Jordan

Here is a portrait commission I recently finished. I made the epic drive to Fort Lauderdale, Fl (from Virginia) to work with the model and develop the composition. This was by far the most intense process I have used for completing a commission, but I was quite happy with the final result. The first painting I painted from life. The second and final piece was created from the study and photographs I took.

 

Jordan

36" x 36" 

Finished bedroom

Here is the final version of the bedroom painting. I decided to title it "3:45pm" which is the time shown on the clock, though it is too small to read at this image's size.

3:45pm

28"x36"

The Mansion

Here (finally) is the finished painting. I will be updating soon with more work.

The Mansion

35"x45"

Twilight

Here is the finished study of the farm. I spent numerous nights painting the scene from life, and one of those nights the sky looked incredible. At the time I wasn't sure (and I am still unsure) if I wanted such an active sky in the final piece, but still I couldn't resist painting it. The study shows the sky on that night, and I've adjusted it (and a few other things) in the value study. Let me know what you think. Also, I'm not sure if I am going to keep the title because I don't want any relation to those books/movies.

Twilight

15.5" x 30"

Drawings!

Lately I've been getting back into charcoal drawing and I'm really enjoying it. At first I was using it as part of the process of creating a painting, but the drawings had enough of their own energy to stand alone. I am experimenting a lot with my charcoal technique, but here are the first two drawings.

There are some drawing issues in the face, but it was a decent first attempt.

Progress!

I've been working diligently on this painting and I feel like it's getting close to finished. I'm really enjoying the way I'm applying/scraping/destroying the paint and I want this history to show in the final product. I'm finding that what's tricky about this process is that I need a good balance of refinement and looseness or the painting starts to look like crap. Ultimately, I need to refine a few things and then screw up other things and I think the painting will be finished. At least that's what I hope.

Progress and Looseness

I have been feeling the itch to loosen up for a couple of months. My work is not usually as tight as it has been, but I felt the need to push myself in a more realistic direction. I'm having a lot of fun now that I've loosened up and I feel like I should have been painting this way all along. The difficult thing I'm experiencing now is how to know when my paintings are done. I don't feel like either of these are finished yet, so I'll probably paint until I get sick of them and then call them finished.

 I had some more compositional issues with this piece. Here is the block-in before I was going to build the smaller canvas. At this stage I still wasn't happy with the composition so I made everything a little bigger.

Here is the result (with a bit of work added) but I am finally content with the composition. The previous iteration didn't have the impact or power I wanted to convey, but I found that making everything fill out the canvas more did the trick. It also meant that I didn't have to build another canvas, which is a win all the way around.

 I put this guy on the back-burner for a while. This is what it looks like 3 sittings after it's first post. I worked on it a couple of months ago when I was trying to get it ready for my solo show but (luckily) wasn't able to finish it. The painting at that stage - which I unfortunately didn't document - was really stiff and didn't have the energy that was so nice in the early stage of the piece, so yesterday I pulled it out again and got wild with it. Now I'm starting to have fun with it again.