Archive for July, 2009

Summer is the time for lighthouses and lakes

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

OK, breaktime over. Back in this post I said I would be taking a break from painting in oils and returning to watercolors for a while. But I felt the summer was slipping away, and I hadn’t done a painting of a lighthouse. How can it be summer if there are no lighthouse paintings? Oh, and maybe a lake as well. So hereby will follow two month-old paintings in oils that I’ve done from year-or-so-old photos.

Since I mentioned that these paintings were done from photographs, I thought I’d discuss that process a bit.

When I get the chance to go away somewhere, it seems I rarely have the time to actual do any painting, or the weather is bad. Consequently I take pictures that I’ll later paint from, mostly in the winter months. I have a 22″ monitor set up next to my easel in my studio, along with a lamp that has a daylight-emulating bulb. For the sake of doing a painting, the image on the screen becomes my world.

The problem is that this world is still small, and usually the shadows in photos become problematic because they look black, and have little visible detail. So I have to make up the detail in shadows based on experience. The process is not perfect, but otherwise I’d perhaps only finish on painting a year.

Tags: landscape painting, oil painting
Posted in Current work | No Comments »

The World Seen Through the Postage Stamps of Donald Evans

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

In 1977, not long after I started working with hand-carved rubber stamps and printing with drawing ink, I had the idea to commemorate everyday objects with my own postage stamps. In coming up with this idea I was very much influenced by Claes Oldenberg’s sculptures, such as this one. (Question: how many of you are old enough to remember typewriter erasers? How quaint this is.)

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Tags: postage stamps, Watercolors
Posted in Influential artists | 1 Comment »