Recent Work #3

The Brothers-in-Law, Fly Fishing

16" x 12" Prismacolor pencil and Dr.Ph.Martin's watercolor inks on Arches 2017

My Father's famous line, "I'm like a Lemming, I always return to the sea."
That's him on the right and my Mother's oldest brother on the left.
Happy times.

Barcelona - Image of the periphery

The grey post-war years before the formation of the metropolis

 

"An outlying neighborhood in the post-war years." 
From Joan Busquets' and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design's tome BARCELONA, the urban evolution of a compact city. VII.1 Autocracy, reconstruction and shantytowns.

I am drawn, passionately, to shantytowns, their charming colors, their patchwork construction and especially to the people who build their lives and communities from practically nothing.  I was inextricably driven to paint it.

The beginning... 12" x 16", No.2 lead pencil on Arches

Roots in Eden

    12" x16" watercolor + gouache on Arches, 2013

 

 

It is very practical to do your laundry on the back step with two large water tubs next to mango trees and hang the clothes in the Barbados sun.  Total cost: a single bar of blue soap.  Later on, with all the money you saved, you can go out dancing at the DJ Disco up the sand road.

For Hot Springs Wizard

With my CD portfolio and physical portfolios packed up safely during the relocation process, the only way I can ensure a seamless link to get a photo to Mister Wizard is post it here.

Glacial Incidental vacations at Sunrise Mountain | Watercolor and Prismacolor pencil mix on Arches |  24" x 18" | 2007-08

The original work in reality is large for a watercolor, owned and on display in my hostess's office building in Las Vegas, which is a real live busy U.S. city in spite of its famed casino scene.  Its an efficient place, a metaphor for life in the 21st Century where vehicular accidents are instantly removed from the beltway by the time long ribbons of slowed traffic resumes its ceaseless going to and coming from leaving a sort of empty space where something ... happened.

The objects illustrated in the artwork are rocks collected with a student geology major while taking a desert sabbatical in Nevada in 2006, brought back to California the same year where they were expanded by the inclusion of a distinctly egg-shaped, smooth surfaced - unusual and rare (most of them are piles of huge boulders above ground or discovered on seafloors and lakebeds) Glacial Incidental, which is what these granite and limestone boulders and boulder-spawn left over from the Pleistocene are called.  Smoothness and roundness of the GI is not a common feature at all.  Think of the battering and long distances these rocks and boulders were pushed from the seacoast far inland as the oceans rose up and traveled eastward.

Now, back in Nevada five years later to the day, which that in itself is interesting, how cyclical the journey is, I come to find the Nevadian rock collection to perfectly resemble the exact mountains where each was gathered. Hmmmm.

Love is All

Love is All

aka Patterns
(see drawing above)
aka Copper & Gold
16" x 12" watercolor inks on Arches

Bitsy had another life before she met my brother and sister in law, they rescued her from a shelter. Bitsy is one lucky girl, especially with three kids to play with her when she isn't napping with her better, her rightful, loving Mother.


(click HERE to view enlarged image in a new tab. Once there, click the plus "+" sign to view detail.)

out of the archives

From the Eager Passenger series.

18" x 12" watercolor on Arches

Where did your favorite picture go?

Here I went to the trouble of reducing nearly 70 images, thinking surely this page would open faster which it does NOT. I've taken the next logical step of limiting the posts to 25 and archiving the remainder. There are two more steps available if that doesn't work, one is the slide show option and the other, which I don't want to do because we'll lose the comments, is line everything up postage stamp size. You'd get to click on a postage stamp to see it bigger. There is even a third option, continue to limit the amount of posts until the page opens with a satisfactory speed.

Just want to let you know I am working on it.

Big, I mean the largest made, 140 lb, cold-pressed, tried and true stock from France is about to arrive so, heh, I'm thinking we'll need more room pretty soon. Awrite! Now if I could just have a word with

the brush manufacturers ... their global best does not meet artist standards. We do not want to pick off Sable fur from the paint area, please OR have a stray strand interfere with our intentions.

UPDATE: Okay, I've just chosen the third option. We're down to 15 posts for this page. It seems to work. Next job ahead is to add year created to all post labels. Sounds kinda obsessive doesn't it.

UPDATE 2: Adding pages so the images stay large. We'll see how it goes.