At The Beach

 

1933

Oil painting 36 x 36, I'm trying to loosen up and combine techniques, making fightclouds with a palette knife, the motion of the painting action adding to the motion depicted

letting Loose

Happy, Oil on Canvas, 12 x 16

3 Men

I combined a couple of different figures that I have painted separately, into a beach scene.......this one is 24 x 36 oil on Canvas

Sugar Sugar

24 x 36 Oil on Canvas.....I've been looking back at the fighclouds that I've done in the past and reimagining them.....

Mark

I found a Canvas 24 x 48 in my studio building, it had a 3/4 portrait on it and I thought I would try painting one of my own, I've always liked the 3/4 and even the full length format as used by Whistler and others but I' feel like I could only make the face interesting, I wondered how to make the rest of the body interesting.....so I thought of my friend Mark, he has been HIV positive since the mid 1980's and very out and proud of that. I've also been looking at the paintings of Elvira Bach lately and I love how she paints bodies.......

Trying Something New...

Sammy's Beach 2  16 x 20 Oil on Canvas...

I have been looking at Milton Avery Beach Scenes lately and thought I would try one myself....I’m not sure when I first became aware of the work of Milton Avery. They must’ve had some at the Minneapolis Institute of arts in the Walker Art Center which was one of my favorite places to ride my bike to as a teenager. 

But when I was in New York I got to spend some time with an Avery at a clients house. During my second stint at college at Columbia University school of general studies I was employed and taught for the school of bartending the student voting agency and one of the clients who hired me regularly was a psychiatrist and his wife who had an apartment in the 60s and had a small Avery on the wall. I asked him about it he explains at the Museum of modern Art used to have this kind of rental or try before you buy program and so he picked out the Avery and brought it home and lived with it for a little while and decided he wanted to buy it so that’s how we ended up owning it and they entertain quite often I understood their idiosyncrasies and I like them and they liked me so I got to spend a lot of time with the Milton Avery painting and I’ve always aspired to Avery‘s kind of simplicity there’s so much content there with so few brushstrokes I’m sure I was thinking of Avery as I painted this