My latest two pieces

It is almost end of April and I have to get ready for a show of paintings I'll have in June at the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting company. There are two rooms there and quite a while ago I decided I'd like to put a whole series of my oil paintings on burlap in there - all in earth tones. I think this will reallly look good in that particular setting of un-plastered brick walls.

I think I have enought pieces to put a good show together, but I am planning to make one more piece because I have one more large piece of burlap stretched and primed and if I want to show this last piece I really need to paint it this week because it will take a while to dry enough. Although I'm using Galkyd Lite medium now and the oils dry relatively quickly, I found that these paintings have a noticeable smell for a few weeks. It's an odd smell of linseed oil and pigments (cannot explain it any better because the pigments really don't smell). I actually like the scent, but I know not everybody does. And as these pieces go into a place where people want to enjoy their coffee and food, the scent has to be gone by the time they get put up. To make this long story short: the last painting either gets finished this week or it won't be in the show.

Well, when I have the piece done it will get posted here. In the meantime I have two other new paintings I did 2 weeks ago. One of them is oil on burlap and quite different from the earlier pieces in this series, except the great flower, because these pieces normally are not figural. I wanted to really hint at a torso, not be quite as obvious as it ended up being. The result is still quite interesting, I thought.


The other one is just wavy forms again, they might be plants or not. That one is done in oils (again my home-ground oils) but on sail-cloth. Obviously the texture of the support is much smoother here and the paints look very different on this kind of support. The painting came out ho-hum, I thought, but mom came to the rescue: she suggested glazing over the piece with bright reds and yellows. Now this is something I normally don't do in these pieces because they are mostly earth tones and my home-made paints. But this time I decided to try it anyway and I was quite impressed with the result. As you can see this pretty thin glaze totally changed the painting, and I think for the better. Interestingly it also made the painting very glossy (probably because the percentage of medium in the glaze is so much higher than in the rest of the painting).