Posts made in March, 2009

"Boogie Fever" by Lesley Spanos. Gouache on paper, 5 x 9.5". Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

I’ve long admired artist Karin Jurick’s paintings of people relaxing on the beach, so how cool is it to get to paint from one of her beach photos, with her blessing? That was our assignment for weeks 27-28 on Karin’s Different Strokes From Different Folks online painting challenge.

It’s mega cool, yes, but also intimidating. If there was one contemporary I wish I could paint like, it’s Karin. Her colors are rich and pleasing, like comfort food for the eyes. Her brushstrokes have that confident, casual look I long for in my own work. Her narrative demonstrates a keen sense of observation and a quirky sense of humor which takes a pretty picture to the next level and makes it Art.  She’s building a solid body of work, and I fully expect her work will hang on museum walls some day. Man oh man, why didn’t I buy something when her paintings first showed up on eBay, when they were more affordable?

Because I like Karin’s work so much, I have to dig deep each time I participate in her challenge to find myself. The last thing I want to do on her blog is a cheap imitation of her work, from her photo! I think it’s a dilemma most of the participating artists share. It’s like being a contestant on American Idol, trying to put your own spin on an iconic song. It’s damn hard, but if you can pull it off, you’re a better artist for it. Even if you can’t pull it off, you’re still a better artist for it, because you were true to yourself. That’s a big reason why I keep doing these challenges – it forces me to listen to my own voice.

That, and it makes me stretch my abilities by painting stuff I normally wouldn’t paint. Like those people on the beach – I love to paint surf, but I have never included a person in a seascape. Never! So it’s Challenge Time!

Here are a few shots I took along the way:

The painting begins with a waterproof pen drawing on paper.

This time I toned the paper after doing the drawing, using transparent washes of acrylic paint. Why? I dunno. Just felt like it.

The rest of the painting was done using M. Graham gouache. My palette consisted of:

• burnt umber
• phthalo blue
• ultramarine blue
• dioxazine purple
• cadmium red
• quinacridone rose
• cadmium yellow light
• zinc white
• titanium white

Oils might have been easier and more effective, but I needed a good workout in gouache. Gouache is tricky, because you need to work quickly, and you can’t put on too many layers before it turns to mud.

Waves are well within my comfort zone. People aren’t! So the beach background fell off the paintbrushes effortlessly, and within twenty minutes, it was done. Then I spent the next two hours struggling with the figures.

Having painted a few waves in my lifetime, I think the main thing I need to keep reminding myself is to let them flow. Because when you let the paint do its thing, all sorts of happy accidents happen that make it look more convincing. Labor over a wave for hours, and it looks contrived, like those frozen in time paintings of waves where every little droplet is defined. (You know the ones I mean… usually there’s light shining through the wave right where it’s starting to break.) I like to paint waves as I see them, churning and violent and random. Today’s waves started as dark humps with lots of brown mixed in, because they’re dirty with sand. Then I made a pass with a lighter color, using a circular, rolling motion to imitate the motion of the breaking wave. The cool thing about gouache is that it remains water soluble even after it dries, so as I painted the undercolor was picked up by the lighter paint, mixing with it and creating multiple tones in between. I finished the wave with a pass of thicker white mixed with a tiny bit of red. The red makes the white pop against the complementary blue-greens of the water.

That’s me smiling at my favorite happy accident in the painting.

Starting to mess with the figures (and yes, they are a mess)…

…and the (butt) end result. I’m not really happy with the figures, or with my gouache technique here. I didn’t know what colors to use or how to define the planes on a human body with paint so I fussed with them too much. Gouache strokes should look confident. Lay them down once, and move on! Mine are unsure. You can see me searching for the right answer. That’s why I need to practice in gouache a LOT more.

But there are some things happening here that make me happy. I like the bits of underpainting showing through, and I wish there were more of them. I like the looseness of the sky and the rough indication of clouds. I like the lack of hard edges around the figures, though I could have used a few hard edges here and there. I like the girl’s hair, another happy accident.

The foreground is a big part of the painting and it needed something to define it and bring it forward… so I added sand texture and pebbles. I flicked some light color on with a brush, then added burnt umber shadows to each speck. Fun.

What color is wet sand? Well, it’s darker than dry sand, and reflects a LOT of sky color. The wetter it is, the more sky it reflects. So I guess sand is a dirty brown mixture of sea color and sky color.

Here’s the finished piece. I was getting ready to send it in to Karin, but I have a few free hours to paint today (after I subtract Earth Hour), and there are more figures in the reference photo calling to me. I could just stop here, but in my head I hear Thelma’s last words to Louise – “Let’s keep goin’!” I’m thinking it’s diptych, or even triptych time!

"Kalifornia Roll" by Lesley Spanos. 12 x 9" oil painting on panel. Copyright ©2009 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved.

A California roll is to sushi what Tex-Mex food is to Mexican cuisine – a Western adaptation of a traditional food using local ingredients more suited to the American palate.  You can find them in shopping malls and supermarkets throughout the US.

The California roll is an inside-out roll (Uramaki), with the rice on the outside, because it was thought that non-sushi-loving Americans would balk at the sight of nori (seaweed) on the outside. Inside is avocado, cucumber strips, and some really gross fake crab (Krab) made from molded cooked fish paste. There are many variations of the basic California roll. Some include mayo, cream cheese, and other stomach-churning ingredients. I’ve had them with crab salad inside (real crab, even!), and while the concept grossed me out, they were actually much better than I expected. (The key is to think of it as an hors d’oeuvre rather than sushi.) Some rolls are sprinkled with sesame seeds or fish roe (Tobiko), while others are served plain.

I did the painting as part of Karin Jurick’s Different Strokes From Different Folks web challenge. If you go here, you can see the original reference photo for this challenge, as well as the other artist’s interpretations.

I love being part of this challenge, but I almost didn’t do this one because it was such a difficult photo for me. Here are some of the issues I had with it:

• There are few shadows to define the form, and I rely on shadows a lot in my painting.
• There is fish roe on the rolls. I don’t do fish roe of any kind. Can’t even look at it without my stomach doing flip flops, due to a bad New Year’s Eve experience with some caviar a few years ago.
• The rolls are drenched in shoyu.

I decided the only way for me to do this painting was to gather some of my own visual information, and combine it with Karin’s photo. I needed to see what color the rice would be without the shoyu, and where the shadows would fall if I changed the lighting. I make simple “mom” style sushi rolls at home, and we had some leftover rice in the rice cooker, so I made a quick mock-up using only rice.  The rice wasn’t properly prepared for sushi, so I added a bit of rice vinegar and nuked it to make it stickier. Fortunately, it didn’t have to taste good. All I needed was a “blank” so I could add the characteristics of Karin’s sushi on top of it.

I arranged the pieces like the ones in Karin’s photo, and played with the light and the arrangement of the other elements. Here’s my final choice:

I wish I’d moved the wasabi out of the shadow, maybe to the upper right corner.

I used a 12 x 9″ gessoed masonite panel. To tone the surface, I used several thin layers of acrylic paint, separated by clear Atelier binder medium, and finished with a top coat of binder mediun. You can’t really see it in the photos, but the layering gave it a tortoise shell-like surface with lots of depth. I almost didn’t want to cover it, and promised myself that I’d leave as much exposed as possible.

The drawing was laid in using a permanent black pen. Mistakes on binder medium can be erased with a cotton swab moistened with rubbing alcohol.

Then I began painting in oils, using lots of red in the rice to prep it for the reflected greens from the plate.

Just feeling my way around here, trying to figure out the colors. The aqua of the plate was particularly hard for me, but eventually I realized it needed to be dirtier and more yellow.

I tried to stay as true to the original photo as possible when painting the sushi. Everything else is mine, but I wanted those to be Karin’s sushi… minus the shoyu and roe. Because the Krab and avocado in the reference were brown from the soy sauce, I had to create those colors from memory.  In the end, I felt the greatest sense of accomplishment from painting those two ingredients.

I kept the plate and mock sushi in front of me, and ended up painting more from life than from the photo. So much subtle color is lost in a photo!

For once I remembered to leave space around the edges for the frame. If I hadn’t, that shoyu dish at the top probably would have been cut off. I want that dish almost kissing the edge of the painting, which probably breaks someone’s rules of composition.

Here’s the finished piece, with the edges cropped as they might be by a frame. The final touch was a drop of shoyu on the plate as a tribute to the original photo.

I’ve dubbed this a “Kalifornia Roll” because it’s filled with Krab.

"The Girls" by Lesley Spanos. Oil painting on 14 x 8" wood panel. © Copyright 2009 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved.

I can’t say that “Sex and the City” has ever been one of my favorite television shows. I’ve laughed at times – sometimes really hard – when I’ve  stumbled across it, but it’s not anything I’ve ever gone out of my way to see.  It’s hard for me to relate to characters who obsess over shoes and clothes. Though I can understand a good, healthy obsession with sex.

So I’m surprised at myself for painting a tribute to Sex and the City. The source of inspiration was a photo of a wig shop window taken by artist Karin Jurick, posted on her Different Strokes From Different Folks challenge. It’s a very cool image, with many stylized wig heads to choose from. My first thought was a take on the Rolling Stones “Some Girls” album cover, but then I noticed these four “girls” grouped together, and from that point on all I could see was Samantha, Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda. (I had to look those names up on Wikipedia.) I searched the web for photos of the actresses, because the only face ingrained in my memory is Sarah Jessica Parker’s.

Here are some photos taken along the way. Please excuse the poor image quality and uneven lighting, as I was shooting in the studio at night.

This surface is a little unusual for me. It’s a piece of birch plywood I stained with a wash of orange acrylic, then sealed with several coats of Atelier Binder medium. I like this stuff, because it provides good adhesion for the paint, and dries crystal clear. Think of it as a clear primer. The way the paint feels when it glides onto this surface is wonderful – sort of buttery and silky at the same time.

The drawing was inked in roughly using a waterproof pen. I’m reminded once again that I should take more time to get the drawing right, because there were a few problems I could have avoided if I had.

The hair seemed like a good place to start establishing the characters. Kim Cattrall’s ‘do came from a red carpet photo rather than the TV series. For a wig, the height and Marilyn Monroe sweep seemed more appropriate than her straighter TV hair. It doesn’t look like her character, but it’s my favorite head in the painting.

Carrie’s hair wasn’t supposed to be green (I got some black paint in my yellow), but I liked it, so I left it that way. It fit with the look I was going for, a mix of reality and caricature.

How’d Courtney Love get in there?

Okay, I’ll just paint out Courtney’s face and hope to simply suggest Miranda with a blank wig head. Not a bad solution, because my heads were looking too human, and I want some of them to look wiggy.

If it’s not one thing, it’s another. Now Charlotte has morphed into Lisa Ling…

…but it’s nothing a big pair of sunglasses won’t (mostly) hide.

I left the background as is, just the stained/sealed wood surface. I love the look of the paint next to the wood grain.

And so we end another painting adventure. Thanks for stopping by!

P.S. It’s just occured to me that I have painted characters who idolize fashion with no bodies for their clothes, and no feet for their shoes. No, my girls are all brains and witty dialogue!