In Early

SOLD!

I decided to take a break from the country and jump back in the city for a painting or two. In Early, Oil on Panel 12 x 12.

Hitting the Wall

I'll readily admit, I've been a bit of a Mr. Cranky Pants lately. I've been pretty unhappy with the state of some things at school this semester and also with my work. I was going great guns and then hit a snag, but one has to keep the head down and lean forward into the wind to make progress.  I knew there would be certain frustrations with the whole grad school process, and my love/hate--well honestly more hate or loathing towards much of Postmodernism. I am pretty unhappy with my writing and research class this semester. There is just no "click", and I know I am by far not the only student who feels this way about this class. We are studying the art world since 1960, my least favorite period in art, especially post 1980 or so. Honestly I don't think the Master Program will change my attitude toward much of the PM world, but I try to remain open to the possibility some things are bound to change on my end as a result. I wonder though if there was a better way to go about this? Throw enough rocks and eventually "they" have to admit the "human hand" has not been taken out of the equation in art. Maybe not. That doesn't mean the process as student will make me less cranky at times or not wanting to have a handful of good stones to toss at the glass houses and a good raincoat and gas mask for the tons of bullshit spewed about that is masquerading as art.

 I also needed Spring Break to catch up on work on the strip and to recharge and sleep big time! I've been reading a lot about how chronic sleep deprivation can really end up taking its tole on you, and I am the KING of sleep deprivation! For much of my art school experience I would routinely get by on 4 hours of sleep a night for most of the week, only to try and catch up on the weekends if I could. Between earning a living as a full time cartoonist/commercial artist/teacher/ student there were many weeks where I would just not get enough rest between huge expenses of energy. I am well trained at the wind sprint, and like a cellphone on low battery I learn to shut off functions ( like laundry, paying bills, taxes and yard work) to save precious battery life---or time.

My crits have gone well with my local and my visiting critics. My visiting critic this semester is Denise Green and we had a good first crit, she gave me some things to think about. I wouldn't say I "get" her art, and so I think its hard to relate to her POV sometimes. This is one of the things about the MFA program is that you might get paired with artist you have nothing in common with as critics. This might give you a real insight and a way of working along new paths---or not. There are very few painters as critics in the program who work in any way like I do, in fact none of the visiting critics do. Green said she  was impressed and a bit confused by my variety of work, the plein air to the recent work like Bravo and the figures with the wrapped heads. She felt I should abandon the still life painting and urban paintings and just do the newer work with the figures, which I don't agree with. Neither do my other critics and so you get very counter in fact very opposite feedback. I went ahead and returned to one of the themes I have been painting the last few years, my commuter series and did this painting called The Signal. I was thinking a lot about Diebenkorn and Hopper and some of the Bay Area painters while doing this piece.

                                                          The block-in for the Signal

The best thing this semester is I have Scott Noel's painting class. I also think after a while, as much as I enjoy some aspects of it, going into a classroom to have an assignment, a set-up by another teacher--even if its a "mental thing", is different than say going into the cast hall and deciding to paint. I might also be a bit burned out on painting that same classroom on the 4th floor after 5-6 years---however I do love my times talking to Noel. We share a lot and a lot of love and respect for each other and he always pushes me, something not all teachers can do after a certain point and I certainly have grown and learned the most from him as we share a lot of things, artistic lineage --even though we will forever disagree on Rockwell. Scott has this great way of holding out the carrot, the hope and then like the master hitting you with the stick as he pulls away the victory with a funny remark. He is the most encouraging teacher and at times frustrating. I also know that painting at 8:30 am after working late means I don't really get going till the end of class and start to get into the zone.
This latest painting was done last week in class and I like it 50/50. I wish I was sharper and had more time, but Scott liked it.  I suppose every painting is a combination of successes and failures, the best ones having more successes, and this one is by far no exception. 

                                                                 The Signal 22 x 22 

The best thing was that Scott came up and gave me a crit in my studio during class. It was the first time we had really looked at and talked about my work since I graduated last year from the undergrad. He laid it one the line in a way no other critic can I think because he has the most invested with me as a teacher. We have a long dialogue, 5+ years at this point. So he gave me a kick in the pants in a way I can use to move forward along the tracks--and that makes everything worth while for me. That's what the benefit of an extended dialogue with a great teacher and painter can provide.

We also had the 6th annual 4th Wall Review Panel this week at the school, which is open to MFA, Post Bacc, and CERT/BFA students. The school invites a panel of distinguished artists and curators  to review the work of the students which is  projected digital images along with written statements submitted anonymously by the MFA thesis students.The panel this year consisted of Michelle Grabner , Fionn Meade and Adam Pendelton. The review ends with the selection of three artists that the panel determines are most competitive for grants, residencies, exhibitions, teaching positions, and other professional opportunities. The event provides the students the chance to see behind the curtain and gain a better understanding of the criteria and selection processes that often takes place behind closed doors. It was the first one I attended and I honestly have to say while I think it's a great thing that the school does it, I felt it predictable in every way in how the three judges chose the winning work. There was a lot of work to look at as there was work from 53 second year MFA students. I am happy for my fellow students that they do this, but at times it was a laughable and infuriating event and re-enforced my dislike for much of the modern art world. I knew if I liked it, the judges wouldn't, and if i thought the work was crap, they'd love it! Some of the reasons given to reject a work seemed like something you'd read on the Onion or a skit on SNL Sprockets. 

There were three rounds of eliminations, from 53 to over 30 and then down to the final three winners. I stayed for the first and most of the second before I had had enough. During the review the panelist made comments like, "Animation is charming and attractive, that's one of the problems with it."A quote from I believe by Pendelton about the animated pieces.

Another critic, "oddly enough I don't know what I'm looking at, but that doesn't bother me". Some other comments that I tweated about as I heard them were, " Arms length abstraction, Constellations of paintings" and "Looks like French Cinema" and the best, work being rejected by a painter for having an " uninteresting point of control". The panelist rejected some work for the exact reasons they liked other work and I found the review extremely inconsistent in that manner.  I'll have my chance next year to do the 4th Wall, but if I had my chance today I'd pass because I don't plan on shooting for any of the orbits these panelists work in. If anything it has convinced me even more to stay on course for the orbit in the art world I have always wanted to be in, narrative, figurative and in control. 

  The Belvedere Torrso 9 x 12 Oil

I enjoyed  the Coffee, Conversation & Drawing in the Cast Hall  hosted by the PAFA Alumni this last Thursday which was run by Nancy B Miller . Lots of former and not so former ( like me) PAFA alumni showed up to chat and draw and paint. I got to spend a good time painting this quick painting of the Belvedere Torso and talk with David Shavlino and Garth Herrick. After much of this week, painting that cast was like a healing salve.

Final Semester Week 14

Well we have basically come to the end, we have one week left till the Spring Prizes at school and the next week we hang our ASE wall. I am down to wanting to finish one more painting for the show, I completed this plien air of the Delaware River yesterday. You can read about my exploits painting this with the Dirty Palette Club over on our blog.

I also finally finished my big center piece painting for my wall. I finished it up in a few days of 16+ hours of painting. I'm pretty proud of this one and have another idea for a painting along similar lines I plan to do over the summer.

Last friday Peter Van Dyck did a demo (along with free pizza) in the cast hall at school. I was a busy week which started off with a visit to my studio by Bo Bartlett and his wife on Monday morning. You can read all about that over on my Michael Cole Manley blog.

i finally got to see the Tanner show at PAFA the wek before it closed and I have to say it was the best show I have seen at the school besides the Cecilia Beaux show a few years back. it was really great to see the painting live, he was such a gifted painter and colorist, the surfaces of his paintings are amazing! I have been very effected by seeing his work and of course it's great he went to PAFA.

Though our time at PAFA as a group is coming to a close as none of my buddies are following me into the MFA we are taking the time to enjoy our last few weeks in our studios.I cooked a big pot of vegan curry and we ate some while watching goofy stuff on you-tube and looking at art books. I will cherish this time i know more and more in the coming years.

Final Semester Week 13

I made better progress in the last two days on my big painting here and once I got everything massed in I could feel the space. Now it's the small moves all over and in some cases I have repainted things more than once to adjust areas to the light-atmosphere I want.

One of the benefits to working on panel is that it dries pretty quick so I haven't even had to use much liquin on this. I can see though I will have to hit this with some retouch varnish because some areas are sinking in pretty good. I hope to be done with this painting this week, just a few more good, long days and I can finish and move on to my last two paintings for the show. We have three weeks left till we have to hang our work.

Final Semester Week 12

I am now into the last month of school, and the last month of my undergrad at PAFA, so I will be spending as much time in the studio painting as possible. My solo show at Rodger LaPelle cam down last weekend and I am happy with the good sales that happened, especially in this bad economy.

So now its the last sprint till the finish line and the ASE. Like a runner running through that pain or stitch in my side, I have to keep the pace. In my portrait class with Scott Noel I got to put in a bit more time on the big paintingScott set up and is himself the central figure in. Now its all the changes one deals with from week to week, class to class as the set-up and the lighting conditions can alter in small and in big ways. but eventually you have to nail down things and move on.

I will have one large painting for my Wall at the ASR, this painting of the crowd of riders inside the train I take to school. I saw this cool scene before me while riding in so I took my Iphone and snapped a dozen or so of pics in a panorama, covertly snapping in an arc across the car. I stitched the patchwork pics together in photoshop and they didn't of course match up perfect, but it gave me a layout which I could do the drawing from. I made a support of luan, whichis very light and has a great surface and which I cradled on the back, primed it with 4 coats of acrylic gesso and then 2 coats of Windsor Newton oil primer.

Then looking at the layout I gridded off the panel and the layout and drew in the painting directly on the panel with Van Dyke Brown in a terps wash.

This is where all the comics drawing and animation background and layout drawing skills server me so well. Once I found the vanishing point it went pretty quick and 90 minutes or so this picture was laid out. I kept it loose and of course made so many adjustments and changes sine working from the pictures created all kinds of "holes and tangents" that I had to fix. I moved heads and hands, all kinds of things as I wasn't trying to exactly trace what I saw in the pictures but to essentially create a space with figures in a specific atmosphere of light. The painting is 3 x 5 feet and so I have to move back and forth a lot to see the whole thing.

This is a picture of what I did in my second session I started working in very broadly and directly using the biggest brush and a Speedball litho/printing roller to mass in things.

This is the painting after my work on it last night, my third session and a detail of a few of the faces below. I aim to keep this one juicy and very "Sargent" in my touch and approach

I can't wait to get back to the studio and paint on it today!

Final Semester Week 10

Another week down into the history books...and the next one ready to fire off! This weeks was busy with many tasks, like building new supports for paintings, in fact one id drying now as I type this. I finished another painting, the one above entitled "Going Home" which is 1o x 20, oil of canvas. With only a few short weeks left I have to keep the fire burning bright. When the model didn't show up for class, Scott decided to take the class to his show which is currently running at Gross McCleaf a few blocks away from school.

Scott is always a dynamo teacher and it was really great to have him walk the class through the show and discuss his work and process. he described his way of painting as Slosh and Cut. He sloshes in big big areas of the painting and then cutting the shapes in the wet paint, in what he describes it as building a shape mosaic. Wet into wet paint paying very careful attention to the placement of the shapes and the percison of the shapes. and their opacity. He paints on a lead ground with no glazing or underpainting. he starts in directly working as fast as he can to block in the whole image. He feels that paint is most beautiful when you don't use a lot of medium, often scraping down entire sections or the entire painting at the end of a session and then attacking it all fresh the next sitting.

The painting above was done directly, all in one sitting

Scott believes that great paintings are as clear as the stripes on a flag, and by compressing the contrast between the lights and darks he ends up with more and bigger shapes of colors in his paintings. he feels that paintings should have a sense of coming into view before you can name specific things. He likened this to knowing a friend blocks away walking on the street by the shapes of their features before you can see their face and specific features clearly.

Final Semester Week 2

Week two of the semester rushed by but I feel was a solid hit on the bat. I got two paintings finished, the painting above of the westbound train to 69th street was finished last night. I have a month left until my show at the Rodger LaPelle Gallery so I will be stoking as much fire in the boiler as I can to keep at the easel every moment I can. In the meantime a spot opened in Scott Noel's portrait painting class so I will end up taking one class this semester, and in a big way it's fitting my last class will be with Scott who was my biggest influence as a teacher while in school and discovering his work was one of the reasons I choose the school.

Last night was also the opening to the Tanner exhibit at the school. It was a big opening with the mayor and lots of luminaries in attendance --in fact it was so crowded I only stayed a few minutes, snapped this pic and left. I'll go back and see it next week after the crowds are gone so I'll really be able to look at the work.

here is the fourth floor studio on Friday where Scott Noel's has his portrait painting class. You can see my friend Alina in the center there painting.

here is a shot of my easel and the studio with my painting The Squirrel hunter in progress. next week will be busy week and my brother graduates from temple so my parents will be in town to visit, so between that and painting and First Friday and the strip I will be jammed. But it's all good as they say.

Fall Semester Week 11--deploy the Heat Shield

Another whirl wind week flew by, culminating tomorrow with my annual trip to the Illux Con with the DPC. Its our 4th trip to the con and we all look forward to seeing a ton of great illustrations and meeting a lot of cool people. We also had our 4th Floor Open Studio yesterday at school. Each floor will be having their own open studio and then next semester in Feb there will a the big one which will be open to the public. But yesterday it was just us 4th floor kids and it was cool to tool about and see peoples work in progress. I've seen a fair share of people's work as I am the floor monitor, but some people I haven't seen a lot or any of what they are up to. The 4th floor is a mix too, we have undergrads like me as well as MFA1 and Post Bac students, so its a real mix of all levels of the school's student body. Of course the easiest way to lure fellow students is with food, especially salty or sugary food, so we set up a snack table and it seems within minutes the floor was swarming with artists looking for free munchies and cool art.

The Halloween costume contest

Home Fine Art Gallery

I also dropped off 6 of my paintings to the Home Fine Art gallery along with my buddy Dave Golas, for our show which opened today and will run till the end of November, the reception is next Saturday, so if you are in the area drop by! But that's not all, I also had the latest painting juried into the newest gallery 128 student show, which opens tomorrow and runs till the end of the month as well.

So, between all the painting and dropping off and running about and teaching and keeping up with good old Judge Parker I could use the Illux Con break just to catch my wind a bit. there are really only 4 weeks left till the semester is out, 5 if you include the crit week, which I won't have with having just the one class. Peter will probably just have us paint that day. It seems strange that good old Tom Turkey is only a few short weeks away, but I am sort of looking forward to the X-mas break and my final semester as an undergrad.

Fall Semester Week 9--over the Hump! Two-man Show!

Well we are now officially over the hump in school with this being the 9th week of classes. I am over a bit of a hump as well personally as I just turned 50 on Wednesday--so it was really a hump week!! I spent my birthday painting away at school, enjoying a nice cake and good time with my friends. I put the finishing touches on my painting above, entitled Market Street. It's the final painting I will have time to finish before I have to go to the framer and get the paintings I need framed for the Emerging artist show I have next month with my buddy David Golas at Home Fine Art in Mount Holly. Our show opens on November 1st, and the reception is on the 12th. You can see images from the card we had printed up below.

Fall Semester-Week 6

This week was a good painting week for me. I finished up another commuter landscape and got a few more paintings underway. I worked from a really old and small low rez pic from my old cell phone. I remember really being struck by the great light in this picture--so that's what I went for, pushing the colors as well. I think I was warmed up from doing that plein air demo last week at the gallery and kept the painting energy rolling.

This is the block-in for the painting I'll be working on for the next 3 weeks in mt Life Painting class with Peter van Dyck. I got to set up this pose so I got something a lot more interesting going on than a guy sitting in a chair.

This was a one-shot painting done today in the class with Peter. The models pose was only for today--so this was just a mad dash in the three hour class to get stuff down as usual. It's really just a attempt to get the light and atmosphere which was changing every minute as the sun rose from behind the convention center. I was thinking a little about Zhaoming Wu's approach on this and i used a big flat brush on it to keep from being seduced by details...

This is a series of comps for my Super Sad paintings. I might do this quite large, actually stapling the canvas to the wall and using huge brushes or squeegies or who knows what. I want to play with more pushed compositions as well. So it was a good week and I plan on keeping the paint brush to the metal as I have only a few more weeks till my show in Jersey!

Down to 46th

Here is another one-shot painting for my Commuter series, its looking down at the 46th street EL stop, just before you hit the curb and go into the tunnel and the EL goes underground through center city.

Walnut Stop

Here is the next painting in the commuter series, its of the trolley stop at the end of my block from this last winter. I love all of the warm cool light mixes you get at night after a big snow storm. I think night scenes are a lot more challenging to paint but if you can nail the light--have a real magical quality to them.

In Station

Here is the next painting in the commuter series, a scene from the 69th Street Terminal. I kept this painting pretty loose until the end and really enjoyed playing around with the color harmony on this one. Come the first of the week I'll be ready to start on a few fresh paintings in the studio...

On The Easel

This is what's on my easel this week in the studio. I have been picking at this a bit every day and I think by the end of the week it will probably be done. I've worked over this a lot and started out with big bold shapes and kept it pretty abstract for a long time just working over all with a big brush and big shapes. I'm working from a photo I took, but once again I am changing things up a lot. I even painted on it for one session not even referring to the pic at all to resolve some issues I had--the 'what does the painting need?' issues. On the other painting I've done recently I felt much more sure of what I wanted in them, not so with this one, which I think is good.

The Rider

Here is the latest painting in the studio, I called this one the Rider, for obvious reasons.