Now with a comment....

So...the influence for this piece came from Alma Thomas and Josef Albers, the former for her painting style and the latter for his seminal investigations into how we see color.

Secondly the colors are off. The left side is actually a green hue and the right is a much richer and darker red. I'll for a better photo but so far I haven't pulled it off.

Untitled. Acrylics on canvas 20x28

So it's only been four months

Oh well....pretty much all abstracts

Working title "Weeds", ink, pen and acrylics, 24 x 20

Rain, acrylics on canvas, 20 x 16

Untitled, acrylics on canvas 24 x 36

The portrait or the abstract, portrait/abstract, abstract/portrait....?

Coin flip and it's, hold our collective breath.....the abstract that gets the blog treatment!

I'd never worked with such an odd shape of canvas before. It's, IIRC, 12 by 48. I started with an idea maybe 18 months ago. Fail. I pulled it out every few months, sometimes painting on it, sometimes just looking. Finally 6 months or so ago I did some pretty drastic modifications and I felt somewhat better about it. But something didn't ring true.

It had the box/window motif that has been a largely unconscious part of my painting from the beginning. (I'm sure there is some deep psychological reason for boxes/windows in my painting but I'm not going to go there.) Was structure the problem? How about color? Both?

A couple of weeks ago I had finished working on something and didn't feel like quitting and I had some paint that I didn't want to waste. So why not, I couldn't ruin a painting that didn't work could I? So it goes.

The color was the real key I think but the changes also improved the structural/compositional aspects. It's okay and it might not be finished but here it is.

Skyscraper (working tile). Acrylics and ink on canvas, 12 x 48

Sometimes things just happen

Several years ago when I was coming out of depression I was creating some mixed media collage type pieces that were pretty angry - mostly because of 4,500 dead American soldiers in Iraq for no apparent reason. This piece started that way with NYT photos of burned bodies and such. This is about version six with no more dead burned bodies. An x-ray would show lots of layers of paint, collage, mistakes, corrections, misdirection, bad decisions and...well you get the idea.

So the other day I was working on a piece and I mixed some paint that turned out beautifully. For those who are not painters, paint mixing is an art and a bit of alchemy. You need a secret handshake and a close connection to the Buddha to get colors right. Usually I can't remember the handshake and the Buddha ignores me. This time though - ahhh - a beautiful pastel yellow that was perfect on its own and when mixed with a bit of Crimson Red (paint colors have names, odd sometimes like Neutrino Bold Turquoise or Betty Davis Eyes Green) came out just right in a reddish pastel contrast. I'll probably never be able to recreate it unless I reach totally enlightenment. Unlikely.

Anywho, I grab the aforementioned multi-layered painting and the magic paint and started to work with little hope. A line here, some paint there, a crock of the neck to see it from another perspective and ultimately I step back and Buddha has graced me with something I like. I sleep poorly wondering whether I'll wake up, go downstairs and realize that the new version, well, sucks. It's happened more times than I care to remember.

This time I don't think so. I like it. For now.

"This is Not a Flag", Beyond mixed media on canvas, 24 x 18

A new abstract

This sort of started with a small study I did.  It wasn't intended but Karen immediately said, "What's the little nude about."  That's how her mind works I guess!  This was weeks ago.  So I took a big canvas that had not one, but two (maybe 3?) failed paintings under coats of gesso.

I started with the study and it went fairly well.  Here's what ultimately happened...

Another Nude.  Ink, acrylics on canvas.  24 x 30

Update to the website

I'm updated my website with a new design.  It's a bit simpler and hopefully easier to look at.  Let me know what you think.  Here's a new featured piece:

Shakori Night.  Mixed media on canvas

New abstract piece

I've been doing a lot of vaguely realistic work and frankly my attempts at abstraction have been failing badly.  I'm working on two that I think might be going somewhere interesting but I'll start with the one that's farthest along.  This  is a poor photo, maybe I'll take another later and replace this over the weekend.  The block in the middle is actually a deep Prussian blue not the black that shows up here and yellow is much more light yellow.  Still you can sort of get the idea.

Untitled, acrylics, 20 x 16

Back to abstract....

I've wanted to get back into abstracts lately but I was stuck. Nothing seemed to work. I broke down and bought a book by Rolina van Vliet called "Painting Abstracts: Ideas, Projects and Techniques."  Generally I'm cheap -- by spending $$ on a book I effectively forced myself to try some new abstracts.  (FWIW, the same technique, in this case paying for 3 months at the gym, seems to be working!)  Both are acrylic on 12 x 16 canvas board.