Showing posts with label figurative art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label figurative art. Show all posts

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Pencil Sketch for Women in Autumn

From Women In Autumn
73cm x 52cm, 28.75" x 20.5", pencil on 300lb Arches watercolor paper.

Women in Autumn - barest pencil sketch of the same figures I've used in Women in Spring, Summer, and Winter. The figures who are all one figure. One nameless woman that I spent 2 or 3 hours drawing in November 2006 at a drop-in lifedrawing session.

This was drawn maybe a month ago but I haven't posted it here since I thought I could take a better photo by placing the drawing against a window when the sun is streaming in. Only I forgot about it, and now, ah well. Here is the sketch for the final painting in the series, Women in the Seasons, which can be seen at my website (scroll down).

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Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Wind Over Grass - contact dance



This is what awaited me this morning after the painting in the night that I put whitewash all over and then rubbed out. I can't say which I prefer, though I am tempted to go over to the art store and buy a canvas and paint a larger version of last night's colorful rendition while the energy is still hot.

This painting is part of my landscape as figure, or figure as landscape series, which I will upload to my life drawing page soon.


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Contact Dance, a painting

In my last painting I had returned to the style I developed in high school. Before the Fine Arts degree, before the style that developed through the Birth Paintings and that became my signature afterwards. I had gone back to re-find who I was, and to see if I returned to that point if my art might develop in another direction. I'm still working on the painting; I seem obsessed with either it, or the process it represents. Working on that small painting is like scraping memory and habit off to get to the back of the cave and seeing what the first marks were. Success is not important in this endeavour. It's all exploration.

So what happened tonight took me by surprise. I am posting the images up to the point where I painted everything white and then proceeded to rub the painting out. It would be an easy piece to re-do since it was from a sketch from a life drawing session which I still have and can reproduce on another canvas.

Who knows, I may re-paint these figures and leave the painting at the point I'm showing you here: unfinished, but still kind of raw, perhaps alive. There is an artist, an Expressionist perhaps, or Post-Expressionist, who this painting reminds me of and when I think of his name I'll pop it into this post (if you know please leave a comment).

It's two figures in contact dance. Actually it's one model in the life drawing session in two poses that I drew on the same page. We do what we can to get the poses we'd like. Because I sought the tensions of the connection point of contact dance, the flow and the seismic lines of energy, I used small lines, a loose construction.



The sketch was done quite awhile ago and the ink had set. Click on the images for larger size.



There was no plan for the painting of the sketch. Lines followed lines; colours suggested colours. I used a plastic egg carton and each colour had its own 'egg nest' and its own brush - 10 all together! This system kept the colors pure, but was akin to a stick game as the brushes often entangled and kept falling!



Click on image for a really large version. 'Contact Dance,' 2009, 14"x10.5", 35.5cmx26.5cm,  India ink and oils on a primed canvas sheet.

Perhaps I should have stopped here. Instead I continued painting, covering the bright colour with a white wash, and then throwing water all over it which got wiped off along with most of the colour. What's left of the painting (see next post) can probably be taken in another direction, and I can re-do what I did here, using this image as a study. Oh, the delights of art-making!



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Friday, October 16, 2009

Julie McGregor's Art: A Spectral Mine


Julie McGregor's art is figurative, richly coloured, with dense backgrounds of oil embedded into the canvas. An heir of the Impressionists and the Group of Seven, she takes the palette further, exploring the nuances and depths of her subjects, their beauty, their slight asymmetries, the way they are contained in the multi-coloured brushwork she has sculpted them out of. Not just thick light revealing the features of her figures, but the surfaces glow with jewel-like dabs and dashes giving the sense of a spectral mine illumined from within by its precious ores. In all of her works an inner power emanates, as if from the energies of the earth itself. Check out her paintings. Beautiful.

Julie McGregor is a Toronto artist and jazz singer.







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A Pulsing Imagination - Ray Clews' Paintings

A video of some of my late brother Ray's paintings and poems I wrote for them. Direct link: https://youtu.be/V8iZyORoU9E ___