Work in Progress

Works in Progress

When I returned to painting in 2003, I was on the verge of retiring from the obsessions of the work a day world, and wanted to reacquaint myself with the world around me. The first thing I focused on was the fantastic shapes of trees without leaves. I then expanded to landscapes, wild life, and still life. As time went on I was exposed to painting the figure and recreating a number of master works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I have become fascinated by the role of the figure in painting to create a mood and tell a story. The integration of light in the composition has become a major focus of my art creation.

The process of creating art is a fascinating experience. As I see it, it occurs on both an intellectual and a technical level. Intellectually it challenges us to experience and react to the world around us, and to share our vision and appreciation. Technically it challenges us to both learn to manipulate the medium and tools with which we create our art, and to learn to critically see the world around us, enabling us to grasp the nuances of light, shadow, color and form.

‎Golden Artist Colors recently posted this quote on facebook, "Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing." -- Camille Pissarro.

As you can see from this discussion, I find the creation of art an extremely challenging and exhilerating experience. I am becoming more and more fascinated by this process. which occurs during conceiving and executing a work of art. The process is complete when the art work is done. For this reason, I have created this page to document some of the steps in the creative process which I find as interesting as the completed work. I hope you also fine it interesting.

New York Series

Worth Street NYC

The following is a particularly interesting example of creating a work of art. The reason is that I am not attempting to copy an existing motif, but rather I am creating a picture/story by assembling a number of independent pieces into and integrated new scene. I am employing the techniques that I learned in Scott Nickerson's Master Class at Colorest, In Red Bank, New Jersey.

This summer I had the occasion to visit a number of sites in NYC and photograph the interesting and diverse people who live and work in the city. Below are six of my photos. I love the ubiquitous push carts. To me they symbolize how food unties the diverse population. The shadow shape in the first photo fascinated me, but the position of the vendor in the second photo was great so I took the second photo as my starting point. I wanted to insert the figures and and vehicles from the next four photos into my base scene. I then cropped the base photo accordingly to provide a strong composition into which I could insert the other figures and vehicles. I then used the time honored techique, dating from the time of Michaelangelo, of griding and creating a cartoon drawing. The photo below shows a transparent grid placed on the cropped base photo. I then created a cartoon of the exact size of my 16 x 20 panel, by griding the paper and hand drawing the scene, modifying the base drawing and inserting the other figures and vehicles. This took care to scale the adders so that they fit in the scene. I did this by ratioing up the figures based on their head size as a relative measure to their other body parts. Once the cartoon was drawn, I transferred it to the panel with tracing paper and used workable fixative to preserve the drawing to accept paint. Below I show the initial block in which is the real challenge to correct the drawing, establish color harmony and a sense of light. In the block in that I have below I am only begining to establish the sense of light. When I finally establish the consistent lighting in a painting I suddenly feel a viseral emotion that is quite amazing!! Well I will report more as the work progresses

Initial block in. An effort to get the drawing right and begin to establish the values and achieve an initial sense of light. Much more work will follow! The last thing that will be added are the trees.

Continuing with the block in. Refined and corrected perspective, added street markings, modified the shadow shape, major corrections on the two figures in black. Touched up the woman in blue and changed the truck entering the scene. It was interesting but the cartoon was not adequate to convey the faces, and there were other drawing errors of proportion that I only recognized as I started to add color. Next phase will be to develop a sense of light as defined by the shadow and transmitted light of the umbrella.

Continuing with the block in. Working to
establish the shadows in and under the umbrella. Much more to do, but comparing with the previous photo, a sense of space is beginning to be established.

Notice how a few changes, such adding the tree branches, have significantly increased the sense of space and light. We begin to truly feel that we are in one of the canyons of NYC! Note the significant impact of adding the tree on the left side. This effect should become even greater when the leaves are added. Notice that I have added an additional shadowed wall protruding to the right hand edge of the painting. This serves to expand the light dark rythm which goes across the painting. This dark panel at the edge also stops the eye from wandering out of the scene, and provides a

perfect backdrop to frame the yellow cab that is entering the scene. The posts that go along the sidewalk for a portion of Worth Street also provided the opportunity to create strategic value contrasts in the scene. Note the post behind the young lady's head cleanly separates her face from the background. The post behind the vendor's head frames and highlights his gray hair. The post just in front of the cab helps to provide definition for the headlight and the front of the car. Also, note the lady in blue was carrying a white bag in the previous picture above. Here I made it a dull orange to compliment the blue dress with red design lettering to compliment the green paper box she is passing. It is really fun to use these elements of the scene to help create the sense of light and space.

In this version I started to put the foliage on the trees and noticed that the concrete verticals on the building in the background were too light and the verticals on the right sunny side of the building did not emphasize the sun and shade portions of each column. Also shadows were needed in the windows behind the police wagon. My daughter pointed out that the wall on the left side of the painting did not read well. These items and other will be dealt with in the next installment.

Notice how darkening the background further sets off the umbrella and will make it possible to represent the various values in the foliage that has yet to be added. Further emphasizing the light and shadow sides of the right hand vertical columns gives volume to the receding sunny side of the building. Reading a book on Vermeer and how he handled perspective enabled me to properly represent the left hand wall so that it adds to the feeling of space and light in the scene. Similarly, perspective was corrected for the taxi, and the lettering was added to the side of the car. I later discovered that many more perspective changes were needed in the taxi! I now see that the wall to the left of the umbrella stand needs to be darkened. So off the the next round of modifications and additions!

Major additions and changes in this step. Particularly adding the foliage to the trees, appropriately including light warm, highlights, and warm and cool darks for realism. The addition of the foliage significantly increased the sense of space, and also served to highlight the umbrella! The fruit was another major addition, particularly the bananas, which drove me crazy! I then added interest to the box in the lower right, detailing the flaps and a plastic bag. Also put one of the bunches of bananas in a plastic bag, and added a plastic container of strawberries and a row of tomatoes to further convey

the crowded nature of the fruit stand. Added details of the ruts, patches, and utility cover in the street. What would a NYC street be without ruts and patches!!! Also started to show the work and got great comments from Scott Nickerson and Valentine. Further worked on the shadows to follow Scott's rule that the darkest light will never be as dark as the lightest dark. The truck on the left and the taxi on the right, were two areas needing refinement. Darkened the truck on the left to bring into line with Scott's rule and widened it for better proportions, as with the taxi on the right softened the bottom edge and reduced the contrast to the lighted road showing through. However, the taxi still did not seem to fit . Valentime pointed out it detracted from the fruit stand, which has become the focul point. To see this put you finger over the taxi and see how the picture changes. He also pointed out that the taxi does not seem to be driving straight on the road! This really helped me to go back and study the situation. It took several hours to figure out what was wrong, and the results were very interesting, which I will report on in the next update!!! Suffice it for now to say that we often do not see for looking.

Notice in the previous image the brightness of the taxi detracted from the fruit stand as did the brightness of the sidewalk and the road between the taxi and the police wagon. Also the reason that the taxi seems to be angling across the road is that I had drawn it as if I was looking at it as if I was perpendicular to it, as I was in the reference photo above. In fact in the scene we are behind the taxi watching it drive away from us. Once I realized this and corrected the perspective, including seeing the right side wheel under the car and reduced the value and intensity of the yellow color, the taxi now appears to sit squarely in its lane and sit in the background! Note that

the wheels and the taxi symbol on the door now must be shown as elipses to maintain the perspective. I then stood back at compared the painting to the reference photo above and noticed that in the previous image the right side of the cart was too light of value, in that it is actually in shadow. Correcting this and capturing the reflections in the metal side of the cart gives the cart a real sense of volume, almost protruding out of the canvas. This coupled with darkening the outfit of the lady on the cell phone across the street, the ground around her and slightly lightening the street to the right of the cart makes a real improvement in the light and volume relations in the right side of the painting. I find it amazing that as I work on developing the motif I am continually seeing the motif more accurately, and once modification leads to discovering the next improvement! I now have to sit the painting on the mantle and look at it for a few days to discover the next round of improvements.

Well, in this round I touched up some of the details on the fruit, the jacket of the lady across the street on the cell phone, softened the lettering on the police wagon, and added the lettering on the taxi cab. Finally, I put my monogram in the lower left hand corner. So I pronounce this one done, until I see something else!

In summary, I used classic painting techniques to assemble this New York street scene. I think this illustrates the amount of work necessary to create an original work of this level of detail. I am pleased with this not only for all of the gymnastics I had to go through to create it, but it tells a story that I love. This painting celebrates the ethnic diversity of New York City where all peoples share the common bond of food!