You can almost hear the brakes hissing.
-
Recent Comments
- ratchetcat on Wine
- saintneko on Wine
- ratchetcat on November Mornings
- Christy on November Mornings
- ratchetcat on Lacunary Fire
-
Book of Days
-
Purchase Prints
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Dec | Feb » | |||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
Take a look at that beautiful rust! Just like the real thing.
Here’s an example of how I go from conceptual sketch to final painting. This piece is titled Our Library and was done as a Christmas present for a friend with two cats. The cats are named Casper and Peekaboo, are great buddies, and — strangely enough — are almost completely identical.
Illustrating the unique qualities and similarities of these two cats is always a challenge. For this piece, I first decided on an appealing setting — a warm, comfortable sitting room — then divided the space and modified the poses, palette, and compositional elements to individuate the subjects. (If you compare the sketch to the final piece, you’ll see that an awful lot of detail work was done after the concept stage; this is perfectly fine if you’re confident in your ability to fill empty space with interesting things.)
Note all the artifacts in the background! Like most cats, these two are often occupied with adventure. One wonders what stories are associated with such a diverse collection.
I recently shot photographs of six Matchbox replica cars from 1983. These will be posted throughout the next week as a series. The textured surfaces of these aged toys are visually arresting — particularly in conjunction with the nuances of design and engineering abstracted from the larger originals.
(These were all shot using a Canon 20d, 24-70mm f2.8 zoom, and flash on a field-expedient lateral jig constructed from an inherited Tiltall tripod and clamps. Fun!)
(Today feels like an Edward-Hopper-in-the-city day: over-bright and weary.)
(Incidentally, is the building featured in Hopper’s 1913 Queensborough Bridge the same as the “forgotten building under the bridge” (aka Queens Terra-Cotta building) recently spied at Scouting NY? The New York Times wrote an article on the building in question which dates the construction of the building at 1892.)