Category: Water Color Painting

How You Know When You’re Obsessed with a Subject

Recently I was in a restaurant (a burger joint) with my wife and there were crayons on the table and a table cloth made of paper to draw on.

Without thinking, I drew the following picture from memory, and if you’ve seen this blog recently you know that I am painting the same subject over and over again, for many reasons (not least of which is that I need to become much less attached the outcome of each painting — cannot treat each one as “precious”).

Restaurant.Jimi.Vinchesi

Clearly I’ve become obsessed…

Though the drawing is incorrect in many aspects, it isn’t too far off and yes, I’ve lost my mind a bit at this point (we had a good laugh about it).

My wife asked me “Why Jimi?” and it was a good question.

In short, like many people I was blown away upon hearing his music (more than 35 years ago) and went on to discover that I could listen to the album “Smash Hits” during my morning and evening commute and not get tired of it after a month…and even a year…Jimi Hendrix Smash Hits

But when I heard his live performance of “Machine Gun” performed during a New Year’s Eve concert with Band of Gypsies, I was transported on a much deeper level.

There is also a grainy video of the same performance. The solo he takes in that recording without doubt pierces the veil of consciousness, no artificial substances needed. As is true in Jazz music, you have to be ready for certain recordings, because otherwise it will sound like noise. But if you are….you can break on through.

He and the band performed two concerts that night, and you have to hear the right version, which is in this clip.  Please note that the recording has the amazing introduction to the song, but then cuts straight to the solo, which is not great, but the solo is all there.

Here is the URL to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yeu9o7rjVKM

There is an analogy to painting in that of his two performances that night (both were recorded), only one of them achieved a kind of perfection, and it is important to remember that Hendrix played poorly during many performances as he took risks that didn’t work out, and if he hadn’t let himself play “badly”, he would never have reached the heights he reached.

And so doing a Hendrix portrait seemed to be the obvious thing.

 

 

Painting with Stan Miller – 2018

I had a great few days last year with Stan Miller in one of his workshops.  He is an inspiring water color painter and great teacher.

Here is a series of my steps painting a composition of his — like all great teachers, he sticks to the fundamentals and is quite strict about not straying along the way, which ends up working very well.

Painting with Stan Miller - Church on the Plains.vinchesi

Here is a closeup of the church at an earlier step:

Church in progress

Quick sketch – Horse

I was imagining a home-remodel and a painting above a sofa on a new wall, and images of horses popped into my mind, though I have never incorporated them into my artwork.  I found some great images online, here is a quick sketch to get myself familiar with it.

Drawing the same thing many times helps with getting the right fidelity and also makes one notice tiny aspects of the lines and darks / lights, and as I’ve said before, I refuse to trace an image for a drawing (that becomes a painting).

Horse study.vinchesi.1

Which one is your favorite?

When painting a portrait, I refuse to use tracing paper or a projector or other methods that cheat on efforts to draw free-hand. It just seems wrong to me, but maybe that’s just a hangup.

I thought I’d juxtapose several of my recent efforts on the Hendrix series and look at some crazy distortions that have occurred at the level of drawing (before any paint hits the page).

I can’t decide yet which of these works in progress is going to become my favorite, would love to hear what you think.

3 Jimis.Vinchesi

Why did I use masking fluid?

What a cruel outcome I recently experienced….

I painted one of my Jimi’s and really liked how it came out — I took crazy risks and by some miracle did not censor my paint strokes or color choices.

Here was the result:

Jimi red and blue-with masking fluid

In particular I enjoyed the splashes of red around the eyes, nose, and mouth, which played off of the ones around the ear and cheek.  Interestingly, the values in the photograph do not match what I did here, and yet it somehow worked (at least to my own satisfaction).

And then came the nasty surprise: it turns out that a few weeks prior to doing the painting, I had applied masking fluid in key areas around the face.  I had no recollection of this, until I noticed the markings on the paper and began to remove them.

This was heartbreaking…

Jimi red and blue-mask erased

And so now I face the prospect of recreating the strokes around the eyes, nose, and mouth, and we all know how that will end up — I will try too hard to match the original, and it will appear over-worked.

And so the answer is to keep painting it over and over and over again, and a few will be worth keeping.

After the masking fluid came off

Jimi Hendrix water color progress

I continue to enjoy pen drawing plus water color, this time with Jimi Hendrix as a subject.  The painting here was done very quickly, as a throw-away (I didn’t put any care into the drawing as I was intending to play with the crazy colors to the right, assuming they would be a terrible mess).

Hendrix 1.Vinchesi art

The crazy things is, every painting I’ve done since this one, with serious intention, is nowhere near as loose and appealing (not saying this one worked).  I am learning the hard way that in water color, fast is best (really cannot over-work the paper with changes) and one must just go for it — if it works, great, if not, do another one.

 

The challenge for me is that I get invested in certain drawings and don’t want to screw up a good drawing, so I end up torturing the paper until it is ruined…

But for every 20 failures perhaps they’ll be a good painting that makes it.

GW love — 1st painting with color

I want to share my progress on a watercolor of George Washington, it’s about 80% of the way there and this is what it looks like right now:

GW.1.2018.2

I need to add the flag above his head, and fix some issues with his dome.

But the big breakthrough for now is that I discovered the round brush and was able to move the paint around in such a way that it got more interesting.

At first when adding the blue background I used a one-inch flat brush, and on this paper (it’s the “wrong” kind, not 100% cotton and therefore not great for blending color) it produced a horrible-looking patchwork of strokes that were unintentional.

Even worse, if I went over the area too many times, previous layers of blue started to come off, back into the brush, and then got bunched up toward the end of the stroke. This created very light values in the midst of what was supposed to be dark values — very frustrating.

The round brush was a revelation and I finally feel as though I am painting with water color and not acrylic or oil.

As I painted around the rectangle that will become the flag, I realized that I needed to lighten the background against what will be the flag’s deep blue in its upper left corner. The blurring did just the trick, lightening the area in a gradual way and will allow me to come in hard with color on the next pass.

Star blurs

Also you can see on the left above that I had masked a larger 5-point star behind the flag but realized that it would be too distracting in the composition, and so I blurred those edges as well.  I absolutely love the effect, particular as seen in the top spike, and intend to use this technique quite a bit in future paintings.

It reminds me of a painter / illustrator whom I greatly admired in the 1980s, Brad Holland. His backgrounds in particular are complex and haunting in a good way. Here is one of his works:

Mike Tyson by Brad Holland

I realize that his paintings are probably done in oil and not watercolor, but that’s ok. I also realize that my painting skills are merely beginner-level, but a man can dream.

Getting back to the flag, I had done some practice nonsense on another sheet of paper and liked what I saw, once again by accident.

Study for GW 1.2018.quick flag

This quick little flag is what led me to want to put it above GW’s head, instead of the star that I had already masked.

Banana

I had a breakthrough of sorts last weekend in my enactment of water color layering.  I can only describe the process as an act of faith — that is, of trusting that the object of the painting will eventually look the way one wants it to (it really does not come into focus until near the end).

fullsizeoutput_147f.jpeg

I also enjoyed noticing that the banana (the real one in front of me) had some orange glow in it, a revelation that occurred only after an enforced relaxation of my thought process and a simultaneous deep-looking.