Finishing up a painting, especially a big one, sometimes drags on for quite a while. Add to my usual difficulty putting a piece to rest, a stint at jury duty and all the business of summer in Maine and....well, you get the idea. I'm just now finishing the piece for which I did that the greenish study of my son from my last post. I did stick to a very limited palette, though I did not paint over a greenish tinted ground color. (Though I do have another painting on the docket that will hopefully explore the gray/greens more fully). There have been times with this limited palette that I've been about to scream; for example, there's no blue pigment, so the best I can do is mix violet with chrome green and bit of white. It's surprising how blue that mixture actually looks, but I've had to be very strict about not just squeezing out a bit of cobalt blue. If I were to open up the blue range of tones within this already tightly controled color arrangement, the whole painting would crash.

This painting has been more of a narrative meander than I usually allow myself. The initial idea was based on the feeling that this winter had been endless.  I had envisioned one of my sons cutting out paper snowflakes and covering the floor and the model?/babysitter?/mother? with them.  Life intervened, and so one afternoon a few weeks ago I was busy making a wizard hat for my younger son, when I knew I just had to put him and the hat in the painting.  Corin can occasionally be a very inspired, obsessive organizer, so when I suggested that he bring some of his toys to sit with him while he posed, he brought all his stuffed animals and a huge pile of other things along. He arranged his animals (aka the Codys) such that they looked like a mini-audience for whatever was going on --which seemed about perfect to me.
The painting is just about done and the frame is in progress. I don't have a title yet, but here's a 98% finished view.....

36 x 48 inches, oil on linen

Color Choices

T.W. Dewing, "Summer", oil on canvas

I'm working on a project that, for many reasons, has me thinking about Ben Kamihira's paintings. His paintings are amazing in many, many ways, but I most admire them for their controlled use of color.
Each morning for the past few years I've had a constant group of pigments on my palette--usually the anchor is somewhere in the Burnt Umber neighborhood with a few chromatics nearby for good measure. The resulting paintings have a nice warm feel and there's plenty of range in the value scale to model forms, but a one-palette-fits-all approach has its obvious flaws. However, there are so many varieties and combinations of palettes that it ultimately feels quite arbitrary what one chooses. So, the other day, after looking at an old Kamihira print ad from many years ago, I opened a book about another one of my favorite artists, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, and was tempted by the desire to paint on a much more green ground than I normally would. I quickly realized that now I'd have to reassess what colors would work with this particular panel. The first question becomes: does one use the green as a strong counterpoint to observed color, or to stay in close harmony with the green? I chose harmony for this go round. So here we go--four pigments, that's all: Terre Vert, Quinacridone Violet, Burnt Sienna and White.

Study of CBB as a Wizard, oil on panel

Two

My second post today--I'm playing catch up on a few items from the last few weeks.

First, I just want to let people know that I added a new "Available Work" section to my web page. It has the absolute freshest DGB paintings as well as a few older pieces that have not yet found homes. There had been some confusion as my "Recent Work" section is not quite as recent as I'd like, and almost all the pieces in that section have been sold.

Secondly, I had meant to post these two portraits that I completed a few weeks ago. They were wonderful, gracious sitters; a pleasure to paint.

Melt

The painting of the snowman and young woman is finished. It's currently being photographed and colorproofed by my friend Ken Woisard. Here's the final piece:

I chose not to add a third figure as it seemed to muddy the waters. Instead I added a bit of clutter to the porch and the red plastic sled filled with sticks in the foreground. The title (for now) of the piece is "Spring Snow". It has been a very long transition from Winter to Spring this year, so continuing to work on this series of winter themed paintings has seemed quite natural. I'm not sure I'll be able to keep it up once the weather turns to summer, though I do have at least one more that I'd like to paint before moving on.

Progress Report

Here are two progress photos of the snowman and young woman project. I just finished, framed, and shipped two portraits, so I'm back with this painting in earnest for the next week. It's moving along pretty quickly, so I anticipate having it finished soon. I started the painting with a light underpainting of burnt umber and white to establish the central figure. Now my palette has expanded, but not by much: ultramarine blue and napthol red are the only two additions. 

I am contemplating adding a second figure (third if you count the snowman) to the painting.  The left side of the porch is the most likely place to situate the figure. Right now the top contenders are either my son wrapped in a blanket and leaning against the post on the left, or my dog curled up on her bed. I did a painting several years ago that I have always loved of a wonderfully soulful hound snoozing on a porch. If I go for the dog as the additional element it will be fun to revisit the subject.

Framing the Snow Angel

Here are a few recent photos from my studio. Gilding the frame for "Snow Angel" took quite a bit of work--none of it too difficult, but due to the scale, it just took a long time. In the end, I'm very pleased with how this looks. The last stages of a painting are always a challenge for me. Staying focused in order to finish loose ends can really seem tedious. I was encouraged to read about Lucien Freud's feelings on this subject in Martin Gayford's "Man with a Blue Scarf: On sitting for a Portrait by Lucien Freud". Fortunately there's the reward of placing the painting in a finished frame and seeing it freshly again. After all the hours of thinking about an image and then the subsequent realizing of the painting, this is a sweet moment that I cherish. 

The painting is off to Dowling Walsh Gallery on Friday, so today I will turn my attention back to a couple of nearly completed portraits while the snow angel serenely watches over me. 

Layover

Last week was an unusual one creatively speaking. It's always hard to sustain a creative thread while away from the studio; when I found myself stuck for over an hour in an airplane on the tarmac in Charlotte, NC I was not pleased.  Having listened to the audiobook of Joshua Foer's "Moonwalking with Einstein" for a while, I needed a break, so I pulled out my sketchbook and drew out a few ideas that I'd been thinking about recently.

Upon my return to Maine I was greeted (fortuitously from a snowman point of view--though not from a human driving point of view) with a heavy dose of new fallen snow. With schools cancelled, I knew that one of my favorite models might have some time to spare, so I called her and arranged for a session. This last image in this group is the result of working with her. One can see the roughness of the first sketched idea take a more naturalistic turn.

So, bear with me, you may well see the evolution of a painting in real time.