Going in Circles

Two weeks ago I ran into painter's block, and was not getting anything done in the studio. As a way to get away from whatever was holding the work back and as an excuse to at least be doing something a little experimenting was done using circles on some random panels. Screws were drilled into portions of the panels and a thin board with a 3/8" hole drilled into it with brushes spring clamped to it was mounted onto the screw, this arrangement was used to generate the circular marks. 

Last week saw an all day critique at school and a long weekend trip to San Antonio to get away for a bit. Feel ready to paint again, got some work done last night. Hope to push though the next month and really get some paint moving. Kind of excited about the circles.

Weekend Work

Developing shadows on the figure to the left. 

Starting some new panels.  

 The new panels with more paint added below an old panel placed on top.

Working them together.

Oil Pattern

Below are a series of shots showing the first attempt at working with creating a tape and oil paint pattern.

Tape mask applied.

Oil paint applied and mask removed.

Preparing to spay Turpenoid on the paint in a effort to get it to swirl and run.

Too much spraying and swirling. You can see the spay bottle of turpenoid on the back edge of the panels. I think I had the paint on too thick to get what I had in mind to work, plus I went overboard with the turp. I had seen this video and it made me want to try it out in my studio. (It's a 19 minute video and the portion that I am referring to does not occur until about 15 or 16 minutes in, if you have the time the entire video is interesting.) The artist Jorge Pombo was doing this with an image of Istanbul that he had painted, but I thought I could apply it to the geometric, hard edged patterning I have been doing. I'll try it again with less paint, a little more dry time before spraying, and less turp when I do.

24 hours after spraying it, the oil paint is still very wet despite the amount of turp sprayed onto it.

Forgot to photograph the second tape mask applied to the wet paint, but this image shows the result of some white oil that was worked into the wet ochre color and than sprayed again. I liked how the tape mask removed the wet oil from the surface when it was removed yielding soft edged line.

Memorial Day Weekend

It's been about a week since I've had any real productive time in the studio. Not sure if I just needed a break or what the deal has been, but getting to the studio has been difficult this past week. I finally found my way down there yesterday morning for a hour and played around with these four triangle panels. 

I took some photos over the weekend so hopefully I can dig into those to find some inspiration for paintings to come.

Cutting

Adding alternate panel formats other than the 2x2 and 2x4 formats has been something I've wanted to work into the mix for awhile now. Rather than building out new panels to meet this goal existing panels are being ran through the saw and then new furring strips are added to to patch the new side.

Here's a jig for cutting a 2x2 diagonally to form 2 triangle panels. I needed some way of holding the square securely in place while it passed through the saw, this is what I came up with. Then square spring clamps are used to secure the panel to the angle guide. The right vertical strip runs against the fence. The cut happens about 2 inches past the edge of jig.

To make minor corrections to angle this bolt can be adjusted.

While it is rare for a Dolak contraption to work, this one did just fine.

There is a lot to explore with this new development, it should really start to add some needed complexity to some of the configurations. Quilting with wood and paint.

White Out

With more panels visible in the studio everything seemed to be heavily color saturated to me this week. Almost out of the tube saturated. So in an effort to inject some subtle color back into the panels I experimented with applying white paint back on top of some panels in both a opaque and semi-transparent fashion. In the image above the configuration on the right have more of an opaque application while the one on the left is a mixture of white latex house paint, water and matte medium. 

More experimentation will have to take place in order to not only tone back color but to preserve some of the past work. Ultimately it would be beneficial to the work if images and texture could be obscured while still peaking out in bits and parts of the panels.

Week of 2-14

Ended up working a lot with texture this week. Some time was also spent shuffeling around panels and looking at a few different combinations.

Not sure I like the crop of the portrait on the top right, the division of the panel cuts it off at an odd juncture and I'm not sure what I would want to do to solve it.

The panel was laying around the studio and had been since last May so I thought I would at least dust it off and see what it could begin to work with.

Weekend of 2-12

Saturday's weather was too nice and it was impossible to spend more than a few hours in the studio, Sunday I got up early and got 4 hours in before church and a few more while Caleb napped in the afternoon.

Red Portrait progress in background, on the floor are two panels that were selected to have some texture and pattern added to them.

Initial tape and a variety of house paints, polyurethane and matte medium.

Here's the resulting effect. I worked with colors that don't appeal to me because I envision covering this whole thing with gray paint and sanding back to get some hits of color from this base. The other goal is to have a more varied painting surface to paint on eventually.

I tried something new with the tape I pulled off of the panels, rather than just throwing it away I used the paint that remained on the front and applied the strip of tape, paint side down to other panels — resulting in a transfer of sorts. The thought has occurred to be before to save all of these tape fragments and use them for collage elements on these panels. But for some reason I have enforced a "no-collage" rule on myself for now and this was a way to use the tape and discarded paint. Sorry I forgot to shoot a pic of the panels with the transfered paint. I'll do that next time.

More progress on this iron painting, top panel paired with a new bottom, just to look at different color. 

Simply wanted to see what these to things looked like together. (I apologize this image is of really poor quality.)

Progress on Brushing Teeth, time spent blocking in large forms, attempting to accurately describe the  proportions, especially of the hand holding the brush.  

Diamond Pattern Execution

Light green paint was added on top of the masking tape pattern along with some modeling

paste for body.

Beginning to remove the tape, it was kind of nice like this, but the rest of the tape needed to 

be removed.

This detail shot is bad, sorry. Anyway after this thing dried for a few days I dismantled the

panels and will either use them as a ground for a new work, add them to existing works,

create a new pattern on top of some.