Trouble Light

Painting #12 for Affinity



Lana and I were definitely attracted to this object, it's almost hard to say why, it was just something that resonated with us. We completely changed the coloration, the original light was orange and relatively warn looking.

2 layer painting

Done with two controlled wet layers, not much in the way of glazing happening here.

Oil on MDF 18" by 13"

Soap

Painting #11 for Affinity



This is the most textural painting made so far. Whenever your subject allows you to create a solid mix of transparency and thick opaque applications, take advantage of it! Painting this way is fun, and forces you to think about a singular use of shape and color as a means to immediate drawing.

Rembrandt and other masters used this method to achieve stunning results. Lana and I always love looking at his pieces, and were thrilled to come across subject matter where we could try our hand with this juicy application of paint. Although Affinity is broadly about everyday objects and their relationship to our lives , we were really looking to bridge the space between neo-pop painting and classical technique.

Finished job at Art By Commission

Hi! We just finished an Affinity style commission for someone! It's on Art By Commission.

The process photos will follow.

Pink Lemonade

Painting number #10 for Affinity

I was in Wegman's and noticed a spiraled tower of those tasty lollipops we all have seen somewhere, or bought for charity purposes someplace else. The colors, surfaces, and overall character of the candies were really quite beautiful. In an instant, I became reminded of the jewels so intricately placed on the robes of the Madonna by Jan Van Eyck, the perfectly reflective glasses in still lifes by Willem Kalf, or the hand-wrought imperfect glass panels that fill modern architectural voids.

With these references in mind, painting this object became inevitable. Later that day, I opened the candy I had bought placed it in my mouth, pulled it out, and noticed the windows of the cottage where we live reflected into the wet red sugar. I took a snapshot of this and used it as the guidelines for this painting.

3 layer painting - (underpainting done with vermillion, black and white)
oil on panel
12.5" by 14.5"

Hydrant

Hey guys, this is painting #9 for Affinity.


The painting is titled "Hydrant" it is executed with oil on panel. For this piece, I re-visited the first oil/glaze technique ever taught to me by Clifford Wun, a really great drawing/painting/design professor at RIT. Cliff really helped Lana and me get to where we are today, without his excellence in teaching, Affinity may never have happened.

A fire hydrant is a very symbolic icon, I wanted to really show-case the forms which come to mind when thinking of this object. I performed a fair share of idealization and simplification and in doing so, removed some of the gritty function the hydrant possesses. The positive space is rendered with painters like Ingres/David in mind with definite attention to color and surface, yet displaying these properties through a relatively linear pictorial form. The main role of the negative space is creating a silhouette to cleanly reveal the iconic shape, while bolstering the potency of the orange tones.

I always enjoy the idea of adding and removing function/duty through art, an example by Jeff Koons titled "Caterpillar ladder" where both objects are made relatively useless, which I find to be all together enjoyable.

Hanging Affinity at Wells

This past October, Lana and I hung our first showing of Affinity at Wells College in Aurora NY. (Aurora is a very scenic town right on the mid-point of Cayuga Lake)

We met up with professor William Ganis, who on top of being an excellent mind in art, also runs the String Room Gallery, where our work is currently on display. He showed us around the space and gave us some tips on hanging our paintings, after that he lent us a key and trusted us to have free-reign.

Once things got rolling, it was relatively easy to decide where to put the paintings; however, getting them all on the wall was a bit challenging at times. For instance our calculations weren't always 100 percent perfect and required fixing, also screws weren't biting into old brick very well. All things considered it went pretty well, no paintings fell down and broke!

Here is a visual progression of the hanging process.

Trip to the Everson and H&M

To anyone who cares about our blog :)

Lana and I went on a trip to Syracuse's Everson Museum to see the current exhibition titled "Turner to Cezanne"! It was very excellent, and gave a visual journey through the start of Impressionism to post-impressionism. We were able to see great pieces by Renoir, Monet, Van Gogh, Turner, Meissonier, Charles Bargue, Manet and many more.


We also stopped at H&M which I had never been to, it was pretty great. Really nice designs and pretty darn affordable :)

Shrimp Flavor

Painting #8 from Affinity

Shrimp Flavoring package from instant noodles, a very bizarre thing in many many ways.

Painted entirely by Lana
oil on panel

Made In NY 2009

These photos are from the Made In NY 2009 show, which was held at the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center, in Auburn NY. Lana and I had our Strawberry Bon-Bon painting accepted, it was one of around 70 works on display by various NY state artists. It was the first showing of any work painted for Affinity; we were fortunate to have our painting featured in the city's newspaper.

Back to Blogging

Hey everyone, now that Affinity is up for everyone to see, we will be writing new posts and showing the rest of the work that went into our show. Please stay tuned, we know it has been a while since our last post, but only good things to follow!



http://www.wells.edu/stringroomgallery/exhibitions/scheiffleepurnell/bslp1.htm

Carton

Painting of a carton compared to origami.

2' x 2'
oil on MDF

Kewpie Mayonnaise

In case you are unfamiliar with this product, it is a Japanese mayonnaise. We thought the red stripes were a great mechanism of attraction, and the really hard text/graphics appearing on the soft mayo was a nice contrast. In reality the package is fairly sloppy/loose; however, with these paintings it is our intent to pinpoint, abstract and reveal the ideal mechanism of attraction for each object, therefore we draw as things as they wish to be not always as they are.

oil on MDF
roughly 4' x 2'

Whirly Pop

Here is a final image of the whirly pop, this was a fun piece to make with techniques that varied a little from the rest. There are physical ridges in each color segment that catch the highlights, we made these by piling on the paint and then pulling a rough house painting brush through it. Once the under painting dried this was a quick piece to paint. All of the detail/info is just glazed over a flat under painting.

oil on MDF
roughly 2' x 2.5'

Tea Cup

Here is the final image to our most time intensive image! I painted the saucer on this thing twice, seeing as how this painting is 4 feet across that is a lot of work...pheww. Although we had good reference, we wound up doing a lot of the rendering based on how we thought it should look rather then how it looked, so at times it was a little confusing. Despite the ups and downs we are pretty happy with the way it came out. The color is very deep and reflective and that is quite wonderful.

4' x 3'
oil on MDF

Bet The Farm barrel commission

Lana and I recently finished a project for Art by Commission, if you would like to see it, you can view it at Art by Commission. Our piece goes on display July 3 at Bet the Farm!

A bit of industrial design

Lana and I have had some bed issues here, the previous mattress was shot as was the box spring and cheap frame. The problem was the frame couldn't support the bed and everything sagged in the middle. After a bit of deliberation, we decided to build our own bed with a platform so a box spring wouldn't be required. We both studied the look of some modern beds and thought their designs and shapes were quite nice and the construction of them seemed easy to emulate. We made a little plan and headed to Home- Depot and got the supplies.
2 (2 x 8)
2 (2 x 12)
3 (2x 6)
brackets
plywood and wood screws

All in all it took and day to get together, we ran into a few problems but were fairly easy to fix. The main problem being that the jerk at home-depot who cut the wood for us was incompetent, our boards were not all perfect. It was important for us to not have any screws or nails of brackets visible, so everything for structure is contained in the bed. The only thing left I suppose is to stain/poly it. The little sawdust left on it makes us sneeze!

Note the delicious Ikea wastebasket (named Fniss)!

Bedside table. Bedtime stories...

Look, Ma, no metal fixings!

Around the area (my yard)

It was a muggy day, but beautiful, nonetheless. I wish the summers here were milder though... I have a feeling we're in for lots of heat this summer ...... ...

Garden part 2

Here are some details of the garden-- Onions (from seed), Lagerfeld roses (buds), Ingrid Bergman rose, and Evening Primrose.

Garden part 1

Brett and I have worked our butts off creating this new garden on the south side of the cottage. We did it over a couple of weekends with the help of a rented rototiller. We should be getting more tiki torches. That touch of corniness fits in perfectly here as far as the DIY attitude of this project was concerned....

Our delphinium will bloom soon and our foxglove later on will too. My begonia is doing well, even though I caught a bunny sampling it once. Also that purplish stuff 'Brachycome' behind the ferns is doing great. And because our soil isn't so great here (lots of clay), Nasturnium does very very well. I transplanted the ferns and well, hmm....

Some baby foxglove we've been growing from seed.... they bloom next year... Peonies, snapdragon and japanese iris... And potatoes! :D

Kewpie step 3

Our painting of the Kewpie mayo should be nearly completed by the end of the week. For now here is a sneak peek at some of the bottle rendering and text/graphics.

Whirly Pop whirling to completion

The whirly pop, a piece I feared may take longer then it did seemed to race to completion. Once all of the initial block-ins dried it was a matter of controlling transparent paint for the dark tones and semi-opaque tones for the lights. Overall the painting is about 95 percent done and once this layer dries we will tweak the last 5 percent. Despite our success it was still no easy task to render the 35 or so different color bands and the other 35 or so white bands that separate the colors.
P.S. - The final photo should be up this weekend.

Tea Cup

Last week Lana and I officially finished all painting on the teacup piece. In the end it will probably be the one that took the most work. Some of our techniques didn't work out as we imagined they would and complicated areas like the saucer had to be repainted twice. Over all we are both happy with the end result and most importantly we each learned a great deal about working on a large scale and painting in general. It still may need another coat of the feldspar green on the background, and it def. needs spray kammar varnish to unify the shiny surface. When the varnish dries we will photograph the 4' x 3' hulk and upload it, for now here is a detail shot.

Dots

The painting we had expected to finish last came first! That's great because we get our main wall back.

Alternate view:


Detail (taken at an angle):


Here's the scale of this brute:

(I'm 5'4'')

(Brett is 6'3'')

We are thrilled to continue this series as much more is on the way. We've worked through the hard conceptual stuff and imagery, the next bunch will just be fun as we know just where to go from here. It's a secret for now....

Made in NY 2009

So we got into our first group show! It's at the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn, NY. Brett and I submitted the maximum amount of entries (2) and the results were as we expected-- the bon-bon accepted and the morinaga rejected. That is fine. As the paper says, only 11 artists (out of 64) had both of their entries accepted!

TL;DR: The show's exhibition dates are June 6 through August 22. There is an artist's reception on June 7th from 3-5 PM. This info and the address is on the paper above (click to enlarge).

...Hooray!

Pittsburgh: The Frick Museum

We just got back from Pittsburgh and we saw a show at the Frick. No photography was allowed, but they gave out a free flyer. There were some brilliant drawings by Millet and we got a peek at some of their permanent collection. Brett and I enjoyed the Master of Half-length's triptych (Don't remember the name of it). We also got to ride a segway, also awesome. Not in the museum, though...

Ground Pig

Lana and I have been entertained the past couple of weeks by a very unruly woodchuck. We first noticed it spring out of hibernation and jump up onto the deck on the south-side of the cottage.

It was fun to watch at first, then the gnawing, scraping and destruction of the cottage began. During this project, it got into a brawl with crunk-the-skunk and everything out there smelled like skunk spray for a couple of days. Enough was enough, Lana's mom got a havahart trap and we began the catching process. The first day we placed the trap near the cottage, was the first day it ran up to the house and switched residences. We soon learned it had a large tunnel network up there where his exit hole was right under the studio window. Keeping this in mind we moved the trap up there and for a few days watched it timidly go in and out and sneak a bite or two of the bait. Our frustration began when it suddenly seemed very reluctant to do anything with the cage at all. One afternoon we noticed it running back to the cottage to gather supplies for this new home, its supplies consisted of a mouth full of insulation and a little tuft of it stuck to its head like a tupee. That night I moved the trap to the midway point of his travel path back to his its cottage hole. The following morning Lana and I awoke and noticed mr. crunk the skunk was trapped in the cage because he couldn't resist chips covered in bbq sauce.
A very cautious release on my part, but by covering the trap with a sheet and being very graceful I was able to carefully let the poor thing go. Another week or so had passed with still no woodchuck in the cage, getting discouraged, I had tossed a few bits of apple in the cage and let it sit without much thought. Finally yesterday in need of some varnish we left for an hour and when we pulled in the driveway we noticed and very angry brown lump sulking in the cage.

Taking pity on him we took him 15 min away to a deserted road and large farm field, the second I opened the cage door he flew out at lightning speed and seemingly began making his way back to Aurora. I doubt we will see the little beast again, but perhaps another will take shelter in the already established ground hog paradise which resides under the houses here.

Status Update

Bon-bon: Done
Morinaga: Done

Teacup: Saucer, highlights, background layer are left (~85% done?)
Lollipop: Shadow detail, finishing work (80%)
Dots: Modeling the dots about halfway done, more shadows, finishing glaze and detail left (~67%)

Kewpie: Not very far along-- (35%)

Soon the three will zip right out..... Then on to Kewpie and the next ones.... We want about 10-12 ideally....

Brett is copying some Bargue on the side, and Lana is doing some illustration (building a portfolio) and training to get a little faster at that. Wellp... that's it for now!

whirly pop update

Last week I finished blocking in the whole under-painting for the giant whirly pop painting. Every one of the 40 or so color areas was applied thick and stroked with the brush hair, this interpretation really gives it a nice uniform direction for the light to follow as it hits the piece. After these were applied, I went in and painted the grey divisions that seperate each color. Right now everything is flat, but over this layers comes a couple of glazes to develop color intensity and form.

Kewpie 2

3. Acrylic wash in
4. Grey oil background

Things are going slowly but surely; we're looking forward to warm weather.

Kewpie 1

1. Start of the pencil drawing
2. Red acrylic paint

Details below of steps between 1 and 2:
1a. Pencil drawing (some colored pencil)
1b. Colored pencil logo & lettering
1b. Acrylic painted logo & lettering

Ingredients: Vegetable oil, Egg Yolk,Vinegar, Salt, Monosodium Glutamate, Spices.
Contains: Egg

MORINAGA'S MILK CARAMEL

Here it is!! Lana and I are quite proud of this one, sorry the photos don't really do the piece justice. Original painting is 37" by 17.25" oil on MDF, check out the progress photos in the archive if you want to know how it got to this stage.

Art by Commission

You may have noticed our new link in the right-hand sidebar--

Brett and I are getting ready to start marketing our new project Art by Commission, and staking out a small place on the internet with the AbC blog. Basically this idea is to do some more traditional art-- still life, landscape, and portraits for anyone who commissions us. Each commission will be evaluated on a case by case basis; we will cater as much as possible to a patron's wishes.

There are more printed things to come, but currently we've created this flyer for hanging up in public places.