Monthly Studio Update - March, 2003

STUDIO UPDATE: MARCH 2003

 

Non-Studio Updates:

The first article of the Pandora's Box Series has been up for a few weeks at Art Renewal Center. Art Renewal receives over 450,000 visitors and 18 million hits a month.

I have legally setup the business consortium, Naissance Holdings International Co. I won't go into all the details here but the idea for it came about from reading Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art by Michael Fitzgerald. The concept of investing, in a manner of shared investment, in the art of dedicated and talented artists and holding it until a ripe time, solves many fascinating problems. Such as: the importance of having art works available for auction houses goes a long way towards making a reputation in the art world; that I, personally, can continue to have revenue come in still have partial ownership of the art; that the investors can be guardians of some of the art works (which is what ownership of good art is after all); and, of course, that the investors are investing their savings and not spending it outright on art.

The Foundation for the Advancement of Art is beginning its marketing campaign. I am delighted that Ashley Frazier, Kristin Currier, and Anthony Teets have offered their help in this area. It's a real honor to have such savvy and intelligent people to accept my proposal. Ashley has a blog site: http://www.strangecurrency.com/strange/. And Anthony has a site with some of his essays: http://3.avatarreview.com:8081/WildeGuy/

 

 

Studio Update:

 

I continue to work on Artemis. The last haul for me is to fully work her hands. Since they are so far forward it is imperative that they should be flawless and convey the muscle tension that I am looking for. As of yet, I don't have someone to model for the hands and it is not something to do "out of my head."

 

 

You probably will not recognize this self-portrait. I started it just before I left Greece, I believe it is in the studio update for December. It is not finished. For the last few months I have been drawing with pencil, essentially they are line drawings that may or may not "fill-in" the detail of the forms. I see the whole series of these drawings as a homage to Picasso. Now that I am settled in I hope to make about 20 more drawings. When I am ready I will put them all together for an online exhibit and I will discuss in detail the connection to Picasso.

 

 

This is a study for an idea I had for a painting. I think this drawing is about ten years old and I just came across it yesterday. It makes me laugh.

 

 

 

I made this pastel this morning at a life-drawing workshop giving at the St. Petersburg Art Center. On Rhodes, such a workshop didn't exist! I love to go to these workshops and "mess" around and experiment with color or line or whatever I want to tweak at that moment. Many times I use these sessions to workout problems that I am having with major works. Oh, and this drawing took two hours.

 

 

 

 

 

Here is another pastel drawn in a workshop. This was drawn in twenty minutes.

 

Here is another two-hour drawing. One of the things I love about pastel drawing is how I feel when working with this medium: I feel totally free. But in truth, there is a lot of technical knowledge supporting that feeling.

 

At these workshops the models usually do one, five, and 20-minute poses or a two-hour pose. The drawings above and below are one minute drawings.

 

With the two drawings below I played with working the anatomy. You can see his hipbone, rib cage and collarbone. They were five-minute drawings.

 

 

 

 

I particularly like this drawing of the woman. Can you sense the movement in it? How that happens is hard to communicate. It is something like making your charcoal move like a wave of air flowing over the body.

 

 

This is a two-hour drawing. I like how the spatial relationships of the forms work.

 

 

 

 

This is a one-minute drawing and I concentrated only on drawing the shadows of the seated figure. Some people don't see a figure in this drawing. I think seeing it small makes the figure look, almost, crystal clear.

 

 

That's it for March.