Painting Stuff

I keep my painting career separate from my cartooning — hell, I even use a different name — but for years I’ve been thinking that I need to bring the two together somehow. So consider this an incursion from reed.ac (which anyway doesn’t have a blog) into bohemiandrive.com (which does).

This is an idea I had a while back while looking through old photos. It seems that I have a lot of pictures of paintings in progress. I thought it might be fun to share some of them here. Arranged this way, they are a bit like comic strips, after all.

As it turns out, sorting through and organizing these images has been a bigger job than I anticipated, so I’m only going to do five for now. I’ll say a little about them, but since the subjects and processes are similar for all of them, here’s some general information up front. These are all oil paintings, either on wood or canvas. I use an indirect method: start with a grisaille, glaze over that, opaque paint over that, glaze again, opaque, over and over until you can’t stand it anymore then you’re through. Now subject-matter-wise, you may ask “what’s with all the skulls?” and I could give you some artist-statement verbiage about the macabre or whatever, but in lieu of that I’ll just say this: do you hear yourself? “What’s with all the skulls?” They’re skulls.

I made something like 100 paintings during the Opplopolis hiatus (which is an eighth of what Van Gogh painted in the same period, but who’s counting), and while I didn’t document the making of many of them I do still have a lot of pictures so I may do this again someday. Maybe I’ll even shoot a video (though this is such a stop and start process it would likely be pretty disjointed.)

Ok, first one. Nine images. Nothing much to add, just that this is the only one in this batch on canvas rather than wood.

This next one is odd because I changed the lighting after the first image. That means there’s a step missing, I think, where I would have put a dark glaze over everything and painted the light back out. I wish I had a picture of that.

This one had a drawing to go with it. I don’t often do that.

This one is on the cover of my book, which, I mean, I’m not trying to sell it to you or nothing. I’m just linking to it.

And finally these three pictures are less about process and more about indecisiveness.

So that was different.

I’m spending all my time on Opplopolis revisions, so there’s not much else to report. They’re coming along.

Next week I’ll do the Opplopolis post I’ve been wanting to do. It’ll be less of a traditional postmortem and more of a mood board. You’ll see.