Gerome Exhibit at the Getty Museum, June 15 - Sept. 12, 2010

Fans of Jean-Leon Gerome (French, 1824 - 1904) will be happy to hear that the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (http://www.getty.edu/visit/exhibitions/future.html ) will be hosting a special exhibit of Gerome's work from June 15th to Sept. 12th, 2010. This particular painting, Pollice Verso, has long been one of the jewels at the Phoenix Art Museum and it's good to know that it will be part of the show. I'm also attaching a photo of the sculpture of Gerome with his gladiator models at the Musee d'Orsay.

Artdaily has more information about Gerome here: http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=35768

Oil Sketch on Frosted Mylar

Frosted Mylar is an affordable and archieval support if you plan on painting lots of figurative work from life. If you're generally new to doing this kind of life work and don't want to waste a lot of expensive linen during your first sessions, try the frosted Mylar. It's good for open studio sketches and for making preliminary sketches for paintings on more traditional supports. In my case, I was trying out a new pair of binoculars in an open studio situation and I wasn't sure if I would be able to find the right place to set up. (I'm going to blog about binoculars later.)The Mylar comes in a big sheet which costs around $5.00 (the portion shown is a quarter sheet). It's opaque and semi-absorbent - actually, it's a little hard to describe, but the strokes show up well and I especially like the way transparent paint reacts to it. I've taped the sheet onto a board to do the actual painting. I've been wondering how I'd frame this piece - I think I would glue the edges of the Mylar to a white gessoed board of the same size and then put the piece under glass (with a spacer between the glass and the Mylar). Everything I've read about Mylar indicates it's archieval but I might still be inclined to put it under glass and treat it as I would a drawing.The open studio session was three hours, but I wiped off my first head and started a new, smaller version, so this one is at about an hour and a half of painting. My wonderful teacher William Whitaker (http://www.williamwhitaker.com/) showed his students how to use Mylar a few years ago and since then I've seen other artists using it as well.

What color did I mix to make that, anyway?

This post probably comes under the catagory of "studio tips". I have high-chroma, "modern" colors on my palette as well as some earth tones, thought I don't usually use all my colors on a particular painting. To make things more complicated, I like to try out new colors, especially tubes I have hanging around the studio. (This is a byproduct of having had several excellent teachers, none of whom, by the way, even remotely paint the same way. ) Lots of times I find myself wondering, how did I get that color when I did that painting?

I've started to lay out little blobs from my palette for every painting I do onto cheap glossy paper. I'm also keeping a record of the mixtures I use. This one, for example, is the palette for the painting of the girl in the tondo below. I was seeing what I could do with one yellow, one red, one blue, black and white. I wrote on the corner of the sheet the brands and names of paint and pinned it to the wall. After the painting was finished I hung the paper palette onto a coat hanger so I can put it in my closet.

Art Books: Rose Frantzen's Portrait of Maquoketa

I paint for hours nearly every day and like a lot of artists who paint a lot, by the time I get onto the internet my brain is a little.... well, it's often hard to come up with something that I think might be interesting to you, the reader. If I'm in the middle of a project (which I always seem to be) I don't like to post much about it.

Then I realized - if I could share my art library with you - THAT is something I like to write about and you might find pretty interesting as well.

I'll start with a hot-off-the-press book by one of my favorite living artists, Rose Frantzen. Her new book is published in conjunction with her show at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, Portrait of Maquoketa. More information about the show is located on her website, http://www.oldcityhallpress.com/ and her book is available there also (it sells for $49.95, plus shipping).

I don't even own this book yet and I'm recommending it to you, how do you like THAT. I've studied with Rose and she is an amazingly talented artist and teacher.

Yesterday's demo at Tempe Center for the Arts

Here's my model Christy - Oil on linen, 18" x 14" - great model and very nice person. I'll be doing another life demo in two weeks, same time, same place.

"Shadows of Unrecorded Trees"

I'm (slowly) working out a system where I can work on multiple paintings, most importantly, landscapes, at certain times of the day, returning over and over again to the same locations at the roughly the same time to take advantage of fleeting light conditions. Since I live in Arizona I can pretty much count on sunshine nearly all of the time, but on the rare day that it's cloudy, I hope I'll be painting (you guessed it) clouds.

So, for example, this is the corner of a wall that catches shadow patterns from trees from roughly 8:00am to 9:15am. I worked on this for around two weeks, using binoculars when I felt the need to examine something more closely (and of course just walked over to it whenever I felt like it). When 9:15 came along, I packed my gear and moved on to an indoor still life which caught a certain light at a certain time of the day.

There is so much to recommend in this sequential method. One big plus is that I can work on larger canvases - at least, larger than the small 8" x 10" or so plein air sketch size. I'll write more about this later on.

More on the "Faces" show at the Tempe Center for the Arts

Thanks again to everyone who braved Tempe Octoberfest traffic and came to opening night of the "Faces" show last weekend. The show will run through Feb. 6th and will feature periodic demos by local artists, including me (Oct. 24th and Nov. 7th, from 11:00am - 1:00pm) - for more information and a map please visit www.tempe.gov/TCA/gallery .

Here's a photo of my three paintings hanging in the gallery. Tempe framer Dave Owen of Montgomery Frames (http://www.montgomeryframes.com/ ) did a fantastic job with these - it isn't easy to find high-quality handmade circular frames. Thanks, Dave!