Standing figure, watercolor

I haven't spent enough time in the studio in the last couple of weeks and it shows. Watercolor, Fabriano rough, half sheet (15"x 23"?).

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."