painting 829
I paint with old friends Phil and Kevan when I get a chance. I’ve painted maybe 30 pictures in this format. I have painted with Phil for 10 years then tried the same with Kevan maybe five years ago. In the spring I got the three of us together to paint in the work studio I bought last year.
Last night I painted The Bean Living Room pictured here. It’s been awhile since we’ve painted. It’s like an itch you want to scratch, to spend an evening painting with a friend whose work you respect, someone you can bs with, talk about life and art with. A decade ago I started doing still lifes with Phil, then I began painting the room with Phil in the picture. This series has evolved into some sort of spatial speed painting exercise where the goal is to come out of the evening with a completed painting. I’ll put the structure of the room down traditionally then I’ll blow the picture out with color and line. At first Phil couldn’t stand this as he wanted to see how I painted traditionally, yet over the years as with Kevan they have come to accept that I like the looseness and play of this style when painting a picture in one evening as I paint hyperrealism and traditional work all the time. These paintings afford me the opportunity to explore spatial Reconstructions, or so I put it. There are 174 paintings in this series of works started in 1997. I’ll spend the rest of my life looking in on this way of making.
This painting is 30 x 36 inches wide for my collectors. The price on this in 2006 is 3000. I have a larger, cleaner image to email if someone is interested. There is a hot spot in the image where light caught the photo too much. These paintings always sell. I like to paint NYC pictures this way, and I did a series of Florence paintings, maybe 15 in all, which all sold quickly.
[Your Name Here]