Welcome
I've been drawing and painting as long as I can remember, copying comic book panels as a kid, a career as a designer and animator, and the last twelve years as a painter. Hope you enjoy the work.
18x36 Oil
This is a studio painting I started a couple months ago thinking it would hang in one of 2 shows I had opening in December. I got to a certain point on it and I got stuck, which happens. It's not a matter of how to finish it, but the best way to finish it. So it leaned facing the wall of my studio for a few weeks. Then driving back from Michigan to St. Paul I hit a stretch along Highway 29 west of
Wausau when the light and scenery was very similar to this painting. I didn't have a camera with me (I know!) so I just kept making mental notes on the color of everything and completed it in a few hours a couple of days ago. It's freeing to work from your memory and painting so much from life over the last 12 years has given me the foundation for it.
11x14 Oil
I did this painting a couple of days after Christmas while I was still visiting my family in the Upper
Peninsula of Michigan. This is the Menominee River which is the border between Michigan (on the right) and Wisconsin (on the left). It was a relatively warm thirty degrees with very little wind so I was able to spend a lot of time on location tweaking all the various shapes locking into one another. A bald eagle was soaring over the river for a while, I did see some tracks that looked canine and a little too big to be coyote, a wolf?
Heisler Park at Sundown 9x12 Oil
Just returned from Laguna Beach, having participated in the 12th Laguna Beach Plein Air Invitational. It was amazing, great to paint with that kind of intensity for a week, and be surrounded by 49 other outstanding painters from around the country. Waiting to get the other paintings shipped back to me, I'll post them next week.
Coast Bones Oil 11x14
Daybreak North Shore Oil 9x12
Birches Oil 9x12
Well summer is seems to be in its final days and I spent a few days last week up in Grand Marais Minnesota, doing a little painting along the North Shore of Lake Superior. The weather was beautiful and the painting went well, I was very relaxed and things just seemed to flow, you can never take that for granted. "Daybreak" won first place, which is always a nice affirmation, and while I was happy with all three paintings, I think my personal favorite is Coast Bones, it was a very complex composition, and I really like the way the debris filled path turned out. Wish I could have painted more but that's life. Starting to teach my Fall classes next week, back to work.
9x12 Oil
A recently displayed some work during the
Tangletown Garden Tour, since I had to hang out and babysit my paintings I decided to set the easel and go to it. The fish on the right is a mosaic
sculpture that really caught my eye, so I framed it up against the house to make it pop, it adds a sense of strangeness to an otherwise restful scene. one of my favorite little geeky things I liked about this painting is the sharp pattern of reflected glare on the yellow house on the left, it was only there briefly, but catching details like that are the little things that elevate a painting.
9x12 Oil
This is yet another painting mined out of Bruce
Vento Nature Sanctuary, it's right in St. Paul just a few blocks from my studio and is a subject I return to often. Instead of the temptation to paint the grassy field behind me I decided to try the challenge of rocky bluff wall at the edge of the park. The light effect was fleeting and I was constantly balancing the values on the rock, keeping it dark enough to read as shadow while having it illuminated by the reflected light.
9x12 Oil
Getting a little tired of paintings that are 90% green, so as I enter the dog days of summer I'm doing more work in the city. This is a great alley off of Summit Ave. in St. Paul they have these old buckled red pavers, love the textures.
18x36 Oil
