Swatch where you are going!

I like to keep a record of the colours I mix when painting by making little swatches and writing notes as to which hues I used and how much. This practice has been very helpful lately when I'm trying to match flesh tones on paintings that I revisit. Lately I've been putting the swatches right on the same panel as the study and it does something kind of interesting to how you read the image; your brain starts to try a piece together which swatches go where. Neat! I wonder if anyone else has done this as a "final" piece?
Do other painters keep a record of their swatches?

After Jenny Saville

Song lyrics are great titles for paintings

Blue Eyes, 48" by 36", oil on canvas, 2017

Dig it

Dig Your Own Hole, 48" by 36", oil on canvas, 2017

Some inspo: Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell

I have these paintings in the back of my mind when doing my large male face paintings. I'm intrigued by the "falseness of mimetic images" and the shock (maybe audacity too) of leaving blank, untouched canvas. It acts as a hue in the image, I'm going to try and strengthen that idea in my next painting.

Monet on the monay

I went to see the Monet exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery today and I found it quite interesting. They didn't have any of his seminal works, but they did have some smaller scale studies of his waterlily paintings that were installed in the Orangerie in Paris. He basically created this huge panorama of his lily pond when he was quite an old man; very inspiring. What I enjoyed about the studies I saw at the VAG was that you could see that he was really into mark-making as a thing in itself. Swirls, twirls, scribbles, scrapes (I didn't realize he did some much scraping . . . has the effect of a soft glow), rhythmic lines, dots, dashes, slashes. Such a huge variety of marks. And a variety of thick, thin, layered, exposed canvas.
As a painter, I could understand what he's saying with all those marks. I can relate to that feeling when your hand spasms and makes an interesting mark that blends with the others. I felt the same way when I saw the Cezanne room at the Musee D'Orsay in Paris; I felt like I was in his shoes making those marks.
Do other painters feel this way/have that experience?
What do non-painters see/feel when confronted with those marks?
And not to mention the delicious colour palette that he used. CHOMP!

Squiggy's Journey

I like to review the studies I do for a painting because I find it interesting to see how different each study can be (even though it is from the same image source).

source image

charcoal and graphite on paper

chalk pastel on paper

oil on paper

Squiggy, 48" by 36", oil on canvas, 2017

I like the feeling of the large painting. It's kind of squinty and twitchy. The title comes from the vague memory of a character from Laverne & Shirley.

Compare and contrast

I thought I'd put my two most recent paintings side by side and see how they compare and contrast:

Raphus Cucullatus Nebula

Manscape

Compare:
-loose brush work that evokes emotion
-strong contrast of lights and darks (high key)
-off-centre focal point/composition

Contrast:
-Raphus looks like it's a shallow window whereas Manscape has a more ambiguous space
-more imagery/elements in Raphus

I feel like these could almost go side by side in an exhibition and hold together. They are painted in a similar way which I think ties them together. I enjoyed painting both of them and I'm very excited to see how viewer might respond to them . . . now if only I could get some shows ;)

Manscape

Manscape, 48" by 36", oil on canvas, 2017

New batch of collages!

I'm working on a new batch of collages for this series of paintings that start from a fractured image.
Here are some samples

I'm excited to try my loose brushwork with these images! I'm still not sure what these paintings mean or how they will be interpreted by an audience, but I'm intrigued enough with the process to keep going.