New Painting, Bartlett Street

Posted on June 13, 2008

I’ve completed a new painting, which is always a good feeling. I hope you all enjoy looking at it.  Rather than a full step-by-step, process I thought I’d just include here the first stage of the painting.

This painting, along with the painting done just before it (of Independence Park; see previous blogpost) is a learning piece as I get accustomed to the new oil-based ground that I’m painting on (instead of the acrylic ground I’ve used since college days). Technically, this painting went a lot better than the previous one, though I still have some learning to do. I’m looking forward to my next portrait, to see what kind of results I can get in modeling the figure and painting fleshtones on such a ground. If everything works out all right in my schedule, I should actually be starting a new, very formal portrait within a couple weeks, so I’ll get to satisfy my curiosity shortly. And, of course, any new paintings will be posted on this here blog for your virtual viewing pleasure.

New Painting, Independence Park

Posted on May 10, 2008

I finished a new painting today. Check it out!

This represents a couple of important changes in painting for me. Firstly (and obviously, for anybody at all familiar with my work) it’s a change in tone and mood. I love all of my paintings (all the ones that make it onto my website at the very least) but I definitely have a quirky sensibility that many find challenging or just downright unattractive when it comes to my selection of subject matter. Telephone poles and power lines? Who finds them attractive? Not too many people. So I’ve made a conscious decision to start looking for scenes where my own odd temperament might intersect, to a greater degree, with the tastes of the broader public. You might call this selling out … but time will tell if it sells or not. I’m not really concerned about the idea of ’selling out’ anyhow. I’m just hoping to make paintings that others appreciate and relate to.

Secondly (and less obviously, especially in merely an internet graphic of the painting) this is the first painting I’ve completed in which I’ve used a new method for preparing the canvas. For the non-savvy, I’ll explain from the start. Before a canvas can be painted on with oil paint (which is an acidic and slowly corrosive substance to cotton or linen canvas) the canvas needs to be protected from the paint itself. The old masters would size a canvas using glue made from rabbit skin and then, in a series of thin layers, apply a firm oil-based ground with a white pigment like lead white. This makes an excellent surface to paint on but has the downside that, after preparing the canvas, the artist has to wait 6-12 months before painting on it.

Well, that’s a heckuva long time for a poor artist like myself without the necessary storage space for such planning and I don’t like the idea of having to hope, when ready to work on a new painting, that I happened, a year prior, to have prepared a canvas of the size and dimensions that I want to work with. So, taking a lead from most my art school peers, I’ve always used an acrylic gesso. This is a white pigment suspended in plastic which dries quickly, remains flexible and protects the canvas from oil paint. However, it’s darn near impossible to really smooth out the texture (called the ‘tooth’) of a canvas. But perhaps more fundamental in the failings of acrylic gesso is that it sucks too much oil out of one’s paints. So what might have been applied as a vibrant, glossy layer of paint tends to dry out as a matte, subdued color.

Fortunately, I’ve recently found some fast drying (one week or so) oil-based primers that give me the best of both worlds. This painting was done on such a canvas. The ground is smooth (though, I’m still getting used to how it behaves, so there are inconsistencies) and brilliantly white and a lovely thing to paint on. The paint maintains such a vibrancy, colors just shine! Of course, it proved a pretty dramatic change and so I handled a lot of the process in the painting with some clumsiness. But I think, all in all, this one is still a success.

Edit on Fri. May 16, to show a few painting touch-ups and a better, more accurate photo representation of the painting.

A new, old painting

Posted on May 4, 2008

There are a number of paintings that won’t make it onto my main, portfolio site www.adamdesrosiers.com for various reasons. I thought I’d post at least this one on the blog, for the curious. This is a painting that’s somewhat unusual in being a landscape painted by commission. Most often people commission portraits, not landscapes. But here it is:

Not a bad painting in a lot of ways. I’m proud of a lot of rendering and color choices. I wouldn’t probably,for myself, want to paint the tree leafless as it is here, but it was important to the man commissioning the piece to be able to see the big building in the foreground as well as a couple behind it (he owns them with his brother). So, there it is. It’s not a painting I love, but I do like it plenty still.

There are a couple of other landscapes that one might have assumed were painted on commission, such as the vitamin shop or the factory with power lines, but in fact I painted those just for myself. In fact, it wasn’t until after I had painted them and heard how many people asked about the businesses buying those paintings that I realized how differently most people saw them from how I did. For many they look, I guess, like adverts. I thought they were just some awesome urban scenery. I’ve decided, since, to steer away from so explicitly bringing in a business name or setting a single building in the focus of a scene to try and avoid that kinda thing.

Wedding Portrait for Jim and Maria

Posted on April 27, 2008

Brace yourself, this is going to be a long post! Or, I suppose, you could just look at the pictures. There are only ten of those.

Barring a reproduction I painted for Father Barnes in ‘07, this is the first painting I’ve worked on in a little over two years. It is also the first painting that I’ve documented through its various stages. So writing this blogpost, whilst hopefully interesting and educational for the reader, is certainly, at the least, educational for the author. I had no idea my method was so … well, chaotic! To see what I put myself through in this painting has inspired me to make some significant changes to my approach to future portraits. With that said, let’s get to the gory details, with my initial sketch.

Read more

An artist starts to blog

Posted on April 25, 2008

Yes, I started a new blog to coincide with a website redesign. If you haven’t already, check it out and let me know what you think of them both. I hope that I have a thing or two of interest to write here. But mostly, I expect to use this blog to keep whoever is interested up-to-date in what new work I’ve done and to show something of my method and what work may be in progress. Feel free to comment here as often as you find a post interesting.

My next post will be a thorough run-down of the stages I went through in painting my most recent portrait of Jim and Maria on their wedding day.

Thanks for reading!

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