Claudia, acrylic on canvas

Over the past four weeks I worked on a large scale acrylic of the beautiful model Claudia, a true artist's muse and, through her blog, an avid proponent of music and painting.

I reined in my abstract tendencies a bit, paying careful attention to Claudia's face, proportions, and the placement of her hands. Still, this wasn't exactly classical realist image - the influences of Andy Denzler, Ann Gale, Andrew Salgado, and Rob Sheridan are now too deeply ingrained in my process. I was probably aiming for a modern take on Klimt and Seurat, perhaps filtered through the sensibility of glitch art.

Labels, of course, are useless, especially in the context of creative expression. What matters to me is discovering new points of view while making art, and certainly I had a lot of fun with this portrait.

We have a two week break before the July session, so Happy 4th to all!

Dimensions: 30 x 30 inches

Leticia, oil on canvas board

Sometimes I like to do a grisaille in order to focus on drawing and observation. It gives my eye a chance to rest and get back to the basics of classical realism, which is the foundation of expressionist art.

My most recent painting of Leticia started out as a conventional black and white portrait, but then I stumbled upon the work of Rob Sheridan who, according to his website, creates images by disrupting signals through analog tape and display equipment, not with Photoshop.

As a technophobe, I'm still not sure how he does it, but I do like the abstract effects of glitched images spliced with blank passages, and so I thought I'd try to incorporate some of his ideas into my painting. And so out came the masking tape and palette knives and my portrait morphed from realism into something a lot more abstract.

I could get closer to his concept by straightening some edges and perhaps darkening the grays but I think I'll leave this as is. For a related discussion, click here.

New Head Studies at the National Academy

I recently did a series of quick head studies in oil from live models. I kept things loose and abstract, combining impasto with smooth passages, but also tried to retain a sense of light and form.

Perhaps I was thinking of British artist Paul Wright, who said:

Whilst I appreciate the importance of the individual being recognisable, [my] subjects are glimpsed rather than exposed, their inner selves hinted at but ultimately inscrutable.... The spaces the subjects inhabit are often indeterminate, providing an atmosphere that allows for ambiguity of psychological state. The subjects retain their integrity and yet a sense of intimacy is evoked.

I think this exploration of formal versus expressive concerns is reflected in the work of many contemporary artists whom I follow, and whose painterly idioms continue to provide inspiration for my own work.

Head of a Bearded Man

Last Saturday my teacher kept the same pose for the morning and afternoon sessions and so I worked on a one-day  study inspired by Daniel Ochoa, whose paintings resemble vibrating sculptures cracking with volcanic fissures.

Ochoa often relies on the rhythm of vertical planes to keep the eye moving from left to right. For this composition I thought that horizontal prismatic bands of shifting scale would be more effective. I had in mind Federico Barocci's haunting studies of bearded men, and tried to express the same feeling in a contemporary manner.

Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 30 inches.

How to Price your Work - with Alix Sloan of Sloan Fine Art

Here's an interesting video on pricing methods for emerging artists from Alix Sloan, owner of Sloan Fine Art in New York City. This lecture is part of the professional development program at the New York Academy of Art.


How to Price your Work - with Alix Sloan of Sloan Fine Art from New York Academy of Art on Vimeo.

Lex, acrylic on canvas

Over the past few weeks at the National Academy I worked on a figure study of Lex, a new model who coincidentally also happened to be an artist who specialized in action figure comics.

I sensed a lot of coiled up energy from Lex so in this work I attempted to combine abstract expressionism with classical realism, using intense colors and rapid brushstrokes while trying to maintain a sense of anatomical integrity and observation.

The tricky thing about young bodybuilders is that it's too easy to make them look like caricatures with their superhuman proportions. Indeed my teacher said that my figure wasn't quite as beefy the model. Lex couldn't make it to our fourth and final session - I would have modelled his abs and exposed arm a bit more but I think I'll leave the painting as is.

Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 inches.

Progress shots from the previous three hour sessions:

Gayle, acrylic on canvas

Currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art's Inventing Abstraction show is František Kupka's haunting portrait, Mme Kupka dans les verticales (Mme Kupka Among the Verticals).

Kupka reworked an unfinished painting of his wife with prismatic strokes of color, eventually obliterating the figure except for the face near the top of the canvas.

Kupka's image must have been on my mind over the past three weeks as I worked on another acrylic painting of a new model, Gayle, who posed for us at the National Academy. Gayle had a calm, quiet presence that seemed to call for a stable compositional device, perhaps a vertical grid of sorts that would convey her rootedness, with shifting light to suggest her flickering, enigmatic expression and interiority.

My painting turned out to be far more realistic than Kupka's but I tried to retain some of his abstract qualities. I simplified the colors to blue and rose and attempted to repeat the shape of the head in the blurred edges of the torso.

I think it might be done, though Gayle will be back for one more session for touch ups.