Latino Vanitas

This 16 x 20" acrylic was done during class. I was trying to model the depiction of challenging surfaces in this medium, and arranged a still life in the vanitas tradition. Only that this time I used african and european instruments to symbolize my culture.

My Friend Jose

He was on a hammock and warned me I only had 30 minutes. It is not a good likeness, but it is a great watercolor. On Lanaquarelle block, 140 lb, 12 x 16"

Jaloguin

This is another 18 x 24" acrylic done from my memories of Halloween. I am not sure if it will stay like this, but I am really liking doing this research into the recesses of my visual memory. It is amazing! I have focused on remembering the mood and light more than anything. In these memories I am the viewer, so none of these children is me. I am not forcing the composition or anything. The revisions I have done have more to do with values and colors than with content.

Ball Games

This 20 x 16" acrylic was done entirely from a collection of memories I have of my childhood in Puerto Rico. The top one is the most recent version. I took some licence with the houses as I did not want to make the background too distracting. I did not want to remember every detail either. After all, the genre is defined by the absence of small details.

The composition came out ok, considering I did not plan it. I find it very interesting to paint something I remember without a set plan, because you never know what's going to show up, it's like planning an impromptu dinner. So although the painting would look more beautiful if I planned it more, I am not sure "the doors would remain open," so to speak, to welcome stray visuals of my childhood.

A Berkeley Figure Painting Session

I was invited to a painting group that meets in Berkeley, at the home studio of a local artist. I have painted the model before, but this time, because of the strange size of the canvas (15 x 30") I extended the view to include a fellow painter hard at work. This palette had Titanium White, Pyrrole Orange, Pthalo Blue, Dioaxine Violet, Cadmium Red, Cadmium Yellow, Lemon Yellow and Pthalo Green.

The Business Part of It

Getting my work professionally photographed over the winter break wasn't hard because I didn't do it. The hard part was packing it again for storage! Canterbury Media did a great job of preparing the images for reproduction, something I could learn how to do eventually, but that is not cost-effective right now (and it would wreck my arm).

I have now uploaded the initial seventeen images to Imagekind. Most are landscapes done in watercolor, acrylic and oil, but soon enough I will be posting portraits and other pieces. I will be posting more as I get subsequent batched photographed and processed. If you like any of them, you'll be able to order glicee prints in a variety of sizes and papers directly from Imagekind. Isn't that great?

The Undocumented series will also be turned into giclee prints. However, Canterbury Media will print them locally and I will do the shipping. The percentage that a company like Imagekind would have received will go directly to Oakland's Centro Legal de la Raza.

Two Looks At Inspiration

Inspiration Point is a rather beautiful (and conveniently located) part of Tilden Park. A friend from figure drawing class and I went at 9:00 AM on a blustery morning, and climbed up a steep little hill next to the main and paved path. I was going to take my oils, but it was just too cold to sit there for hours. I took watercolors instead, and a Lanaquarelle pad that is 16 x 20." As it turns out, the sun played hide and seek for a while and this helped me fight the wind chill (I was wearing neophrene gloves and many layers). I don't know why I don't remember that folding chairs don't work on hills (Karen my friend was sitting comfortably on the ground). An easel is what I should have taken, as the wind kept destabilizing my pad.

The sunnier view is of Mount Diablo, and the darker one is of Tilden looking south. The straight line near the top is the actual Inspiration Point parking lot. It looks like we did a lot of walking, but we did not!

Winter Still Lives

Last year I started a tradition of painting a few still lives indoors, between December and March. Our winter is very rainy, and here on the hills between El Sobrante and El Cerrito, it gets foggy too. All of which makes working outdoors unpredictable. So I turn the focus inward and work from my imagination, from dreams, or from something I can place indoors.

I seldom have the patience to find a decent composition, a skill I need to work on. But something I've realized is that it takes me an average of two hours to paint each object in a still life. This oil is 24 x 36," a manageable size. Still lives beyond these dimentions pose other challenges and as a result take more time.

Instead of cotton duck, the support is engineered birch. I am enjoying painting on this surface, but had to switch to sable brushes so that I would not end scraping 30% of the paint surface with each stroke of the hog bristles.