new studio

About a six weeks ago, I leased a studio on the 3rd floor of the Continental Gin Company Building in Deep Ellum (Dallas) Tx. The decision to look for a studio kind of bubbled up out of nowhere, and I'm really glad I acted on it. I'm in a beautiful old cotton gin factory that has been converted to artist studios. My studio is spacious and north-lit. I'm fortunate to share the building with a great collection of artists in a vibrant, redeveloping area. Working here has completely changed the scale, time frame, and je ne sais quoi of what I paint.

This is a work-in-progress shot of my current painting of a local beer garden with food trucks around a junked sedan. I use my Scene Sketcher Android app to abstract the photo source. It's still pretty rough and needs further balancing of value and atmospheric saturation, but i'm enjoying working on it. 100 cm x 45 cm.

no model

I had some drawing problems getting started and only finished about half the panel during the posing session. So quite a bit of this was made up and not observed. 13" x 17".

too much glass

Since glass blasting beads under gesso worked so well, naturally I had to try mixing glass into the gesso. I quickly found I was painting on sparkling sandpaper, which isn't so wonderful. Actually, it probably helped the painting since I had to scrub in about twice as much paint as usual. 17.5" x 13.5" - 3 hours.

glass beads

I added 40/70 grit glass abrasive blasting beads to the primer I used on this panel. Even through two topcoats of gesso, this made a huge improvement in the way the surface holds paint. It is much closer to good oil-primed linen. The extra surface area from the slight additional texture completely changes the 'grab' of the surface.

The painting was a bit of a challenge because the model made two pose changes after I started. 16.5" x 14" - 3 hours.

more free

The drawing is still too tentative, but at least some of the paint handling was more bold. 17.5" x 13.5" - 3 hours.

strong light

There was a bright single light on the model,  so I made that the theme. Also finally got a couple of props in one of these portrait sessions! Since I didn't have a lot of time for them, the flowers and table were just flung on unconsciously. The face and hair looked ok after just two values, so I quit them while I was ahead. 14" x 16.5" - 3 hours.

rotisserie chicken

The studio had blazing lights everywhere and was incredibly hot, so I just tried to do the minimum to survive and get this done. Also I realized that backgrounds can and should be telling their own story. So just chasing around lights in the background, somehow seems to make an emotive commentary on the subject. 16.5" x 14.5" - 3 hrs.