PAINTING in progress

4/1/12 I like the background now.

03/25/2-12 No painting this weekend. No avoidance either, just a typical busy weekend. I feel more comfortable with the painting, like I have it corralled and it is just a matter of breaking it in. That means, for me, it was a successful venture. It was frightening for awhile because I was not confident of a good outcome. My pulse was probably around 300 bpm when I finally broke lose and started thrashing around with the paint. Felt good.

03/19/2-12 Some things have to happen in secret. I did paint, I did break loose of the existing drawing and I managed to stumble on a direction that was much more pleasing to me. The drawing will go back on top.

03/11/2012 No painting this weekend although I am painting it everyday. It is in my bedroom, the only wall space available, so it the first and last thing I see. Somewhere deep inside my brain it is being painted.

03/04/2012 I admire people that can paint. There are so many of them, blue chip artists and old masters. All of whom I wanted to emulate. Fat chance. Because of my job I can only work on the painting on weekends. Still unhappy with the color and bound up by the drawing. I have no clue what I will do today. Nothing this weekend

02/26/

Unhappy with new painting

I am not a painter, meaning I rarely do paintings. Paintings are complicated matters requiring space and time, hopefully in continuum. Color is emotional and the colors I created were conflicting and unsatisfying. The three major paintings I have done in the last thirty years solved the problem by using master paintings as background.

The Wedding Portrait The Saturns devour their children Woman with child

Recently, I was commissioned to do a painting that was to be based on one of my drawings. I had this fantasy that I could paint the way I draw without being drawn into a long protracted contest of desire and ability. However that is what always happens. For that reason I decided to post the story of this painting. The battle begins.

The drawing chosen was abstract and I started out thinking I would dissolve the marks into the background with glazes. Of course I did not do a sample but instead jumped in the way I draw. I just start. The dissolving idea was not pleasing so I started painting in the background around the marks thinking I would come back and repaint the marks which would add a another layer of what I hoped would be interest. It was not long before the colors drifted into acid oranges and greens. This painting composition has set the stage for battle with color.

For now, I am just going to paint and see what happens.

Changing the color.

I could not live with the gray. The painting needed to be lighter and with familiar, comfortable colors. The surface needed to be worked as one. I am starting to see some happy results.

My strawberry

I am a scenic artist painting sets for movies. Normally, I am pretty far behind the camera. "Across" put me front and center. It was a totally different world. A world full of love and support the likes of which I have never experienced.

I did all the artwork for "Jude" played by Jim Sturgress. It was a extraordinary and terrifying experience. Julie Taymor, the director had seen my book, "Drawn Out", which was introduced to her by the designer Mark Friedburg, and decided that I was the artist for the movie.

She wanted drawings for the movie in my style.

My style was to draw and hope for the best.

Frankly, The strawberry saved my ass.

The Studio

They build a studio for me right in Steiner stages in New York City where the sets were built. It gave Julie Taymor and the designers easy access to me. and visa vera.

The first job was to come up with a strawberry logo for the character "Sadie" based on the Apple Records logo or the Altman Brothers "peach. You can see many attempts on the wall. Eventually, because there was a scene where Jude is throwing strawberries at the wall and they turned into bombs I got the idea of an exploding strawberry as the logo.

I put globs of paint on a table and smashed it with a hammer until I got one I liked. After it dried I copied it larger almost exactly, just tweaking it a bit to make it a strawberry. Then I proposed the idea that Jude paint
the strawberry during the throwing scene. For that I made a large one painted like an action painting. It was not until I saw the logo on their crew hats did I realize they liked it.

Evan Rachael Wood dancing in my studio

Julie Taymor had wanted an animation of Evan moving so they photographed several, dozens of photos of her dancing around in my studio. Which was fine until she took off her boots and I realized that I had dropped several push-pins and thumb tacks on the floor. Fortunately she missed them all.

The other drawing that saved me

Julie wanted a drawing that expressed Jude's heartache at losing Lucy.