Blog Archives

Q: What’s on the easel today?

Work in progress

A: I am planning my next pastel painting and the photo above shows a preliminary charcoal sketch for it. I’m continuing to study the effects of scaling my work up or down. This piece will be a smaller, 26” x 20,” version of “The Orator,” 38” x 58” (image), 50” x 70” (framed), from 2017.

Comments are welcome!

Q: What’s on the easel today?

Preliminary charcoal drawing
“Schemer,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 26” x 20,” packed up for transport to the framer
“Schemer,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 26” x 20,” Unframed

A: Here is a preliminary charcoal drawing in preparation for my next ”Bolivianos” pastel painting. With the most recent works I have been experimenting with scale. This will be a 58” x 38” version of ”Schemer,” 2019, 26” x 20.”

Comments are welcome!

Pearls from artists* # 494

Shamans, Tiwanaku, Bolivia

*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Emile Cartailhac was a man who could admit when he was wrong. This was fortunate, because in 1902 the French prehistorian found himself writing an article for L’Anthropolgie in which he did just that. In “Mea culpa d’un sceptique” he recanted the views he had spent the previous 20 years forcefully and scornfully maintaining: that prehistoric man was incapable of fine artistic expression and that the cave paintings found in Altmira, northern Spain, were forgeries.

The Paleothithic paintings at Altamira, which were produced around 14,000 B.C., were the first examples of prehistoric cave art to be officially discovered. It happened by chance in 1879, when a local landowner and amateur archaeologist was busily brushing away at the floor of the caves, searching for prehistoric tools. His nine-year-old daughter, Maria Sanz de Sautuola – a grave little thing with cropped hair and lace-up booties – was exploring farther on when she suddenly looked up, exclaiming, “Look, Papa, bison!” She was quite right: a veritable herd, subtly colored with black charcoal and ocher, ranged over the ceiling. When her father published the finding in 1880, he was met with ridicule. The experts scoffed at the very idea that prehistoric man – savages really – could have produced sophisticated polychrome paintings. The esteemed Monsieur Cartailhac and the majority of his fellow experts, without troubling to go and see the cave for themselves, dismissed the whole thing as a fraud. Maria’s father died, a broken and dishonored man, in 1888, four years before Cartailhac admitted his error.

After the discovery of many more caves and hundreds of lions, handprints, horses, women, hyenas, and bison, the artistic abilities of prehistoric man are no longer in doubt. It is thought that these caves were painted by shamans trying to charm a steady supply of food for their tribes. Many were painted using the pigment most readily available in the caves at the time: the charred stick remnants of their fires. At its simplest, charcoal is the carbon-rich by-product of organic matter – usually wood – and fire. It is purest and least ashy when oxygen has been restricted during it’s heating.

In The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair

Comments are welcome!

Q: What’s on the easel today?

Reference photo, preliminary charcoal drawing, pastel painting

A: (Foreground) “The Enigma,” soft pastel on sandpaper, “26” x 20” is awaiting finishing touches.

Comments are welcome!

Q: What’s on the easel today?

Preliminary sketch

Preliminary sketch

A:  I’m working on a preliminary charcoal drawing for my next large pastel painting.  It will be number seven in the “Bolivianos” series.

Comments are welcome!

Start/Finish of “Poker Face,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″image, 50″ x 70″ framed

Preliminary charcoal sketch

Preliminary charcoal sketch

Finished

Finished

Start/Finish of “Incognito,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″ image, 50″ x 70″ framed

C-print and preliminary charcoal sketch

C-print and preliminary charcoal sketch

Finished and signed (lower left)

Finished

Comments are welcome!

Start/Finish of “Judasing,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38″

Preliminary charcoal sketch on sandpaper

Preliminary charcoal sketch on sandpaper

Finished painting, before signing

Finished painting, before signing

Comments are welcome!

Start/Finish of “The Ancestors,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38″

Preliminary charcoal sketch on white drawing paper. The white bits are masking tape used to tape several pieces of paper together to make a large sheet.

Preliminary charcoal sketch on white drawing paper.  The white bits are masking tape joining small sheets of paper together to make one that’s 60″ x 40″.

 

Finished and signed

Finished and signed, lower left

Comments are welcome!

 

 

 

Q: Do you have any favorites among the Mexican and Guatemalan folk art figures that you depict in your work?

Idea for an upcoming pastel painting

Idea for an upcoming pastel painting

A:  I suppose it seems that way, since I certainly paint some figures more than others.  My favorite characters change, depending on what is happening in my work.  My current favorites are a figure I have never painted before (the Balinese dragon above) and several Mexican and Guatemalan figures last painted years ago.  All will make an appearance in a pastel painting for which I am still developing preliminary ideas (above).

Comments are welcome!    

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