About one Year Ago...

Davide set me up in a painting studio. It was far enough away from our apartment that I felt stuck there. This was the point: no distractions, just me battling myself through paintings for 8-12 hours a day. The goal was to learn color, light, shapes, and really grow technically. I started with a concept of painting girls paired with unsettling dolls, using colors I wouldn't normally gravitate towards. I used only oil paint and gradually added amounts of walnut oil. I discovered walnut oil while researching Old Masters techniques. Walnut oil won't yellow whites over time, and it's more fluid than linseed oil. I fell in love with it, and the completed paintings have a phenomenal and uniform texture and glow. However, this process takes a long time, because each layer of paint takes a week or longer to dry. So, it took months to work on these paintings, and though I had many more paintings sketched out with more provocative content, I grew bored...not of the learning process and what I learned, which was alot, but with the final product. While in my opinion they are beautiful and more realistic than anything else I'd painted to date, they were just not haunting enough, not unsettling enough..just not where I wanted to land. And, a habit of mine is to learn as much as possible as fast as possible..and once I feel I've learned the lesson and conquered the battle, I move on. Thus, these paintings were left unfinished as my passion took me onward.

Studio Update...

Here's a quick peek at part of a new oil painting that measures 36" x 72"...