Erik's Rants and Recipes: Street Date! Paintings!

January 23, 2007

Street Date! Paintings!

I am not at all happy with the photographs. No, let's go further: these photos stink. The colors are a little washed out, the lighting is wrong, the vertical lines are not quite vertical, and the horizontal lines are, well, you guessed it. I need to work on my setup and to practice. It will probably take about a week of work.

So, I could delay on these, but there have been enough delays. Expect new photos of these (and many more) later.

Are you ready?

Good. Let's Begin.

I have decided to open the show with a little oil on canvas that took me decades to do. Decades? Yes. I did a little still life years ago and hated the thing. When it dried, I tried to scrape it off the canvas. No luck. I had neglected it too long. The paint and the canvas were one (I told you, there is rarely a risk of my paint leaving the canvas). It was a thick impasto, and would require drastic means to remove the paint. Well, I found the thing again in a corner of the studio, while looking for an unused canvas. "Oh, that," I thought. What if I tried to rework the painting? Keep the thick impasto, but to add a couple of citrus fruits, add layers of paint, change the colors, etc.? I did that, and a few days later I had a painting that I was happy with:

Now, keeping in the mode of older paintings of vegetation, here is a little watercolor sketch I did of Melanie's garden in Santa Cruz, from before we were married. I still like this one:

And, after we got married we moved to Oakland, where we lived among the pine trees up in the hills. I did this watercolor in about 1997 of a tree in our back yard. It is framed under glass, which is why you see the irritating glare. Like I said, I am working on this art photography stuff. Sorry.

Around the same time I was also having fun exploring the sweeping vistas and exciting landscapes, but doing it in these small watercolors. Here is a (from memory, so don't go holding a photo up to see if it is accurate: it ain't) view of the Bay and everybody's favorite Federal Penitentiary:

Now, I was starting to come up with the approach to landscape and abstraction that would fuel me strongly for the next decade. The breakthrough works (completed in 1996 and 1997), did not come out well in the photos, so they will have to wait. But I can live with the photo of this oil on canvas abstraction based on a view of North Beach in San Francisco:

And, yes, my style remains heavily influenced by Richard Diebenkorn, as you can plainly see in this little watercolor I did last year:

What came between these paintings? Lots of things, like this oil on canvas imaginary landscape:

And, even as I am working on different material now, I still take a dip into these waters, as you can see from this watercolor from last year:

Or in this nocturne, loosely based on my street in East Oakland:

Ah, nocturnes. Difficult to draw (because if you are drawing the observed world, you are doing it at night, usually under very bad light), difficult to paint (all those subtle variations of dark), and nearly impossible to photograph. This is an almost tolerable photo of a nocturne I did of Yosemite. I did the drawing almost completely in the dark, and had some horrid glare problems. I will consider a good photo of this one my triumph. I am not even close yet:

And, I mentioned the matrix for exploring the physical world in an abstract expressionist mode, did I not? It is a complex thing derived from the musical theories of Stockhausen and serialism. This is one of the recent small oil paintings from it:

Well, that is all for now. One, I need to hone my skills photographing these things, and, two, that is a lot of art to digest for the time being.

At the opening on Thursday (remember the cyber-opening!) I will, hopefully, replace the photos with better ones, and will provide the gallery sheet, with title, dimensions, price, etc.

Thank you for visiting the Erik's Rants and Recipes cyber gallery.

Posted by erik at January 23, 2007 11:41 AM

Comments

Oh, I also like the water colors, esp. the pine tree, because, having used them, I can appreciate what when into it.

Posted by: William Luse at January 24, 2007 3:57 PM

Cool, Erik. I especially like the first one, the retooled still life, and the nocturne, though I'm not educated enough in technique to say why. I did my duty in humanities and read about all the expressionisms, but still don't feel equipped to comment on what they are trying to say. But I do see that you are accomplished in using the palette, from thin layers (and flat washes) to deep texture. Maybe I'll be so lucky some day.

Posted by: William Luse at January 24, 2007 3:52 PM