detail: parade 41 this slice of the painting is giving me ideas...
3:16 PM update: i've been tweaking, interspersed with light snacking. i'm feeling pretty good about where it's at, but then i said that yesterday and then went and added 1.5 figures today.
i'm finding that, as this series progresses i have more and more demands on myself to hit the bulls eye dead center. i'll probably decide on an image for parade 42 tomorrow, which may be 24"x48." the detail i've cropped, which you see on the right, is giving me ideas for a vertical composition. we have to drive in to alamosa for meetings tomorrow....stay tuned and we'll see what emerges on tuesday.
if you haven't seen last weeks new yorker review of mad max, it's highly entertaining .
parade 41 44"x44" oil on portrait linen 5/31/15 3 pm
1:24 PM update: a new figure and a half entered the composition just now. still needs some tweaking, but definitely provides the eye with a more interesting journey about the surface. on row 2: the sky to the east as seen from the studio, 1:15PM.
9:48AM update: a new figure will enter the picture plane of parade 41 today. below right: how it looked yesterday afternoon. TO VIEW THE ENTIRE PARADE SERIES TO DATE, CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW below left: north crestone creek 2 days ago. we took another great walk up the creek yesterday. the snowmelt increases in volume daily as the temperatures rise and this year's healthy snowpack melts and feeds the creeks.
THE PARADE SERIES OF PAINTINGS: A BRIEF OVERVIEW
Parade 48x30" oil on portrait linen 2010
the name comes from this 2010 painting, exhibited in my solo show at skoufa gallery, athens, in 2010, and now in a private collection in athens, greece. foreshortening, or drawing and painting objects and people as seen from above, is something that comes naturally to me. when, for example, i look down from one of the levels at MOMA in new york, i always shoot photos. that angle just turns me on. so i have a lot. but it wasn't until this painting, derived from photos of a parade on skoufa street shot from a second floor balcony in 2009, that i began making paintings of images viewed from above on a regular basis. i was able to draw on the thousands of images from shots i had taken at museums, of street artists in denver, in malls, and so on. i made a series of smaller works in oil, mostly 16x16" and when my gallery owner and dear friend in houston, ron gremillion, founder of gremillion & co. fine art saw them, he asked if i could make larger versions for a solo show in november, 2015. and thus, the current series was born. thus far there are 18, which you can see by clicking on the "parade series" link, above.
in a parallel activity, i've been making a series of abstract collages (go to the works dropdown menu at the ver top of the page and click on recent collages) with imagery and drawing sourced from my decade long series of plein air paintings (go to the works dropdown menu and click on plein air) and my ongoing study of 11th c. chinese calligraphy master, huang tingjian. the two paths feed into one another, always in unexpected ways, and keep me on my toes. the casals quote below sums up my attitude about growing older as an artist.
the sky looking east from our living room yesterday about 8 PM