These paintings are a portion of the 160 I have done to date.
To see title, size, materials, year, and present location of picture, hover your cursor over the image. To view all pictures as a slideshow, click on any picture.
Materials
All my paintings on canvas and paper are constructed true to archival standards.
Paintings completed prior to 2004 are done in acrylics on canvas. All current paintings on canvas I use artist quality oil paints with Gamblin's Neo Megilp. It is generally recommended by archival experts that a painter use one medium only through the entire construction of a painting.
For the small panel studies, I use a sign makers plastic material called Sintra. It has not been established, or even discussed, to my knowledge, whether Sintra could be considered archivally safe. For this reason, and for record keeping purposes, I do not sell these panels. For me it takes pressure off me to work out the bugs of a painting on these economical panels that do not need to be primed. The purpose of these panels are to make preliminary studies.
My color palette entails flake white, zinc white, perylene red, quinacridone violet, indian yellow, yellow hanza light, cobalt blue, manganese blue, vandyke brown, and chromatic black. With this palette I have an opaque white, a translucent white, plus warm and cool versions of the three primaries and blacks. I believe all the non-white paints are translucent or semi-translucent.
I use Gamblin Artist Colors and mediums, for the range of selection, the high quality, and for the unrivalled, comprehensive educational materials they offer their customers. See their website, it's great. Note especially their description of the neo-megilp, which is a non-lead formulated version of an old masters medium. Being thixotropic, it can be vigorously worked and spread as a thin film, or lightly handled and used as an impasto. It has a medium drying rate and was plenty fast enough when used in plein air painting. Unlike other mediums, it has a glistening, sparkling sheen, rather than an even gloss.
Imagery
Images are collected from peak visual experiences. Recent paintings may be work-ups of recollected scenes from as long as 40 years ago, or from last week. My new home, Portland, is replete with scenery, and I haven't even gotten out of the city much yet. Paintings may be composites of several scenes, that is, inventions, if that is what is required to convey the best essence of the memory.
Cameras
I do use photographs, either single lens reflex photos or slides, or low resolution camera-phone digital photos. For me this is essential because I do not have the time to return to a site to sketch, or I am no longer in range to do so. Furthermore, the quick weather and light changes in Portland make it fairly impossible to ever retrieve the glimpse of a few minutes before. By nature, fleeting sightseeing experiences always seem to be the most precious. I believe truth is stranger than fiction, which makes more emotionally moving pictures.
Preparatory Drawing
I have been making 1" x 1-1/2" pencil thumbnail sketches for all paintings, shown under the "Drawings" tab. People often ask, why do you make them so small? This is an old customary sketchbook practice and still widely used today as reference tool in graphic design. More than that, it allows me, as I'm drawing them, to be as far away from my page, proportionately, as if it were a full scale painting and I was across a large room. With all the time and materials that will be invested in a large painting, it is necessary that, from the start, a painting reads as intended. This establishes the crucial linear placement of the composition, which is then transposed onto the full sized canvas.
Value Studies
After that, the contours are roughed in with a faint wash of vandyke brown oil paint with neo megilp onto an 8 x10" panel of sintra (a plastic sign-makers materiel), then developed as a value study. This panel I allow to dry for at least a week, in sight, during which time I will unconsciously begin noting errors, which gives me a starting point for corrections in the next sitting.
In the meanwhile, while this is drying, other panels can be begun in the same way.
Colour Studies
When that paint is no longer tacky, I make thin glazes approximating the hue of the dominant objects, then progress to the less noticeable ones. I try to confine each picture to a single hue and it's family. Those alone are so vast a selection, from pure to dull, from light to dark, from tint to shade, and their complements, there is no end.
Reworking
This stage takes place in an unknown amount of sessions, and is the period that is the most discouraging for me. Because I continue until all aspects meet my intentions, the surface texture becomes very nubby and heavily reworked. This is a quality that viewers seem to love or hate. Please consider this quality if you consider purchasing a painting, as it is invisible when they are scanned and shown on a computer screen.
Glazing
This final, and most pleasurable stage is done with glazes of a very small amount of color with the neo megilp, often a tint or shade of a dull color. Objects, previously painted in all manner of hue variations solidify into a coherant form, once glazed over as a total piece. The sheen of the entire picture is unified, and the jaggedness and clumsiness is somewhat camouflaged. I love this stage, as it is really the only moment when the picture might at all resemble what I had experienced myself.
Varnishing
Varnishing is an archival strategy, it is a removable protective coating.
Final Comment to Fellow painters
Procedures and practices notwithstanding, painting, for me, is an infinite and baffling mystery, the speech of my soul, by way of the interweaving of simple pigment in a vehicle.
-cec