NC Studio

In September 2020 Christina and I went up to NC for a getaway. Upon our return she saw a new listing for acreage a little further up the road from where we had stayed, and so we turned back around and went up there the very next weekend to take a look. Just as with our home in Handsboro, we mostly ignored the structures and focused on the land, which had a stream adjacent to the road, a meadow, and a long stretch up to a mountain ridge. We spent a day looking at several other sites but agreed that this was the best. But, also just as with our home in Handsboro, we were going to be starting almost from scratch with the dwelling.

The property had a double-wide mobile home and a shed with a broken garage door at the west end of the meadow. We cleared away the mobile home and decided to convert the shed into a small dwelling and studio as the first phase of living there. We began the interior demolition and took out the garage door in the spring of 2021. It took some heavy lifting to imagine how the shed could become an attractive place. We looked at books and magazines on cabins and Nordic houses and sketched out things ourselves. Then we contacted John Whelan, an architect I knew from NY with whom I painted in Provence over 40 years ago. We also connected with builddwell, a builder in the area and brought them into some of the discussions. The property has well water and underground power lines.

Over the first half of 2021, we developed a concept and John created the plans. This was the first time Christina and I ever had designed something from close to a blank page. We wanted to fit the essentials of a dwelling into a format that later could be converted into a studio. We had only about 770 square feet of covered space. It was tricky. We started with an open plan space for all but the bedroom, bath, and utility room. John’s advice was to have a long bank of windows over half of the exterior of the house. C and I also got good advice from my brother Stan and his wife Judy who had designed an attractive retirement home in Pensacola. As we got the foundation poured and opened up the walls, the contractor encouraged us to add a covered porch, which brought us to 1,000 square feet of living space. We also realized we needed a covered entrance at the opposite end. Here is where all that ended up.

We broke ground in late summer and by late winter things began to come into focus. COVID, weather, labor, and supply chain delays slowed it all down. I resigned from work at the end of 2021 and retired in early 2022. Fixtures, furniture, and appliances began to arrive in the summer and we got a provisional certificate of occupancy in mid-summer.

Memphis

Without realizing it I started a series of paintings of the Mississippi River in early 2021 on the levee where the Industrial Canal enters the River right at Holy Cross in New Orleans. Prior to that I had done some views of Natchez and completed a larger piece in November 2021. While working on the studio and transitioning into retirement, I took a trip to the Delta and Oxford to see my younger daughter and went up to Memphis to Tom Lee park to do a scene that I had sketched 3 years earlier. I completed a smaller field study that I liked a lot but I also started a larger version with a grey underpainting. High winds and limited time prevented me from working larger on site and so I had to take it home to complete it.

Back home I realized how I had compressed the scene into the dimensions of the canvas and so I spent time getting the arches of the bridge right and adding more river to the foreground for the large version. I did some work on this at home, took it up to NC and back, and then finished it last week while Christina was up there. There is a sharp difference between the treatment of the lower and upper halves of this painting. I still am not sure this will remain as is but for now, I am calling it finished. It was great to have the earlier study available as a reference and I like some aspects of it better than the enlarged version. Overall I am happy with the third installment of this series.

Natchez

About two months ago, Derrick Evans and Rip Daniels invited me to Natchez to see the Society of Architectural Historians recognize their wonderful Yaryan project as Best in the South. We stayed in the very comfortable riverfront B&B Eidelweiss. Just below us was Natchez Under Hill which gave a nice perspective view of the bridge. The next morning I did a quick 2 panel study and got a few reference photos to help me out. I had tried to do some earlier versions but they were too far upriver and there was too much surroundings to distract from the bridge. The light was wonderful, but it was too much and I couldn’t get it all in.

The bridge structure led me to experiment with a geometric version of the scene that had some fun lessons in moving the eye around the space . Here are a few of those states. Pretty clear that I need a more subtle approach to this idea.

So in this case, I was right up adjacent to the bridge and was able to add in a barge as it traveled ever so slowly upriver. I had a gentle rain come on but was sheltered by the back of the SUV.

October and November were very busy and so not until Thanksgiving week did I have enough time off to enlarge this sketch into a painting. I did this on a 30x40” canvas and repeated the blue monochrome tonal undercoat. Working on the girders of the bridge in more detail reminded me of when Dad built a model English Man O War that stood on our mantle when I was young. It was a lot of detail work and there was no substitute for getting it all done right. In my case, I still fudged far too many lines.

Next I went over the undercoat with color and worked out the various parts. The water and sky were difficult. I ended up with something derived from painting then using saturated paper towels to get a more subtle effect. Thanks EL. But the sky and river were indistinguishable. Perhaps because I was working from an occasion when the sky was overcast and everything was kind of monochrome anyway. But I tried to separate the two. To do this, I started in with oils, and then eventually painted the whole thing over in oils.

I finished this after seeing the second installment in Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary. Tomorrow is the final part- the rooftop concert. Coincidentally, this is the second in what will be three Mississippi River bridge and barge scenes. I already have done New Orleans and now have Natchez. I have sketches from Tom Lee Park of a scene I want to do in Memphis. So next stop, Mempho.

About a month later, I came back and reworked the foreground and adjacent current.

Bryant Grocery

Several years ago I did a rough edged painting on Money Road with the Bryant Grocery in the shadows concealed by overgrowth. Last month I went back up there on a day of severe stormy weather and heard once more from Wheeler Parker about his cousin Emmett Till’s encounter with Carolyn Bryant 66 years ago today on August 24, 1955, and his brutal murder at the hands of her husband and his men.

When I got back home I couldn’t stop thinking about how my own painting pushed the focal point off to the side and centered on that damned gas station. So I promised myself to do a big piece that put the Bryant Grocery in the forefront. And, since now it looks more like a topiary than a building, I went looking for some sense of how that location looked in 1955. Eventually I pieced enough details together to create this painting. It’s one of the biggest canvases I have painted recently, 4 feet by 5 feet.

Once more I started with a tonal study, this time using a graphite pencil to shade in the blocks of different tone and draw in the shapes and negative spaces. Then I used a brush dipped in water to smear the graphite onto the canvas and this created a nice blurry old postcard effect with soft edges that I liked a lot.

I followed that with thinned down gray scale paints to fix the patterns. Next I used a limited red and green palette to create the color accents and did a very washed out, scuffed up sky, a little like the one in the five dancers.

Then I went back and covered up the significant amount of unpainted white canvas, or most of it anyway with white paint. At this point, I now am going over it in oils and straightening out the crooked parts and punching up the colors. I will be donating this to the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, MS, and a print will go to the Emmett Till Civic Center in Summit, IL. Here it is in its near final state. Still tweaking here and there.

Bryant Grocery Money MS

Christina in garden

Several years ago the Sun Herald did a wonderful profile on Christina’s gardens at our house. I loved her smile from the photograph in that story and kept a copy on my shelf. Last month I decided it was time to work on a portrait of her and picked that image to start with.

To begin with I converted it to grayscale and painted it free hand onto the canvas, shown below, then spent some time tightening up various parts.

I wanted to resume the approach from the painting of Dad and Uncle George, this time, using a red and green limited palette. Almost from the beginning this became difficult to stick to in an outdoor scene. But it is an interesting approach. If I could reproduce multiple underpaintings and do series work a la Warhol, I might try that. But I got under way with the following as the starting point.

The problem was there was a lot of blue in the scene and I couldn’t completely ignore it. Or so I thought. I went ahead with the blue and also deviated to get the golden brown hair. I liked the silvery gray tips of the palm leaves in this state but I ended up passing that by. From the beginning there was a strange phenomenon where from a distance the face looked off -blocky- but close up it worked well. This state sort of worked, but I was troubled by the gloomy distance. I wanted there to be more sunlight.

There were so many details to adjust in the face to get what I wanted. It made me newly aware of all the nuances of portraiture. There just is no fudging accuracy if you are working in this way. From the first basic state I seemed to have done a few things right and I managed not to lose them as I refined the other pieces. It is an intimate experience to pay this much attention to all the elements of a person’s likeness.

After I got this far, I felt like I needed to go back to the original plan, or at least revive the original plan where I could, and de-emphasize the other colors besides red and green. So I reverted the color scheme of our house to its prior state, a kind of gray-green-blue, and I tried to find ways to shift other blues into paler or darker versions, or else, take them in the direction of violet as with her clothes. And then I filled in greater detail on the plants, the middle distance, the neighborhood, and the shadows on the sidewalk. It took quite a while and yet I think I kept the basic piece pretty much alive throughout all the revisions. So I am happy with it.

One step more. A friend pointed out that the sidewalk on the right was unnecessary. Another example of “just because it’s there doesn’t mean you have to include it.” So I took it out and added some more plants and ground cover.

Winter Barge

I visited New Orleans over New Year’s weekend to see the view from the levee at the foot of Deslonde in Holy Cross. It was wonderful. I did some oil sketches and took some photos and a video as barges turned downriver from the Industrial Canal. Back home, I used one of the images and the sketches to do a black and white undercoat of the scene. It has two roll on-roll off (“ro-ro”) vessels on the wharf upriver from the entrance and a swing hanging from the channel marker. The stern of those ro-ros look like a massive steel cubist collage.

The next move was to import the picture above into Paper so that I could try an idea out I had - to thin out the paint with medium and tint this drawing with colors and let the tones beneath show through and provide the shading. This was a very easy way to test out the idea and it worked.

I used acrylic medium and followed this color scheme pretty closely and got largely what I wanted. I didn’t quite get that silvery grey green for the levee but that’s OK. I am happy with how this turned out. About eight hours from start to finish. (to be continued…)

Well, not quite. I lost the thread of the experiment on the levee, painting over and over it until you couldn’t see the underlying drawing. So I started over. I gessoed the bottom part, redrew the levee bank and path in black and white and stuck to using color in thinned out form as a tint rather than as an opaque “icing.”

I also developed the sterns of the ro-ros and the adjacent wharf, took out the swinging child (“Just because something is there doesn’t mean you have to include it,” reminded C), and improved details of the tugboat and stern of the barge. Now, perhaps, it’s finally done.

Liftoff on the Beach

Where I first saw this image I don’t recall, but it stuck with me and I later came upon it again by accident and saved it. The undulating line of the dancers’ arms, the peaks and falls of their feet, what a terrific combination. I sketched it in acrylic in black and white and then tracked down the story via image search. The First Negro Classic Ballet Company leaps on Laguna Beach in 1947. The exuberance and soaring freedom seemed so perfect an antidote to COVID cabin fever. I got to work as a housewarming gift for a valued co-worker.

After doing the sketch I enlarged the image just focusing on the outline of the figures to get the basic silhouette down right.

I worked up the image with light tone choices. The main lesson I learned here was to - go way lighter in the sky. I originally had what looked like a photo negative. After I had corrected the sky tone, I had this right balance and could get some headway on the anatomy and modeling.

Next I went back with darker tones on the figures and the background. This was really useful to me, a lesson in developing a painting that I had not learned before. I toyed with the idea of finishing the whole thing in black and white and then just adding a handful of color accents but this seemed gimmicky.

Moving into color choices I was operating on my own imagination since the original image was black and white. I used thalo blue in the sky, the water, the hills, and the dark clothing elements. I used orange, black, and zinc white adding some thalo blue in the darkest points for the bodies of the dancers. Later I added some quinacridone red to the blouses of the dancers at each end and the passerby. I used some cadmium and lemon yellow for the stripes.

Getting to this point was about a 6-8 hour operation and then adding the blue sky took hours more. Even then it looked colored in with a crayon so I had to go back with a second coat.

Over the next several days, usually early mornings, I fixed anatomic problems, tightened up the borders between coats- eliminating the “lacuna” was the job. Fancy word to say I took out the stray spots or stripes of unpainted canvas. I got it to a near final point with one more pass. Toward the end, I focused on the hills and the distant buildings, reducing the number and shape of them and bringing in some greenery around them. I also improved the hand gestures of the dancers on the ends. Here is just about where it ended up.

Click below to scroll through enlargements of the dancers.