David's work

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Also of interest

• Work in progress (5)
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• This photo (0)

Also of interest

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I finished this awhile back, but never posted a final.

N.B. This is a hard one to photograph. Despite lots of fiddling, the values are wrong and the colors are slightly off. Oh, well. I kind of like it.

I now have a page, linked in the navigation bar at the top of this page, that collects some of my drawings and paintings. All of them have been posted here before, but I thought it would be a good idea to make my immortal images easier to find. As I add new work (the ones I can stand for other people to see), I’ll write a post and also add the image to the gallery.

Feel free to add comments or constructive feedback.

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Just finished. I wrote about painting this one in a recent post. Oil on panel, 8 × 10”.

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Oil on canvas, 14 × 12”. I did this at the end of last year in class over several sessions. I didn’t get to the apple and the cloth by the end of the pose, so I finished it using a photo as a reference. I’ve had people tell me this is a very sad image, but it doesn’t seem so to me. The model, Becky, sustained a broken toe (during martial arts practice) midway through the series of sessions, but insisted on continuing despite the pose being kind of uncomfortable. I posted the image on an internet art forum and another Boston area artist recognized Becky.

Note that with this blog software, clicking on the thumbnail takes you to a display page with a medium-sized image. Clicking on that takes you to a larger version of the image.

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I think my drawing and painting skills have improved markedly over the last two years. I’ve worked steadily and produced some good pieces (and some real dogs, but I’ve learned from those as well). Studying with Dennis Cheaney has been very useful.

I still have a long way to go. Here are some things that I want to work on:

Pictorial composition. I don’t feel like I have a real handle on how to plan an execute a picture so that I start with a plan and end up achieving the effect I was looking for. While I can usually identify what went wrong, that doesn’t always translate into not making the same set of mistakes again. I feel like I have a few basic compositions that work OK, but I don’t have a breadth of competence in this area. I want to become comfortable with complex compositions involving multiple figures and a hierarchy of focal points.

Color. I still struggle with how to use color. Sometimes I default to dull color mixtures because they are easy to use, not because they are the best solution for the color problem I am working on. I want to become more comfortable with color composition, including various sorts of analogous and complementary color schemes.

Drawing. While I can draw, I often move too quickly and later realize I’ve made some serious error in placement or proportion. That is particularly problematic when I am in the initial drawing stage of a painting.

Light. I want to become more competent at painting a variety of light effects.

Landscape. The landscapes I’ve attempted in the last year have mostly not been successful. I want to get better at planning landscape compositions and making them work.

The figure. I want to find a way to start working from the model again. While I am sometimes able to attend figure drawing sessions with the Worcester Drawing Group, the poses are too short to really go into the sort of depth that I am looking for. As our family finances recover from Brendan’s birth, I want to hire a model for long poses. And, if possible, get back to Dennis Cheaney’s classes in figure drawing and painting.

Body of work. I am trying to develop a significant and coherent portfolio of paintings that I can present to a gallery for professional sale.

That’s what I can think of right now. There are obviously lots of other shortcomings to work on, but those are the areas that I feel need the most work at this time.

Leave a comment. It would be great to see your goals for your next steps as an artist.

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I’ve been working on this one for a couple of weeks. I don’t think it’s quite successful, for two reasons. First, in the leaves I kind of got too stuck on fiddly details before I established the large masses, and that affects their dimensionality, especially on the left one. Second, the composition deviates from the still life convention of basically depicting some objects in a box, looking at them against a vertical backdrop. In this composition, you are looking down toward two objects on a flat piece of crumpled brown paper. That would be easier if I hadn’t chosen to light them from behind. I thought I could make the perspective work with the shape of the shadows, with the graded lighting (dark to light, front to back) and with receding perspective in the texture of the paper. While I think I did OK, I’m really not quite happy with it. I like deviating from still life compositional conventions, but they are conventions because they work. I’m still learning which rules I have to follow and which I can get away with playing around with.

It’s painted on an ABS (styrene) panel, a new product from Real Gesso. I found it really nice to paint on in oils, with just the right grab and absorbency. Full disclosure: they sent this one to me as a free sample, but I am sure that I will be buying some. If you are tired of pre-primed canvases but don’t want to have to make your own painting supports, these are a good choice.

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Since the Summer, Kiri and I haven’t been able to attend figure drawing and painting classes at the New England Realist Art Center. She got too pregnant, then she had Brendan, who does make things more difficult.

We have been attending sessions on Monday nights of the Worcester figure drawing group at Worcester State College (actually, we’ve been alternating weeks while the other one watches the kid). An open figure drawing session is very different. First, there’s no instruction. Second, it’s a lot cheaper. Third, poses run from one minute to fifteen minutes. At NERAC, poses run for four or five three hour sessions. So it’s been a bit of an adjustment.

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Awhile ago I posted on a little sheet of copper I had prepared for painting on. Here’s what’s on it now. Oil on copper, 5 × 7”. It’s not done yet—I need to correct a couple of elipses and clarify some of the details. But so far I like it.

The copper takes oil paint like nothing else I’ve worked on. Normally, any surface is either absorbent or slick. Either way, the initial application of oil paint can be a bit of struggle. Not copper. The paint flows right off the brush, with no streakiness, chattering, staining, or other problems. Also, you can incorporate the tone of the copper itself into the painting. I need to find a source for bigger sheets of thin copper to paint on.

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This is “Wrapping Paper,” 16 × 12”, oil on panel.

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And on day three.

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This is a few years old, from back when I was painting in acrylics. It’s my best painting from that period.

Acrylic on panel, 28 × 20”.

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This is graphite on paper, from life. This kind of drawing is time-consuming; this drawing took five three-hour sessions. It’s the first time I’ve brought a drawing to this level of finish.

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