“This, the face in the mirror” he waved his hands in a soft circle as if starting a magic trick or trying to grasp an intangible abstraction.
“Your pencil getting all this boy?” I eyed the chessboard, but my hand was busy. The pencil glides. I always did.
W.Wolfson
9×12 Quick Sketch
I started a new series 5×7 quick sketches using waitress pencil. Image & accompanying text.
#1
Drawings done while waiting for dinner or tea. I did not have anything in mind beforehand but after the fact thought of Goya. First and foremost, the duty of every artist is to create.
Graphite & Paper 9×12
With my work i am always seeking to evolve and become better & better. One way I do this is to leave my comfort zone of methodology which I have down pat. All my work falls within a very specific size range. To further mix things up, I have begun doing larger works than our my usual norm. I still prefer my smaller sizes (5.5×8.5 -9×12) but I do enjoy the challenge and have been pleased with all my larger works.
“Mad King” 14×17 graphite & paper
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
“Let It Bleed” cake, drinks, art, music and some self portraits, uneasy jet travel
Self portrait “At the Party” 9×12
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
For Sharon Anderson
I had an acquaintance in Toronto who fancies herself a shutterbug. She walks all around the city snapping photos of whatever catches her eye. She does this on her own, with friends and as part of an informal group.
The city has some vibrant graffiti and murals. Someone had done one of Prince, which she snapped a photo of. Prince as he was in the first flush of mega-stardom, decked out in the white ruffles and purple sequenced jacket. The problem was, it looked almost nothing like Prince. The outfit was correct and served as a visual clue: “you are looking at Prince”. Had he had no shirt on (or a different outfit) as occurred in some promo photos and videos, then no one would have had any idea who it was.
A lot of stars, especially artists, have one or two images ingrained in the public’s conscious. This is even more so for musicians of the pre Instagram age. Record companies, Dj etc all had to have the promotional photos/packs. The publicity photo a pre requisite but not too often updated. Jim Morrison is forever fitting into his leather pants, shirtless or with white pirate shirt, starring back at the camera as he wonders whether it is all worth it, forgetting that Rimbaud gave up poetry to become a white slaver. Jimi Hendrix is caught up in a spider’s web of bandannas and clashing colors as he lights Monterrey Pop on fire. And Prince had the ruffles at the throat and purple sequenced jacket different in color but similar to what Pete Townsend, light years away stylistically from the purple one, wore in the sixties.
So much rock was born out of rebellion, which is why every generation still holds it dear. Lazily resorting to visual shorthand of well known outfits reduces them down to a sort of uniform, very anti-rock (rebellion).
The best art tied in to musicians/artists, they should be recognizable in a different outfit or even just the face.
What makes for an even more worthwhile work is not their recognizably but rather does the work radiate an emotion which in turn makes the viewer feel something. The handicap of doing the visual shorthand of obvious outfit is even with some of the better works, you are freeze drying the emotion(s) to what was offered up in the photo. All photos are the souvenir of a dead thing as the moment has come and gone.
Faces, not necessarily of famous people, have always called to me. To conjure up a face on paper is an important part of what I do. Emotion coming through is the most important facet of what I do.
Here are several faces, done on different types paper. The inherent properties of the papers adding themselves to my voice like spice(s) to a stew.
All are 9×12
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
I am reading Roland Barthe’s Camera Lucida. Some of what he says of photography is equally true of current figurative painting.
Everyone has a phone which allows them to now capture the minutia of their daily lives. This has effected photography as even someone with no artistic inclinations can take a shot which is frame worthy given the right location. now we are witness to location porn or given the ease of snapping photos, luck of happening upon an interesting moment more than compelling individualized photographic voice. Digital photos have become akin to infinite monkey theorem albeit at an extremely accelerated rate.
With painting the negative impact is slightly different. Regardless of an artist’s style, people expect a type of hyper realism, being able to capture and document their lives with a pocket sized device instantly would make anything short of this, espcially when time consuming posing is involved, seem absurd or archaic at best.
To paraphrase Barthes on being the subject of a (portrait) photograph:
I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.
While hyper realism bores me, I do aim for each work to capture the subject’s likeness. Not a disconnect but an unexpected effect sometimes occurs. The subject of a portrait has a definite image of themselves. The artist may notice something physically or psychologically that they do not see in themselves (or like). The effect similar to when one hears a recording of their voice. Few think it accurate.
Part of what Barthes has in mind, perception of oneself versus the relationship between artist and subject. With portraits, I want accuracy of portrayal but it has always been that it is the artist describing the subject using their words. Words in this case being the artist’s style/voice. I talk about you but I choose my own words to do so.
This is a 9×12 piece on French cotton paper. The inherent properties of the paper is a softness and delicacy of line.
Paper Life Painting 