YUPO - START TO FINISH

As promised in yesterday's blog posting, below are the eight photos taken as I worked on this painting. The first shows the beginning step, with one big, irregular white shape that goes off the paper on all 4 sides. Basically, I painted one light value in the shapes around it. The second shows a few strong darks added next to the white shape, breaking up some of the white shape in the sunglasses and hat areas.

The third and fourth photos show the progression as more values are added to help meld the darks and lights together. (All of this basically came from instructions given in a workshop I'd taken a couple of years ago with John Salminen.)

Our workshop teacher, George James, also started with a few simplified shapes placed within a specific chosen grid, within the gridded page, and generally included one bigger white shape. I added his grid idea to the big white shape idea and proceeded to design the shapes.

Things started out okay, but I was not happy with the way the painting was going in photo 4. The white hat on earphone guy was too too strong (but needed to be important,) and the painting seemed to be way too predictable.

Thank goodness George suggested pulling the big white shape on the left side (shoulders and backs of the 2 guys in photo 5) all together. After taping the edge of the hat to protect it, in photo 6, you can see how I used a squeegee to drag some green paint through that area. I was 'back in business.'

From that point on, I was having way too much fun, adding more patterns to the painting in the form of checkered flags effects as well as road stripes. There are some cool textures added at this point, too, that can be seen if you click on the paintings.

The last three posted progressions have very small areas changed in them, but the changes significantly improved the way the painting reads, I think. Much to my surprise, my husband, who strongly prefers very realistic paintings, said he really liked this one. (He LOVES racing.)

My hope was that the painting would express the feelings of speed, the activity, the excitement that goes along with this sport, and I purposely chose colors for the painting that are on the race flags - black, white, yellow, red.

I've also posting the two reference photos that this painting was sketched from. I liked that I could combine an Indy car race driver and car owner, along with a Nascar race fan, in one painting and get away with it. Someone in class today commented on how 'good' A.J. looked in the painting, (a little like a younger Paul newman.) The first reference photo is of A.J. Foyt Jr. and his namesake grandson, who now drives for him.

Thank you to George James for opening my artist's eyes and ears. He is a brilliant master teacher as well as one of the most progressive artists in our age. We called him 'George' all week, but while writing this blog up, I wondered if I should've called him 'Mr.' or 'Professor' out of respect. He has my full respect either way.

I surely appreciated all that he discussed and shared with us throughout the four days last week and hope to take another workshop from him in the future. I'm also looking forward to his fourth DVD which should be released soon from Creative Catalyst Productions. (His other three videos are excellent, by the way.)

Now I'm headed to the studio to continue work on my new series of sports-related paintings. This time it's golf.