Man and Music

The seed image for this experiment was a memory of my father playing the violin. Dad loved music. He would conduct the radio when the Saturday Texaco Metropolitan Opera with Milton Cross would come on; he would play the violin with passion and the piano…. well, he tried. Here is the first pass: It is […]

Cloud-Inspired Abstract

I began this experiment with my recent cloud watercolors in mind (Watercolor Clouds from Photograph, Watercolor Painting Process – Clouds).  However, instead of using gray-on-gray, I used two different colors. I laid down the dark red first. Then I used a diluted red and copied the dark contour, leaving a white gap.  I chose blue […]

First Foray with Compromised Materials

I decided to ease back into watercolor this year.  A while ago I poured some latex watercolor resist (frisket) onto a 12×16″ block of watercolor paper. On each occasion that I passed by the studio, I saw the frisket design and thought about how to develop it. On new year’s day I started painting.  When […]

Water Hole Cover

This one caught my attention. The combination of metal, concrete, pink and white writing and most important of all, the blue dot, compelled me to take this street-level photograph.  

Skin Deep

I love textures of all kinds. But rough textures are the best to photograph. Oblique lighting reveals all the nooks and crannies. This is a close up of a bit of skin. It could be a picture of the hide of an animal, for all its wrinkles and fur. But it is bark, the skin […]

Pen and Ink and Color

I started today’s square with a penciled free-form design. I hadn’t used pen and ink for a while, so instead of painting in the loops I inked them in using parallel lines of different orientations. I am reading about Willem de Kooning, who was constantly revising, scraping and repainting, as he worked on his canvases. I […]

Abstract – Observations: de Kooning

I anticipate a goldmine of information and inspiration from the book I am reading, Reductionism in Art and Science: Bridging Two Cultures, by Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel. He points out the similarities between the investigative methods of neuroscience and the experiments of the abstract artists of the ‘New York School’. This group of […]