The new ‘Among the Clouds’ painting is beginning to take shape. I estimate another two days or so painting bed related drapery, and then it’s on to the figure.

Earlier this year Bryan was working on a special project for BB&T:

Click here to check out the finished product. (View at 100% for best quality)

Now that it’s published we can add it to our website!

The New Years Eve piece is coming along quite well. In fact, it is finished. I toyed with the idea of simply posting an image of the final painting, but showmanship seems to suggest that I make you wait for it and build the drama in the meantime.

Here we have an image of the painting just as the background colors have been roughly chopped into place. The quality of the photo is obviously sub-standard, but the combination of dark colors and glossy wet paint has proven to be too much for my camera to handle. I have painted dimly lit scenes in the past, and have not been entirely satisfied with the overall mood achieved. Hopefully this one will break the trend. With the colors of the sky and walls in place I should be better able to judge how bright to paint the figures.

Back in the present, two new canvases are currently under the brush.

The first one shown here will be a very simple figure study similar to several I have posted on in the past few months. The second should be a little more interesting.

I have decided to test out the results of the past nine month’s figure practice with something a little more in line with what I was doing before. The composition features a young woman waking up in her high-rise apartment to the magnificent view of two other sky scrapers rising out of the clouds. Any of you who have looked through my portfolio enough may recognize the background from ‘Study for Among the Clouds II’. This is the sort of composition I had in mind when working on those studies years ago. I will be keeping the detail relatively tight, but will incorporate anything from the recent figure series that is applicable, and see if I feel any more competent as a painter.

Tune in next time to see what happens. And please, write in with your questions or comments.

Here is a picture of the weather outside my office today. Ugh. It’s supposed to be sunny and 70 this time of year but noooooo… snow the size of cottonballs has been steadily dropping all day.

I recently read an interview by Lee Sanstead and was struck by the singularity of his work. I’ve never heard of anyone doing what he is doing. It must be the most fascinating research. Besides lecturing and assembling a huge database of photographs of rarely publicized classical artwork, he is working on assembling hundreds of auction catalogues of sales of the genre over the last century. I bet he is a great speaker. If he came out to Utah to lecture I would be first in line to buy a ticket. (Hell, Lee come hang out for a ski break! We’ll put you up!) One issue he brought up in his interview that I really appreciate is the enormous gaping void in art history where some major turn of the 20th century art belongs. I can’t put it better than Lee so here’s an excerpt of the interview, discussing in particular the absence of documentation about American sculptor Daniel Chester French:

“Art History never mentions the fact that the greatest artists of the day–artists who were household names and loved by millions–had long, successful careers and populated the world with their masterpieces. Artists such as Bouguereau, Alma-Tadema, Frederic Lord Leighton, and the American Master sculptor Daniel Chester French.
Do you know that Daniel Chester French had more influence on American public art than any other artist of the day? Mix in the fact that he was an absolute master, and one would think that he would have dozens of books written about him. In fact, because of Modernism’s absolute distaste for French and the actual facts of this time period–because they would rather propagate their own agenda in labeling people such as Jackson Pollack an artist–French has been left out of art history. There has never been one book written about French by a modern-day art historian. Yet, there should be dozens of books on him right now. In fact, pick up a modern-day American art-history text, and he receives barely more than a foot note. And this was the creator of the Seated Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial–one of the most visited and awe inspiring monuments in the nation. That is like writing a book on the Renaissance and never mentioning Michelangelo!”

For the full interview please click here (Note: Hopefully, you, dear reader/clicker, are not offended by nudity in art. If not, proceed. If you are, grow up.)