I started a new series 5×7 quick sketches using waitress pencil. Image & accompanying text.
#1
Tag: On the Road
Tan Lines
Between all my recent travel and getting ready to go on the road, I realized that I had not done a piece on my French Cotton paper in a while.
“As a child I spent my entire summers barefoot, right up until the day before school started. I think that’s why as an adult I like beaches so much, they are very different in Europe. ”
French cotton paper & Watercolors 7×10
Dior Glasses
There is a pleasure to exploring when on the road. A different but equally satisfying thing is to have places all over the world where one is known, a regular. This is a self portrait of me at one of my favorite places while on the road.
Watercolor & Multi Media Paper 9×12
Caro Diario
On the road. This paper was just laying around. Although it was generally being put to use as scrap paper, it is landscape style. It was nothing fancy nor great but I decided to improvise part of my trip diary on it. It is not whether something is frame worthy or selleble but the process itself which brings me joy and is the personal payoff for me. I was pleased with the results.
Tani
First painting from on the road. I am very pleased with this, even more so as I had far from ideal lightening and worked on a counter.
Tani 5.5×8.5 watercolor and paper
groovy
About to hit the road again.
Here is new 7×10 Watercolor & French Cotton paper
Birthday
“Let It Bleed” cake, drinks, art, music and some self portraits, uneasy jet travel
Self portrait “At the Party” 9×12
In a Moment
Renaissance painters largely did Royal/High Society portraits along with the obligatory religious work. It was important for the portraiture to look like the subject. However, there could be subtext either positive or negative in the clothes the subject was wearing, the accoutrements around them. These send their own narrative out into the world.
The painter locked in the subject’s position, then worked from there. Now, with camera/photos, people expect, if the subject is leaning their head to the left, then paint it exactly that way.
I have often written about the relationship between artist & model and audience expectation. Another aspect which has changed is positioning.
I want my portraits to look like the subject and I include every little bit of minutia that I see, from a blemish to an about to fall off button. when not working from a live subject, I do not rigidly adhere though, to position offered up in the photo .
Once I did a commission, working from a photo. When I was done, it was the spitting image.
“Oh, my head had been tilted back slightly more in the photo.”
It had not been a flattering angle, chosen because it decreased a chin but increased nostrils as focal point. A strange argument to me, as angle aside, it looked just like her. Most people would never see both the photo and the portrait.
Not by way of excuse but as part of my usual modus operandi, I do sometimes slightly alter an angle. It is as if I am capturing the moment before or right after that in the photo. Depending upon the naturalness of the pose, at other times I do not alter a thing.
She took possession of the portrait. Upon hanging it in her home, she snapped at photo of it on the wall. At one of the fuller cocktail parties she faux-casually brought up her portrait. Wanting some justification for her initial cool reaction she had been eager to show a party goer or two the photo I had worked from and the finished portrait both of which rested within her phone.
“Oh, that is great, it looks just like you, especially in the eyes!”
After a few more comments like this, she felt better. She put away the photos of twins, born a minute apart.
“Blue Pillow”
Watercolor & multi media paper 9×12
Left Bank
What makes for a good trip or proper travel is not checking off a list of places to see with their associated objects;
The Louvre, Mona Lisa….
It is absorbing the feel of a place, ambience of scents, sounds..In taking time to do this, one notices how others live their lives & what is important to them. It also allows for a deeper memory retention of the entire experience which then adds to the “you”. It is what is actually meant by “Travel broadens the mind”.
For artists there is even more of a potential benefit.
Every artists works & travels differently. I am always “working” regardless of where I am in the world. The only variation is what equipment I am utilizing. Short trips will find me leaving the paints at home, filling my coat pocket with my trusty pocket pads as I like to travel as light as possible and most likely would not have time anyways.
Any give place should effect an artist. Not in the most obvious way such as “I am in London, I painted Big Ben”.
It is ambient light, the lines of architecture, they become further accoutrements to the palette. It does not mean that one enters artistic phases ala Picasso and Cubism et al. Rather, work done in one place does not look exactly as it appears back home. The artists voice is ever present but there are different components to the fore, mixed in with some of the more familiar.
If you have never been or only as part of a tour group, then every place in France is lumped in together. Despite some commonalities, each area is distinctive with their own cuisine and habits. It is the same with the ambient light.
Aix-en-Provence is all beautiful yellows punctuated by bursts of trees and the sounds of fountains. Lyon is soft pinks as if the buildings are made or at least coated with the delicate charcuterie which they are the masters of making. Paris in itself is diverse. From arrondissement to arrondissement, from the Left Bank to the Right .
People, myself included, proudly proclaim themselves of their side of the river and which number arrondissement.
I like even some of the seemingly “ugly” streets with their time worn dirty gray and fatigued creams. These areas tend to be where some of my artistic heroes lived, cheap rent and every third door a no nonsense bar having been the draw.
I like working with colored pencils on gray or brown paper. I limit my palette intentionally as a challenge to myself. Getting the effects that I want in this way makes it “easier” when using paints. Although I use mainly pinks, it is realistic in that in the real world there are seemingly limitless colors but go out on street look at buildings and the street. On encounters a fairly limited palette.
These pinks, urban children of Fauvists, remind me of some parts of Paris. Not that this color is found there but it is same effect, translated in my minds eye. This little corner I continue to pass almost daily. It has been there forever and i do not think it ever had any straight lines about it.
I initially encountered it when staying at my first great apartment. It was en route to my groceries and favorite bars. Four floors, impossibly winding stairs that made you drag your shoulder against the wall as you ascended since the light was always broken. The biggest part of the place was the bathroom, with a large old tub, frosted glass windows which opened up onto a shadowy verdant courtyard with its cracked flagstones. I kept the primitive hi fi in the bathroom doorway since it was connected to the bedroom. Only music with a minimal of voices sounded good as it was a mono player. Mostly Zoot Sims duets and Lester Young trios.The neighbors would lean against their window boxes of geraniums smoking and slowly nodding their heads to the music. Dark silhouettes with one wavering orange eye-dot that would flare with inhalation.
Hard work and I was fortunate to be able to trade up apartments. I remained in my neighborhood just moving a few streets down. The building has become one of the visual shorthand for the deep affection that I hold for the every day in Paris and those first exciting years.
W.Wolfson ’19
Left Bank 9×12 colored paper and pencil
Burlesque
I am not one to accumulate clutter but had a few boxes to go through before moving my studio back in November. I came across a really nice digital pocket camera. There were actually still some store/factory stickers on it which excitedly proclaimed how many mega pixels it was. Impressive for then perhaps but the average cellphone of even five years ago had it beat in the mega pixel & zoom department.
Everyone has a camera now via their phone and i can not remember the last time anyone i know packed a separate camera in their bag when going on the road. Speaking in the most general terms, there is often at best a generic beauty to the better taken photos. Rarely is a photographer’s voice discernible.
This is because the better photos, the heavy lifting is done by either the equipment or location. There are to be sure some contemporary photographers with a worked for voice but they suffer from the fact that digital equipment has made them easy to parrot in much same way that phones now have apps to make ones photos look like an Andy Warhol (et al ) painting.
Cameras have effected how people look at other art too. Now they look at it as if a camera themselves. A camera takes in all it sees in one fell swoop. It is a disinterested eye devouring an entire scene without chewing, the interest only existing via the photographer’s eye. This inherently lends an emotional barrier to the medium.
With painting they eye can take it in, nibbling in small incriminates, beginning at any point on the canvas. With the passage of time new things can be noticed. Paintings have the ability to grow with the viewer. Living right, with evolution, none of us are the same person today that we were a year ago. A painting can take on new or added meanings for the viewer.
When the subject or viewers look at one of my pieces, the first thing noticed or commented upon always differs from person to person. The joy of viewing a painting is a very individual act regardless of how well known a piece may be.
I do not strictly do portraits but it is one of the things in life which gives me the greatest pleasure. Once an artist finds and perfects their voice there is the danger of lapsing into mere mannerism. It is one of my prime motivations in constantly mixing it up with what equipment I use.
For this portrait, i knew that I could execute it in such a way that it would please me. In my head i saw the correct background color to go with etc. I am very fortunate that with some of my work i have the luxury of no deadline and freedom to experiment. It is crazy for me to not do so, as in worst case scenario, I just throw a failed attempt away.
I realized aside from some minor flourishes of sunlight upon a cheek I had never done a piece show effects of lights on a subject. My experiment was to portray this effect and ignore what i knew to be all the “right” choices in regards to color.
The subject is under colored lights of a club. Hair dyed by the lights which also play upon the skin in splashes. I choose purples which aside from minor flourishes i rarely work with.
The paper is mutli media paper. This style paper has very different properties than the French cotton that I use. It requires a different technique to achieve the volume and mass effects that I desire. Multi media paper from brand to brand also possesses different properties from one another. When dealing with the different brands, i would not say that there is a “best” but I have found some work better with different colors than others due to pigment properties.
This is 98 lb which makes me work a little slower while layers dry, without the wait seeming interminable. I was very pleased with the end result, achieving all the effects I wanted.
9×12 Watercolor & multi media paper 98lb
Paper Life Painting 