Paintings that bring a big breath of fresh air into your space
I recently finished this painting of people and cars at a dirt track, and thought you might like to see how it progressed from start to finish. For reference, I used photos I took at the local county fair in Winston-Salem, NC. I combined parts of the images, then made changes to that and invented other bits.
In this video, I’ll show you the different paint layers and explain what’s happening in each one.
Enjoy!
What’s happening in the studio these days… These are some works in progress on the wall. The pieces on the sides are finished and the one in the middle is in the early stages of painting.
I am pleased to share that I’m now part of the School of Filmmaking faculty at UNC School of the Arts. I’m teaching in the Production Design and Animation departments and am excited to be training the next generation of filmmakers. This semester I teach how to communicate ideas, mood and stories through drawing, as well as color: how we perceive it, how it behaves and how to use it effectively. I am not exaggerating when I say that what I’m teaching is 100% my JAM.
In the studio, after a summer of drawing, I decided to be brave and do something I’ve been trying to do on and off for about 2 decades: integrate the human figure into an abstract painting. I sanded down the paintings I started in the spring (they didn’t feel right) and am working on a new group of works. I’m making six 30×40 inch pieces – a sort of proof of concept if you will. I’m still figuring out what they’re about, but it feels like the right direction for my work at the moment. I’m enjoying the process and am learning a lot. You can see a studio view below.
PS: The shop is open and works are available for purchase now or on a payment plan. You can see available pieces here. And you can always email me if you have any questions about my work, whether it’s an existing piece or a commission you’re thinking of.
This morning I installed a new painting in a collector’s home. This painting has been a wonderful project to work on, so I thought you might like to hear about how it developed.
The painting was commissioned by a filmmaker as a wedding anniversary/holiday gift for his partner who is a neurologist. The client asked me to combine stills from one of his films with illustrations of brain cells by the 19th century artist/scientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal, one of his wife’s favorite artists. He trusted me to come up with something using all of those images as references and was open to the finished painting being abstract rather than looking like any of the photos he sent me.
To make the painting, I ended up layering image after image to find new overlapping shapes.Then through a process of finding and combining shapes and playing with color, the painting emerged. It was a fantastic project to work on.
If you’d like to commission an artwork, you can learn more about the process here or email me to start the process.
Lately I’ve been living and working more slowly. I realized working at a break-neck speed isn’t sustainable or enjoyable anymore, and that since I work for myself, I could give myself permission to work more slowly. The fact is I will always get my work done, so I can choose to take my time and enjoy the process. I’m not a procrastinator, so it doesn’t make sense for me to anxiously work fast anyway. This is all easier said that done however. I realized I needed to slow down in 2020, but it’s taken me a year to actually put it into practice.
I’m also deliberate about not multitasking if I can help it. Most of the time, genuine multitasking isn’t actually as effective as singletasking for me (not sure this word exists, but I’m using it) and at the end of a long work session of multitasking, while I might feel virtuous, everything feels like a bit of a blur, and the process definitely isn’t enjoyable.
There are certainly tasks I can complete relatively quickly and painlessly, but generally speaking these days I’ve been mindful about my thought processes and the way I do things, and I feel overall more content while working and living more slowly. Except on certain designated bike rides when speed is kind of the point of the ride – that’s different.
On that note, here’s what’s happening in the studio right now. And yes, I did mention that I don’t multitask, but I typically do have multiple projects going on at once. I just don’t work on them simultaneously.
I’m working on a series of landscapes where I’m playing with shapes and colors. I’m working slowly, trying to figure out the kind of color-play I want, refining the edges of shapes, thinking about the feel of the surface…
It feels good to take my time and work meditatively. These are the first two in progress.
I started in reds and pinks and oranges, colors that I knew would be mostly covered up and dissonant with the colors in the finished paintings. I like to allow little sections of the underpainting to show between shapes or through brush marks. Now that I’ve covered up most of the underpainting, I’m reworking the colors to fine tune how they relate to each other.
I’m thinking of what I’ve learned through experience over years of painting and back to grad school in one of my favorite and most challenging classes: color theory. In this class we studied the Munsell color system, which breaks down color into three properties or dimensions: value, chroma and hue. The way I put this into practice as I paint is by making some colors darker or lighter (adjusting the value), making some more or less dull (chroma), and in some cases changing the color completely – like turning a violet into green (the hue).
Because the paintings are paired down with a few interlocking shapes, the colors become even more important. I think that as art becomes more minimal, each decision becomes more significant because everything is there to see, plain as day.
As I make changes in color, edges of shapes shift around too: some edges get more crisp and some become softer. This process is both intellectual and intuitive as I think through what I know about color relationships and how I want the paintings to feel.
These paintings feel like an important bridge for me. For years, I’ve been wanting to integrate the landscape with the geometric work I did in my Little Watercolor Squares series. (See some of the paintings here and the book here.) Last year, I made geometric interiors for my show at Elder Gallery. (See that work here.) These new paintings feel like an integration of all that past work, and that feels good. This work isn’t ego-driven. It’s not trying to prove anything. It just is.
On the other wall of my studio are some small paintings I made to test out compositions and colors for this new series. These little guys will be available at the Ardmore Art Walk on May 8th.
The larger painting on the right is a commissioned piece that’s drying. It was inspired by Amanda Gorman’s Inauguration Day poem.
To be the first to know when the landscapes above are available, subscribe to my Insider’s List here.
This morning I went exploring in the neighborhood with my son. We walked through a stream and through bramble and over fallen trees and on a hillside of kudzu… we found animal tracks and bones and all sorts of adventurous stuff. We also found beautiful flowering weeds!
I always get excited in that transition from winter to spring, when the dandelion, violets, clover, and nettle and all sorts of tiny tender leaves and flowers start to appear. I picked one of my favorite (it was in a spot filled with many others), some purple dead nettle, so I could make a drawing.
I thought you might like to see the process and maybe even join along. So here we go back in the studio…
In case you do want to join me, I’m using pencil, Pigma micron ink pen, watercolor and a 140lb watercolor paper.
Want to learn how to use watercolors? Check out my watercolor course.