Green apples

We frequently paint green apples in my still life classes because they help students see reflections and how colors influence each other.
 

Acrylic on canvas, 4x6"

Catching up. Again.

I have a bunch of paintings to get posted from the last year.  Here's a couple cherries to get started.

Last fall, I started teaching painting classes through Anoka-Hennepin Community Education.  This fall, I also started teaching at the Maple Grove Arts Center.  I teach a five-week class that centers on making small, 4x6" paintings each session.  The goal is to encourage students to paint small and paint often so that there are fewer barriers to practice making art.  I do a course on still lifes and another on landscapes.  My recent classes at Anoka-Hannepin have been sold out with about half the students enrolling for more than one of my courses.  So it's been a lot of fun to see familiar faces and get to know this group over time.  It also means I have a bunch of little paintings.

Acrylic on canvas, 4x6"

Glass jar, hinged lid

Oil, 10x8"

Strawberry

Acrylic, 4x6" SOLD

Blueberry

Acrylic, 4x6"

I painted this one a few weeks ago--just a chubby little blueberry.

Mrs. Smith

Acrylic, 6x4"

Red bell pepper

Sliced red bell pepper, oil 12x9" SOLD

Recently, my mom was over for dinner.  While making a salad, she sliced this red bell pepper in half. I loved the contrast of the white seeds against the red interior of the remaining half.   So I painted it.

Something new!

Three blueberries, acrylic, 4x6"

A banana, acrylic, 4x6" SOLD

Over the last several months, I've gotten back to painting!  With two little kids, it is difficult to carve out time.  But my sweetie has helped me make time to do it.  I have a backlog of paintings--both small and large--that I've completed recently.   I will get those paintings posted and will put up new work as it is completed.

Garlic

Oil on gessobord, 6x6" NFS

Right now I'm taking a drawing class at a little school called The Atelier in Minneapolis. The style of drawing and painting is Classical Realism, and getting a likeness is not the goal. It has to be perfect. At the end of the 10 week class, I will be lucky if I complete one drawing. So the pace is a little frustrating to me, though I think it will be a very good learning experience and the work that people create is truly amazing. This painting ended up much looser than a lot of other paintings I have done. But I like the simplicity of it. Perhaps it's a reaction to the very precise drawing that I'm doing in class!

Nature Journaling

This winter, I took a class through the arboretum at the school where I work. The class was called Nature Journaling and it was about using drawing and painting to record notes about plants and critters that you find in nature. It was neat because we learned about the things we were drawing and painting, such as what the shape of a bird's beak tells you about what it eats. We worked from plants and taxidermized animals and used pencil, pen and ink, and watercolor. I am a few months overdue in posting these, but here are some images:

The acorn from a red oak. Pen and ink.


To practice simplifying flower shapes, we first drew a daisy made from a paper plate that we stuck onto a twig. I decided to include the push pin. Pencil.


This butterfly was from the day we focused on bugs. Pencil.


This beetle was probably 3 inches long and very shiny. Watercolor.


A taxidermized grosbeak. Pencil.


A blue jay. Watercolor.


For the final class, we went to the natural history "museum" in the biology department, where they had a ton of taxidermized animals, many of which had been processed by monks a hundred years ago. This eagle looked so noble sitting atop his perch I had to draw him. Pen and ink.


The bohemian waxwing was also in the natural history museum. Pen and ink.

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).  

A Nectarine

Oil on gessoed paper, 3.5x3.75"

So we made the move to Minnesota, of course. With all the excitement of moving into a new house, starting a new job, and getting settled in, there has been almost no time for painting. But I did manage to sit down the other day in my new studio with my brushes and a nectarine to do some work. After a few months away from painting, I wasn't sure how it would turn out. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I hadn't forgotten everything I've learned.

As if moving halfway across the country and starting a job weren't enough, Laura and I decided to adopt a puppy! We've been debating about this for, well, always. And a sweet, fuzzy, one year old cockapoo was offered to us free of charge. We weren't sure about it, but after puppysitting him for a weekend we found that he had suckered us in. So we kept him. He's housebroken, which is wonderful. And he loves attention, which I don't think will make it very easy to increase the time I get to spend painting. But he's a sweetheart and we are so thankful to have the little furball.

So I present to you, Hero the Cockapoo.

Prosperity

Oil on gessobord, 7x5"

After Christmas break, one of the students that I have worked with for the last couple years brought a gift for me from Malaysia, where his parents live. The gift was three statuettes, representing Luck, Long Life, and Prosperity. Since then I've been itching to paint them. I started this one a couple weeks ago, and built up several layers of paint to bring out the shadows and highlights. Hopefully it won't be too long before I paint the other two.

My wife and I are leaving Thursday for Minnesota! The apartment is a maze of boxes and assorted treasures that we have collected over the years and there is a still a lot of packing left to be done. We arrive at our new house on Saturday. Of course, this means that it could be a while before we get settled in enough for me to get back to painting and posting on the blog. We are making one detour on our trip: As we pass through Ohio we'll head down to Cincinnati to see my painting in the show at Manifest Gallery. Should be fun.

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.