Great Plains Art Museum
1155 Q Street, Hewit Place, first floor, Lincoln, Nebr.
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Needless to say, I’ve been very busy preparing for the show, and I haven’t had time to update the site. I made four brand new paintings made specifically for the show, and I’ve posted them below.

oil on canvas “Suspension III” October, 2011

oil on canvas “Expanse” October, 2011

oil on canvas “Culminate” October, 2011

oil on canvas “Approach II” September, 2011

oil on canvas “Appearance” June, 2011

This piece was commissioned by a friend as an anniversary present for his wife. He allowed me a lot of freedom in his request — he wanted a seascape with a muted color scheme, and a sense of hope. These parameters are very much in my comfort zone, so I was able to focus on the mood of the piece rather than the technical aspects.

I wanted the piece to have an overall sense of calm, so I chose a deep blue as the dominant color. I balanced this with a cool yellow light that overtakes the upper right part of the painting. The light is offset by some darker clouds which are moving off the scene, and by tumultuous waves that catch the approaching sunlight. There is turmoil here, but it seems to be subsiding and relenting. Calm and warmth are beginning to appear.

oil on canvas “Summer Landscape” November, 2010

Final version of “Summer Landscape.” Previous versions of this painting can be seen here.

In the previous version of this paintng, the colors were too muted, and the center of the painting lacked focus. I feel that those issues have been largely resolved in the final version: the colors are much brighter, and the transition between the yellow skyline and the blue clouds is much more elegant.

I am quite pleased with the mood of this piece. It has a brighter, more intense palette than I usually paint with, but still has an overall sense of calm.

My plan for the color scheme is to draw on the orange from the wall, but make it much brighter and yellower, and to complement that with deep blue in the water. Also, I want the orange sky to have a sense of calming energy to counteract the more violent energy in the sea.

Versions 1 – 2

“untitled – work in progress” | oil on canvas | March, 2011 | versions 1 (left) & 2 (right)

The colors were quite bad at first, but it was a start. The second round of paint helped the color significantly. I was struggling a little with the water at this point – I wanted to reflect the orange in the waves, but the color was getting pretty muddy. It will take patience to pull that off – more glazing and less wet-on-wet.

Version 3

The third iteration is starting to feel much better. I went in with some thin ultramarine blue glazes which really calmed things down a bit.  It looks like the way to handle the water is with slow glazing, one color range at a time, so that the blue and orange don’t get muddy. There’s still a lot of work to be done here, but I think the piece is headed in the right direction.

oil on canvas “untitled – work in progress” March 24, 2011

With this in mind, I set out to paint a sunset. Historically, I’ve avoided this, largely because sunsets are so iconic that they immediately evoke a sense of nostalgia that I don’t want to reproduce in my work. With that said, the feelings that I experience when I witness a sunset are very much inline with the concepts behind my artwork. Especially in the midwest, where the sky becomes an enveloping field of color, a sunset can be invigorating and overwhelmingly beautiful.

The source imagery for the piece is from a photoshoot I did in a local park at sundown. This image is still pretty dark, but I think that there’s a lot of potential for hope when dark is matched with light.

Version 1: First Sketch

Here’s the first sketch. I love the immediacy of loose oil sketches, the forms feel energetic and unrefined. I’ll lose a bit of that when I polish things up, but that’s the way things go. There’s a lot of room for improvement here: mostly, color needs to be refined – the yellow is especially bad.

oil on canvas“untitled, work in progress, first sketch”September, 2010

Version 2:

The horizon is tighter here, giving the piece a better focus. The center of the painting, in between the yellow and blue, is pretty ambiguous — I’m not sure what’s going on there. More thin glazes next time should make the yellow more luminous. The blue part of the sky seems to be shaping up pretty well.

oil on canvas“untitled – work in progress, revision 1″October, 2010

*The work in the first few posts actually occurred in the last few months of 2010, while I was working on redesigning the site. Therefore, there is a discrepancy between the date the entry was posted and the date of the work.