Conclusion

The latest painting finished in the studio, Conclusion 18 x 24 OIL

Ken Kewley Workshop-mini-post

This will just be a quick mini-blog about the Ken Kewley workshop I took this last weekend at PAFA. It was a really great 2-day workshop that stretched Saturday and Sunday and Kewley is a very good but easy going teacher. he provided most of the material for the workshop as well to help focus and get everybody to work and concentrate on the ideas and subjects he was putting forward for us to work with--creating strong, solid compositions using abstract shapes and colors. I think this is one of the reasons the workshop went so well and everybody was able to also produce a lot of work. These are two of the several pieces I did that combined painting and collage. The top is from the first day and the second is from the last day. After I catch up on more of the strip and get my paper written I'll do a longer blog before I take the Jon Redmond workshop later this week.

Week 12

One month of school is left as of today and I know these last four weeks will fly faster than the first four weeks. I have a bunch of paintings due in my painting classes and two more papers to write for my 19th Century Art class. The painting Above is my under painting for Renee's class which I worked on in a second sitting. Now tomorrow I'll take it into school and start the color on it. The under painting was done in Burnt Umber and titanium with just some terps to thin it down, it dried really quickly as a result and will be ready for me to load on the color. One of the paintings I have left to do was this more abstract pieces for Media & Methods class. I had to do this using an earth palette and I guess we are going to do something else with it in class.

SCHOOLS OUT! Goodbeye Spring Sememster 2009!

Hurrah! I am now completely done with the Spring Semester at PAFA, my last crit was yesterday morning in my Intaglio class. I haven't posted much of what I did in the class this semester due to the fact I had to do all the work in school. Lisa Hamilton my teacher was really great, she had a great knowledge and love of this medium, which as a painter I found to be at times exceedingly tedious and frustrating.Don't get me wrong, you can do amazing pieces with this medium, but te process means that so often you have no idea of what result you will have from some step or process for a while due to the way this medium works. You have to do something to the plate, then drop it in the acid, clean it, ink it and then print, only then will you see if what you just did yielded the result you desired or had in mind. it can be to dark, not dark enough or any number of thing as this isn't a direct medium like painting. It really requires lots of time and lots of patience with learning how these techniques work and how to manipulate them and yourself to get something you want on the plate. Even simply wiping the plate the same way each time to do your edition of prints is very demanding depending on the image you have.

I decided that the last image i would do in class would be a totally abstract one to just throw caution to the wind and explore the medium in a different way: mark making,non-figurative, letting a randomness happen and then to try and react to what I just did in another random way in a layering of textures, paint blobs, soft ground, etc.

This is a print I did over a dozen proofs of as I developed it, it's based on a picture I snapped in Dali China. I used lots of aquatint, open bite, tape, tush, etching, in short, everything but the kitchen sink on this one.
This is one of my monoprints based on a recurring nightmare I would have as a kid when I was sick.
Our class crit.
I'll miss some of my classmates like Jeff who's returning to Chicago for family reasons and won't be back next fall, and I do want when time allows to try some more prints in this medium, but for now I really just want to be lazy for a few days and sleep more...