Painting in Progress - Amy -

 

-The rough for Amy. -

Why Amy?  See the affiche above the man in blue?  That's the poster for the movie about Amy Winehouse.  I can't wait to see it.  

I love my paintings at this stage.  Most everyone who sees them live when they are merely blocked in like this, yells at me to stop painting, right now.  But I have a compulsion to lick the very edges of my canvases.  Amy is nearly finished and it differs little from what's here.  Lick lick.

- Amy is an F40 size linen canvas.   

The French have the weirdest canvas sizes.  P is for portrait, F for figure, and M is for marine.  Then there are the squares.  While the square sizes increase in increments of 10 centimeters, the weird sizes follow no contemporary rules.  An F40 is 80 x 101cm, a nightmare for framers outside France. These classic French sizes must be some residue of life before the metric system, the euro, the internet.  I've searched for the reason and found it's based on aesthetique harmony.  Yeah, gotcha. 

Time to update.  Even the Italians have adopted the metric system for their canvas sizes.

The story of the Tigre l'Heure Bleue

It took me 36 hours to paint this 3 meter long resin sculpture.  I travelled to Metz two different weekends, painted from 10 am to midnight Saturday, all day Sunday, and again on Monday morning. A ginormous suitcase filled with cans of acrylic paint accompanied me and lost a wheel.  Losing the wheel was a drag.

This is a boring video in real time.  See what it's like to sit and paint for hours.



 See the bus on the left.  The background noise was a fan. You can see the tiger is male.

When Sarah Hasch, director of the gallery  In3Arts and owner of Sarah Hasch Fine Art, phoned me to ask if I would consider painting one of the 10 sculptures for the Exhibition I didn't hesitate one second.  I've always wanted to paint one of those cows.  But a tiger? Forget the cow.

The directors of TCRM-Blida offered me a space.  I worked next to artist, Sarah Tuelet.  Here is an article in Le Républican Lorraine with a photo with Sarah Hasch and she.  The TCRM-Bilda was Metz's city bus depot, now a collective atelier for selected creators.  Artists are alloted spaces free of charge. One Saturday I listened to a rock band practising for what sounded like a performance.  Lots of cute guys walked by.  The Blida is dusty because two carpenters create all kinds of things including that chair which gave me splinters. The carpenters' circular saws scream and belch out sawdust.  Dust is abrasive.

Metz is a beautiful town that takes care of its artists.  It is the home of the second Pompidou center.  Metz hosts the magnificent Saint Stephen, a cathedral whose nave is one of the tallest in the world.  Chagall's stained glass windows beautify a chapel close to the northern transept.
 
The ten tigres will be exhibited in the place de la gare of Metz 8-12 April then sold on auction June 5th, 2015 at the Zoo d'Amneville.  Proceeds from the sale of the painted sculptures will go to saving tigers in the wild.

I had a vague idea of what I was going to paint, The Blue Hour. But which images? The two sides of the tiger are different images of boulevard de Montparnasse in Paris.  I hated the painting for the first two days then stepped back to observe it and thought, "Children will love this."  Before this clue moment I was ready bag it and go home.

The painting developed into the idea that the tiger is a silver animal stealing through the streets at night. The feet and legs and uderside are silver.   He throws on his cloak to disguise himself, blend in and hunt his night prey.  The French saying "l'heure bleue entre chien et loup," brings sense to my idea.  The blue hour: when dogs retire and wolves come out.

Sarah Hasch and I decided on the title l'Heure Bleue because it fits with my series the Parisian Blue Hour.

painting process- a Parisian Terrasse and Tabac --

I can't believe it's been over a month I've not posted a new painting. After seeing my agent and speaking with a few galleries the consensus was full colour night scenes.  The Heure Blue series continues.  This Tabac night scene is in the works.  I love how the tree canopy reflects the red light from the red spiral carrotte.

The spiral neon carrottes that indicate Tabac shops are disappearing from Paris. LEDs replace them. Many of the paintings I've done in the Parisian series are now testimonials of how the city has changed in the last eight years. 

Only high quality paints can give you these colors.  Knowledge of mixing colours is a must.  Cadmium red mixed with ivory black or phtalo green for darker reds. Golden ochre, or cadmium orange and quinacridone for lighter reds.  Now white, please!

Another Parisian Cafe Painting

 

120x120 cm (sketch stage) --

This is my 101th painting in 2014.  Eighty-eight were small formats and thirteen large.  Before I was working for Carré d'Artistes I'd spend a month on a painting this size, now this size flows out in a week.

The waiter is delivering a bottle of rose to the table in the sunshine.  Nothing new about that but everyone in the painting is fiddling with a mobile phone.

work in Progress

 

It's a marathon.  Forty down and I'm just starting.  Have to finish three large formats by Friday including this one of the Bon Marché and the one from the last post whose title you'll get to vote on when I the finished painting.

Tonight I paint until midnight.

Le Bon Marché - 100x100cm, oil on canvas (unfinished)

The forty on the floor will go to another one of Carré d'Artistes galleries, I will let you know when that happens and where.  Working for them is a challenge which I'm really enjoying, it's like training for a marathon.  Shorter and longer runs and lots of them.  Now the large formats are flying of my brush. 

drawn but not done

Times Square scene,

100x150cm

oil on canvas

So this is how I start.  I project one of my photos and draw in what I think looks good to me then block in some colors.  This is a large painting that I'll finish when I get back from 5 weeks at the beach in the Mediterranean.  Eat your heart out!  

See you in August.

Times Square in the works

This is what it looked like friday evening.  

Today I should be nearly finished.  

What I learned years ago when riding my vespa to the Tuscan country side and painting watercolors from life is the importance of starting a painting with the brightest most prominent colors.  Jeanne Dobie, in her book, Making Color Sing taught me this.  How many times did you wait to add that brilliant red to the very last and when you laid down the color it killed the entire painting?  The reason why is that the surrounding colors make the color sing.  Start with the most important color, the rest is a piece of cake.