The Landscape of Painting

My Life as an Artist | Part Three

Meanwhile back in Philadelphia, I kept at the set design work for the other 51 weeks of the year. I designed, and we built, sets for commercials, corporate videos, and ultimately TV shows.

As the sets I needed to design got more sophisticated, I needed to develop new skills in order to speed up the drudgery of designing with pencil and paper, as well as to more effectively present my ideas to my clients. So the next step was to learn how to use a 3D program on the computer. I took 6 months to learn enough that I could make the switch to the computer, away from the draft board. But in reality, these programs are so deep and complex that it took me maybe four or five years to be able to show my ideas the way I saw them in my head. Do you see a theme here? I teach myself stuff. But all was not well in the world of commercials and TV in Philadelphia, at least, and in the latter part of the 90′s the set design business had faded for me, at least in terms of carrying the overhead of a shop. In 1998 I closed my company.

Instead I began to work freelance as a set designer for companies that had a shop, but no designer. It was a good situation. I bore none of the costs of running a business, but I still got to design sets.

All the while we continued to go to Maine in the summer, and and I always worked on my paintings. Throughout the 90′s I had several one-man shows of my watercolors. By then I’d been working in watercolors for going on a decade, so I decided to switch to pastels, which I’d never done before. I pretty much set watercolors aside as I taught myself how to paint in pastels. Doing pastel paintings on location was very problematic, though, so I started to do sketches and take photos of scenes that I liked, and then I’d work on the paintings over the winter months. The pastel pieces were more involved, and I enjoyed working in the studio, with more control of the weather and light, and even enjoyed painting some interior scenes, which I’d never tried before.

Eventually, through the early 2000′s I had several shows of my pastels, in Maine, Massachusetts and Delaware. Always happy to learn something new, in 2004 I decided to teach myself how to paint in oils. It took me several years of hard work to get to the point of feeling that my paintings were ready to be seen by the world. In the spring of 2007 I had a show of more than 30 landscapes in oil. This is a painting from that show:

Cliffs | 2006

While it would be great to live a life doing nothing but artwork to make a living, that only happens to very few artists. There has to be another way to make a living. As you’ve seen, I’ve done a bunch of things to make a living. I just remembered that I didn’t mention that I did several stained glass commissions after college. Maybe another time I’ll tell that story. Or the time that another stained glass artist had me pose as Jesus for one of his pieces for a church. But I digress. I still do the occasional set design – this work has virtually disappeared – but I’ve also tried to reinvent myself, this time as a website designer. As you might guess, I’m happy because I have to teach myself new stuff. Here’s the link to Avenue 3 Design, my portfolio website for web design and 3D rendering.

I guess this is where we came in. I think we can now move forward from my original posting, How I Got Here. Now that we’ve met, I plan to blather on in future posts about how I work, what I like about my work and don’t, how I’m inspired by other artists and why, and other issues that may have something to do with painting, or maybe just things that interest me. Thanks for reading.

Tags: landscape painting

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 12:48 pm and is filed under The path to painting landscapes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.