WILDlife at Heather James Fine Art in WY

For you art enthusiasts in western Wyoming, three of my watercolors are featured in "WILDlife," a group show at Heather James Fine Art in Jackson, WY.... The opening reception is next Thursday, September 8. Also included are works by Henry Darger, Diego Giacometti, Penelope Gottlieb, Tim Hawkinson, and others.

More info at http://heatherjames.com/assets/press/jackson/WILDlife_PR.pdf

Painting Milk

I started working on this watercolor a few weeks ago. The butterfly is a Lorquin's Admiral who took an obsessive liking to our car when we were in western Nevada last summer. The question I have to ask myself is how many unfinished watercolors can I stack on my drawing table (which is little more than a rickety keyboard stand)? At this point, I have a pile of four...


I did some of the wet-in-wet glass shadows first, in case they didn't go so well...


Time has flown by, and it's almost done at this point... Just need to darken some shadows and even out some asymmetries.


Okay, now it's really almost almost done. With watercolor the command to stop sometimes has to come from the materials. If you insist on plowing ahead the punishment is murk. The title of this painting, "Milk," comes from the word on the glass.

Back to the fishbowl

I'm back to work on this fishbowl watercolor, which I started in November but first had to finish the two newer paintings resting on top of it. Below this is another drawing board with an unfinished watercolor I started in 2008. Below that is an even older drawing board and below that layers of I don't know what... Keep digging down, and at some point you hit limestone with trilobite fossils, I imagine.

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Larger than life this time

They say you can't fix mistakes in watercolor, but this is not quite true. In addition to various means of making minor corrections, such as scrubbing, blotting, and scratching off color, you can also make more drastic changes using a little technique I like to call "starting over."

Okay, this doesn't always get a laugh among non-artists, but thanks anyway. In the case of today's painting, I started over in order to make it larger, and to change the subject's body pose downward to a (hopefully) more dramatic angle, accentuating the weight of the key.

I'm almost finished...

Look for my watercolor at Incognito 2011

This new untitled watercolor study is just off the drawing board.
Size: 8 x 6 in.

I'm sorry I will be unable to attend Incognito in person -- that is, the annual fundraiser art sale for the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Each year all the "can't miss" events seem to want to pile up on the same handful of weekends, and April 30, the date of Incognito this year, is shaping up to be a third-degree conflict magnet. I won't test your patience by ticking off the other events piled onto that day on my calendar. I'm just sorry because this is a fun free-for-all, in which people scramble to buy work by hundreds of artists, some famous, some emerging, and all the same size and bargain priced to move. The catch is the work is displayed anonymously, so you must trust your lust, as they say. You get to find out who created the artwork you just bought only after you pick it up. If you are considering going, I suggest buying a ticket at one of the higher levels (for example, "Patron"). It's more expensive, but the higher price includes a voucher for an artwork, and the remainder of the ticket price is tax deductable. More critically, the fancy ticket gets you priority entrance to the event, which is critical because most of the best work sells in the first few minutes. Get there early in any case. And look for my little watercolor on the wall somewhere... Am I cheating by posting an image here? Perhaps, but those who know my work will recognize it anyway, and those who don't are probably not reading this.

Thanks for your support!

re:FORM at Honor Fraser Gallery

Hi. This is a brand new new watercolor named "Blacky." Someone may be supporting a good cause by taking this painting home and hanging it on their wall later this week...

It will appear in re:FORM, an auction event happening on Feb 10 at Honor Fraser Gallery in Culver City to benefit the Drug Policy Alliance. If you are interested in attending this auction, offering works by such artists as Ed Ruscha, Frank Gehry, Jane Callister, Seonna Hong, Ed Moses, Lawrence Weiner and many others, you can learn more at www.reformartauction.org.