Flower Seller on a Cool Morning (Work in Progress)

Update:  One thing I'm thinking of is changing the composition to enlarge the bouquet, so that it fills the upper right quadrant of the painting, something like the mock-up, above.

Below, is the painting as it looks, now.  Still a work in progress.

I'm going to put it aside for awhile and then re-evaluate the composition.

 


Flower Seller on a Cool Morning: oil paint on 30"x40" canvas. Still a work in progress.

 Meanwhile, be sure to check out the swimming turtle, on my other blog.

Woman Waiting On A Sunny Morning

Painted this morning, from life.

Oil on 30"x40" canvas.

The figure in the foreground is the figure I painted today.  I painted her on top of an old painting (actually one of my first tries at oil painting on a large scale), probably painted three or four years ago.

Today is unseasonably warm, expected to be in the 70s (F).  We were able to have windows open while we painted.

Bathing Beauty; Sleeping Sitting Up

Drawn from life, yesterday afternoon.

Bathing Beauty is oil paint and oil pastel on canvas, 24"x36".

Sleeping Sitting Up is oil pastel on clear gessoed doorskin, 12"x12".


About these:

The model chose her costumes. The first was an early 20th century swimsuit. I imagined a summer day at a beach with a rollercoaster.

In the second pose, she got into a state that reminded me very much of those times when, exhausted, you fall asleep despite yourself.

At the Stables (work in progess continues)

I did some painting this morning. So I'm posting what I did, and now will give this painting a rest and look at it later to reassess. It's time to get some other paintings going.

On an unrelated topic, except that it involves rocks, as does this painting, I recently saw the eagle in Eagle Rock. It was about noon and I was a passenger in a car headed up Figueroa and onto the 134 freeway west, and I looked up at the big boulder and saw why it is called Eagle Rock! Small mystery solved.

At the Stables (work in progress)

When it's hot, I look for a shady place. This, an oil painting on a 30"x40" canvas, is my first stab at painting the San Pascual Stables, in the arroyo area of South Pasadena.

Ficus on a Sunny Morning (30"x40")

More of my ficus obsession. This is the painting first posted on July 14th, further developed.

Ficus on a Sunny Morning (work in progress)

This 30"x40" painting on canvas is of another Pasadena tree, this time one on Cherry Drive.

Karate Student at Night (work in progress)

June 14 update: On left, the most recent version.



This is an oil painting on 36"x48" canvas. It's another Green Street night scene, this time of a student at the karate school, that I am painting from I photograph I took while on the same walk that resulted in the painting, Discord on Green Street.

There were two students and a teacher in the studio. The students were blindfolded and doing moves that their teacher called out. This is a painting of one of the students, just gathering himself to move.

Breakfast at the Cricket Cafe (work in progress)

This oil on 30"x40" canvas is a painting I'm working on from my March visit to Portland, Oregon. The Cricket is a small cafe in the south east quadrant of the town, at Belmont and 32nd Ave., with really good breakfast (based on one visit, for breakfast).

What I've learned so far, from working on a larger scale, with this painting, Lorena and Flower Seller, is that I really should at least mark the canvas and the source photo into quadrants, so that I have some good idea of where things go. It's very easy for my eye to get lost in all the space and lose relationships between things. Marking quadrants sure would have made painting this much easier.

Adding glazes and modifying Lorena 20"x24"

The portrait of Lorena finally got dry enough for me to try applying some glazes. I used M Graham's non-toxic walnut alkyd medium for oils, mixed with small amounts of paint.







Note: The top photo is of the eyes after I read pasadenaadjacent's comment and re-painted; the lower is of the askew eyes pasadenaadjacent commented upon. The last photo is of the whole portrait, as it now looks.

Vancouver Farmers Market Paintings

These are the two paintings I've done so far that are about a recent spring
morning farmers market in the Pacific Northwest town of Vancouver, Washington.

If you've seen the earlier posts about Flower Seller, you know that painting an oil painting on such a large scale was a new experience for me. It was so big, I had to move it off the easel and prop it against a wall in order to finish painting it.