Tangled Garden painting in-process

Tangled Garden Painting, in-process (7), 18" x 24" compressed charcoal, watercolour pencils, oils, and other stuff (yeah, the catch-all: mixed media) on triple-primed 100% cotton canvas sheet.

I am not happy with how this painting is developing and likely will not offer it as a 'gift' when Tangled Garden reaches 1500 views. I'll think of something else.

Anyhow, the blue sky and green grass are painted in oils, the colour on the mask was drawn on with watercolour pencils and I can mostly rub it off if I like.

The good news is that I am working on a video that I hope will be interesting when it is finished - I bought long "Ladies Sexy Fishnet Mitts" for this and future painting videos (which alone should qualify as 'interesting').

'Tangled Garden' is a slow art film of a triptych of earth poems, Surreal, mythopoetic, a rhizoma of images, metaphors, explorations, philosophies (with English subtitles). -A Floral Opera (2011) -In the Hands of the Garden Gods (1979) -Slipstream, the Tangled Garden (2006) (with impromptu speaking between the poems, which each end with ~~~ in the subtitles): http://youtu.be/OG37qWh4rTM

'Every Angel is terror' (Rilke): painting in-progress

I was photographing this in a patch of sunlight, my backside in the alley, and a man drove by in a large red SUV, and the man with the puppy that is part husky called Maggie was trying to get her on leash so she wouldn't run on my still-wet painting, and then the man in the large red SUV started backing up, and Maggie's owner and I, well, what's going on? He stuck his head out the window. 'Do you paint?' 'Yeah.' 'Is that yours?' 'Yeah.' 'Do you sell your work?' 'Yeah.' 'Do you have a studio?' 'No, just my apartment.' 'Can I come by to see your work? I like paintings.' 'Sure.' 'Is that one for sale? I like it.' 'Yes.' So I gave him my phone number. He's the general contrator for a store going in around the corner.

A cute story, that I share. My apartment is getting so filled with paintings and drawings from all these lifedrawing sessions I've been going to I am considering selling with a PWYCA - 'pay what you think it is worth, and what you can afford.' Although a painting this size might go for around a grand, I'm not affiliated with any galleries and don't even have a 'store' at my art website. Rather than have all these paintings collecting dust in folios, I might shift my sensibility to another way of offering my work to those who really love it.

"Every Angel is terror. And yet,
ah, knowing you, I invoke you, almost deadly
birds of the soul" from Rilke, 2nd Duino Elegy, 2012, 18" x 24", in-progress, charcoal, acrylic, triple-primed cotton canvas sheet.

'Every Angel is terror' (Rilke) painting-in-process

"Every Angel is terror. And yet,
ah, knowing you, I invoke you, almost deadly
birds of the soul" from Rilke, 2nd Duino Elegy, 2012, 18" x 24", painting-in-progress, charcoal, acrylic, canvas sheet.

TSA tonight. I'll work on it over the next few days. A rough draft, you could say.

Figment, or what is departing?

Figment, or what is departing?, 2012, 20.5" x 16", mixed media on 90lb archival paper.

For me, I see strange and unintentional resonance of the woman with one of the earliest cave paintings, the Shaman of Trois Frères (scroll down a bit). She is half elk, a shaman, and he is a primal man who may transform on the full moon, an adept of the great goddess. Does the strength of moonlight compose him? There's something Fellini-like about them. As if from a dream. Or a poetic metaphor. The animal soul and its poetry of desire.

Her dress is made of red ink.

[One figure is from the OCAD figure drawing sessions; the other is a rendition from the Keyhole session. Together they make another story.]

         

Seated Man (in progress), TSA March 30th

Seated Man, 2012, 16" x 20", 40.6cm x 50.8cm, graphite on stretched canvas.

Sketch from TSA Friday night in pencil on a small canvas, 16" x 20", that I will finish as an ink painting.

Seated Man, in-progress, 24" x 30", 61cm x 76.2cm, mixed media on stretched canvas.

When I go to TSA non-instructional, drop-in lifepainting sessions, I usually spend the first 3 hours working on a larger painting; then I leave it to dry for the last hour while I sketch the model on a smaller canvas. At the top of this post you see the sketch that will become an ink painting. Below is the larger painting I did first. At TSA, I use thin layers of acrylics - they dry fast. To the left is what I completed at TSA on Friday night. At home, I finish the painting with oils - oil sticks, oil pastels, oil paints.

On the left is where the painting is today. It's still unfinished.

I'm considering putting a figure in black line only behind him, and some purple crocuses at his feet. To me, he seems a spring god, the spring rains and sap greens around him, a garden god who represents the fertility of the onrush of Nature's awakening after the long winter months.

Before the light was gone, on my walk through my neighbourhood this evening, I saw yellow tulips, small star-shaped blue flowers (which are? not phlox, or asters, but...?), yellow forsythias, and small magnolia trees just beginning to blossom. I may go by in the next few days with my sketchbook and see if adding a spring fauna to this painting will give it a fullness.

Seated Woman (one finished, one in process), TSA 23 March 2012

Woman of the Sea Far Inland is finished. I painted a beautiful model at a non-instructional drop-in session at TSA on Friday night. Last night I whipped up the energy of the painting with some oil sticks I had bought at Gwartzman's. Looking at it, I think it might be a painting to go with a poetry manuscript I am in the process of compiling for submission.

I'm still working on the second painting below, Woman Seated, Waiting. She does look like a woman caught in thorns, a jagged and perhaps dangerous situation, doesn't she. There's something Pre-Raphaelite about her, and Medieval Christian saint.

2 Woman of the Sea Far Inland (final), 2012, 18" x 24", 35.7cm x 61cm, 

acrylic, oil sticks, oil pastels on triple-primed canvas sheet.

2 Woman Seated, Waiting (in process), 2012, 16" x 20", 40.6cm x 50.8cm, 

graphite, India and acrylic inks on stretched canvas.

Here is a little slideshow of the album where these paintings from the 

non-instructional drop-in painting session I went to at TSA last Friday night. 

Click on any image in the slideshow to go to Picasa and a larger size.

                              

Seated Woman, TSA 23 March 2012

Last night I went to TSA (Toronto School of Art) drop-in painting session (it only took a year to get there). Many fine artists. Perhaps these capture an essence. I'm considering going at the painting with oil sticks, and the pencil drawing on the canvas is going to get an ink treatment.

Woman of the Sea Far Inland, 2012, 18" x 24", 35.7cm x 61cm, acrylic on triple-primed canvas sheet.

Woman Seated, Waiting, 2012, 16" x 20", 40.6cm x 50.8cm, graphite on stretched canvas.