Saturday, May 26, 2007 at 09:12AM Painting outdoors when the weather is fine.
I've added a new page in the 'Art Journeys' section called Outdoor Painting. Here's a chance for a virtual visit to my outdoor studio. An indoor visit is in the works.
Friday, May 25, 2007 at 08:32AM which is what this site is right now.
Don't step on any nails. This piece, which is reall called Construction Zone, started with a scan of a fuchsia that I made on a whim. I layered it over a page from one of my watercolor sketch books and was off and running.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007 at 09:14PM 
I don't find myself doing humor in art very often. But this little ant amazed by the Cosmos always cracks me up. I guess I can relate to how it feels.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007 at 07:53PM Using the camera of our minds
I've added another in depth discussion page sharing my process for a new work-in-progress entitled Kauai Night Dream
Click on the image to go to the page and see the entire piece as it stands now. Check back later to see how it turned out. Like many of my Digital Alchemy Pieces, this one incorporates painting, photography and computer graphics. But Somehow the style seems different to me. Maybe I've morphed into a new genre. Should I call it Bio-Alchemy? This piece excites me because it is starting to capture something I've seen in nature quite often, but have always found impossible to get with a camera. I'm talking about that luminous, almost hallucinogenic quality nightscapes have. Our eyes see remarkably well into the vagary of night, but it's our a vivid brains that do the magic. You see our eyes are getting very little color information at night and loosing most of the shadow detail. But despite this deficit our brains use our past experience and knowledge of what the landscape should look like to fill in the the detail, and sometimes, create a sublime moment. I find this eye/brain relationship truly remarkable. This example goes a long ways towards explaining how the eye/brain organ functions radically different than a modern camera.
How many times have I left the studio late at night, exhausted from working on a deadline project, only to feel instantly revived by the fresh cool air and the transcendent moon back lighting the giant maples and cedars around the house. Such moments are worth at least an hours sleep.
Once I was doing a film in Jamaica, and had a few days to explore the island. this would have been around 1986, and essentially in a pre-digital photographic age. I rented a motorcycle and headed into the Blue Mountains with my still camera. Just after sunset I found myself on a ridge road near the summit and looked westward across the jungle to the sea. My view was shrouded my massive trees and hanging creepers and fireflies glinted in the shadows as the last chromatic ribbon of light faded into the water. I pulled over and took it in with a bitter sweet chord ringing in my heart, for though I was looking at a scene of extreme aesthetic beauty, I knew that it would be pointless to get out my camera and try and shoot it. What I was seeing was beyond the technical limitations of the equipment, of any equipment.
It occurred to me sometime later how to capture this type of image. I was camping at Mono Lake on the desert side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains when scene of similar delicate beauty occured. The full moon rising over the desert lake became partially obscured by cloud; Lunar light turned the diaphanous mist into silver poetry. I realized then that while my camera might not see I could. So I decided to think and observe like a painter, studying the visual mechanics of light and tone blooming before me; Memorizing all that I could about what this moonrise looked like.
And now I find myself living in an age where digital tools allow me to recreate these moments. Combining the skills of photography and painting, I can pull on my magical observations and 'print' what I saw. I now realize that I was able to take that long lost picture in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica after all; I only had to be patient while the scene remained latent in my memory, awaiting the visual renaissance happening in visual art today.
Monday, May 21, 2007 at 11:55PM 
I'm currently working to move my website and my blog into the same space. I'm working through the design problems now. Unless I want to do unsupported Custom CSS, I'm somewhat limited in my options, but all the Squarespace advantages still seems worth the stretch. Thought I'd share a circle motif that may or may not end up in the final design. And here's how it might look in the Squarespace sight.
Sunday, May 20, 2007 at 10:34AM A piece that sits at the intersection of two genres
In my figurative work I have been fascinated by the bio-geography of the human face and all its subtle beauty. I've also done a few Digital Alchemy type pieces that I call matrixes, the most famous being Tree Matrix.
I've always liked the juxtaposition of multiple instances of objects in a similar subject matter. I'll have to post a matrix gallery soon. The Blue Face matrix is a conglomeration of some of my many face paintings, They are all acrylic on paper, in this case, usually 11 x 14, Most of these really were painted in blue tones. Although the one in the far lower right, Burnt Umber Aiesha, was originally painted like this.
I'll talk more about figurative painting in a later post, but just wanted to share some thoughts on naming conventions today. I've found that most artists struggle with the process of choosing names for their work. It can demand a level of introspection that might be at cross purposes with the creative energy behind the piece; Sometimes having to label something with a meaningful title can force the artist to say to much. One school of thought is that the viewer/appreciator of the art should not have a 'frame' put around it in the form of a name. I can understand this point of view, and it's why many artists resort to the dreaded 'untitled #x'. I actually think this is the easy way out, but I don't begrudge the artists that choose to do this. In my case, I happen to be a rather prolific painter and my biggest problem is keeping track of them all. I might easily paint fifteen faces like these in a day, and if I'm on a run of faces, I could have over a hundred at the end of a month. If someone told me they just loved the piece called 'untitled face #37" I would have absolutely no idea what they were talking about. In case you haven't noticed, I have a visual brain. (unlike the engineers who named all of our streets and avenues in the Puget Sound region with numbers) But I also dislike trying to come up with a name that tries to convey deeper thematic ideas, although I have dipped into this strategy a few times.
Take the case of Angela With Blond Hair. People will wonder 'Is there a real Angela?' or 'which Angela?'. To set a few things straight, almost all my figurative work, nudes and faces included, are painted from memory and imagination. I rarely work from photographs and almost never with models––outside of life drawing workshops for sketching. So when it comes time to name the pile of faces I've just painted, I play a little game, I take the first piece on the pile and give it an 'A' name, in this case Angela, the next painting on the stack gets a B name, Barbera maybe. In this way I work my way through the alphabet. It gets a little obsessive when I try and find the just the right name that 'fits' the personality of the face staring back at me. In this way its not unlike naming your children I guess. You want to have a name that suits the individual. Usually the names come to me right away but sometimes I get crazy and look up names in data bases on the web. 'Oh this one seems Irish to me and I'm at the the F's so maybe Fiona will do." I then try and add something else descriptive to the name, a word that refers to color or mood or something. If I stopped just at Angela, then sooner or later, I'm going to have more than one Angela. But By adding the blond hair, I get something more unique. This gives me half a prayer of remembering the image and it makes my image database much easier to manage. Imagine searching on 'untitled' and getting back hundreds of entries. Useless!
Saturday, May 19, 2007 at 08:05AM
Another image from a large body of tree spirits that seem to show up in my work. I had a somewhat bland photograph of young cotton woods against a lazy sky. I played around with symmetries and got something close to this. The result was very anthropomorphic. So I then added some subtleties to bring out the human figure aspects even more. One technique I used for this was to use the liquefy brush in Photoshop to put figurative bends and curves into the tree trunks and branches. It was a rather painstaking process because you can't preview the symmetry until the liquefy mode is finished. Creating the symmetry involves flipping a copy of the image and then juxtaposing it along the edge of the original. This can be done with a hard or a soft edge. In this case I used a fairly hard edge. I remember making several attempts at the right curves and bends before I got it right.
For some reason, this image seems to suggest a member of the insect universe, something alien with veins and wings. Since Trees and insects have a such a complex relationship, that connection seems right to me. I found a geometric pattern left over from the creation of Desert Energy and used it to make the tile like tapestry on the edges. This print feels very balanced and complete to me, and I'm very happy with it. At least one other individual seems to agree, because it sold at my last show.