Mysterious Thrills

Ink Drawing - Created during The Butterfly Project performance
New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Newark, New Jersey
June 6, 2009
Link to journal entry: Mysterious Thrills

Cargo Pants

Sketching in Old Lyon, France

Link to journal entry "Travel Tips for Artists - Cargo Pants"

No time to be fussy

Link to journal entry on wordpress.com

Rapeseed Fields in Southern France

Link to journal entry
Third Time Around

Mother's Day

Watercolor Sketch painted in Arles, France. Cafe La Nuit, painted by Van Gogh.

Link to journal entry... Mother's Day

Cypress Trees in Southern France

Link to journal entry

An adventure in France

My dear friend, Mlle. Jane, treated me to a trip to France!

Over the next few weeks I will post sketches, photos, paintings and rambling thoughts on my wordpress blog. Each time I add a new post, I will also post an image and a link on this blog.

Link to today's post on wordpress.com

Bad Link

Sorry for the bad link on the last post.

Here is the link to my wordpress blog: chriscarterart.wordpress.com

A Shift in Direction

Trying once again to simplify my life, I have decided to try wordpress for my illustrated journal blog. After visiting Alexis and Nicole's blogs, it appeared that I might find it might suit my needs a bit better. I'm not sure how wordpress and blogger are related, but I was able to import all of the posts on this blog into my new blog. On occasion, I will post to this blog, but probably not more than once a month.

I believe it is easier to subscribe to the wordpress blog. You will find a "Blog" drop down button in the upper right corner that allows you several options including subscribing. My new blog is Third Time Around at chriscarterart.wordpress.com.

Over the next couple of months I am working on a large commissioned piece. I doubt that I will post paintings on Ebay during this time. I might simply vanish until late Spring when I will offer Creativity Workshops and Painting Workshops from my home studio.

Image: Maggie Segale - oil on paper

One Hung, One to go

I'm cutting it close. The paintings must be dropped off at Wing's Conservatory before noon on Saturday. The paint will still be wet when the color studies are hung. Fortunately the paintings are oil on paper and need to be matted and framed under glass, protecting the wet paint from being smeared by curious fingers. Within an hour or two I will have completed the last of the little color studies and will begin cutting mats and framing.

Working four days a week at the prop shop has forced me into a discipline of scheduling my time carefully. Another benefit, aside from that of a regular paycheck, is the pruning of priorities. Over the past five years I have spent a great deal of time on marketing that has not proven to move me toward my goal of becoming a better painter. Ultimately, learning to paint with clean, fresh, exciting color that suggests moods, atmospheric conditions and excitement will bring me far greater satisfaction than adding more exhibits to my resume.

I look forward to disappearing from the public eye for awhile.

Image: Ellen Mihalick, painted over black & white, giclee print of photograph by Elayne Wishart.

Eric Ortega

The energy and movements of Eric Ortega have been an inspiration to me since I began painting him four or five years ago. He inspired my spontaneous Zakar Art work and now the first oil painting of him. The exhibit Reflections of a Dancer opens next weekend at Wings Conservatory in Chester, New Jersey. Along with a selection of my watercolor paintings and Zakar paintings, a series of color studies created from the photographs of Elayne Wishart will be presented. This study of Eric is one of the paintings that will be on display. The exhibit is a fund raising event for the Butterfly Project. For more information on the Butterfly Project, click here.

Reflections of a Dancer - Exhibit at Wings Conservatory

First Image: underpainting
Second Image: first glaze over underpainting.

The exhibit, Reflections of a Dancer, opens at Wings Conservatory in Chester on March 7th, 2009. The exhibit will raise funds for The Butterfly Project, supporting children's cancer research.

The technique used in the color studies I have created for this exhibit is new to me. The images were taken from the beautiful photographs of Elayne Wishart whose work will also be shown in the exhibit along with the work of Deb Gichan and Ana Tatoris. Using the traditional technique of underpainting and glazing, I first used the computer to transform Elayne's color photographs into black and white photographs. I then printed giclee prints and painting the initial underpainting (first image posted here) directly onto the print. I felt like a hack doing that. My goal was to play with color and glazes on figures as I did on landscapes last year. Taking the time to redraw the images of twelve paintings for a fund raising exhibit was not part of the plan, especially when the images themselves were not originally mine. Still, it worked against my grain to simply paint over someone else's photographs. These paintings are not just inspired by Elayne's work, they are, beneath the surface of paint, Elayne's work. So be it. I have learned what I set out to learn by this experiment, that complementary colors in an underpainting does not always work as well with interior/figure work as with landscapes. Analagous colors glazed over the surfaces of walls, backgrounds and flesh worked a bit better for me.

However, struggling through the color studies, nuances of color were suggested that I would not have thought to experiment with and will lead to further studies. Heaven forbid I find myself at a dead end of exploration. I had planned for the orange underpainting in many of the studies (not shown here) to be obliterated by the glazes. Instead, I left a great deal of orange as it added energy to the work. The flesh tones often conflicted with the walls and had to be adjusted. I will choose the colors for the underpaintings differently the next time I work on figures in an interior.

All in all, it was a delightful experiment and I am grateful to Elayne for allowing me to use her work for this small series of color studies.

For Exhibit information visit www.chriscarterart.com and click on the link for schedule of events.