Hi all!  In an effort to mix it up a little Bryan and I were talking about maybe doing a bit of guest blogging.  I don’t know if it really counts as guest-blogging, as we do live in the same house together, but it sounded like it might be a bit of fun.  The idea is that, as this next piece proceeds, Bryan is going to tell me about how it is going and what he thinks are the points of interest.  Next, I will probably digest that information and then regurgitate it with an extra, I-am-not-strictly-involved, sort of perspective.  We’ll see how it goes.

My first observation about this piece, which I’m tempted to call my own title, but Bryan would huff… is that we don’t normally spend a lot of time talking about how Bryan got this or that idea for a painting.  These days most ideas for eventual works of art are in the pipeline for a couple of years.  I can remember talking with Bryan about this particular idea (or some form of it) well before we got married sometime in 1997 I think.  Something about the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea… Over the years the initial idea has been worked over and worked over until something just feels right.  Then you have to fit it into the painting schedule.  One of the great difficulties of realism is that it takes so long to do any given painting you end up with a huge backlog of painting ideas.  None of this splashing paint here and there, then a new canvas the next day baloney.  So if Bryan quit brainstorming new paintings he wants to paint and just stuck with the list he has right now, he’d probably still be working until 2015 or so.  See??  I get to say all these fun things ’bout my husband that he is too shy to talk about.. he he!  Soooo… back to the painting.  Like I said, this one has been on the backburner for quite a while, when a great confluence of events made it the next big effort.  The combination of finding a great model, having some new knowledge and tools from the GCA, and finishing a large bout of commission work makes this an ideal and exciting thing to start on.  There were the standard hiccups: how to find a time for the model, how to find the time for the photography studio, oh.. the pose is wrong… how about the costume?  Where the hell do you find a kimono in Utah?  When can we reshoot?  What to do with the five year old during the modeling session?  Etc. etc.  Like I said, there’s a lot of backstory that nobody gets to hear (or maybe nobody wants to know? Ha!).  After touring the studios at the Waterstreet Atelier and talking with other artists at the Grand Central Academy I’m starting to realize that it’s all part of the quirky art business and I probably shouldn’t rule anything out as strange (within reason).  So finally the model is found and scheduled, the costume found, the studio set up, the canvas prepped and it’s go time.  Woohoo!!! Slap that paint on!!! Ohhhhhhhhhhkay… wait a minute.  Not so fast.  You forgot about the painstaking drawing and proportions and all that beautiful jazz.  I often think that if Bryan quit with just the drawing on the canvas it would still be neat to look at:

Bryan tells me this one is particularly fun because the scrap is so good that he doesn’t have to improvise as much as paintings he’s done in the past.  He’s very excited about the dramatic lighting of the two large figures.  It’s one of his darker pieces.  The painting will have lots and lots of wood in it, which is a fun task for Bryan - he’s always liked the warm texture of  wood in paintings.  And, another fun sort of thing, is that the background takes place entirely in Bryan’s studio, so it’s almost a studio portrait of sorts.  I know a lot of artists like to put little bits and pieces of themselves into their paintings and this one has a lot of reference material for anyone who has been reading the blog for a while.  Lots of fun…. stay posted!  I’ll be writing more after Wednesday!!!

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