Here are a few images of the figure with all of the flesh complete. The reflections in the wet concrete and in the fountain make a lot more sense now.

Of all the feet I have painted, I think these are my favorite. In the past I have often commented (see the archives of the Artist’s Studio @ www.cordair.com) on the inherent difficulty of painting feet, especially female feet. There are a lot of tendons, muscles and joints in a foot and most of them are an essential part of the overall shape. However, any exaggeration or slight misplacement of any of them can result in really crazy looking feet…not something you really want attached to an otherwise attractive, non-crazy-looking woman.

It just occurred to me as I was writing this commentary that in spite of all of this, almost every figure I have ever painted has been barefoot. In fact, the painting I am working on right now with the concrete steps (see earlier post) has four bare feet lined up in a row, and all four belong to women. When will I ever learn to make things easy on myself?

Gallery stroll night in Salt Lake City is always a bit of a surprise. Not everything about it of course, you get a fairly standard range of art both in quality and in style. There are talented artists in Salt Lake, and most of the time I find something I really like, if I visit the right gallery. There are, naturally, untalented artists as well, and their work is considerably easier to track down. The last few times I have made the rounds have been pretty short evenings, and I haven’t been to the few studios I am already familiar with. Consequently I have discovered a few really nice gallery and studio locations I was unaware of. They were not usually filled with anything remarkable or worth commenting on, but I did stumble across this little gem.

Years ago, before I ever sold a painting, and while I was still employed full time as a cabinet maker, I built my first large easel. My boss at the time was extremely generous with materials toward employees who pulled their weight around the shop, and when the door display in the showroom was replaced, he let me have anything I could salvage from the old one. The big find was two huge, solid maple frames 30” wide and 84” high. I modified them a bit, fitted a piece of one to slide over the other, threw on some door hinges, an eye-bolt or two, a rope cleat and a few pulleys, and I had a fairly functional easel. The thing wasn’t exactly graceful, but it worked; and it may have required a little brute force to operate, but it could have supported several hundred pounds of painting. I used this easel for several years and didn’t replace it until Sara and I bought our first house in 2003 and I finally built a new one. For anyone familiar with my work, ‘Winter Evening’ was the first painting not painted on the old maple monster. After the upgrade, the old easel was stored in Damon Denys’ studio until last month when he moved out. Damon and I lugged the thing to a local thrift store and left it there.

Imagine my surprise when I saw it, two weeks later, adorning the window of an eclectic antiques store on Pierpont Ave. Technically this qualifies as the first work of mine ever offered for sale in a Salt Lake area gallery. Unfortunately, the easel is unsigned and the sales commission is 100%.

Here is a little preview of my current project. At 36” X 36” total canvas size, the square inches just of concrete stairs in this painting are nearly double the total square inches of the fountain piece. Lucky for me I enjoy painting concrete.

I suspect this may be Asher’s new favorite piece. He is a connoisseur of stairs, and will often point to this painting and shout “STAIRS!” To be fair, if he were exposed to a few of the paintings I was exposed to at the Salt Lake Gallery Stroll last weekend, he would have probably shouted out “GREEN!”, and been just as completely accurate. Several other words in his vocabulary would have also been appropriate (scary and no-no come to mind), but he will have to speak for himself.

Here is some great advice from a blog I’ve been enjoying recently called ‘Art Muses’.

http://wwwartmuses.blogspot.com/2005/10/random-acts-of-kindnesswhy-you-should.html

Why should we speak up when we see something we like? To keep it going, moving, and growing. Rationalart has had it’s fair share of critics since it came online in what, oh 1997 or so, but we’ve also had a lot of encouragement and support from people who like what the artists are attempting too. Thanks to all of you who have shared your encouragement. I wonder if we’d have lasted this long without it. Cheers to you!

There isn’t really a lot to say about the progress of the painting at this point that isn’t relatively apparent. The left arm and leg have been painted, both of which are at least half obscured by overlapping areas, making them much less difficult to complete.

I should mention that if you happen to be reading these posts and have any questions or comments, or if you would just like to dicuss anything art related, comments are turned on. If you would prefer a more private approach, you can email me a question and I will address it either in an upcoming post or by email.

In these images, you will notice two things. The most obvious is that I have begun work on the figure. The other is that the cloudy mountainscape in the background is suddenly finished. Normally, I would allow an entire post to discuss just the background, however, on reviewing the photos I took as I went along, I discovered that I neglected to photograph my progress at that point. Whoops. I will just gloss over that step by saying that I painted the mountains and clouds, and it went smoothly. Did I mention I shot the scrap in Scotland? Lovely isn’t it? Let’s move on.

Every once in a while I have a day where I can’t seem to paint anything. My colors are off, I drop brushes, and I can’t even draw a straight line. If I’m really lucky, I am wearing my least favorite clothes on those days. The day I painted the head of this figure was definitely not one of those days. If anything, it was the complete opposite.

I began by blocking in major shapes of color. I have included two sequential images of this process, and on the left you will see the face once the blocks of color have been blended slightly. Next I deepened the shadows in a few places and then keyed up the mid-tones, adding a bit of red to the cheeks and smoothing out the neck and chest. This is usually the most involved step for me while painting flesh or fabric, usually because there is a lot of fine tuning to do with the colors. This time around, however, I was dead on with the colors the first time, and there was very little tweaking necessary. I would like to think that this is a direct result of all the practice I have had lately with flesh tones. I used black to define the final shape of the eyebrows, eyelashes lips and the side of the face. Once again I spent a little time blending colors and softening edges. I blended titanium white into a few areas that needed to be a little brighter, and then used it to lay down the final highlights.

This is the usual order of the day for me when painting a face, but this time it seemed to go very quickly, and it turned out exactly as I wanted it to. I started right in with the hair. Now, as I hinted at earlier, this was shaping up to be a great day of painting. Well, the hair fell right into step. I almost always paint hair in two steps: one to lay down the basic colors and the general shapes, and another to add details and final highlights. This time it all seemed to come together at once. Again, the colors were dead on, eliminating the need for any on-the-canvas blending. This meant that I could be much more exact with the placement of the first layer of paint. I was able to finish the hair with a little black to separate a few choice strands and a little white to set off a very few highlights.

Up to this point, this painting has been a real pleasure to work on. Up next is the remaining flesh of the arms and legs. With any luck, they will fall into place with as little trouble as the rest of the piece.

Occasionally, during the course of a painting, a casual observer will make a critical statement that allows me to gage the effectiveness of whatever I happen to be working on. Sometimes this results in a reworking of a certain area, sometimes I move on, realizing enough work has been done, and then other times I just have to laugh.

Asher happened to glance up at my painting just as I was finishing work on the fountain. He immediately became quite excited, pointed at it quite seriously and said, “BATH!” Good enough for me. The water looks like water.

Skateparks get new art from Salt Lake City. These two sculptures were installed at two of Salt Lake City’s skateparks, one in Fairmont Park in Sugarhouse and the other in Jordan Park on 1000 S. 900 W.
Now I realize that public funding of the arts with hard-earned tax money is a nice thing for a city government to do, but geees people - have a local contest or something! I bet half of the kids who skate at those parks could have come up with something much cooler. The first one looks like a cell phone antenna gone wrong and the second one looks like some cheesy mall logo. Miss!!
I have a fifteen year-old skater brother and I’m pretty sure he and his friend’s assesment will be more along the lines of, “Dude… let’s totally vandalize that.”

Painting the water was actually a pretty good time, and may have provided me with the nearest approximation to being an abstract painter I will ever have. I stared at patterns much like what you see on the left for hours.

Though I was a little concerned I would be plagued by dreams of odd, squiggly blue lines (I wasn’t, thankfully, though I did end up a ‘They Might Be Giants’ tune stuck in my head for some time), the overall effect was quite successful, and I am really happy with the fountain.

After reading the article linked to in that last post, I felt I owed it to the Art community to call the attention of the people at Christie’s to this fine work by up-and-coming artist Asher Larsen.

This piece entitled ‘Draw, Rayon!’ is among the first works in colored wax on recycled newsprint by the artist, and is significant due to the conspicuous exclusion of the color yellow, until now a favorite choice for both drawing and snacking. This piece is being made available by the artist’s father for $12.2M.