Week 11

The hands on the clock seem to be spinning and the pages on the calender are flying off like in an old cartoon and the final month of school happens. In a month we are done and out the door for summer. hard to believe that the semester seems to have evaporated so, but this is true and i am playing catch-up here in Casa Manley. Like a factory calling in extra shifts the lights burn long into the night and smoke pours from the stacks. At the end of the month is the Spring Prizes at school where you enter into multiple drawing, painting, sculpting and print making competitions. I already have some pieces ready and I am working on a few more, so I plan on entering into as many categories as possible.

The painting above is my wash in-wipe-out under-drawing I completed in my Figure painting class yesrteday with Al Gury. I spent the whole class really paying close attention and working slower, even wiping out things many times. I learned that if I don't feel confident about the shapes and the drawing--I always go wrong. At the recent eakins competition I ended up making the major mistake on not spending enough time drawing and always felt wrong about what I had done as my start and then tried to save it as I went along--major, major mistake. I should have wiped that dam thing out till I felt like I got down what I wanted. So my new saying is in the beginning of the painting "If in doubt--wipe it out". Next week I'll start massing in and blocking in the tones.

This is one of the homework assignments in my figure comp class is to take a painting, do a study of its as a drawing, then arrange a still life ourselves borrowing the composition and do our own painting. So of the pieces the teacher had I choose a Cezanne still life. The painting above is an in process shot of my painting. I'll finish it up in the next week. I'm trying to distort the perspective in the same way Cezanne did and hope to get to see the show of his work currently on at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.