Smaller Paintings

Here are a couple of new paintings that I hope to sell on Etsy.  The first one is 7" x 9" and is of the Burnside Bridge.  This has a lot more detail than I had hoped for this size of painting.  It took me a lot longer than I thought,  so I have figured out that I need to focus in on things for these.

Burnside Bridge

 This painting of my wife Jennifer works fairly well, but her face is a bit too severe and I think that I am going to try to fix it.

Jen in the Sun

Lonely Window

The title pretty much says it.

You can look out windows all you want but at some point you will actually need to go outside.

This painting has a lot of dark sections, which hopefully focus the viewer on the blue sky and clouds.

The lamp was there, but I moved it into the current location.

The rolls of paper and stacks of drawings will hopefully give you the idea that an architect worked here.

Last Days of Desko

This is the beginning if the end.

This was the view from my office window at the Pacific building in downtown Portland. Well, it was one of the views.

In any case, I will no longer have this view as I have been "let go".

I am in the process of starting my own architecture business and hope to also spend more time painting.

Now is a good time to buy a painting if you were interested.

YIKES!

Extra Paint

I have a pad of canvas "paper" that I have been playing with.

When I had extra paint from the last painting, I had these there canvases taped up next to my easel and I used some of the richer colors to try to be abstract.

I also have visited the Rothko exhibit a few times and was inspired. After looking at the Rothko paintings I had a dumb-ass "I could do that" moment. If you look at his paintings in person, you wonder how they got as popular as they did because they are poorly painted. Don't get me wrong, I like his work, but I was amazed at how simplistic and primitive it looked and felt in person.

In some ways, it seems like this kind of gut level understanding is what he would have appreciated.

Do go see the Rothko exhibit at the Portland Art Museum and also see the John Frame exhibit on the second floor as a counter point.

Portland Morning

I am a morning person, which is good in Portland because that is the most likely time to see the sun.

The early morning sun burns the gray off the city landscape. It is the contrast that is so amazing.

This is a 30x40 painting and I think that I get close to the feeling of the light and dark. Painting atmosphere (the fade you get over distance) is still a mystery to me, but I will keep at it.

Portland Cityscape

This is a 30x40 canvas. Getting this under painting worked out required 4 to 6 hours of pencil time and 4 hours of painting. This is a morning scene which will have lots of contrast when I get going on the color. I hope to keep the sky beyond more or less white with an overexposed feel. I painted in the sky in white to see what I might get out of it.
There is a lot of nice color in this scene.
It is easy to get overwhelmed with the level of detail, especially when working from a photograph. I have to keep backing up and squinting to make sure I get the major elements to read. I like to contrast the light and dark and give detail to things that pop in the image. Since there are no people in the image (can't believe this was actually the case, but it was) I will add detail in the signs to give some scale.

Orange Sign

Since Christmas, I have been renovating my basement, again. Hopefully this is the last time for a while.

Unfortunately I was not improving my studio space. It is the same as it has been.

I was very much missing the painting. The lack of painting was effecting me in a bad way. The art work has become much more of a mental health issue and going without makes me sad.

This is a painting that had been started many months ago. It has been sitting in the basement taunting me. "Finish Me! Finish Me!" it seemed to beg. I just let it sit there, festering.

While not one of my more inspiring pieces, I like how it came out. The name "Orange Sign" is because of the one orange sign in the middle of the painting. I used some of the same orange to accent the sky, which is fictitious, but the blank fields of blue (painted more blue/green) needed something to liven them up.

I have always been fascinated by the scale of these entangled over-pass structures. Crazy big they are.

I have seven blank canvases primed and tinted, ready for more action.