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.