Week 11 The Final Countdown Coninues

Well, this week certainly has flown by. Friday will be the 12 week in my Animal Drawing class and so that leaves me only 4 classes left there. The drawing below of Mr. Ed as I called him was finished up last Friday, i tried to work back in and even add more of the environment. the picture isn't the best I'll have to shoot a better one when I get the drawing home and set up the lights. The painting above was a quick in-class the other day as I sat in on Al's morning class at school, I grabbed a panel from the school art store and did this quick little study in a little over and hour plus. Oil, 9 x 12.
I did this painting today in media & methods class, Anthony had us do a quick grisaille...so I decided to whip out my iphone and grab one of the pics I snapped while riding the train into school. I dickered around with this a lot and tried to keep it fun and loose. I was looking a the huge Richard Diebenkorn we have in the school museum this afternoon. 18 x 24 in oil, next week we are supposed to glaze color into this...

Week 11 The Final Countdown Begins

The semester has turned the final corner with final crits basically a month away.This is what ened up on canvas the other day in Materials and Techniques class. The teacher Anthony didn't want me to do anything figurative, so I must have banged out at least 10 images that I ended up wiping out until only this ideas remained--basically because I wanted to leave class and not start over. This week we are supposed to paint over this as well as start yet another grisalle.
I was happy that my painting I did of the SEPTA commuters was accepted into the returning students show at school even though I am really pissed off about the SEPTA transit strike here in Philly. Now I have to drive in every day and fight the horrible traffic to go to school and to teach. Maybe I should do a painting of that!

Week 10

This is a quick burnt umber wash-in I did in portrait class yesterday afternoon, for a quick color study I'm doing before I do my larger picture. it's 9 x 12 on gesso board in oil.

Brandywine Paintout

Yesterday I ventured back to the Brandywine river Museum in Chadds Ford for the 4th time this year. but this time I didn't visit the mueum instead I went along with a group of friends from school to do some plein air painting next to the museum along the Brandywine river. After painting in the damp chilly weather we had a great dinner cooked by Jane in her beautiful home with her awesome dogs. A great start to the week and I think we just caught the very, very tail end of the fall colors.
Here you can see me posing with my paintings after my block-in, the final is in oil, 8 1/2 x 11.

Week 9

This week went by fast--hurling me through the 9th week of school like a shot.I fished up the painting in portrait class after 3 poses and then started another drawing of our horse model on Rives BFK in pastel.


The two sketches above are from Renee's class for our next pose, I'm going with the closer one which I will start on next week.

Week 8 mid-term and Vincent Desiderio Workshop

This last week was mid-term at PAFA. I only had one crit, and that was in Renee's class but we learned to stretch canvas in Materials & Techniques class and drew a live horse in Animal Drawing--but the best was the two-day workshop given by Vincent Desiderio. Once again Vince came down and gave a two-day intensive workshop for about 30 students, a mix of undergrads like myself as well as MFA students.

I took his workshop last spring and it was one of the best experiences I had at the academy, and this one was just the cherry on top of that. Vince transfers not only his mastery of techniques to you but his energy, philosophy--(a lot of that) and his passion as an artist. In short, he's sort of like a dynamo that charges you up!
Like my other favorite teacher Scott Noel, Vincent gets you going from all sides.Above and below you can see my painting in progress.



Above: Vincent gets ready to do the demo. Alina likes what she sees...

The workshop was broken into two days, the first we would get the drawing done and shellacked and then try and get as much done as possible on the painting, finishing it on the second day. Like last time in the workshop we did a block-in drawing in ink first, and some of the students did their drawing in charcoal, which looking back on it I should have done. The ink is more difficult to work with and starts building the paper right away where the charcoal won't. So next time I will do this with charcoal first. next we shellacked the drawings and then Vincent gave us a demo using one of the students drawings to do his demo with. he loaded in the light masses of the figure, succumbing on the titanium white along with a little burnt umber, yellow ochre and a little black.


The group was split into two rooms and Vincent walked in and out and gave everyone crits as they worked, for a few he would stop and paint on their drawings to demo what he was talking about and to make sure you got what he was talking about. It's a mixture of observational drawing and painting along with some ala prima. You are trying to draw what you see but also invent or push the concepts, the form in light, turning away from the light, slow or fast.



I also got to have Vincent give me a private crit on my work which I took in. He liked my paintings and said the were very good but that I could activate the surface more, bring more texture into parts of the painting. So I will try that on the next big painting. it was a great weekend that seemed to go really fast and while I got to know Vincent a bit better and my admiration grew for him as an artist I think I grew to like him even more as a person.

Black and White Red Head--Mid Term

This week we are at the mid term at PAFA and I had to do two paintings for my class with Reene Foulks, the same painting on a black toned canvas and a painting of the same subject on a regular white toned canvas to see how the toned canvas effected the overall color but especially the skin color. I choose to work for a picture I snapped of my friend Alina in the car at night and use her as the subject because I thought having the red hair would make a great accent to the painting. The second painting was the one on white which I did much faster than the one on black, that one took a second sitting to charge more color on as the dark canvas sucked it down. Both paintings were under 3 hours in execution.