Paintings in January

In January, I finished seven paintings. I didn’t make much progress toward finding shows or venues to display my art, but I did go to Scottsdale to peruse some galleries and I gave out my card a few times. I got into a show at the FOUND:RE Hotel which has a focus on contemporary recreations of the works of old masters, so that’s exciting!

I finished one of the two commissions that I’m working on, and the other is nearly done. I’m hoping to continue to focus on local networking and establish a first pop-up to attend.

This floral piece was one that I started in December. I left it in quite the questionable state—sometimes a piece leaves you mixed. I wish I had done things differently, but it’s a painting. You can’t love everything that you create.

It was good practice on a recent motif. I’m trying to shift the focus on the cast shadow compared to the subject itself. The difficulty with this painting was that I left it for far too long between stages, and it lost momentum. There’s only so much you can do when your flowers are dying! Also, I moved my easel and setup halfway through the piece, so I had no (dead) reference to work with.

I toyed around with multiple shadows and tried to get the focus of the piece to blend away from the subject and into the double-shadow, but I didn’t go back over the second shadow in a lighter pass. As I’m looking at the piece now, I think there’s more work to be done—I might mix my light Naples Yellow + Alizarin Crimson + Pthalocyanine Green mix into the shadow for some specks of light through the stems. Perhaps I’ll make a slightly lighter/bluer black to illustrate better that it is, in fact, two shadows. This can be done even though I pulled the tape.

My favorite piece of the month was my Cézanne dupe— immediately I was off to an excellent start, and I think I need to follow this process for future pieces. I used simple blocking with my palette knife and drew the sketch with the knife in a color near-complementary to the underpainting.

I remained in the midtones for the majority of the painting until the very end, adding in dark accents.

Here are the two commission pieces that I worked on near the end of the month. The left one is complete, and the right will have a big yellow sunflower and some other weird, abstract-y bits.

Through this time, I finished a few smaller panels, plus the big red and orange piece!

My main goal for the next few weeks is to publish some course material. I’ve been ruminating on it a while, and I did a quick draft which I published to my Patreon for the intro of the oil painting course. I have a few changes that I’m hoping to make, then it’ll be off to the races. I’ve begun by drafting out a script (which is hard to stick to when you’re talking at a camera) and I’m hoping to do some organization and video editing in the coming weeks.

My secondary goal is to continue to push on places to exhibit my work. I think that going back to Scottsdale has merit, but I’d rather identify shows via my membership to the AAG, or look up pop-ups in Phoenix on the internet. I don’t think I want to do First Friday—it doesn’t seem like my jam.

Finally, I’m feeling like I have enough dry oil paintings to run a booth, but there’s always more room for paintings! I want to keep creating and learning new techniques and applications of my current techniques to new subjects.