Throwback Thursday

Colored Pencil on Paper

This painting goes way back to before I started using oil paints. Probably even before I made any paintings with pastels. It's a studio piece that brings together various experiences I've had on night hikes in the wild. The moon was done using a sketch of a lunar eclipse I made from my back porch in Pennsylvania (back porches can be wilder than you might imagine.) The cliff is based on one I came across in the Wasatch Mountains. The bighorns are based on ones I saw while passing through the Colorado Rockies, and alludes to the many times I've been aware of wildlife not far from me on walks in dark forests and canyons.

Here's some thumbnail sketches I did while working out the composition for this picture:

I wish I had gotten a better photo of it before it was gone. The painting was sold at a gallery that closed years ago. The picture at the top of this post is a digital image of a bad 35mm film photo, heavily edited to try and bring it up to the quality I think I remember in the original piece. It's the best editing I can do, but still falls rather short of the original. Nonetheless I hope there's yet something in the image the reader can find to enjoy. 

Thanks for visiting my blog!

Another Throwback Tuesday...or, The Girl in the Green Shirt.

22" x  15" Pastel on Paper

Here are a couple pastel portraits mentioned in an earlier post. Years ago I worked exclusively in dry media, such as graphite, charcoal and colored pencil. In the early 90's, wanting to make larger works and finding colored pencil unsuited for that, I switched from colored pencils to pastel. The pastel paintings were done on archival printmaking paper that had the right kind of  "tooth" for the kind of pastel painting I wanted to do. Pastel not only made larger works so much easier to do, but also improved value range and color saturation.

30" x  22" Pastel on Paper

Coincidentally, the model's family lived in the same neighborhood as a well-known painter named William Whitaker, and were friends with him. When the second painting shown in this post was accepted and hung in the Springville museum's Spring Salon, I was surprised to see it on the wall right beside a painting by the model's neighbor, William Whitaker.

Photographs by Hawkinson Photography.

Another Throwback Tuesday

Colored Pencil on Paper

This piece goes back to the '90s. I met the woman who modeled for this picture at (conveniently enough) an art supply store. It's a colored pencil piece on a full-sized sheet of archival printing paper, and one of the reasons I don't work in colored pencil anymore. That's a LOT of paper to cover using only tiny pencil points! I made a couple other paintings of her, but with pastel instead of colored pencil. Maybe I'll show those works in future "throwback" posts.

This portrait won a merit award for me in 1998 at the 74th Utah Spring Salon at the Springville Museum of Art, and was reproduced in the show catalog. I've neglected entering these kind of shows for a while now, in favor of painting for professional galleries. What museums like and what galleries want seem to be two different things. I've been considering getting active in museum shows again, while continuing to paint plein air landscapes for galleries, which I very much enjoy doing. The demands, opportunities and challenges that come with shows like The Spring Salon carry a different kind of excitement.

Photograph by Hawkinson Photography.

Throwback...Tuesday?

Colored Pencil on Paper

Not just a throwback, but a throw way back. This goes back to the time when I drew with colored pencils. It goes back to when I would roam forest and fields with a Pentax 35mm SLR film camera photographing wildflowers and wild fauna. Then I would send the negatives somewhere to get developed and prints made, and have to wait to see how the pictures turned out. Sometimes I would sit in the grass and sketch using colored pencils. Back then sketching was faster than photography.

Late in the Summer monarch butterflies would migrate through the region of Pennsylvania where I lived, refueling in fields full of goldenrod and joe-pie weed. Butterflies don't sit for sketches very well, so for the drawing shown above I used various photos of monarch butterflies, goldenrod, etc., that I had taken with the old SLR on a few of my wild wanderings.