Adam Desrosiers Fine Arts blog

Posts will probably be coming up pretty slowly for the foreseeable future, unless I get a hankering to start blogging about subjects other than my artwork (not terribly likely) so I thought I’d at least update now and let y’all know what’s holding back the blogging.

That’s the Mrs. and she’s very pregnant! In fact, that’s an older photo. As I type, our baby boy is one day late. Painting, I’m sure you understand, has taken a little bit of a back seat to preparing the household for a new member. I even got up the gumption to acquire my driver’s license. Yes, I waited until I was 31 to first get a driver’s license. I guess the proper motivation has always just been impending fatherhood.

Also keeping me quite busy, the job which actually pays my bills (coffee roasting, unlike portrait painting, has seen no recession) is booming. They got me doing 50-60 hour weeks. So between keeping people caffeinated and looking after Jenn, there’s minimal painting time.

I am still painting some, if slowly. My current work, as I mentioned in a couple previous posts, is a triptch portrait; three siblings each on their own canvas, intended to be 3 complete, individual paintings, but which are at the same time meant to hang together as one piece. It presents a number of challenges for me, but is going well. When it’s done, it’ll be blogged here and added to the main site.

Not a hard show to land, I work here as coffee roaster! But it’s a great place to hang work, as it gets more foot traffic than any gallery I’ve ever been in. Actually already sold a piece (the small painting of a tree, not in this photo) and possibly a second.

The response from locals here has been really fantastic. Of course, four of these six paintings (the small one not shown) are places everybody in Beverly recognizes, and that at least tickles most folk. But what’s been a bit surprising, and really quite touching for me, is the number of people who express to me a real sense of gratitude for painting these. People are saying things like, “Thank you so much for sharing this work!” and “I know all these places, but not like this. It’s such a gift to be able to see our town through your eyes.”

These are probably the biggest compliments I’ve ever been paid for my work and worth more to me than all the dollars I’d get for selling the whole show without any such compliments. I’ve also been glad to hear how many people use the word “luminosity” when talking about my paintings. Luminosity has long been the central focus of my attraction to artwork from realist, to impressionist to even abstract painters. Getting a sense that light emanates from the painting is what I’ve always wanted to achieve. This body of work (the paintings I’ve completed since I started painting again in 2008) are the first pieces fully to achieve where I wanted to get my art since I started painting in college. And it’s a quality that just doesn’t translate to my website, but needs to be seen in person. So if you’re near Beverly, stop in at the Atomic to check them out!

It’s really a blessing, not only to have such a show up, but to be available in the showspace to discuss the work for 5 or 6 hours every day I’m working (the rest of my hours are in a seperate room, bagging and shipping coffee). All in all, a success of a show.

This painting was actually completed about a month ago, but I’ve been a bit lazy about keeping the website and blog up to date. Still, here it is.

I haven’t painted a winter scene since my first, clumsy attempts at painting in Jr. High School. I think this one turned out a bit better. Of course, it’s mostly a sky scene, but it’s a decidely wintery sky, no?

For the curious, here are a couple of older (3-5 years) abstract paintings of mine. I haven’t painted a totally abstract piece since. They’re both rather large, like 45-50 inches tall. I’m feeling a bit too lazy to go measure them right now.

I guess I’m just posting these because I’m feeling particularly sentimental about them at the moment. I know they don’t go over nearly so well with people more drawn to realist work (my main focus in painting at the moment) but, believe it or not, I know plenty of individuals who’d rather see me leave the realist stuff and focus on expanding into a series what I started with these two pieces. I’d love to paint more abstractions too, but not at the expense of the realist work. I guess it’s a series I’ve left on the back burner for that mythical time in life when I might be painting more steadily than I can afford to today.

Anyhow, I’ve got a new landscape that should be completed in another week or so, and that will probably be my next post. I’ve got a series of children portraits lined up to start when Spring weather properly rolls in, but as I am also likely going to be returning to some grueling hours at a day job to pay bills, those portraits (and all artwork) are probably going to be completed absurdly slowly.

I’ve done finished my foggy day painting. And it was as difficult as any painting I remember.The colors are all so subdued and the shifts, from far distance toward the foreground, are so subtle that any slight error in color tone threw off the painting’s sense of space.

In the end It’s probably not my favorite painting in the world but it’s got a calm, contemplative kind of charm. And my wife loves it, so I’m happy to have it on the wall for her.

Let me know your thoughts, if you’ve got any. You prefer to see me stick to my typically more vibrant coloring scheme? Or you think this is an interesting turn toward the muted and subdued that’s worth pursuing some more?

I don’t often work very small, but since I wanted a break from my other painting (a difficult, foggy scene of a beach near my apartment) I thought I’d paint this little guy. It’s  8″x12″

The scene is quite busy and I don’t know that I handled it with as much finesse as I could have. It’s tough to make decisions about what to simplify and what to include from a busy scene in nature like this, and my instinct is, with most paintings, to try throwing everything in and subdue it through careful composition and coloring consideration. I feel this works in many of my paintings but this one might just have wound up too busy. At least, it was fun to do, and an inspiration to try my hand at some more small works.

I took photos of a number of steps I took in making this piece. Continue on in this post to see them.

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The title says pretty much all I have to say about this painting. It’s a simple piece, though one I very much enjoy looking at.

Skies come relatively easily and enjoyably to me, so I thought, after the challenges of my last few paintings, I’d do this scene which is mostly just sky.  I have also another, somewhat more ambitious and challenging landscape in process right now, but that one might never make it onto my site as I can’t tell if it’s going to be successful or not. It’s a foggy scene, which I’ve never painted before, and it could just turn out to be an abject failure. If, a couple months from now it’s still not on the site, you can be sure that it did fail and I moved on to the next painting.

At last, I’m done with my portrait of John! It took me quite a few months. While it’s not the only thing I’ve worked on since completing my last painting, it has been my primary project. I think it is worth the wait, though. updated: John has seen the portrait and recommended some touch-ups which I’ve made.  The image here has been updated with a new photo. Check it out:

This big painting (about 50″ tall) represents a new direction for my portraiture. If you’ve read my other posts, you have a sense for the technical changes I’ve made with the ground, which is a big enough change, but I decided to also adjust my technique in regard to how I use mediums with my paint and how I apply multiple layers. In short, and to oversimplify the matter, I’m using less medium and painting more thickly. This change accounts for the amount of time it took to complete this piece. I realized that, in the past, I’ve relied heavily on applying multiple very thin layers of paint to carry some imperfect color mixing, so that any given layer of the painting might not have the effect I want in the end, but I’d compensate through layering. For instance, a slightly too-red flesh tone can be painted over with a slightly too blue a flesh tone and they’d together turn out pretty good.

With this painting (and my future portraits) I wanted to get something with more immediacy and a more painterly feel. Doing this I realized how hard it is to mix a great flesh tone. I spent a couple full days working on John’s face that I just wiped away entirely until I finally worked out how to achieve the flesh tones I wanted. It was worth the work. This painting does just exactly what I hoped for it and I now have a stronger sense for mixing (Caucasian at least) flesh tones, which will speed up my process in the future.

I didn’t take too many photos of the process, but if you’d like to see a couple examples of the early stages, just continue on past the jump. I hope you like the piece and I’m happy to hear any comments (critical or complimentary) that you have. I have a tough skin, so don’t treat me with kid gloves if you gotta voice a criticism!

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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.

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.