Works In Progress

I am leaving for a trip to Miami tomorrow to celebrate the start of 2013 on the beach, where it is warm! As always, my watercolors and paper are packed and ready to go. 

I wanted to squeeze in one more post for this calendar year, but I don't have anything completed at the moment. I do have a couple of paintings in progress. They are both at the point where someone might look at them and think they were finished, and that they were just really boring. But do not be confused! They are not done yet! I have plans for their finishing touches, plans indeed!

Kiley Portrait

One of my co-workers at the USS Constitution Museum commissioned me to paint a portrait of his dog, Kiley as a Christmas gift. It was a great project and I was honored to be asked to do this painting. I also got the chance to meet Kiley in person last week and she was so excited about life!

Visit the Future!

The final assignment for my Illustration class was to create a 16" x 20" poster. To prepare, we looked at different styles of posters since they began to be a popular method of advertising in the 1800's-- the modern poster began to rise as printing technology improved. 

I have always been particularly drawn to travel posters. I think they are gorgeous! I was inspired by vintage posters, but wanted to apply the style to something whimsical so I made a travel poster for a time machine using gouache on paper. I've got these two old-timey people stepping out of their time machine (named "The Flying Laboratory" after Amelia Earhart's plane) and stepping into the City of the Future! 

In my original sketch, I had a lady scientist stepping out of the time machine and a man in old fashioned safari gear front and center, but when my class critiqued my sketch, they agreed that for female empowerment and strong women everywhere, I should put a woman in the front, boldly stepping into new territory. I liked that idea, so here she is! ...And her Victorian man-companion gets to carry the bags. 

My classmates were pretty awesome. 

And now, dear readers, where would YOU travel if you had a time machine? 

Ula Installation

Today was exciting because I installed nine paintings at Ula Cafe in Jamaica Plain. This is the first time I have ever put work up in a cafe and I am very thankful for the opportunity. I would not have been able to put up the show without help from my friends Kat and Hel, who are both fantastic people! 

I snapped some photos of the work hanging up on the walls:

All of these paintings have appeared previously on this blog except for one. The largest one with the prominent leafy tree and the colorful fences is a piece that I started last Spring and then put on back burner. When this opportunity to show work came up, I decided it was the perfect time to finish the piece. It is based on my backyard in JP. Our neighbors have a lovely, multicolored fence that I had to get onto canvas. Here is a closer look at the painting:

And finally, I wanted to include part of my artist statement that I hung next to my self portrait:

I am primarily an observational painter and no matter where I am, my work is inspired by my immediate surroundings. I love capturing a place and then committing it to canvas or wood panel. The collection of oil paintings I am presenting is inspired by views from the windows of my house here in JP and the streets I walk every day. Because these paintings are all snapshots of my life, I have also included a self-portrait to complete the narrative.

Night scenes are particularly interesting to me because of the extreme contrasts of light and dark, the heightened importance of shape, and the way every color stands out, illuminated against the dark. Trees, houses, and clouds are some of my favorite subjects and it is fascinating to see how they change with the light at different times of day.

Thank you Ula for giving me the opportunity to show my work, thank you to my friends who have been incredibly supportive of my art, and thank you to my housemates for putting up with the smell of oil paint and my brushes taking over the bathroom sink. 

No Firing at Random!

This Saturday I completed a painting for the USS Constitution Museum, where I now work one day per week. Because our visitation is slowing down with the winter season, we took the opportunity to focus on developing new programs and improving on existing ones. My project was to paint a battleship to accompany our educational program Boom which teaches museum visitors how cannons work through hands on demonstrations. Don't worry, we are only firing alka seltzer cannons, no shrapnel here! My battleship painting will, believe it or not, be used as the target for the alka seltzer cannons. I painted it in acrylic on a 46" x 70" (or so) wooden flat. I also included one of my initial sketches.

I am very happy with the way my painting turned out! So happy in fact that I may paint with acrylic more often. I studied painting with oils in college and I am also fond of watercolor. Two opposite ends of the spectrum of paint behavior, I know. Painting with watercolor is like controlling chaos, and while you can re-work it as much as you would like, every layer will be visible in your completed piece. The layers, transparencies, and unpredictability of the medium adds to the overall effect. Oils on the other hand, once you have the hang of them, give you complete control over your image and you can do so many lovely things with blending and texture. I like to mix some of my colors directly on my painting surface when I use oils. 

Acrylic is a medium I usually fight with. It dries so fast that there is barely an opportunity to blend colors the way I would with oils and getting the painting wet again doesn't allow me to re-work the paint like I can with watercolor. I thought of acrylic as the worst of both worlds. However this time, I think I got the hang of working with it. I believe there are also products like acrylic mediums that I can buy to help the paint dry the way I want it to. Also as it turns out, acrylic is significantly easier to photograph than oil. It is almost impossible to photograph an oil painting so that the colors look right and there is no glare, but taking a picture of this battleship? It came out perfectly.

Brewery Nightscape

I just completed this painting last night, a nightscape from my front balcony. The building in the distance is an old brewery and it is a beautiful structure, very iconic of the neighborhood (at least for me).

Landscapes I forgot about until just now

Like the title of this post says, I have a couple of small landscape pieces that I found while searching through work from earlier this year and I wanted to post them. The first is the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain done in water color and the second is a view from the train in central MA done in colored pencil. They both have pretty interesting clouds.