Skip to main content


Oil on cardboard. I have been loving this pairing since the cardboard soaks up the first few layers of oil paint I can lay down some nice intial rough layers without having to wait forever for it to dry before continuing on.

I haven’t painted anything focusing on the figure for years and after reading a quote by Toulouse, which seemed like a copy of something said by Courbet, I thought that while in France I could paint things that I have seen instead of imagining places comprised of things that I have seen, but don’t actually exist.
This painting is of a photo I took during the Balkan music at the bar night, but the photo didn’t turn out due to the low lighting.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

French underworld tattoos at the turn of the century. The man sports a tattooed mustache intended to foil the prohibition of facial hair in the Foreign Legion. The World of Tattoo by Maarten Hesselt van Dinter. I can only dream of being anywhere near that combination of badass and crazy. Though at that point the Foreign Legion was probably still the best place for criminals to get their record cleaned so perhaps he is as well quite legitimately scary upon all of that. I find myself flipping back to this page time and time again to romanticize the French underground from around 1900. Give him an accordion, a beret, and some braces. Prostitutes who could easily kill you if you ever come up short and tattoo the names of their ‘actual’ lovers between their breasts, close to their heart. Tattoo ‘Je mother fucking t’aime’ in a tattoo cursive along my collar bones.
Post a Comment
Read more
I finished the painting of the girl and her accordion enough to take it in for the critique in painting class. I still kind of want to darken the background a bit more to make her stand out more as well as add detail to the ‘speaker’ on the accordion, but perhaps I also just need to be finshed before I ruin it. The critique was a bit of a disappointment. The reactions from all the other students was that it was kitsch and not a true represenation of France. The professor added in that it was painted well, but in a style that has been outdated for almost a century. Again the language barrier prevented me from defending myself adequately. Although after class I went up to the professor to ask if he had any recommendations on contemporary artists I could look up, which I hope helped him see that I am not an idiot.. So now I would like my next painting to be a bit more ‘modern.’ I have another piece of cardboard in my room that I think I would like to use of this new idea, but as ...
Post a Comment
Read more
Our next day in Paris we took a stroll without destination through Montmartre. Of course stopping by the square filled with artists to look at their work. Since the cliché for paintings here is that of street scenes of French architecture I was entralled to see new techniques and ideas. Perhaps it isn’t really the avant-garde of modern art, but it pleased me a lot to look at. There was one of the artists who used a piece of bamboo cut into a point as a quill pen that he would dip into a small jar of ink. This was then followed by watercolor that turned the picture into a beautiful colored painting. Simple, but the detail was amazing with the erratic line quality. The simple watercolor paintings that I have been coming across in France have led to quite a lot of inspiration for me, but I just hope that I will be able to use this inspiration improve my own watercolors. Perhaps when I no longer have to worry about my paintings for painting class. We met an Egyptian who told...
Post a Comment
Read more