Floral [work in progress]

Figure

Recent pen and ink drawings

Portrait

Sketchbook/Conway/Fall

I'm working on a picture of the scene represented by the two ink drawings at the bottom and have been using them (and the exercise of doing them) to understand the value possibilities and where I'd like to head with color, too. I took some photos one day while driving around Conway and Ashfield and have decided to try and do a series of watercolor pictures. Above them is a watercolor sketch of that scene; the other an ink and watercolor sketch of another piece I plan to do.

Some work from Sunday

Graphite, watercolor and gouache. Both pieces are about 5" x 8" and done on mat board. Quick studies with color added after the initial "outlines" were made. Personal preference for the yellow background; something about the attitude (real or imagined) depicted.

Pictures in progress

The top one is a fall scene I started recently and have set aside long enough...want to get back to it; the lower one I have been working on very slowly (ten months or longer). Both are oil on canvas board c. 18" x 24".

She reminds me of Wyeth's Helga

Wyeth, in something that I recall reading, referred to himself as making abstract work. That may or may not be a difficult self-observation for some to swallow. I can see it, I think; his work was so amplified, super-real at times, that it seems he went beyond duplicating what was before him. The lines (which of course don't exist in the observable world) that he was required to make to construct the image expressed a quality in the subject separate from the subject itself. I think that is abstraction. When I made this I was attuned to what I felt; an energy, attitude or emotion, an ethereal expression.