Tagged: classical realism

Undreamed Shores

Breaker

The Breaker. Walnut ink on hand-prepared paper.

That’s the title of my new show going up Friday, January 5 at Arts of the Albemarle:

  • 516 E. Main St., Elizabeth City, NC; map here
  • Friday, January 5, 2017, 5-9pm

View 20 paintings and drawings featuring the North Carolina landscape in all weathers.

 

 

Oil on paper. 18 x 24″

Wide Open preview 6: swept and garnished

The show had a happy and buzzing opening night at the Chowan Arts Council, whose volunteers pulled long hours hanging art and laying out a spread of refreshments.  People from four counties, two states and three generations enjoyed themselves, which pleased me.  Two people told me how the scene below resembled places they know.  Then they told me about the people, alive as well as dead and buried, in their own places.

field betwen crops

Gates County. 12 x 16.” oil on linen on panel

The last time I counted, Gates County, NC has five stop lights.  It might have six now, but I wouldn’t know because I’m happy with that number.

This scene is not far from the Dismal Swamp, featured in my last post and offers a different sense of lush potential.  This is a field resting between crops when the trees are green.  The ground is not finished–just taking a breather.  Look at those leaves, and you can hear the earth boast, “see what I can do.”

Civilization depends upon this sort of readiness.  How we meet it is important.  When I was a child, fields like this were visited every week or so by the poor, who were paid at the end of the day to tend them.  Even then, their jobs were losing out to machines.

Currently, there is a conspicuous absence of people outdoors here.  I painted this scene in July, and drove by it again just this November.  There were more people visible in November.  Even the autumnal head count is down as deer hunting with packs of dogs–a social activity-has given way to sitting alone in a tree stand and waiting for the quarry to walk by.  I don’t know what that means, but it merits reflection.

Wide Open preview 2: large drawing

Below is the 24 x 36″ large study I did for Harmony in Green, an early 20th-century auto garage in Edenton.  It will hang my solo show there on Dec 4.

In the Renaissance, most preparatory drawings for paintings were done in chalk.  This is a great way to indicate quickly where things go in the composition  Such drawings look like this one, which took about twenty minutes to do.  Chalk is smudgy for shadows and holds an edge for sharp lines; hence, one can capture a lot of information with it.

Figure study

Seated Figure. Sanguine chalk.

But to test out large blocks of light and shadow, one turns to ink.  Since we live  a century into the era of comics and posters, it’s nothing for us to look at a poster and register an image.  Most poster- or comic-style drawing, though, is a very efficient shorthand, which purposely omits reference to the third dimension.  If you were busy perceiving depth in a billboard, you couldn’t read that billboard while driving.  In short, what we spend in depth perception, we gain in information.  Non-realistic pictures are worth a thousand words, as marketers the world over agree.

Realism, though, is priceless.  Witness this gem from Luca Cambiaso (fl. 1550’s):

figure studies

Luca Cambiso. Figure studies. Ink

Yes, this is realism, albeit at its most stripped-down. No one doesn’t like these Renaissance robots.  Just the act of breaking these abstract figures up into front (lit) planes and side (shadow) planes gives them life.  This is simplicity: a little doing a lot can make for a monumental effect. If you remember Genesis 1–or any other creation myth, for that matter–you have already noticed that life will not go where there is no form.

So here’s the same treatment applied to a 24 x 36″ study of the building I’ve been working on.  A little doing a lot over two square yards.  The ink is walnut ink made from the bounty of North Carolina, and the pens used in the drawing are reed pens, just as Cambiaso used.

Bunch's Garage

Bunch’s Garage: large study. Walnut ink. 24 x 36″

 

Small bites, September 25, 5-7 pm

The Windsor Boutique Hotel at 36 Broadway in downtown Asheville is presenting me along with two other painters in its next “Art at the Windsor” series.  In addition to art in the lobby, there are three floors of realist paintings as well as a few abstracts.

Kudos to the Windsor for assembling a group of a dozen or so realist painters.  Precious few galleries show such a belief in art that depicts actual things.

Check out the hotel’s teaser here:  http://www.windsorasheville.com/blog/

Long gone

Long Gone. 18 x 24″

The painting above will be there, as well as some that are not featured on this site; for lovers of fine drawings, a large-format crispy autumn scene with ten botanically accurate tree species and a three-hundred yard depth of field, executed in walnut ink without brushes on a frosty November morning.  Yum.

Oh, and the chocolates at these functions are swell, too.