krisc.blog

You might notice that some pictures from older posts have disappeared. Fret not, I did some summer cleaning to keep the blog easier to skim through. You will see a small “read the rest of this entry” link underneath the posts that have been cut.

I’ve also updated my About page, to read like something decent.

On the painting front, I’m working on the diptych but don’t have much to show right now. Hopefully this coming weekend I’ll make significant progress and will post more process shots then.

Cheers!

I was hoping to work some more on the diptych over the past week but other things came up. I managed to spend a whole two hours on it (them?) this past weekend. But, where I lacked in progress I made up in a defined sense of direction. Looking at the canvases for a few days and taking my time with the latest painting session helped me resolve some issues. I have a better sense of where the paintings are going now and any future sessions will be much easier.

A few shots of the two 60 x 40 canvases I’m working on right now. Total of 3.5 hours put in so far. The pieces will be horizontal when done.

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Jean-Paul Riopelle was an influential Canadian artist and a member of the Quebec artist movement Les Automatistes. His work started off as surrealist but eventually progressed towards abstract expressionism. Though born in Montreal, he lived most of his life in Paris. A receiver of the Companion Order of Canada, he is widely revered in Quebec. I was introduced to his work by an old acquaintance and fellow art lover while discussing other abstract expressionist artists.

Jean-Paul Riopelle (Canadian, 1923-2002)
The Wheel – Cold Dog (Indian Summer) 1954-1955

It’s been a while since I posted on this blog here. There are a few of reasons for that.

First, I wanted to compose my thoughts and work out new ideas before I commit to buying more canvases. Second, I took a week-long vacation, to get away from the city and work. I visited some friends in Chicago for several days and I have to say I had a great time over there. It was my first time in that city and it impressed me quite a bit. You can check out my touristy photos in this Flickr collection.

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Here’s one fresh off the easel. As with the previous painting, I’m posting progress shots, minus the words. This one was much easier to do and gave me the least grief of all my recent work.

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Shinichi Murayama is a New York-based Japanese artist/photographer. His work is heavily inspired by traditional Japanese painting and sense of aesthetics. The most recent series of photographs of action brushstrokes is quite stunning.

Sharing a working process can be informative and intriguing to both an artist’s colleagues and audience alike. It gives an insight into how a particular artist’s mind works and shows his/her decisions during a project’s lifetime. So, with this post I’ve decided to show how my latest painting took shape.

Believe it or not, this is what the original idea for the painting was:

And the first two layers of paint.

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I may have been introduced to the work of Cy Twombly in passing some time ago, but probably wasn’t aware of it and certainly couldn’t place him, though his name sounded vaguely familiar. I stumbled upon him again recently when I read about a retrospective of his work Tate Modern in London set up in 2008. 

Cy Twombly is an American who emerged from the post-abstract-expressionist era to become one of the most important painters of today. Most of his work deals with or is influenced by poetry and classical mythology, a thematic shift that happened when he moved to Italy in the 1950s. He has sometimes changed styles drastically, thus making it difficult to specifically categorize his work as one kind of abstract art over another. It is certain, though, that his paintings will leave the viewer anything but apathetic.

I have read that he is the kind of painter people either love or hate. I’m firmly in the former camp.

I was playing with my digital camera one evening recently and wanted to see what I can come up with using motion and long exposure. The images below are what the camera gave me. I was surprised to see how painterly most of them seemed; even the compositions gave me something to think about when doing future work. You can see the complete set on my Flickr page.