Paul Klee is one of my favorite artists. I found a couple of articles in David Sylvester’s book, About Modern Art: Critical Essays 1948-1997 (Henry Hold and Company, New York 1997) that have given me more insight into Klee’s later work (1937-1940). Sylvester describes these compositions as pictures without a focal point. Sylvester references two works […]
I prefer and muted colors lately. I don’t know why I began with the most saturated of saturated colors today. Before I applied the earthy terra rosa, my favorite part of all the colorful arched streaks, was the watery interaction between the purple and yellow pigments. Since purple and yellow are complementary colors, their combination […]
I was reading about a new book today, which I can’t wait to get. The author is Eric Kandel, Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist who wrote The Age of Insight, a wonderful book about art and the brain. His latest book is called Reductionism in Art in Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures. “Abstract art, says […]
The good thing about painting more than one picture at a time (when one has the opposite of writer’s (or painter’s) block) is having one available to post when one does not have the time to paint during the day. That was the case today. I had no spare time at all. I did a […]
I’m still stuffed from Thanksgiving. Perhaps that is the reason for the food-related subject of today’s painting. It wasn’t a conscious decision, however. I began with a dry brush applications of terra rosa. Within one set of outlines I allowed purple and cadmium red to merge. I followed the opposite curvature of a short stroke of terra […]
I drew this little figure eight-ish figure with terra rosa, using a relatively dry brush. I retraced it with a sloppy wet brush and washed the top outlines with nickel quinacridone to cause drips. I filled one outline with purple and its opposite with cadmium red. As soon as Joy, my wife, saw this painting, […]
I have the opposite of writer’s block. I’ve been doing one painting after another. I experiment with merging of different pigments and try to vary the strokes of my brush to effect different designs. I don’t remember the precise order of events for the painting below except for the beginning check-mark of a brush loaded with […]
I used a lot of the same colors today that I have been using lately (see Volcano?, When Robots Attack, Orientation). I used a sloppy wet brush to apply purple, cadmium red deep, Prussian and phthalo blues and mauve. I applied the colors in adjacent pools and left them alone to merge. I was struck by the results and did not […]
I started today with a purple swoosh of paint. I pre-wet the paper, which gave me a less saturated color than I would have liked. As with yesterday’s study, I began with the paper in landscape format. While the paper was still wet, I ran a brush loaded with cadmium red deep parallel to the […]
“When Robots Attack” is the name of today’s composition, not a post mortem on mechanized warfare. I didn’t intend to paint the likeness of a robot. At the very least, after I painted a watery yellow and green orb, I thought I would use the drips to create tentacle-like projections. I used acrylic inks to enhance some of the drip tracings, […]
