I haven’t lived in New York City for about 8 years, but it still seems like home. My wife and I were watching a Woody Allen film the other night. It was set in the late 1930s, – early 40s, and for a split second, an art deco building appeared in the background. “That’s on 2nd […]
I used the same basic pigments as in yesterday’s painting: Ultramarine Rose and Ultramarine Blue. Having left the dish with the rose pigment overnight, I noticed that it separated into red and blue components. Closer inspection of my tube of Daniel Smith Ultramarine Rose revealed the pigments PB29 (ultramarine blue) and ‘quinacridone red’, noted as PV19 (actually a […]
I worked with ultramarine rose and ultramarine blue today, as well as lemon and English yellow. I began with a variation on a check mark drawn with a number 10 round brush dipped in ultramarine rose. I traced the outer contour with ultramarine blue and outside the blue, lemon yellow. On the inner contour of the rose curve, […]
When I lived in NYC, I wandered around the streets, usually with my camera loaded with black and white film. I had loaded my mind with some of the classic photos of old and, in some cases, even tried to find the addresses of some of the doors photographed by Minor White and photographers of […]
Before I went off to do my errands today, I slopped some paint on my watercolor block. I wet the entire paper, then washed with ultramarine rose and ultramarine blue: a streak of blue and a circle of rose. In between errands, I stopped home and filled in the circle with blue and overpainted the […]
Today’s watercolor is another salt experiment. Instead of washing the entire paper with single colors, I mixed them in one pass. While the pigments were mixing in the wet mass on the paper, I sprinkled pretzel salt on them and waited for it to dry. Here is the result: I’m going to pin this up in […]
Sometimes it is good to get back in touch with art materials. Not only pigments, but their interactions, behavior in dry or saturated conditions, and interactions with other substances. Today, the ‘other substance’ is salt. I used indanthrone blue and lemon yellow to wash the watercolor paper. I spread a bit of large-grained salt (that […]
I began this watercolor by using latex resist to paint a long shape flanked by small dots. After that dried I applied a graded dark blue wash (indanthrone blue). I tilted the paper up so that rivulets of blue would leak from darker to lighter areas. After that dried I applied an orange yellow (English yellow) wash from […]
During my walks around New York in the late 1980s and 1990s I saw many interesting things. I frequently walked south on Broadway to an important dividing line: Houston Street (pronounced How-stun). It divides South of Houston (SoHo) from North of Houston (NoHo). I don’t know how many times I looked south from the northern corner […]
There is nothing worse than putting your heart out there only to realize that no one cares. I happened upon the scene below in Central Park in the late 1980s. The puppeteer in the curtained stage clearly expected a crowd, as evidenced by the wire leading to the speaker on the ground. No one came. Maybe […]
