I've reduced the prices on several of the paintings to help get things rolling.
Read MoreA step by step of a Fall Challenge or Oh Boy ...Pie
This weekend one of the guys on a forum I frequent suggest we do a Challenge paint and we agreed on Fall Harvest as the theme. Some of the folks on forum do periodic challenges where 5 or six people usually agree to the theme and time frame. When the paintings are finished we all pat each other on the back and say how grand the work is. The forum is populated with people different levels of accomplishment from the very accomplished to to very beginner. It's kind of fun and eases the pressure of production.
The forum is at http://www.drawmixpaint.com where Mark Carder attempts to teach people who can't draw a lick to paint. It's a disciplined work flow or process that seems to work. It helped me get back in painting form after a six year layoff.
I thought I'd follow my process from sketch to finish sharing my thoughts and feelings as I go along.
Fall Harvest
This is just an excuse for me to buy some Cortland apples and make a pie. I shouldn't be eating pie. These simple line sketches show my origin thinking on the project. We have an old copper pale that I've wanted to use in a still like for a while. Thats where I started. As you see I like to use diagonals and squares and golden ratios in my thinking.
Original doodles from my sketchbook
I use a Canon 5D Mark II connected to my MacBookPro with a USB cable. The Canon Camera Window app allows me to see the set up in a live view on the laptop. I have full control over the camera's features like exposure, fStop, and ISO. I can then shoot the images right from the computer.
This image is the first take with the camera.
Original set-up. I like the relationship of the apples to the pail.
This set is okay. I almost decided to use this but kept pushing. I didn't like the left side. And it wouldn't fit real well in the 24 x 16 canvas I have on hand. So I added another apple a cup and some pheasant tail feathers.
setup...... It looks chaotic but it isn't. The lighting is simple. A 5000k pigtail florescent. Tracing paper is a good diffuser. The cardboard will look like wood when painted.
Still life set-up. Light is a desk lamp with a tracing paper diffuser. It's all set on a workbench that serves a million functions in my limited space.
The finished shot
I shoot photos as RAW format so that I can control exposure and the like in Photoshop.
This image is a composite HDR. 2 exposures combined. I then process it with a few filters to add some squint to it. It's now softened the colors are a little more real yet translated. The left side is now resolved. The feathers break up the straight line of the table.The apple in full shadow and tarnished silver goblet. All the edges are apparent where to loose and where to define.
Usually this is not my type of image but I like it. The reflections lost edges and light & dark. Below is a image overlaid with compositional guides. 24 x 16 inch proportion.
The finish with composition guides overlaid. I use these to transfer to canvas.
Sme of the key planning and interest points. The set-up was planned withe the 1 to 1.6 ratio in mind
The next step is to make a full size image for color matching and drawing 1 to one. the prints I have now a half size so scaling using the proportional divider set to 1 to would be easy but full size will be easier on the eyes. The drawing will be simply blocked in with only details elaborated where necessary. The ground will be the same tinted gesso mixed a few months ago. There should be enough left.
The real next step is really making a pie from these lovely apples. Off to make the crust.
Oh Boy Pie!
Well that it the pie is made all I have to do is eat it.. Later this week I start the painting hope.. Stay tuned for updated.
Update. Added Bell upper right.
May use added bell?????
With the addition of the bell several good painters have brought the cup into question. I made a version without the cup. The jury is deliberating
With no cup
6 value ranges
After making this abstracted value range image in Photoshop I decided that the cup works best by breaking up the curve of the bottom of the pail. Just waiting on a set of new paints that I'll be testing on this painting. Can't wait.
Painting from photos in my studio
I paint in my studio. I do draw and sketch in the wild when I can. I travel far and wide to participate in life drawing sessions. But! I paint primarily in the studio from my photographs.I'm telling you this because I've had a few questions about it lately. Today Plein Air painting is all the thing. I love it and have some favorite practitioners. But I work best in the studio on the board. I feel safe there. I can work in my underwear. I can have the Weather Channel on the TV or listen to an Stephanie Plum's latest misadventures. I can take a nap, which may be because I'm getting older which of course I'm not. But this is how I've always done it saince I was a teenager painting down in the cellar next to the furnace of my childhood home in Bradford, in my air-shaft studio at Kennedy Studios on Beacon Hill in Boston in the 70s and the Cupola in the old firehouse near South Station. Or my cramped 1 bedroom apartment in the Murray Hill neighborhood in Manhattan and all the other tiny spaces I've worked in.
I'm either working out of my head or working from photos that I have taken of things, places and people over the past many years. To build an image I cycle through these photos like a manic looking for the clues to where the voices are coming from. But for me it's not voices but stories and memories that call to me from my pictures. Stories that fade in and out and are forgotten and found and forgotten again. There is excitement and anticipation in every memory card filled only to be forgotten with every new iPhone camera click or when an ancient roll of prints from film or box of slides is rediscovered.
Mostly these photos were shot as sketches of the moment or place or light or time of day or object. They are like pencil marks on the pad for me. All. Every once in a while, while doing my manic shuffling, I find, I see the image I've lost and am looking for and have been looking for for years. The process of building a painting begins.
I usually craft my photos into compositions that couldn't have been painted on the fly or in Plein Air while chasing light, rain, tide and the need to use the men's room.
Not by me at least.
in the studio I can go through my anxious process of anticipation, preparation, loathing, hope and redemption over time. Not on location for surely it would kill me to suffer it all in an afternoon. I know this because every time I try - that's what happens. I'm slower than my surroundings.
I like being surrounded by my dried palette, little science experiments and disorder. Somehow it's the constant interchange with the disorder that I love. It seems the only way I can create harmony on the canvas.
I'm a studio painter.
This image lures hanging in a window is an example of the 'manic shuffle' I had lost the set of images used to build this composition years ago. I had done several watercolors from this 2004 photo shoot in Rockport Harbor. I started building this composition in 2006. Abandoned it for 6 years while at the corporate sweat shop. When I emerged early this year I couldn't find the images and sadly gave up on the picture that was in my head. In June I found them on an old hard drive. I spent a month tweeking the composition and painted it this in August. Most paintings don't happen like this for me. Only the good ones.
Motif Number 1.2
Oil on linen 26 x 20
©Jim Kingston All Rights Reserved
Motivation.
On the road to realism?
I did this illustration in 1984 for some magazine that I can't remember today. Is it realism? Maybe not realism but certainly everything is 'depicted'. No it's not realism but it can be read like language. We understand every object from the carrot to the triangle and t-square. It's in a humorous shorthand, a vernacular so to speak of realism.
When I was a student in the 60s at The School of Practical Art, soon to become The Art Institute of Boston, under instruction the illustrator Norman Baer I had a lot of the tools necessary to learn to paint decent realism. There was just one thing in the way. Me. I was from a working class home in a Massachusetts mill town. I was angry, had little confidence and a cultural affinity for alcohol. I did have one thing in my favor though. I was a funny bastard. There I was in a program focused on illustrating using realism and my lack of confidence held me back. But I used my humor to keep myself afloat. I started drawing my humor. I became a humorous illustrator. Painting realism was forgotten.
Through the 70s I was lucky to have found work art directing and doing humorous illustration. I was part of a group of illustrators in Boston working for the alternative newspaper The Real Paper. We had great times and made great illustration. A maturing time for both me and my generation. I cast out demon rum. I actually made an okay living. Got married and moved to NYC and Madison Avenue. My humorous illustration was not as funny in New York as it had been in Boston. There were a lot more funny bastards in New York. At the same time technology was blossoming and I got the bug. By the late 80s I was a tech guy inventing tools procedures for varied clients and training folks at top publications in the way of the digit. It was a better business, pay was prompt and generous. Life was good but not so funny.
All through most of the 70s I was painting. Mostly realism mostly portraits. I painted in acrylic. When I say mostly realism I mean a stylized realism.
Beacon Hill 1973
Cambridge 1980
By 1980 i was beginning to work in watercolor doing what I called realism. I was doing paintings like this rock and flowers watercolor strictly for myself. I was driving myself to realism. I had gotten married. Quit drinking and smoking and started painting realism. I kept it to myself not thinking it to be very good or not good enough. Throughout the 80s and 90s i polished this approach to watercolor realism in my down time from work. My work changed and went in different directions but a painting style developed and matured. It was a personal and infrequent thing. Come along to 9/11/2001. The world charged for me, loosing most of my active clients in one horrible morning. Manhattan changed. We were both all of a sudden out of work. After about a year I got serious about being a painter. I struggled for a while looking for a style and medium. I want back through my watercolors and realized this was it. Straight up realism. I had done a series of 'Chairs' paintings in the late 80s that very real and had a styled approach that I began grabbed on to. Guess what? It was one thing to leisurely do the occasional watercolor for myself and quite another to it for real.
Blue Chairs Mt Dessert Island 1986.
Diamond Reo 1982?
So there i am, 2003, pretty much out of work painting realism stylized but surely real. How do I recreate the magic moments i encountered while developing my process during the past 15 or so years?
I was doing a lot of renderings not really painting. I look at them now and I want to puke. Great renderings but only surface. Realistic but nothing real. No heart, just objects. All I was doing was building inventory. I started using oils which I hadn't touched since I was a teenager. I painted a few boat paintings and sold them too cheaply. I was getting away from just a rendering. The water i was painting was completely stylized but even more real quicker too read making more impact. For several years I exhibited my stuff in the traveling circus of the juried art fairs. Life in a camper and a tent. Weird but I loved it. I met and talked with hundreds and hundreds of people. Got to commiserate with other artist and artisans. It was the lifestyle of the gypsy artist. Great fun but not very profitable. Not at all.
2006 the financial crisis begins and we are again both without income. I've got to find work. I had been accepted into a lot of the better shows for the winter art fair season in Florida and had no vehicle of money. I was offered a job in a prestigious financial news organization. I had to take it if not for the money the challenge and prestige.
Flash forward to 2012. We were selling our apartment in NY and using the proceeds to build a beautiful home on land we had in PA. My wife had found the one great job there but I was still in the city soon to be homeless when boom. No job in poor health from too much stress. After dealing with the move and organizing a studio space I finally started painting January 2013 after a complete layoff of 6 years. The longest period ever without painting or drawing. I was very worried about my skills. It took me about 3 months with help from Mark Carders production oriented method and a lot of life drawing to get me back on my hands and production skills. Remarkably I'm handling paint now better than ever.
I've done a few good paintings but I'm starting to seeing objects again. Rendering surfaces to the exclusion of reality. It's easy to fall into this.
Realism in painting is like it is in in life, it's under the surface. I hope to be able to achieve showing that more in my paintings. So far I've touched on it a little, but I'm not there yet. I feel sort of like that guy in my 1984 humorous illustration with the carrot and painting reality in realism is a really big stick.
Oy a pumpkin
I had to do it. I found this old pot up in the woods half buried and is rotted through. But has a great color and patina. It just so happens that a pumpkin is almost the perfect complementary color to it. So I bought a $2 pumpkin with a dent in it. I hadn't drawn of painted in a 2 weeks. I had a kidney stone blasted and then the rear door feel of my car. I feel good now but the door is still off the car.
So to keep my fingers and eyes limber I set these guys up and had a go. I painted them from life. I wiggle around too much so keeping a steady point of view is a pain in the ass. It's ok just ok. It'll never see a frame and you can only see it here. (iPhoto shot)
'ole Folkie Jim
This is my friend Jim Higgins. Known in folk music circles as 'ole Folkie Jim. We've known each other for years.
I like this portrait because it grabs the essential Higgins. Intense and complex always with some humor underneath. I was a challenge painting this from an iPhone image with no mid tones. I did a little cosmetic surgery removing a few wrinkles. I think I captured the real him and his ever present Hawaiian shirt.
It has to dry for a while with some thickish whites in the shirt. Then I have to oil it out to revive any sunken areas then away it goes.
Jim Higgins
Oil on Linen 11 x 14
Back to life drawing at the AFA
Tonight I returned to life drawing on Tuesday nights at the AFA Gallery in Scranton facilitated by Ted Michalowski. This evening we had the best model I seen in 8 months. An anatomy lesson on 2 feet.
There were 10 of 15 people there. What amazes me is that most of them are drawing in small (9 x 12) sketchbooks with little sharp pencils. They can draw but they even put two or three poses on a page. I paper so expensive? Drawing is a physical thing. You have to move and gesture. And they mostly sit at a table or in a chair. I stand for for 3 hours and I'm an old guy. Most of them are young kids. It takes me an hour and a half driving each way. then 2 or 2 hours of poses. It's a days work but worth it. They have better pizza in Scranton. We have better cow pies.
Here are a couple of tonights poses.
I'm developing a technique using a sharpie to set the key points and gray pastels to give the form mass... stay tuned
This model was fantastic... really fantastic.
A 3 minute pose... I like this a lot