Traveler, trimmed at the top. Perhaps I'll take another couple of inches from the bottom.
Magician trimmed at the top and bottom. Much better!
After a few days of humming and hahing I’ve committed to editing the Traveler and Magician paintings from their earlier square composition. Now rectangles, the compositions look much better balanced, with the focus of attention moving down to the sun and the hand and face of the Traveler, while in the Magician the relationship of the sky to the land feels more compressed and dramatic. I’m looking forward to building the stretcher bars for these paintings now that I feel more certain of their shape.
We’ve rigged up a camera obscura in the studio. It makes beautiful softly focused images appear magically in the darkened room. I love the shallow focal length – it makes very specific areas of the image very crisp, but these quickly drop off into gently diffused areas of softness.
There’s a lot going on this week. Tomorrow I’m going to Ventura College to see an opening of figurative art, titled “Skin Deep: Artists Examine the Nude” including some work by John Nava, whose fabulous paintings were rendered as tapestries in the Los Angeles Cathedral. I’m looking forward to meeting him very much.
I’ll be at the Los Angeles Convention Center on Saturday at the Los Angeles Fine Art Show: Historic and Traditional, when I’m serving on a panel discussion titled Realism Today – Old Methods, New Visions
Saturday afternoon, January 21, 2012. Â 3.00-4.15 pm
Panelists [in alphabetical order]
- Adrian Gottlieb, artist and atelier director
- Michael Pearce, artist and chair of the art department at California Lutheran University
- Kate Sammons, artist
- Michael Zakian, art historian and director of the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University
Moderator
Peter Trippi, editor of Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine
