For Barbara

A couple of the drawings for Boy on Bed. They're not very good drawings but they worked for reference. (The face and arm/shoulder are hinky. The model was a swimmer so I blame the shoulder on that.) I also did some color sketches in oil but I can't find those.

Still Life

"It intrigued me to think that sorrow and memory could be contained in matter; that an object could bear the internal life of a person, as if people could not bear to be the keepers of their own souls. I felt a strange pity for the stillness, the steadfastness of objects." --Regina McBride, The Nature of Water and Air

Self-Portrait

A detail from another recently retrieved image--the rest is very unfinished--from 2004-2005, I think, definitely in the depths of winter (which here is usually unrelieved grayness and gloom). About 14" x 16," from a 20" x 24" canvas. Oil.

Boy on Bed

This painting is from my residency at Vermont Studio Center in July of 2002, an award from the NC Arts Council. More than five years later, I'm still incorporating insights I gained from visiting artists such as Vincent Desiderio and Frances Barth, and from the other residents, especially my friends Betsy Regan, Steven Barker, and Eleanor Kotlarik Wang.

For a long time I felt this painting was unfinished. Unlike my usual process, I worked from a series of drawings from life rather than photos, and intended to finish on site with the model, but time ran out on me. As I look at it now, however, I like the sketchiness of the paint, the unadorned abstraction of the composition, the bold color, the simple palette. The Nap is in many ways a direct descendent of this painting and shows me a direction to pursue: more beds. :)

Oil on canvas, gritty acrylic gesso ground (wore a good old brush down to nothing), 18" x 30."

Two Women, Part 3

Acrylic added. Time to start a new one.

Two Women, Part 2

Watercolor and graphite. Maybe I should have stopped at this point... but I didn't.

Mask

I found (in a box marked "Pencils," strangely enough) these Derwent Sketching pencils, marked "dark wash" and "med wash," which melt--but not completely--into washes with water. Kind of interesting effect. This is about 6"x 7," on CP paper. The photo charmed me because her mask is crooked and her neck is dirty--I think I caught the mask, anyway.

Two Women WIP

Graphite, wash, watercolor on 300 lb Fabriano CP. About 20.5" x 28". Lots more to do.

Latest Figure

Nothing like standing in front of the easel to make you humble again. Wc/acrylic on 300-lb CP paper. The image is about 20"x28"--a full sheet, anyway.

These nudes are based on "French postcards"--erotic photographs from the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries. I started with them simply because I love the figure and they were reference to experiment with, but as I study these pictures I become more entranced with the young women they portray. In so many, the poses are "sexy," but the faces are bored or sad, and their hands look work-worn or grubby even though they're ornamented with long nails and jewelry. If I develop this series into more than opportunity to play with new and unfamiliar paint, I will concentrate even more on the faces and hands, trying to find the individuals, the girls locked in these old dirty pictures.

Award

Nap was selected for the First Prize in Paintings at the NC Artists Exhibition. I'm so proud and pleased I could pop.