Mona Lisa

oil and egg tempera on masonite, 6x6"

In Renaissance days (and today), recreating old masterpieces was a common way of learning to paint.  This is the final holdover from the Renaissance class I took a year ago, and it's the only one painted in the Italian Renaissance style.  The Italian Renaissance style isn't much different than the Dutch Renaissance style, well, at least not in how they built layers of paint.  The Dutch masters started with burnt sienna or a similar red-brown layer and built from there.  The Italians started with a green layer.  That's it.  

I haven't decided if this is entirely finished or not.  Then again, they say Leonardo kept dabbling at the original for a span of 20 years or more.  So I suppose I've got some time to make up my mind.

Here she is after the second layer went down--you can see the first green underpainting, a glaze of cerulean blue over the background, a glaze of fleshtones in the face, and white egg tempera on all the light spots.  

Chubs for Luck

oil and egg tempera on masonite, 6x6"

The first night of our honeymoon in Hawaii, we ate at an outdoor restaurant that was surrounded by chubby little statues just like this guy.  I took about a million photos on the trip--but I snapped a shot of this statue because I thought he could make a good painting.  I started this painting when we were still in Boston and I was taking the Renaissance painting class.  Now, almost a year later, I have finally finished it.  

If you wonder why I have done so little painting since we got here, here's one reason.  Someone doesn't like it when I paint because it means I'm not playing fetch with him.  So he climbs up on the sofa that backs up to the half-wall that separates my studio from the family room, hangs his feet over the wall just like this, and drops his ball into the studio.  He then barks and whimpers until I pick up the ball and throw it for him.  Then, he climbs back on the sofa to do it all again!  It's quite an exciting and unpredictable game, but it's hard to resist that fuzzy little face.

What's the cone for?  Well, to save money, a friend offered to groom him for us.  The nearly $300 vet bill that resulted from Hero getting his ear cut with the scissors really taught us that some things are better left to professionals.  He got his stitches out and the cone off today, and immediately got a professional haircut for $40 (which, it turns out, is a lot less than $300).  

Commission-Maple Leaf in Mische

Oil and egg tempera on masonite, 6x6"

This fall a colleague gave me a maple leaf and said she wanted to commission a painting of it. I made a couple attempts that I wasn't satisfied with, and then our wedding and honeymoon pushed the painting to the back burner. Once I learned the mische technique, I thought it would be a great way to capture the depth of colors within the leaf. Thankfully, the client was patient and I had a photo of the original leaf to work from. So here it is, my first commission.

Pensive

Oil and egg tempera on masonite, 6x6"

This is another painting done in the mische technique. It is based on a photo of my wife sitting in front of a window. This is actually the second mische painting that I started, but waiting for all the layers to dry made it take months to complete.

Acorn Squash

Oil and egg tempera on masonite, 6x6"

Here’s another painting done in the mische technique. It might be my favorite one so far. When you see it in real life, it’s amazing how much it seems to pop off the panel. It looks like you could reach into the painting, grab the stem, and run off to make some squash soup. If you were into squash soup, that is. Unfortunately, the photo has a bit of glare, but hopefully you can still get the point.

Continuing the steady stream of life updates, our house-hunting trip to Minnesota proved fruitful: we got a house! We worked with a fantastic realtor (who happens to be my dad) and did a whirlwind tour of available homes in the northwest suburbs of Minneapolis. We found a great one with lots of space and a big yard just at the top of our price range (turns out the great houses are never at the bottom of your price range). We made an offer on Monday, they counter-offered on Tuesday, we counter-counter-offered that night, and they accepted our offer on Wednesday! So now we just have to wait for home inspections and everything else that goes into closing the sale. We haven't decided yet which room will be my studio, but there's lots of space so we shouldn't have any trouble finding a spot.

Apple in Mische Technique

Oil and egg tempera on masonite, 6x6" NFS

Here is the very first Renaissance style painting that I started. I know, you already saw a couple of them a while ago. But this was the first one that we started back in January, it just took longer than the others. There are at least ten layers of paint in this piece, starting with earth red and ending with cadmium red--with many other colors in between. I really like the way that the apple comes out from the background. The apple I was painting from had very strange markings on it, as you can see. But by the fourth week of painting, it was definitely getting brown all over. So I took a photo of the apple and had to use that to finish the painting. Unfortunately, none of the photos that I took of the painting came out very well. As with the other Renaissance style paintings, there is a touch of medium (a mixture of varnish, linseed oil, and paint thinner) mixed in with the paint to make it a little more translucent for glazing, so it has a bit more sheen than paintings that don’t have any medium. That sheen makes it difficult to photograph without there being a glare. I’ll try to get a better photo sometime soon.

In other news, remember that job I was interviewing for in Minnesota? Well I got it! My wife and I have decided to make the move to the Midwest and we’re actually flying back to Minnesota this weekend to look at houses. Wish us luck!

Sagittarius

Oil on masonite, 6x6"

The instructor of my Renaissance Painting class has said several times that it's a great technique for painting night skies. Intrigued, I thought I'd give it a try. First I looked up the constellation Sagittarius online to find a star pattern (it's my birth sign). From there, the painting started out in the same way as others: A layer of transparent earth red with white egg tempera in the lightest areas. Then a layer of yellow ochre went over the whole painting, with more tempera for the stars and astral clouds. Over this layer, patches of red and green were painted in thinly, with more tempera in the brightest stars and lightest parts of the nebula clouds. At this point, the painting looked like some crazy galactic Christmas story. Finally, two layers of ultramarine blue with more tempera went on. And that's when it really started to look like a night sky. Even though the "distant" stars are only behind a fraction of a millimeter of paint, they do appear to recede by light years. The tempera got a little too thick in the middle section, but the overall effect came out pretty neat and now I have a funky new (but very old) approach to painting a night sky!

Voggy Sunset

Mische technique (oil and egg tempera) on masonite, 6x6"

Finally! I have finished my first Renaissance style painting! This painting was done in many layers, starting with a base of transparent earth red (basically, burnt sienna). While that layer was still wet, I put in a layer of white egg tempera for the brighter areas. When that was dry a week later, a layer of yellow ochre was laid over the whole painting, with another layer of white egg tempera in the lighter areas. From there more layers of color were put in, with a week of drying time in between each. The purpose of the egg tempera is to create bright areas that glow through the layers of color above them. This technique is called Mische Technique, and is a resurrection of the methods used by Flemish masters of the 16th and 17th centuries.

The inspiration for this painting was a photo taken on our honeymoon. At the end of a day of hiking around volcanoes on the Big Island of Hawaii, we drove down to the shore in time for sunset. It was a particularly "voggy" day, as the locals told us. London has fog, LA has smog, Hawaii has vog. It's when there is a lot of volcanic emissions in the air, causing a rather stinky fog. But it certainly makes for some cool light effects! Sunset on this day did not have the pinks and oranges that I am accustomed to, instead there was a strange golden film everywhere, obscuring all but the brightest reflections in the distance.