Sketching outside

Here is a pencil sketch of a food cart at Portland Staste University. This was an absolutely fantastic day to draw outside. I used an Eagle 314 pencil and spent only about thirty minutes on this.
I was hoping to do a sketch a day, but that is not happening. I will try to do more.

Art as decoration

This is a 3D Studio (computer) rendering showing a 8' x 12' sculptural painting for an office building lobby. We sometimes design big walls for art only to find that the client does not necessarily want to spend $20,000 for a large art piece to put there. It seems like there is an opportunity to make art for these kinds of spaces without breaking the bank. I came up with this concept of different size canvases with superimposed geometry. I feel like I could do it for $3000 and make a profit. Artists and gallery owners who sell large scale work will probably frown on this kind of thing, but maybe there is some room for me to get in the door. It can't hurt to try to use my architectural connections to sell my art.
To make this image, I used an existing model of the space. The idea for the piece was sketched on yellow tracing paper and scanned into the computer. I made 3d objects of the canvases in the 3d program and added the image of the sketch on top, which is called mapping. While the sketch was done with colored pencil, it approximates the look of a hand painted image.
How do I feel about art as decoration? Art is decoration for most people, on the surface anyway. The fact that they want to spend their hard earned cash on a custom piece says something and if they want it to match their sofa...so what.
It would be nice if there were more of a dialogue between the architect and the artist. Having an artist make a piece for a space makes a lot of sense to me and seems to make it less of decoration and more of an intervention. It has more meaning perhaps with respect to the architecture.

Still Wet Portland

I just finished this 11 x 14 painting of the Portland Tribune building. It is the back of the building and It is the view that I see from the parking garage where I park my motorcycle. I like the building massing and the way the morning light hits the walls.

I am trying to get more color variation in larger planes in the scene. As I study other painters work it is clear to me that successful paintings pull more and more color out of both bright and dark areas, which can make a simple scene much more dynamic. A photo of the subject may not even reveal these colors and the need to be interpolated or fabricated. Either way it makes for a much more interesting piece.

Exaggeration of color is very important in the city scenes, which can tend to be more grey in reality.

The mind will perceive the colors when one is viewing the subject in person, which is the benefit of on site work. When working from photos, which I am forced to do, one must remember the subtle colors and or fabricate them.

The following set of four 18" x24" paintings are for sale.

I hope to get them up in a coffee shop in Portland and sell them for $150 to $200.

Most cafes that want to hang your work seem to want at least eight paintings, so I am working on a few more.

I think these are good explorations, but not where I ultimately want to be with the work.  If I want to sell these, I probably shouldn't admit this.

I am learning a lot from each painting that I create, which is a good thing.

The two foggy paintings are very subdued and cold and don't have the depth or color that I was seeing in the real scene.  There are bits that work for me, such as the glazing that is starting to happen.   Still, I need to work harder at creating depth and color in these (see Monet in London for his foggy work).

The "cranes" I like, but the perspective is a bit off and there is no energy.   It is an interesting moment in Portland's landscape.

My favorite is the "sunrise".  I like the colors and the different geometries in the scene.  The contrast is good.  I think that the view of Mt. Hood and the city are fighting for attention, which I'm not sure is a good thing.

The next paintings after these will attempt to focus more closely on urban scenes and I hope to start bringing the human figure into the work.

Portland Fog I

Portland Fog II

Building Portland

Portland Sunrise over Mt. Hood