Portland Grain Facility

I did this for a friend.
I tried to balance the darks and lights of this late afternoon scene.
The clouds were fun to paint.  I need to do more clouds!

Orange Dumpsters

I have been working madly making frames, painting and dreaming of art openings...
This is a quiet scene from the NW Industrial area.

New Subjects

After doing the Mississippi alley paintings, which I like, I have to admit that certain subject matter is a harder sell than others.  I still need to see if I can get some play with the alley offerings, but these next few are more obviously Portland.

The last scene is of some orange dumpsters in the NW industrial area.  It could be anywhere, but Forest Park is in the background...

I hope to get back to work on these soon.

Alameda Pick Up

It has been way too long since I have posted!  I have been busy with architectural work and have been neglecting my painting.  Before the Holiday break, I completed a painting that I will be donating to our kids school auction/fundraiser.  I just need to fill out the paper work and hand it over.

I was taken by this scene, which shows the landscape at the end of the summer.  The grass is dry and brown and the shadows are long.  The back side of the old school building has a lot of stuff going on.  As an architect, this building is a mess, but it has some interesting massing and contrast.  The boy running in the center of the painting adds some energy to it.

Some Plein Air Painting



 



Imagine three grown men standing under the Marquam bridge overpass, in the wind and rain, with their easles out trying to paint.
This was my first time painting outside in a long time. 
What is funny is that these guys had all summer to do this and they finally went out on one of the first bad days of fall.
This painting is much looser than I usually do. 
I may have to try this again when the weather gets better...

F.Y.I.  I did not know what plein air painting meant until fairly recently.  It is French, of course, and just refers to something done outside.  They could call it "Outside Painting" but "Plein Air Painting" is fancy and we need to be fancy.

More Alley Paintings



The shadows cast by the power lines is interesting to me.  Maybe that is all I have to say about that.

















This is the largest of the four Missippippi alley paintings (4 ft x 4 ft).  The red wall creates a tension in the painting which I am not sure that I intended.

Lebbeus Woods - Death

Lebbeus Woods died this past Tuesday.  Here is a link to a NY Times web article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/arts/lebbeus-woods-unconventional-architect-dies-at-72.html?_r=0

I have been intrigued with Lebbeus Woods and his complex design and artwork for years.  It was in grad school that I first learned of his work.  I had been following his blog, which he had recently taken a permanent break from.  I wondered what he was dealing with.
While Lebbeus had only a few built works (his art installations the exception) he had a big influence on the architectural underground. 
His drawings are futuristic, post apocalyptic, but also beautiful and well crafted.  He challenged ideas of war, natural disasters, poverty and human survival.
His blog reminisced about his past work, but always provoked a current discussion about architecture and art. 

Here is a link to his website:
http://lebbeuswoods.net/

I like that he was a sort of architectural vigilante who would use architecture as a way challenge conventional thinking about world issues.  His work was often dark, but also optimistic and inspiring.
He was a very unique voice in a cacophony of architectural rhetoric and I will miss him.

Rest Well Lebbeus...

Alley 2

Here is the completed second painting for the Mississippi Alley series.
I had a hell of a time with the green and ended up throwing out a quarter cup of paint.
You may notice that I highlighted some of the leaf edges.  I did this because it need to pop a little more.  I don't usually like to do that, but I think that it helps this painting a lot.
This is a 36" x36" painting.
It will be interesting to see how the subject matter goes over with people.
This is really just a weed, but I like the complementary colors and think there is a kind of determined beauty here.

Alley Series

This is the first of four paintings inspired by an alley just West of Mississippi Ave.

Till Death

Introducing the happy couple.

Dressed to Kill 2

I don't think this guy is coming back.
I discovered that blue painters tape will stick to 110 lb.
cold press, so I won't be doing that anymore.
I purchased some spray fixative to protect the charcoal.  This one is especially susceptible to smudging.

Dressed to Kill

Some Craigslist post was requesting artists to draw zombies.  I never submitted this, but I was intrigued with the idea.  I then thought it would be fun to take images of good looking men in suits and make them zombies.  This guy is obviously not too far into the zombie thing and he still looks pretty good.  Maybe he is a zombie who can be saved...
I used a 3H pencil for the layout and then a hard HB charcoal pencil for the final line work.  No smudging on this.  The idea is to come up with a drawing style that I can use for a graphic novel.

After looking at this sketch for a few days, I am thinking that this is how I have been feeling as of late.  I can't convince my kids that he is a zombie.  They think that it looks like a guy who has been beat up pretty bad.  Indeed.

Alley Painting Starts

I was wandering around an alley just West of Mississippi Ave and got some ideas for pieces.
Here are the starts.  I used iron oxide and yellow ochre for the rusty base color (it looks like I spilled spaghetti  sauce on them, but whatever).  Then I used my usual dark mix for the sketch and added white in some spots to identify highlights.
Painting big is much more exciting for me, allowing for bigger gestures and less small brush work.
The paintings at the right and left are of interest to me.  My gut tells me that there is potential in these somewhat ambiguous images but we will see if anyone wants to buy them.
Not shown here is a 48" x 48" monster canvas that will have a big alley street scape!

Small Paintings

I have to admit that doing these small paintings is not my favorite thing.  They seem to take more time than I want and I find that I don't like working small as much as I like working big.  I also can't sell them for as much as the big paintings.

I really procrastinated working on these, but managed to get myself motivated enough to finish these four little guys.

This first 6" x 6" is on a wood panel and is my favorite.  I was working from a photo and had to take liberties to get the scene right.  I removed some blue mats (not sure what they were) and a few of the tomato plants at the right to show more of the tree and have less clutter.  The focus flows between the yard debris container, the bucket and the tree, which is good.  The sense of the late afternoon light is what I wanted it to be.

This next one is an 8" x 8" on canvas.  This is one where the photo is perhaps better that the original.  It verges on being too dark, but works.

 You see these blue bins all over the place.  This 6" x 6" is my second favorite or is tied with the first one above.  The balance of light and dark is just right I think.  I almost removed the white waste basket at the lower left, but like that it seems to be having a dialogue with the recycling bid.

 The last one is an 8" x 8" on canvas and my daughter said that it would be funny if there was a dog peeing on the fire hydrant.

Graffiti, Is it Art?

I thought that I heard someone outside on Thursday night last week.  I also thought that I heard the rattle of a spray can, but when I went to look outside nobody was there.
The next morning, I found this on the street in the middle of the intersection.
They could have tagged the buildings near by, but they chose the middle of the street.
It is an interesting compliment to the "legal" marks around the man hole.
I was going to notify the police, but since there wasn't anything offensive about the image and it was not an obvious "tag" I let it slide.
What does it mean?  I don't know.  Is it art?  I think so.
I would have tried to engage the manhole more if I had been the artist.

More Industrial Stuff

This is the finished Clearwater Trail scene at the Ross Island Sand and Gravel Plant.
It was fun to paint but did take a while because of all the stuff.
I keep looking at my work and wonder if I should be covering the line work more, but I like the graphic quality of it.  The subject matter lends itself to this technique as well.
The sky was kept simple, although I did think about adding some clouds.  I exaggerated the light blue "haze" to help focus the eye.  In the real scene the sky is a fairly constant gradation.

Ross Island Sand and Gravel and the Springwater Cooridor

Here is a start on a 3' x 3' painting of the Ross Island Sand and Gravel plant, which is just north of the Ross Island bridge.

The plant is a vertical structure that, I think, balances the composition.  

The detail below shows the line work.  It is easy to get overwhelmed with all the bits of stuff, so I try to draw the major elements with a pencil and then paint in the rest of the detail as I go.  It is best to step back and squint a lot to get just the essence of the details.

As I was scouting this scene, there was an angry voice coming from across the tracks, up on the back.  I can't remember what he said exactly, but it was something like "What are you doing?!".  I could not see him, so I imagine him to be a troll living under the bridge.

Industrial Scene

Here is the completed painting of the scene down under the Freemont bridge on the NE side of the river.  This is an industrial area that has a crazy scale to it.  The truck is a good point of reference for the scale.  The size of the wood poles is crazy.  I don't know if you can get poles that large anymore.
I do find the power lines and cables to be very interesting and a way to create an abstract field.
I love this scene, although I wonder if it pulls the eye too the left.

Fireworks

Jen had a birthday party for me on the 4th of July (my birthday is the 3rd).
One of the things that we did was have people brink some metal scraps so we could create some kind of sculpture.
I have an inexpensive arc/stick welder that is not very good, but I am getting used to it.
After a few failed attempts to get the metal to fuse, I was able to cobble this sculpture, which my kids call the "Atomic Bunny".
I like working with metal and maybe, some day, I can have an actual welding shop/studio to do big stuff.

The Pruitt Igoe Myth

I learned about the Pruitt Igoe projects in St. Louis when I was at the Environmental Design School at UC Boulder.
I did not remember the details, but understood that it was a massive failure.  Since this was a design school, we talked a lot about the failure of the project in architectural terms.  I am sure we talked about the failure of the public housing system, but it is not what I remembered.
The Pruitt Igoe Myth is a documentary that is very well made, touching and eye opening.  Included in the film are a number of candid interviews with past residents, some who were there from the beginning.  Some remember the opening of the place and the joy of moving into their new "poor man's penthouse".  When it was fully occupied and there was enough revenue to pay for the maintenance and security it sounded like a great place.  It was clean with light and views and places to play.
The decline happened when the industry in St. Louis began to decline and a large number of people left the city for the suburbs.  Industry followed these folks to the suburbs and left a hole in downtown St. Louis.
It turns out that the Pruitt Igoe projects, like many others, had to use the rents to pay for maintenance and security.  When the residency rate declined, so did the revenues and everything fell apart.
If you think that you know about Pruitt Igoe, then you need to see this.

Here is the trailer on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7RwwkNzF68