canvas pliers. It's a very worthwhile purchase, and not just to save your knuckles. By the way, don't bother getting any other kind except 100% metal pliers. Anything else (ie. plastic) will break and you'll need to replace.

Oh, one other difference between canvas then and now. It is, of course, possible to stretch a canvas too tight. Back in the 1970s when you did this it meant that the canvas might suddenly tear on the frame. Today it's more likely that the stretchers might break. The wood being sold as stretchers is not as good today.

No hard edges so far

I am trying to glaze my way up to the right colors. I've so far avoided any really hard edges and now it's getting on my nerves. I need to start drawing into this one to create some interest. This is on linen primed with a clear acrylic so the brown of the linen shows through. In principle I like this idea but wonder about how it may discolor as it ages.

Are you peeking at my underpaints?

There's a conscious effort on my part here to create some interesting colors and optical effects by laying in some complimentary colors as underpainting. You can be the judge as to how successful this is when I'm finished.

I did this kind of underpainting in the composition at top. You can see traces of the orange underpainting peeking out from beneath the pale blue surface on which the two shells sit.

Finito?

Sometimes I sign these things and then a few days later come back and add another couple of daubs...

And speaking of signing, I have used only initials here. Can you blame me? With a name like this? On a canvas that is only 9 x 12?

My son, Chris, is going to a reception tonight at the Chicago Public Library which is exhibiting, among others, the poster design he did for them. In an email to me he made reference to his incipient fame as a graphic designer on his way to becoming a 'household name.'

"With a name like ours?" I replied.

Almost finished

I still need to adjust the highlights in the smaller shells. And that cone shaped whitish shell in the lower center is still too bright but I'm fairly happy with how this has gone. A little more work and it might be signature time.

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.

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.