Critter Watch Italy

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

          My client wanted three buxomy babes in a pool setting with an Italian landscape and Roman ruins in the background. This evolved over time, as creative endeavors do. In late August or early September, I woke up with this idea that I did not want to create a voyeuristic situation as much as an inviting one. So, I decided to have the model try a pose that looked directly at the viewer and said, “Come on in; the water is fine.” Working in a visual language, sometimes it is difficult to communicate body language in text (e-mail). So, I shot a quick snapshot in my room while I struck the pose and sent it to the model to communicate what I wanted, time being of the essence by that point.

     I am struggling now with the acrylic paint. It seems so much more fun on landscapes, but seriously, for large areas and, thus far, skin, I am still wishing for my oils. Mostly it is the fact that acrylic dries fast (creating hard edges if I am not on top of it!) and that the color dries darker than applied. That latter makes it difficult for me to match areas that I have worked on earlier. Hmmm, practice and experience with this material could help that a bit.

     Today’s images are my “critter pics,” consisting of cinghiale (Italian for “boar”), a sunning lizard, and the swallows are back. Like the robins in central Texas, the swallows passing through here in Italia signify a season change. I wanted summer to last longer. I never got to swim enough and I like the warmth, as well as doing less laundry.

     Oh, yeah, and one image of my “Invitation” figure that greets one as he enters the room. This image just shows Notan design. I tend to build off of that and use it to check shapes before developing the figure.

Mural Project Italy

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

I have the perfect client! He not only treats me as a professional, he gives me his dream requirements and then he also allows me to interject my artistic opinion and usually goes with it. He contacted me this spring and asked for a large painting. He had the idea fairly fleshed out in his mind, consisting of three voluptuous women, Roman ruins, mountains, and a pool in which the babes would frolic. But not knowing the lingo, he said “mural.” By the time I finished asking him questions to clarify his vision, he agreed that a mural on the entire wall was much better than what he thought he wanted.

He is also ideal because he can just look at a very rough sketch of my basic idea and see past the scribbly charcoal and into the vision. Over the summer I have fleshed out more of the details and spoken many times with my new mural guru, Victor Goikoetxea. After arriving at the site of my very first mural (as a grown up, I mean, since my mother let me paint an ocean theme on my bedroom wall when I was a young teenager), I recalculated a few details in the perspective and architecture part of the designo.

My client helped me on my second day here to draw all of the perspective lines in pencil on the wall. See how perfect he is? Even giving me an extra pair of hands! Actually, I think he is quite interested in the whole art-making process and has warned me that many neighbors and guests will be dropping in from time to time to watch me work. So, this is to be more like vertical street painting! Ha.

The second day I was delighted when I was told to come see the cinghiale in the yard and caught one on “film” here. The fig trees are starting to have ripe red fruit, and the beasts want to eat them more than they want their privacy in the woods. Who could blame them? I have myself been eating the juicy figs right off of the tree!

In this last image, I tried to show you how much I have drawn on the wall. I am not that good with Photoshop and thus just ended up making the contrast higher and then darkening the image. I hope you can see some pencil marks. There is a ventilation window in the upper left part of the wall. It was a bit of a problem and a HUGE consideration when I designed the mural. I was not sure if my idea would even work, but we took a look at the sketch on the wall and think that with some embellishments, all will be lovely. Here the dark wooden door with black iron hinges has been taken off and the base coat of white paint was painted over the red brick and wood piece that creates the opening. That way, I can paint right up to the window and the illusion will work better.

I am lacking sleep these days, not just these few days, but also because I explored San Sebastian, Spain, a lot, as well as spending long days at the mural workshop, trying to learn as much as I could in half the time of the other students, who stayed for the whole month class. I even spent one night working at the atelier in an attempt to get to a point in which I could continue with the next step of oil painting. Still, I have yet to learn that while I can do anything that I want, I cannot do EVERYTHING that I want!

Thank you for reading. I am not sure if I let you know often enough how grateful I am for your interest in the art and my journey.