trinity

watercolor on Arches HP 300gsm, 14" x 10".

more than half my session with trinity was spent on portrait photographs with a variety of tops for color contrast. trinity mentioned she felt tense in front of a camera, but this image is from the second half of the session when she had relaxed into the work.

this hot pressed paper is well sized, making it easy to lift paints, but also producing a whitish, pearlescent effect in colors laid on as several juicy layers. trinity's hair is jet black, but for color interest i first blocked the hair in with sepia, then built up the blacks with overlapping sections of perylene maroon, phthalo green, pyrrole orange, phthalo blue, dioxazine violet and nickel dioxine yellow. once these had completely dried, i cut into the glazes with a moist, 1/8" acrylic flat brush, scribing the plaits and highlights and revealing different color mixtures in the process.

the skin tone is diluted chromium titanate yellow, with darks in cadmium orange, cadmium red and benzimidazolone brown, all muted with tints of phthalo green. the background is two layers of quinacridone violet. she has striking, hazel yellow eyes set in a black iris border; i painted these with green gold, then glazed with perylene maroon to get the right hue.

trinity enjoyed the portrait images enough to post a dozen to her facebook page. i'm glad she likes them.

TECH NOTE: i've recently discovered that i have to choose the option "discard the embedded profile (don't color manage)" in photoshop before posting images to the web. for some reason, files that retain the camera image space lose color balance when compressed on blogspot.

trinity

watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm, 14" x 10".

a figure study from the trinity session. this is one of the first poses, and while it is not one of trinity's favorites, i liked it enough to work up as a color study.

i am drawn to this pose because it is frank and confident. the woman has her own space, which is a brilliant deep blue (rough layers of cobalt blue deep, phthalo blue and ultramarine violet), and she does not characterize the viewer through her stance. she has a well formed, capable figure, feminine without weakness and healthy without sensuality. the panties domesticate the image and add whimsy as well. i spent a lot of care on the facial portrait, though it is only the size of a dollar coin. the hair was fun to paint, and i made it dark brown rather than her black to show the plaits more clearly.

trinity has a pale, creamy complexion that i used a new mixture to reproduce. the flesh tone is chrome titanium oxide dulled with ultramarine, tinted with pyrrole orange, phthalo green, indanthrone blue and quinacridone magenta. the photograph does not reproduce the modeling well, which is very lightly done.

trinity's hands

watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm, 10" x 14".

these are the hands of a young local woman of polish english descent, who works in web site design and is exploring a variety of alternative and tribal healing practices. she complimented my paintings and consented to model for me; we had a very enjoyable and productive session. she was confident for a first time model and gave me many good images.

usually i ask the model to present her hands in front, which means the thumbs will be turned outward when the palms face up. i asked trinity to drape her hands behind her back, over a chair, to get this image. i like it because it mimics the right and left hand of two individuals touching.

trinity was a gymnast in her early teens, and i learned from her about gymnast mental preparation. the background here is mostly cobalt teal blue, which resembles her "power color". i tinted it slightly with yellow to sharpen the contrast with the skin tones.

the flesh base tone is chrome titanium oxide, muted slightly with ultramarine, then tinted with pyrrole orange, burnt sienna, quinacridone magenta and phthalo green. the sleeves are cobalt teal mixed with cadmium scarlet, painted in overlapping strips to produce the ribbing in the fabric. shadows over skin tones are always challenging, and i like the way these turned out. (colors are more accurate in the full sized image; click on the image above.)

kat

charcoal on Strathmore drawing, 14" x 10".

i worked a few weeks ago with a new model, an austrian woman who is here as a student in physical therapy. she is working as a stable hand with a local horse breeder and aspires to become a professional jockey in america, and wanted to model because "i have never tried it before."

kat proudly describes herself as descended from four gypsy grandparents. like many of the young models who work for me she is independent minded, candid and self assured. it is getting harder for me to keep up with them.

watercolor on Arches CP 300 gsm, 12" x 9".

this is the life portrait done in charcoal pencil and painted in a flat, tesselated, almost graphical novel style. it's not corrected from a photograph because it turned out very well. (i like the days when i have my hand!) it suggests her secure attitude but unfortunately isn't turned enough to display her remarkable profile. i will post a smaller profile portrait soon.

background is indanthrone blue, which the photo makes too light valued and blue rather than violet blue. hair is sepia with perylene maroon. flesh is raw sienna wash tinted with burnt sienna.

self

watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm 14" x 10".

last christmas jan and i attended a bracebridge dinner at the ahwahnee hotel in yosemite valley. a festive and memorable affair, and we enjoyed the old hotel and the very colorful and gabby staff. someone should do a book about those people! we had perfect timing, too ... drove in with chains the night a snow storm passed through, and got out just as a new storm was coming in. (photos are posted on my facebook page.)

anyway, this painting was done from a photo of me all dressed up with no place to go except dinner, in my new olive italian suit, mostly m.graham olive green, perylene green with some phthalo green or phthalo blue accents on a sepia foundation. chair is cadmium scarlet and all kinds of scrap paint thrown in. the face is mostly burnt sienna with cadmium red and phthalo blue modeling, but it is washed out in the photo by the dark values.

leah's hands

watercolor on Arches CP 600gsm, 14" x 10".

leah is a lovely young massage therapist who has been working with me and my wife, and on recommendation to good friends. she is one of a kind, a sweet, inquisitive and generous spirit with an amazing skill in her craft and remarkable personal integrity.

i took a few photos of her hands after one of our 2+ hour sessions, and liked this photo of one hand supporting the other enough to work it up into a painting.

the background is three layers of quinacridone violet, muted and darkened with a layer of phthalo blue and two of benzimida maroon. it's in that mystical zone between a spiritual purple and an earthy brown. i used the glazes to nudge the color around, but mainly to tamp down a whitish speckling that occurred because the arches paper pushed up a fine texture of cellulose fibers as it was wetted. (i have had a lot of problems with arches papers lately. more on that in another post.)

the hands were painted entirely in the most intense, lightfast and transparent paints i know of -- nickel dioxine yellow, pyrrole orange, quinacridone red, phthalo blue, phthalo green and quinacridone orange (i think there is even some dioxazine violet in there) -- all heavily diluted into crystalline tints. the image was built up with layer after layer of these watery hues ... mostly the red, oranges and green, with yellow, blue and purple for accent and modeling. in noon sunlight the painting shimmers.

carole

watercolor & charcoal on Arches CP 300gsm, 16" x 12".

i worked with carole last saturday and had a memorable experience with her. this is the portrait sketch i did at the end of the session.

carole has a type of feminine strength that i find really compelling. intelligent, confident, serene, physically robust and instinctively gracious. my drawing completely left me, and i was unable to do her hands. the portrait sketch was done in pencil, then aggressively modified with charcoal from the pose photograph.

i have had two packages of 40" x 60" arches 600gsm sitting in my garage and not had inspiration to work with them. carole likes to dance and at the end of the session she threw some astonishing "dancing" nudes that are finished down to the fingertips. so i am thinking of painting a few of them up, really big.

i was struck by carole's features, and she explained that her geneology goes back to the native indians of belize and european colonizers. i relished the idea of two tribes separating in prehistory, walking in opposite directions to the ends of the earth, iberia and central america, then mingling again in her bloodline. her eyes, which are black, are painted phthalo green overlaid on cadmium red deep, making them appear both black and iridescent.

her combination of indian and european features is very striking, and her face is both attractive and complex. i emphasized complex in the portrait. i overmodeled contours to give the portrait a robust, primitive feeling. i kept the color palette small to contrast hair and figure. the flesh tones are mixed of quinacridone magenta or cadmium scarlet with green gold.

three heart circle

Acrylic on gessoed canvas, 14" x 18".

this started as an anatomical heart in a yellow flamelike circle, with the surrounding black mixed by overlapping yellow, red orange, magenta, blue violet, blue and green paints.

the two diagrammatic hearts were added as i drew it, but i may take them out and redo the painting.

i worked mostly with paste acrylics, so i let brush textures come out in every part. it would be fun to repeat this by pouring the colors, but the canvas was preframed and somewhat slack, so liquids would have puddled on it.

i liked the effect of the "chromatic black" and i am thinking of playing around with it using a more geometrical or process control of the mixtures. still i like the cartoonish effect of this painting.

self

Watercolor & charcoal on Arches CP 300gsm, 14" x 10".

this is the first time i've tried an object tracing as the basis for a drawing.

i laid the glasses on the paper and traced the outside contour with carbon pencil, then added the interior contour. then the whole face was drawn using the glasses as proportional references.

background is cobalt turquoise and cadmium yellow; shirt is ultramarine blue; flesh is manganese violet and raw sienna, darkened with burnt sienna, hair is ultramarine and burnt sienna. glass frames are burnt umber and cadmium red.

lula

Watercolor on Saunders Waterford 350gsm 40" x 26".

this pose is from our session last spring. i asked for a simple standing pose.

the background started blue but turned into yellow green, struck through with magenta streaks marked with backruns. that was striped with a transparent yellow, producing a kind of vibration around the figure.

the figure is entirely in red, yellow and green, mostly siennas and browns, quinacridone gold and chromium oxide green. blue is the cutout (background) color and yellow is the color of the palest skin.

the extended rectangle behind the figure indicates how much her legs were stretched in photoshop to produce canonical figure proportions. this renders the figure idealization as a spatial dislocation.

i may do this one again with different pigments.

april's hands

Watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm, 10" x 14".

i've started work on the series of april images, which she posed with her son.

april did several hand poses, and this is the first i have painted.

one of the poses has her hands overlapped, fingers interlaced and radiating. i tried to draw the image several times and failed, and i tried painting it on a very large format and failed. the image has a kind of intensity that is hard for me to realize.

siena

watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm, 14" x 10".

another siena pose from the sessions earlier this year; she is crouching on the studio bed and looking into winter sunlight.

the main color problem was rendering her pale skin in shadow.

everything here is several layers, the painting has a "worked" quality and pigment granularity somewhat like nolde.

the aim was not to render her back with anatomical accuracy but to give it a kind of dark shimmer or translucency.

melon

watercolor on Arches R 300 gsm, 9" x 12".

this was one of those paintings that happen because an interesting object lands near a blank piece of paper. i got into the color mimicry of the fruit and skin, and making the background a dull color exactly between gray, brown and purple. it has a more velvety visual texture than the photo demonstrates.

paola

watercolor on Arches CP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

this is the last of the four paola paintings. the pose was taken in late afternoon light, the model lounging in the studio's leather and bent wood rocker.

i worked on this one in small stages and slowly, letting the piece sit for a while in between. it was the most interesting to work on, mostly because of the detail in the rug, limbs, and the interwoven leather strips.

i realized after completing the series that each painting is keyed by one of the four painter's primary colors -- green, red, blue, and yellow (this one).

weekly figure group

charcoal on Strathmore drawing, 14" x 10".

another figure drawing group, another model ... i've worked with this model before but forgot to ask her name. she was a great subject -- lots of variety, good musculature and proportion across her form, and energetic interesting poses. she did not do a single lying down pose, which most models use as their free nap. amazing!

the group has been in a slump lately. don, one of the stalwarts, has been sick a lot, and the group organizer has frequently used a particular model, jo, who is both unpleasant to look at and a loud personality. she has worked at the group six times in the past three months. i ran into two artists on my way into the group who were complaining about her; one had just walked out when he found out who the model was.

i called don at home to check in on him, and he asked who was the model at the group that night. "jo," i said. "gee," he replied, "three times in four weeks." and then he laughed.

paola

watercolor on Lanaquarelle HP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

third in the paola series. this was shot in very dim light so the modeling contrast is subdued.

in contrast to the previous paintings, this is done in a rough, skritchy manner, with iridescent color contrasts and unresolved brushmarks, somewhat in the style of bonnard.

this painting was the model's choice as compensation for modeling. many thanks, paola!

paola

watercolor on Arches CP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

second in the paola series. we were working outside and she stretched out on one of my sun loungers, making for a great image.

i bumped up the chroma in most of the colors and mixed her "hot" skin tones primarily of quinacridone gold and quinacridone magenta, muted with a little phthalocyanine green YS and perylene maroon or burnt sienna.

her face, which was in complete shadow and rather dark in the reference photo, required a lot of fine tuning to harmonize with the lighted parts of the figure and appear darkened but chromatically balanced -- not too yellow, red or blue. (a green bias ended up looking yellow.)

the previous painting was done in a very "liquid" style in which all the areas (with the exception of the hair) were rendered with juicy washes tilted and blotted to create very smooth diffusion modeling. in this painting i relied more on the brush to model the figure, but still tried to keep the edge transitions soft.

paola

watercolor on arches R, 300gsm. 10" x 14".

despite the distractions of stock markets and home improvement projects, have been slowly finishing a handful of pieces on paola, a model i worked with last march.

this is a simple image, less revealing than most of my nudes (i think the term is "implicit nude") and designed around simple shapes. i like it because it highlights most of her flattering features, especially her large eyes, slender arms and elegant hands.

blue or purple is distributed throughout the background but not in the figure, which is entirely earth pigments plus pyrrole orange, perylene maroon and phthalo green YS.

weekly figure drawing group

charcoal on strathmore drawing, 12" x 9".

i have missed several sessions in august ... our dog died; i spent a couple of weeks completely refinishing and repairing my wife's redwood greenhouse; and we have been making preparations for a fundraiser we will be hosting this weekend for the endangered species coalition.

anna marie was the model tonight. i have not especially enjoyed working with her in the past but last night was a very congenial session. she was much more relaxed and focused than has been usual, and she had put on some very flattering weight -- by eating, she said, "butter and eggs". scott, a local english professor, was drawing by me and we had some interesting exchanges on campus politics and classical rhetoric.

although her figure is lovely and great interest to draw, i focused mostly on her face, making several drawings and a couple of paintings. these two drawings are both 10 minute poses.

for some reason my glasses were not giving me the clarity i needed and i had only a fuzzy perception of her real features.

coast cypresses

watercolor on arches CP, 600 gsm, 42" x 29".

i began this painting in 2002 and finished it this week. for five years i have kept the porcelain dishes of dried out paints used in the painting, and carefully transferred the painting from one hanging and one storage to another. today i framed the painting and hung it in our great room and i have finally cleaned out those dishes. my thanks to nick simmons for insisting i get back to it.

i'm an admirer of the late 18th century style of tinted watercolor, for example as perfected in the works of francis towne and john cotman. i kept to the drawing as closely as feasible, and in several places accented or cleaned up the drawing with charcoal pencil. there is very little modeling of form, and complex textures are mostly confined to the grassy bank.

my original interest was in the interlacing branches, a remarkable image of tree community, even though i eliminated about half the branches that appear in the original photo document. i also eliminated all the shadows. i did not want a crisp light concept and the bewildering tesselation of shadows and branches that a strong light rendering would create; instead i wanted the trees to stand as distinct but intertwined figures. i played a violet scale across the tree trunks to define the spatial contrasts between foreground and background trees, and darkened the sky to suggest early morning.

i have never persisted with an unfinished painting for this long. the only reason i did so was because of the enormous work i had already put into it -- the underdrawing alone took two or three hours. it's not my favorite painting, but it is very gratifying to see it finally finished.