New Paintings

The painting pictured here is titled "Red House". The size of this piece is 18" x 18" and it is an oil painting on a canvas wrapped panel. This composition of this piece is a continuation of the series of paintings I started last year of origami houses.

I love the shape of these little paper houses. Visually, I've always been drawn to clean edges, and a clear representation of light falling across a form - and this shape delivers on both of these elements. I also enjoy the repetition of shapes as they travel back in space, and the combination of plumb and diagonal lines. I find that I'm now searching for these kinds of shapes and lines in the real world. Conceptually, I'm drawn to both the lightness and the darkness of what this little house shape represents and autobiographically, it's a nod to the number of homes I've moved in and out of in my adult life.

In this painting, I started with a drawing to help establish the composition, but then invented the color you see in the finished piece. As a deviation from the paintings I created last year, I wanted the shapes to be a vehicle for color and less a rendering of my object (no more folds and creases like what you'd see in the source). In this piece I worked in layers and sanded the piece in between each layer. This created a texture that provided a nice contrast to flat opaque shapes on the foreground. 

This painting is titled "Midday Sun". It is a 20" x 18" oil painting on canvas wrapped panel. The source for this painting is the apse of a local church in my neighborhood. This church captures the sun exceptionally well around 12:45 to 1:30pm in early summer and creates this lovely series of diagonals and triangles across the roof and sides of the building. 

The method for this piece is similar to the one I employed for "Red House", but in this case, I took a photograph of this building at the ideal time of day with clear skies and then sketched my chosen composition from that photograph in colored pencil. While painting this piece, I referenced my sketch and not the photograph in order to prevent a literal of a rendering of the building. In this piece I wanted to look at the shape of the shadows and light, invent a color palette that felt more emotionally representative of the source. I also worked to push some of the naturally existing contrasts in this composition. 

This piece is the first where I sourced directly from my current neighborhood. I love the conversation between this "real space" vs my "invented space" with my paper houses.  

Content Originally Published in my e-newsletter on August 8, 2024 @ 1:00pm