Wax Paper I

Wax Paper I
11 x 14 inches
oil on panel

I began with a detailed contour drawing the same size as the final painting, and then transferred the drawing to the panel:

It was so much easier to do the underpainting having solved many of the drawing issues already. I used brown and black, and just used paint thinner to lift the paint off again for the lights and whites:

Stage 2 of the underpainting, still using just brown and black and thinner:

A first pass of basic color. I was worried at this point that I wouldn't be able to capture the feel of the wax paper's transparency, but I felt better when I refined the lower right corner of the wax paper shape and started getting a feel for it:

This is where I missed photographing a few stages. I worked especially hard on the ellipse shape of the rim of the dish, it's so easy to make a painted rim look distorted:

Now that the pitcher and dish were complete, I spent the last several days of work just focused on the wax paper, moving from lower right up to the top:
The completed painting:

NEWS: Two July Shows

I currently have 18 paintings on display right now. Nine are at my eye doctor's office, Dr Marcus, who likes to show a rotating series of art on his waiting room walls. My work will be on display through July and August, and the office is located at:
512 Westline Drive in Alameda, CA

My second show is at Frank Bette Gallery, also in Alameda, and there will be an opening with wine and refreshments this Friday July 11. I'm honored to have had all 9 paintings I submitted accepted to their group show "Still, Life". Frank Bette is located at
1601 Paru Street at Lincoln Ave, Alameda, CA

Oh and an update on the Stow Lake landscape I started last month.... due to the fog and also the smoke from forest fires, there hasn't been a clear sunny day in San Francisco for a month! Even when it is mainly sunny the light has a disturbing filtered feel to it, like we are living in air the color of weak tea. I'd like to paint outside again, but summer in San Francisco may not be the season. We usually have our nicest days in September, oddly enough.

Sneak Preview: "Wax Paper I" and Thoughts on Realism

Wax Paper I (detail)

11 x 14 inches
oil on panel
(work in progress)

This is just a cropped detail of a larger painting I am working on right now - so far 26 hours and counting. My good camera is broken so I've had to photograph the stages with my inferior "point-n-shoot", but the good camera is being fixed soon so when the painting is done and the camera is fixed (whichever comes later) I'll post the final painting and all the stages.

I decided that posting frequently was making me feel like I had to complete something "postable" every few days. Sometimes a little pressure is good, but sometimes it makes me rush my process. So I'll be posting less frequently, but when I do I'll have something substantial to show, and I'll still publish all the process photos.

In the meantime, here are some thoughts I've had rattling around my head about realist art - or maybe it applies to non-representational/abstract art as well:

When we look at a painting we are confronting a situation of real/not real. Our minds flutter between these two paradoxical concepts embodied simultaneously. This flutter quickens to a thrum, and it is in this space, the simultaneous holding of the paradox, that our beingness is felt.

When we create, we are experiencing beingness – the loss of awareness of self, the loss of awareness of past and future. Nothing but the present moment exists, a true experience of reality. This state is difficult to enter, but in recording it an artist shares the experience. Looking at a painting we get a glimpse of this state of being.

The act of painting elevates the subject. Mundane objects are infused with an epic, monumental quality. Like a scent that fills us with longing for a certain afternoon years ago, a memory, the shadow of reality, can often strike us more deeply than the original. Paintings are the shadow of reality, the record of a memory. Through painting we reveal a depth of reality in the moment that can touch us more deeply than the subject itself.