My son and I had a talk about mortality, the sadness of the situation and how we should appreciated every day and those around us. We both left the park with a sadness but a feeling of hope, the outpouring of love and concern from the mourners and the idea that we need to tell the people we know that we care before they leave us. Sadly, she wasn’t there to see the love and the concern but with the beauty of the sunrise and the presence we both felt, I almost feel she was looking down and she had found some peace.

Art by Gordon:

This is one of those images that got lost for a …: This is one of those images that got lost for a long time, kind of faded and darkened and than was given new life. I realize now what mo…

This is one of those images that got lost for a long time, kind of faded and darkened and than was given new life. I realize now what most effects me about the night sky, it is the silence of stars, the indifference of the universe to our tiny insignificant figures. On a camping trip with my son I recently captured the night sky just before we turned into to our tents and the silence and the majesty of light in the pitch blackness capture both of our attention. We both ended up laying down in a river bed and watching the stars, I think I will never look at the stars the same again.

After that experience of listening to the intense silence of the sky and the realization of both our place in the universe and the fact that the sky at night is a multi-dimensional landscape I have not only wanted to learn more about the stars, I’ve also improved the insight I have on painting them. I start with the background the stars, the stars you barely see and move from those to the more obvious stars in the foreground-this gives the sky a depth just like a landscape. I intend on getting the stars to twinkle off of themselves-as the eyes goes through the image, stars appear and others disappear as the eye focuses on the dimensions of the stars.

The second image is a study of the lights on the water-it is more of the reflections rather than the stars. I got this idea years ago and it has only now come to completion. The inspiration usually takes longer than the actual painting it seems.

I intend on doing a very large scene of the night sky-one that maybe covers a wall-nothing like painting on a great wall-it’s very empowering and not at all intimidating-okay depends on my mood in any given day.

I have sketched this image out so many times and have added and subtracted from the original idea. My main focus for this image is the depth, the road takes you back into the sunrise. Its a scene I see all the time as I drive around the country in north Texas.

It was a hard transition from New Jersey to Texas, the landscape is totally different, I have had to find beauty in things that are different from where I grew up. As you can see no water and no night sky which have both become my specialties over the years. I wanted to concentrate on the details in the foreground and let the viewer be able to get lost in the sky and the field in the background.

Even the colors are a bit of a departure from my standard work, this series is kind of a jumping off point as I am trying to enlarge the scope of what I paint and not be bogged down by not being as familiar with the image or techniques but the payoff has been a fresh spontaneous approach to my painting, the closest I have ever painted to en plein air. I have really enjoyed this new series and feel like it is a stepping stone to what I am really interested in painting and perfecting. Stay tuned, many new and different images are already finished and about to be revealed. Thanks for reading.

Detail of Sunflowers

First of all, this is not my photograph, my phone battery happened to run down on the day we went on Tenkiller Lake in Oklahoma. So this is my sons image from his phone. It was another amazing evening watching the colors of the sky change and getting skunked again by the illusive smallmouth bass-I’m eager to get back to the largemouth, a more cooperative species of bass-that’s my story any way.

So on this lake, I was amazed with the clarity of the water-you could see to the bottom and the color of the water was deep blue to green getting more vibrant blue as the sun faded into the horizon. We were in a perfect place for the smallmouth, deep areas under rocky ledges, giant slabs of stones in deep cold water areas and yet nothing. I swear they’re laughing at us down there but I digress.

It was still an incredible evening, we watched as the sun went down and as he continued to fish from shore I photographed the trees as the sun made shapes and silhouettes of the branches. After a long time of just enjoying being there we stayed in a cabin and realized we had bought too much fish-all in all a wonderful night and even though we didn’t catch a damn thing-the time we had in nature, just kayaking and enjoying the moment-it was a priceless perfect trip.

When I returned from the trip I painted an image to show just how clear and amazing the water was, I was impressed with the colors of the autumn leaves floating across the electric blue water. I studied the depth and clarity of the water and from sketches and photos created the third in my new series of paintings.

This is from my recent trip to Lake Murray Oklahoma. Late in the evening my son and I watched the stars looking for shooting stars. What amazed me the most is the silence that was so distinct that evening as if the earth had taken a deep breath. You have not other option but to be amazed at how small and insignificant you really are in the universe. The experience made me want to learn about all the stars so just as I did with botany I could not only see stars but really observe them because with knowledge forms interest and with even a limited interest of a subject we look deeper and notice more than the casual observer.

The main idea of this painting for me was to keep it quite simple. If you look at the stars there are several different layers of stars from the tiniest hints of blue and greenish stars to the larger stars that blink in and out of the image. I slowly worked up the glow of each set of stars, some I would blend back into the sky and others I would define-the final result was the fact that the stars twinkle in the viewers eye as some stars appear and the focus goes to other stars, I think it is the first time I intentionally did each star and attempted to create depth in the blackness-the thing about the scene that struck me was the immenseness of space and how the stars had so much space around so I started with them as a focus for the image. The water was left simple although there is more detail than can show on the image I included, I’m still working on perfecting shooting such a dark image.

I want the viewer to feel the silence I felt and the mysterious quiet that was overwhelming to me that evening. I hope this might inspire others to learn about the stars, go camping with your kids or simply look up at the sky at night for just a moment and be still.

I was talking to another artist today and we talked about illustration and drawing. We talked about how to draw or illustrate well and I tried to put the process to the simplest form. I remember when I was in drawing class they would have us either draw blind contours or draw the image upside down to fool the brain into drawing what it sees and not try conscious or subconscious to fill in the gaps with logic.

The conscious deciphers the images it sees. It will fill in much of the blanks and make assumptions of temperature, texture and distance, a conscious image of what it sees with cues of what it remembers. The problem with drawing an image is that most of the time the conscious naturally takes over the process and draws what it thinks or assumes it sees and not what it actually there. Some aspects of depth and texture might need to be exaggerated by the artist to convey the distance or texture since we transfer a three dimensional image that is real to a flat image that is obvious to the brain that it has no depth and no actual temperature. These visual cues are how the artist or the photographer captures the illusion of the image and explain to the viewer what they should expect of the image, these cues will hopefully be subtle but that is up to the artists style and intention.

An aspect of photography is directly related to this process of explaining to the viewer what they should feel or see when they see a flat image. On one of our trips I explained to my son that the reason his photograph seems flat and bland compared to what he saw is the fact that he left out the visual cue that would explain what he saw. The camera automatically is trying to create an even grey value of the image, mix this with the fact that there are no cues to explain distance and most point and shoot cameras shoot with a wide vantage point-the image is destined to be flat and bland unless the photographer adjusts and creates the cues needed to convey the space-the palette of the artist is not much different than the artists’; proportion, value and change in texture all explain to the viewer what they are seeing ad how it should be interpreted by the eye and the brain-the illusion of a sweeping canyon or the endless ocean scenery, even though the image is a flat, non-dimensional image. Once he used images for proportion and adjusted how the camera saw the value of gray-suddenly he had a photograph he was proud of.

Beside the basic loss  of depth and dimension the artist has to work with, the fact that the conscious is trying to fill in what it thinks it sees which means the actual image is not capture correctly but is almost like the very abridged version of  a novel where all the main ideas are left out. My best example of this is the rendering of droplets of water-on first notice you would over complicate the process and yet the image is very simple- a block of dark color that the droplet is on and a transparent area that is lighter than the object, add a highlight of light and the droplet is complete. As artists we must capture what we actually see instead of allowing our brains to ignore the actual the eye sees and fill in the blanks with a conscious attempt at seeing.

A challenge- go and look at a field that is on a hill and try to explain why the hill looks like it descends-how would you capture the image and explain that the field dips down when all you have is a square flat image to work with. Another great example would be to look at a road and capture it in a view finder-realize that  miles are capture within a square that is very small-what makes the road appear to be long and expanse when it fits within a small area when view through a viewfinder. Looking at a landscape this way will help in drawing and photography. I hope this was helpful.