Catch up: 57 varieties

OMGeeez am I a slacker or what? When was the last time I wrote a thing? So much has happened, so much is happening, hard to keep up with it all.... I'll try to catch up for anyone who may still be reading this and stay on it. Apparently I am supposed to be writing a book and I need to practice my word-assemblaging. So, I'll begin with the current things and work backwards and then cool stuff coming up.. it's all very Back to the future. Starting with the Charleston workshop about a week ago. Let me just state that Charleston is killer, it's def jam yo, all that and a bag of chips, the shiz and 23 skiddooo all wrapped in bacon. Not much of a better place to teach an urbanscape class than there with the added bonus of southern haute cuisine, people who are so good looking you start wondering about it and an ocean. The 3 day class was only slightly hampered by rain the first day but the next few days were cpmpletely unhampered and flawless x10. As in most of my classes, regardless of theme, I talk about the big picture of design and intent, I get the students to work things out in their simplest forms  then move to the more complicated and then color later on the last day. It's all about the idea and with street scenes, theres a lot of ideas to be had.

First two demos, the one color value plan (very important) and an odd 3 color demo (4 out of 5 artists concur)

Another demo, here I used all the colors available to me but focused on the value structure with color vibration... no details and lots of lost edges. This could make for a nice big one.... watch out Mr. Deibenkorn! Wait... I'm sorry he's what? Oh..... Okay, my bad Mr. Deibs.

And a final demo with a very loose and vague start to show how to bring something around from out of focus to in.

While I was there, of course, I shot tons of great reference for more paintings. So much to paint so little time. Yeeeesh.

Going back a little further in time was the Plein Air Painters of the Southeast or. as I call it, the PAPSE generation, official Paint Out and annual gathering of artists in Nashville Tn. Man, what a magnificent tribe. I drove up with Mark Horton, a wonderful friend, artist and owner of a gallery in Charleston, SC which I have the good fortune to be in. For anyone who says guys don't talk about real stuff, you missed it, 9 hours straight of yacking. No sports were mentioned, no fishing chat, no coffee klatch, no talk about whose was bigger... we stalked about real stuff, life stuff, relationship stuff, guy stuff, so much stuff that we covered it all and when we drove back 5 days later, it was 9 hours of silence sprinkled with the odd joke because that's how I roll. Note to self, write down the good stuff lest we forget (and we always do). The highlight of the trip was the invention of a store idea (Marks) that we are going to open called Just Sconces, which is equally as good as the art gallery I'm opening called Honey Distribution System, and also the brilliant idea (mine) of a personal Wikipedia page in which I make up everything but do it in a way that may be almost believable and just leave it for people to find because my new tag line is going to be "I'm kind of a big deal" and I need to back it up with fake stuff. It's next on my to do list. It was way fun..

So back to the tribe, Anne Blair Brown set this thing up and we had bountiful places to paint, great homes to stay (a couple of 250 to 1,000 acre ranches to hang out on and in) dinners every night, lunches everyday and all with the nicest, most talented people you would ever want to know. I will say, I do not take this stuff for granted anymore, I get to hang out with really cool people and go to really great places and do fun, creative stuff and make a gojillion dollars doing it... one of those things is not quite true, but I'm not saying which.

We all painted barns because why wouldn't you and so I called this one Barnapalooza. It's a 20 by 20 oil on wood. I'll be sending it to a gallery soon because I like it a lot. 

Here's another barn painting, which nearly completes my annual barn quota, I just need one more. It's a 20x20 which I called Barns-a-million because everyone painted barns. I like this one too but I think it needs something more... oh, and I hid a penis in it.

Now this one is completely different because it is red. It's an 11x14 oil and I called it Barnucopia because, well, you know. I really like this little gem and am going to do a large version of it because of the saying, "If you can't make it good, make it big or make it red." and also because I like the composition and, by the way, this compositional motif came about to have the barn wall dominate because I looked at it through my iphone which gave me an odd crop that I may not have come up with otherwise. I used it. It's not cheating if Steve Jobs says it's okay. Wait... I'm sorry he's what? Oh..... Okay, My bad Mr. Jobs. Heretoforth, I'm going to use any trick in the book to make something different and cool, I have a million ideas that I'm going to create thanks to the help of modern technology. There is absolutely no excuse to not be creative anymore.

On the day of the show, we had a quickdraw where I did this little gem. Still life number 3 in my life, I should do more. Sold it.

So in summation: Great class, Charleston is awesome, lots of barns, be more creative, paint more still lifes, more to come.