Resuscitation

This is the latest addition to my series on restoration experts. This scene takes place in the shop of Patrick Ottis Company in Berkeley, CA and features Patrick Ottis (in the tee-shirt) and David McCarthy breathing life back into a Ferrari V-12. Patrick graciously granted me complete freedom to shoot in his shop on two occasions, even though they were under the cloud of show deadlines. This painting was compiled from dozens of shots and it took a long time to come up with this composition; once it was decided, the painting advanced smoothly.

In this painting I reverted to a style I naturally gravitate to, called scumbling. Traditional glazed painting (shown in December 2011 blog installment) starts with a monochromatic (one color and white) underpainting and then several dozen thin glass-like layers of transparent color are added on top make a full color painting that can appear to glow. This is what the old masters, pre-impressionism, did.

This scumbled painting also started with a complete underpainting, but color was added with a VERY dry brush of color and not laid on top, but scrubbed in. It provides a whole different surface to look at and I like to use it occasionally. Check out Patrick's right arm, it's one of the finest anatomy studies I've done. Besides all the stuff in the background, I really like the way the figures came out.

Open House/Studio

Well, the Open Studio was a huge success. There was a steady flow of folks all day, nearly a hundred visitors in four hours. It was fun to see people with common interests meet for the first time and the reuniting of those who hadn't seen each other in too long a time. I hadn't seen Ken and Veronica Kusudo in twenty years!



I can paint, but I'm no good at the food thing, all I could think of serving was a case of Coke and a 50# bag of oats. Food stores are so foreign to me, I don't know what most of the stuff is, I'm just looking for products from Celebrity Apprentice; so Deborah provided the selection of cheeses and snacks to satisfy people's culinary needs. People left with more than full stomachs. A lot of books and prints were sold and there were hourly door prizes. The winners of signed original prints were Barbara and Dick Gladden, Russ Wicks, Cesar Duran and Kelly Capps.



Friends from Brea, Fullerton College, the Ferrari Clubs, clients, buddies, family and everyone else all provided a huge base of support for me. A million thanks!

The Warden

Deb and I went to visit Mark in January. He had been sick and in and out of the Reno hospital for a year and a half. I had seen him a few months ago but now he was home and I wanted to see him there. He looked better on the second day and although he was skinny as a rail, his face was full and his hair was white and bushy like Mark Twain. The next day he went back in the hospital and about the time we got home he had passed away.
While there we looked at the family photos in the room. His wife Carleen pointed out a photo (taken by Skip Waller) that she loved. It was taken about the time the two of them met and (important to me) shot in natural light. I wanted to do his portrait from this picture and Skip gave the okay. Scott Faris suggested the painting be titled "the Warden".
I spent the next several weeks looking carefully at the picture and focusing thoughts about Mark, getting completely lost in the work and going on autopilot a lot of the time. Working from a great photo helps, but knowing the subject intimately takes it all to a different level; one where you don't need conscious thought, just intuition. I tried to make it look like there was a grin under the scowl, which was often the case with him, and found the smile in his eyes, not so much the mouth.
It turned out to be a great way to deal with the loss and I got this painting out of it, which we then delivered to Carleen. She sent a note which read in part "You captured Mark’s eyes! His eyes had gold flecks in them when he was young, and they showed up in the painting. " I'd have missed that detail if I was looking. It's like other paintings were training and here I had to operate blindfolded, drowned in music and misery and see what comes out at the end of the day. I am really pleased with the results, for me it transcends illustration and borders on art.

Bookcover: Whistling on the Stair

I was so pleased to get a call from Saylor Smith who was about to go to press with his 3rd book and asked me to do a painting for the cover. He had taken a photograph to be used as a guide for the painting, but wanted the subject in an 80's Angel uniform, a bat on his shoulder, a catchers mitt in her hand, and add an interesting but muted background. So sketches were started near the end of November and emailed back and forth until we got a suitable composition. There were a few things I needed to change from the original photo, I wanted the vantage point to be a bit lower and needed more info in the shadows so I got a friend to pose with his daughter and re-shot the scene. I was able to use some of this new info in the painting, but the more I worked with Saylor's original, the more I was able to see in it. I wanted the grandstands as a background right away and found some suitable images, some from the painting "The Hub" made last year. So here it is, I left room at the top and bottom for title and author info, and then worked with Saylor to come up with a layout that he liked, playing the part of a graphic artist, then the publishers went to work polishing it up and making a great presentation.

University Club

This commission for Vern King came to me by way "That Frame Place" in Brea, where I have sent clients for frame work since 1971. Vern saw that the sailor and young lady in this Norman Rockwell piece reminded him of his son and daughter-in-law, and decided to have an original oil painting made rather than buy a store bought print. This allowed him to personalize the piece, changing the Taxi to a Studebaker convertible, add himself in there and make the whole thing square rather than slightly portrait. We wrote up a contract that eliminated any confusion of this trying to be a forgery of the original Rockwell painting and proceeded. Vern supplied the photos that were needed and I got a poster of the original painting to work from. I was amazed to see Rockwell used a pretty rough unrelated texture to the whole thing. It looked as though he roughed up the gesso before he started, probably to paint the rock texture faster while working under a deadline. When looking carefully I could even see this texture in the surfaces that were supposed to be smooth, like the sidewalk, glass and the car. So I did all that too, trying to be faithful to the original and it really helps tie everything together. Too much texture would be a distraction, but he really had the touch. I learned a lot from this piece and thank Vern for the opportunity to create this new family heirloom.

Sonny

I have been fortunate to have so many friends who are superior photographers. Joseph “Joey” Viles is one of those guys; one I have known since kindergarten and whose work always impresses me. While perusing his website I came across a black and white image of his brother Sonny with his wife Pam. It is a great shot so I called and asked for a good print so I could do a charcoal drawing from it and he obliged right away. The picture was taken with a 4X5 Polaroid and has such a rich texture, very much like the fine grain Tri-X film that I loved. I’m not much for shots taken with a flash as they are usually washed out with too much light; but in the hands of a professional, a controlled flash can be an effective tool, like here.

So I dug out my old charcoal pencils from the 70s and started laying out ovals and blocking in values. I use a knife and sandpaper pad to sharpen the pencils and sometimes fill a 1” brush with charcoal dust from the sandpaper to block in big areas. Then I start to map out the geography of the face. There are simple mathematic formulas for this and I follow them as far as they’ll take me. Then I jump off the bandwagon and draw what I see, making adjustments as necessary. I keep going until it looks right.

I did use the computer a couple times here in an attempt to be contemporary. I posterized the original, letting me know big areas of value, and this was amusing. When we were kids, Scott and I did a lot of silk screen work and we had to make all those posterizing value decisions with only our teenage brains, so the computer did little to improve on those years of good training. At one point I took a digital picture of my drawing, put it in the computer and printed it. Then printed a copy of Joey’s original on top, the same size, but a different color. This told me where my drawing deviated from the original and I fixed what needed to be fixed, which was minimal.

Speed

I was recently invited to participate in a show called "Speed" curated by Jeannie Denholm. The show was at the House of Balsamico in Irvine and was exhibited to private audiences during September and October. Jeannie picked four pieces for display and I created a new piece specifically for the theme. One piece, "Targa", was borrowed from the collection of Lee and Lynn Dudacek; while three others "Access", "Norm" and "TRC" were loaned from the collection of Jason Parr. My sincere thanks go to them for making these available for this show.

The fifth piece, "Sharknose" was painted specifically for the show and made its public debut there. This was based on a charcoal piece I had done almost twenty years ago, and it came to mind almost immediately after hearing the theme for the show.



This is Phil Hill at Monaco in 1961, the year he became the Formula One World Champion. I've never determined what made the front wheels shimmy this way, it must just be a nanosecond of wheel jerk that drivers corrected for intuitively lap after lap in these tests of concentration. But that is what made this image so attractive to me and what came to mind when thinking of "Speed".