Write a story about Hans Zoff and Bea Ware and the best story wins the drawing on the right This contest closed Monday November 8, 2010 The crazy mixed up world of Hans Zoff and Bea Ware by Matt O' Malley was the winner.
The story you write should be a "Flash Fiction" which is a complete story in one thousand or fewer words. Please post the story in the comment section, you will have to provide your name and an email address in order to be qualified to win or you can e-mail me at kmencher@ohlone.edu with your info. The contest closes Monday November 8, 2010. There is a problem with how many characters can post (only about 4,000) so if you cannot post it. E-mail it to me at kmencher@ohlone.edu Go to my website for more contests: http://www.kenney-mencher.com/ Winning flash fiction stories will be integrated in with an exhibit in San Francisco at ArtHaus Gallery (April 8th for the reception). The show is called: Renovated Reputations: Paintings and Fiction inspired by Vintage Portrait Photographs The exhibit will include a series of 20-40 paintings and mixed media works ranging in size from 8”x10” to 18”x24” framed with thrift store and vintage frames. In addition to the exhibited works ArtHaus is publishing catalogs signed by me and as many of the authors as possible. Catalogs/books will consist of image of the painting with the text of the “flash story” surrounding the image. If I can get the authors to come to a book signing/party, authors would sign their pages for some of the printed stuff. We're going to have a photobooth for the show for participants to play with and vintage costumes. Of course I'll send the authors free copies of the catalogs. I will announce the winners the day after the closing deadline for the competition. I'm planning on doing one flash fiction competition a week every Monday from now until April. You can preview the works I have so far completed here: http://www.kenney-mencher.com/catalog/recent_work.htm (If the conditions in the side bar are not to your liking, I'm totally flexible. Send me a contract that you like and I will mail it back to you. I just don't want to chase people for signatures when I publish the catalog!) ________________________________________________ Also sent to me by e-mail. THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS by Dee Turbon His name was Hans and he was a hustler, you know. Cards mostly, in dim back rooms where the drink is cheap and the air is hung heavy with smoke, and the men there are none too bright, and the House always wins. And he did pretty well for himself. Never so big his winnings that the House was ever alerted and he was roughed up some and thrown from the premises into the street, but always enough he could afford a new coat when he’d a mind, and cigars in boxes, and champagne from France and a room at The Excelsior, though the name makes the place sound a lot grander than it really was. He wasn’t the kinda guy that’d turn your head, not really, except that he wore a fedora hat and he wore it like he was somebody. But he weren’t nobody, you know. He was just a low life, see, something that crawled from under a stone one day, and just my luck it was my bed he crawled into, leastways that’s what I told the police in a statement they took. Oh we had a time of it at first, me and Hans. Pretended like it was something that we had, something special. He was all soft words and smiles. To start with he was. And candy wrapped in too-big ribbons and flowers filling the room, all sorts, roses and lilies and lavender, and the air so thick with the perfume it made me breathless and dizzy. Course he thought he chose me, that’s what I let him think, what I let ‘em all think. Truth is I followed him to a bar one night and I worked it so he’d buy me a drink, laughed at everything he said and played a lock of my hair through my fingers, played him, too. Men are easy that way and one thing led to another, as I knew it would, and then we were together. That’s us in the photograph, right at the start of things, back when he couldn’t keep his hands off me. Spent a whole day in bed once, folded in his arms, the window wide so we could hear the traffic on the street. And we ordered room service and ate like we was royalty, if ever royalty was to stay in a room in The Excelsior. But looking at that picture now I see it is a lie. And just maybe he hustled me after all, that’s what I think, looking at his smile in that picture. Only he should’ve known. The House always wins. Found him two nights back, and he’d had a run of good fortune, that’s what he said, and I could have it all, he said, and he showed me that his pockets were full with what he’d won. And he smiled that same smile, the one in the picture, and his hands reached for me instead of her, instead of the girl he’d bought for that night. And I almost faltered, such was the charm of the man. Even staring down the barrel of a Ladysmith 9mm he could smile like he meant it. ‘Come on, Bea, you and me, what do you say, like always, and I got enough we can bathe in champagne if you like, and I could buy you a bloody flowershop, and a dress shop too. What do you say, Princess.’ ________________________________________________ Sent to me by e-mail. This one made me laugh. It's very punny! The crazy mixed up world of Hans Zoff and Bea Ware by Matt Omalley It was a normal evening in the coastal noir lit laundromat, Coin in sense. Bea Ware was alone and engaged in a detective novel, Coastside Detectives: The Grand View, when something caught her attention on the street. It was a man, a rather dapper looking man wearing a gray fedora and raincoat. He was at the rear of a black Studebaker working on opening the trunk. Bea drank him in and he seemed so thin she imagined the drifting evening fog might tip him over. The man looked up from what he was doing and stared into the shadow filled laundromat. His piercing blue eyes seemed to see right through Bea and when he smiled and hoisted a navy white duffle bag onto his shoulder Bea could not help but blush. The man entered the laundromat and paid no attention to Bea as his hard-soled leather shoes echoed upon the checkerboard floor. Bea watched his every move. When the man reached her washer, he stopped and gently placed his hand on the lid. Bea watched as he touched the washer’s smooth white skin, the lid that seemed to pulse to his touch. Bea took a shallow breath. The man dropped his load to the floor, opened the lid of the washer next to Bea’s and took his soiled underwear and garments from the duffle bag to fill his washer. He was adding soap when Bea’s washing machine stopped. She immediately headed for her machine. “Excuse me.” Bea said as she accidently bumped into him on purpose. “Well hello.” The man replied. “My name is Hans, Hans Zoff, and you are?” Bea’s golden locks fell cinematically off her face as her pouty lips formed the words “Bea Ware.” Suddenly, Hans’ washer stopped and metal shutters dramatically unfurled from above the windows and entryway of the laundromat: sealing the building from the outside world. Bea and Hans both ran to the door and started banging on their steal cage with their fists but it was to no avail. They were trapped. “We’re trapped!” Hans exclaimed as he held Bea by the shoulders. For a moment, their eyes locked and the same fire Bea felt seemed to fill his eyes. Her chest heaved as she took a deep breath then suddenly, cackling laughter filled the air. They both looked deep into the room: past the washers and dryers and from the shadows commanded a heavily accented voice, “Hands zoff, zee briefs!” Bea gasped and Hans pulled her to him, his firm hand held her waist. Together they walked, as if joined by the hip back to Hans’ washer where the same voice issued another command, “Zat ist far enough!” From the shadows emerged a devilishly tall bald man in a Nazi uniform, wearing a monocle and holding a luger. “So ve meet again!” The man holding the gun exclaimed. “Yes,” Hans replied, “Indeed we do.” Bea looked into Hans’ face. She could see he was tense, “Who is he?” she asked. “It is none other than,” Hans grimaced, “Herr Kalvin de Kline: Nazi sympathizer, and brief marauder.” Bea gasped. “Yes, it is I.” Acknowledge de Kline, “Your briefs, please.” “You cannot have them.” Hans replied. “Not as long as I have one breath left in my body, not as long as there are free men in this world willing to fight for justice and what is right, not as long as there is even one man on the street, begging for a bit of clothing to keep his nuts warm, the ones that some passerby gave him from the goodness of his heart, will you have these briefs!” Bea looked into Han’s face, so admirable, so strong, so gallant…but stupid! “Will you take mine and let me go?” Bea stepped away from Hans lifted her dress, pulled off her red satin underwear and tossed them to the Nazi. “No!” de Kline declined the offer. “Ze briefs!” Hans smirked and reached into his coat pocket and retrieved some folded pieces of paper, “These?” he asked as he held them into the air. De Kline nodded yes. “Then take them.” Hans said as he tossed papers into the air. “Nooo!” de Kline screamed and dove to grab the documents. In an orchestrated move, Hans lifted the lid on his washer, pulled out a handful of wet clothes and threw them at de Kline. The gun went off, the lights went out, and Bea found herself knocked to the floor, screaming in unison to the sound of a struggle, washers being hit by flailing bodies, then the opening of some sort a door. Her screaming didn’t stop until she felt the warmth of soft lips pressing against hers. “What happened?” she managed to say between kisses. “He got away.” Hans said as he retrieved a small flashlight from his pocket to illuminate the room and a trapdoor in the checkerboard floor. They stood up, but Hans was limping and Bea had to swing his arm over her shoulder for support. They smiled at each other and walked to the trapdoor. Hans found the latch, opened the door to reveal a wooden ladder that disappeared down a shaft and into the darkness. They could smell the ocean and hear waves lapping at the struts of the pier. Hans shined his flashlight down and illuminated the crown of de Kline’s head. He was in the tower of a mini sub, about to close the hatch. “Until we meet again” Hans shouted. De Kline, looked up, smiled, saluted with the folded pieces of paper in his hand, closed the hatch of the sub then melted into the ocean. “He has your briefs?” Bea cried as she looked into Han’s eyes. “No my dear” Hans said, “No man will get my briefs, for I keep them safe and secure and hidden, in my pants. He just has some folded pieces of blank paper.” “Oh. Hans!” Bea cried. “Oh. Bea!” Hans said. He pulled her close and kissed her deeply. |
I'm Kenney Mencher. I'm an artist who left a tenured professorship in 2016 to pursue making art full time. This blog is about art, art history, with a emphasis on human rights. I make homoerotic art featuring bears, otters & other gay wildlife.
Sunday
Flash Fiction Contest: Hans Zoff and Bea Ware
Friday
Velasquez and Cherise
I’m a bit obsessed with Velasquez. Especially one painting in particular called “The Water Carrier of Seville” 1619.
(This title sort of sounds like Alfalfa singing, “I’m the barber of Seville.)
What I love about this painting has to do with the fading back of the figures, the heightened chiaroscuro and tenebrism, and check out the flow of the composition as it moves back into the shadows. The faces are very interesting especially the old man AND check out that glass of water! I’m pretty into painting glasses of water, check out my posts on it:
So, I posed some of my students.
Took some close up shots.
Similar blog posts about technique and the use and misuse of art history:
- Rembrandt, Matisse and Me
- Henri Matisse and Me
- Marcel Duchamp, Rrose Selavy, Mona Lisa, and Me
- Giacomo Balla and Me
- John Singer Sargent, Caravaggio and Me
- Velasquez and Cherise
- N.C. Wyeth, Chuck and Me
- Me and Hopper: A Certain Slant of Light
- My Use and Abuse of Photo Reference
- Themes in Art; Sequential Art
Thursday
N.C. Wyeth, Chuck and Me
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| “Chuck’s Frolic” oil on linen canvas 40”x30” |
So here’s a painting of Robin Hood by N.C. Wyeth.
Here is a reference photo I took of my little guy, Chuck, playing with another Chihuahua names Angel. This one is actually a Adobe Photoshop collage I did to work out some compositional bugs.
Here’s my finished painting of “Chuck’s Frolic” oil on linen canvas 40”x30”
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Similar blog posts about technique and the use and misuse of art history:
Similar blog posts about technique and the use and misuse of art history:
- Rembrandt, Self Portraits and Me
- Rembrandt, Matisse and Me
- Henri Matisse and Me
- Marcel Duchamp, Rrose Selavy, Mona Lisa, and Me
- Giacomo Balla and Me
- John Singer Sargent, Caravaggio and Me
- Velasquez and Cherise
- N.C. Wyeth, Chuck and Me
- Me and Hopper: A Certain Slant of Light
- My Use and Abuse of Photo Reference
- Themes in Art; Sequential Art
Tuesday
Me and Hopper: A Certain Slant of Light
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| Edward Hopper "Sunday Morning" 1926 |
1) Edward Hopper
2) Emily Dickinson
3) My students
When I was at Lehman College taking a humanities core class my favorite professor Herbert Broderick had us read Emily Dickinson's poem and relate it to Edward Hopper's painting "Sunday Morning" 1926
"A Certain Slant of Light" 1924 Emily Dickinson
There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.
Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.
None may teach it anything,
'Tis the seal, despair,-
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.
When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 't is like the distance
On the look of death.
That comparison haunted me and so I decided that I would do a painting based on this by combining the feeling of the poem with Hopper's background. I was going for the emotional content that I thought Dickinson was expressing and I tried to make it have a kind of gendered feeling to it.Here's one of the reference photos I used.
Here's the finished painting:
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| Kenney Mencher "A Certain Slant of Light" oil on canvas 30"x40" |
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Similar blog posts about technique and the use and misuse of art history:
- Rembrandt, Self Portraits and Me
- Rembrandt, Matisse and Me
- Henri Matisse and Me
- Marcel Duchamp, Rrose Selavy, Mona Lisa, and Me
- Giacomo Balla and Me
- John Singer Sargent, Caravaggio and Me
- Velasquez and Cherise
- N.C. Wyeth, Chuck and Me
- Me and Hopper: A Certain Slant of Light
- My Use and Abuse of Photo Reference
- Themes in Art; Sequential Art
Sunday
Flash Fiction Contest: Win this drawing of Edgar
This contest is now closed.
The winner for this one is Edgar by Mark Brosamer.
I gotta say, the quality of all the stories were excellent and I really have a hard time choosing between them. For instance, just the ending line of Dee Turbon's and Kermit Hayes' stories made me pause. I really appreciate all the effort you have made in writing these.
The winner for this one is Edgar by Mark Brosamer.
I gotta say, the quality of all the stories were excellent and I really have a hard time choosing between them. For instance, just the ending line of Dee Turbon's and Kermit Hayes' stories made me pause. I really appreciate all the effort you have made in writing these.
Write a flash fiction story about "Edgar" and win this drawing of him.
 Edgar,11"x14" oil and mixed media on masonite |  Edgar, 12"x9" graphite on paper |
Click on images to enlarge.
The story you write should be a "Flash Fiction" which is a complete story in one thousand or fewer words. Please post the story in the comment section, you will have to provide your name and an email address in order to be qualified to win or you can e-mail me at kmencher@ohlone.edu with your info.
The contest closes Monday November 1, 2010.
There is a problem with how many characters can post (only about 4,000) so if you cannot post it. E-mail it to me at kmencher@ohlone.edu
Go to my website for more contests: http://www.kenney-mencher.com/
Winning flash fiction stories will be integrated in with an exhibit in San Francisco at ArtHaus Gallery (April 8th for the reception).
The show is called: Renovated Reputations: Paintings and Fiction inspired by Vintage Portrait Photographs
The show is called: Renovated Reputations: Paintings and Fiction inspired by Vintage Portrait Photographs
The exhibit will include a series of 20-40 paintings and mixed media works ranging in size from 8”x10” to 18”x24” framed with thrift store and vintage frames. In addition to the exhibited works ArtHaus is publishing catalogs signed by me and as many of the authors as possible. Catalogs/books will consist of image of the painting with the text of the “flash story” surrounding the image. If I can get the authors to come to a book signing/party, authors would sign their pages for some of the printed stuff.
We're going to have a photobooth for the show for participants to play with and vintage costumes.
Of course I'll send the authors free copies of the catalogs.
I will announce the winners the day after the closing deadline for the competition. I'm planning on doing one flash fiction competition a week every Monday from now until April. You can preview the works I have so far completed here:
http://www.kenney-mencher.com/catalog/recent_work.htm
http://www.kenney-mencher.com/catalog/recent_work.htm
________________________________________________________________________
This one was e-mailed to me:
EDGAR DOILY AT THE POINT by Dee Turbon
Edgar Doily, hair all shocked and his ears like the spread wings of birds, and a smile as bright as old man Hoyle’s picket fence and just as crooked. And his pa said he was to come straight home, soon as school finished, and he had chores to do and his homework, too. And no man ever made a success of his life without he had to put in the effort, that’s what his pa says. Only Edgar Doily didn’t go straight home. Up to the point he went with Tommy and Shoo and Grits.
Throwing stones, throwing them at the sky, high as birds or clouds, and then those stones falling, fast as bullets, and entering the water making a sound like duck-farts, and that’s what the boys call ‘em, and the boys laughing fit to burst at that.
And Tiff’s there’ too, and the boys all think she’s the prettiest girl in school, so they throw their stones a little harder, even though their arms ache, and they laugh a little louder and all for the catching of Tiff’s attention. And she knows. Handstands then, and cartwheels turning, and Tiff joins in, tucks her skirts into her knickers and shows the boys a longer leg, and their whole world is turned upside down and time is too quickly spent, their time, and the church clock tells them it is late.
‘You have the bluest eyes I ever saw, Edgar Doily, and I choose you to walk me home.’
And he is dizzy and his heart skips and he might be turning cartwheels still. And the prettiest girl in school takes his hand in hers and they walk the slow way to where she lives, and what they talk about he afterwards can’t recall, but he talks without halt until they stand at her door. And she turns to him and tip-toe tall she leans into Edgar Doily and kisses him, the kitten-pink tip of her tongue in his mouth and kitten-soft, too. And she says he kisses real nice and she hopes he’ll walk her home again one day.
And ‘what you got to smile at Edgar Doily?’ says old man Hoyle leaning on his picket fence gate, a pipe between his teeth and his old cur curled at his feet. ‘Cos your pa’s looking for you and he ain’t smiling, no sir, he ain’t.’
And Edgar notices then the dark at his back and the sun gone from the sky, and he quickens his step, skipping it looks like, and he stumbles some, but the smile does not slip, and Edgar Doily holds tight to the memory of Tiff’s kitten-kiss. All the way home and his pa waiting there, looking at the clock on the mantelpiece and counting off the minutes, and they are many.
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This one was e-mailed to me:
Edgar by Mark Brosamer
Lots of the kids in our cul de sac had fathers who had gone off to the war, so my case wasn’t really that special. Still, my mother bore it hard, and maybe even harder because I was an only child. Sometimes I would see her crying as she smoked out on the porch or standing over a sink of dirty plates. Usually I was running out into the street and I will admit to you that her sobbing embarrassed me enough that I did not stop to comfort her. I pretended I didn’t see her tears, and she would do the same, yelling after me through a cracked voice something like “Edgar, I want you home when the streetlights come on!”
Mostly the kids on the street spent our days outside, playing war or imagining ourselves on some great western adventure, and this was especially true that breezy summer when our fathers had been shipped overseas. In our play, we fought their enemies in our own backyards, in the fields and culverts that peppered our little suburb. We turned anything longer than our arms into rifles, anything shorter into hand grenades and sticks of dynamite.
I didn’t think about my father dying, to tell you the truth. I somehow knew that he would come back when school started, as if the war could not possibly last through Labor Day, when I’d need him to help me with math or get ready for the October Pinewood Derby.
I remember the strong, warm wind coursing through our town that summer, how it irritated our eyes and kept us down at the creek, our pantlegs rolled halfway up our scrawny thighs. I remember the incident with Mr. Jenkins, too, who lived two doors down from my house. As one of the few men left on the block, he had come to help us when there was a toilet leaking or a lawn that had grown too long for a boy to mow. I don’t know why he wasn’t sent off, although Pete had overheard his mother whispering something about a bad liver or maybe it was flat feet. We weren’t that concerned. In fact we were glad to have him home that summer, because we had been eager spectators of his own private war, the one he’d been waging since spring against the gopher in his front yard.
Arnie’s cousin had seen him at McWhorters buying traps, and then we all saw him dropping poison down the holes that had turned his lawn into a miniature minefield of craters and the excavated piles of dirt next to them. He dug; he swore; he’d shake his head and scowl every time he passed his front lawn on his way inside.
It must have been late August when his patience wore out. Most of us kids were sitting on the curb in front of Carl Finkelstein’s house when Mr. Jenkins called us over to his yard.
“Hey boys, y’all come over here for a minute,” he said, gathering us towards him with a broad sweep of his thick arm. He was holding a white painter’s bucket full of hammers, eight or nine of them.
“Listen men, I have a little mission I need you to help me with, something I can’t do by myself, okay?” He set the bucket in the middle of his tortured lawn and rubbed his hands together slowly.
“I want each of you to take a hammer and kneel yourself down in front of a hole, you hear me now?” He reached into the bucket and pulled out a hammer, handing it to Nick Campolo, the oldest kid on our street at twelve years old.
“That’s it, come on over boys.”
Out of curiosity, I had crept over to see with my own eyes the bucket full of hammers, but I did not come any further until Mr. Jenkins called me by name.
“Edgar,” he said, drawing out the ‘e’ in my name a little too far, “you’re a tough little cowboy, ain’tcha?” He held the wooden end of a hammer out to me, and I could feel the eyes of the other kids on me as I reached out for it. I raised my arm as slowly as I could, wondering if I could stretch it out slowly enough for him to think I was an imbecile or just uncoordinated. Maybe he would lose interest in me and pass my hammer into one of the clutching hands of the other kids.
Mr. Jenkins waited as long as he needed to, then dropped the hammer into my small hand. It pulled at my arm as if it had already hijacked my tendons and muscles for its own purpose. I wanted to run home, but knew that I would never hear the end of it from the other kids, especially Nick, who had positioned himself at the biggest hole and was staring menacingly down into its black mouth.
I sunk down beside one of the last remaining holes, trying to choose one that looked abandoned, although really they all seemed pretty fresh to me.
Satisfied with our positions, Mr. Jenkins the garden hose from its rack near the faucet at the front of the house, stretching it to the last remaining gopher hole in his lawn.
“Now boys, listen to me carefully. There’s a war on, as you know, and we all need to help each other out, right? Like them times I lent a hand to your mamas ‘round the house. Well here’s your chance to lend me a hand. I’m about to turn this hose down into that gopher den, and in a minute you might see him pop up out of your hole, and if you do I want you to bring your hammer down on his dirty little head, okay?”
I looked around at the other boys, hammers suspended over their heads in anticipation, all staring into their holes. I counted them, trying to calculate the odds of the gopher coming up my hole, but the arithmetic eluded me. I did not know anything about the underground science of gophers, or whether he might have some contingency plan saved for just such an ambush as this. I secretly hoped they were more clever than we gave them credit for, like the cartoon coyote that seemed forever to escape, scarred, burnt, flattened, and pock-marked, but always intact.
My mind reeled, striving for escape, and meanwhile Mr. Jenkins had turned on the hose, jabbing its end into the hole at his feet.
I stared as far as I could into the black hole between my knees, my eyes blurring in the hot afternoon wind. I imagined that I could see through the end of that miniature tunnel, beyond it and into whatever jungle or trench or desert my father was protecting for America. I saw him back in our living room, sitting in his plush recliner and smiling as he pulled at a cigar. I saw my mother, too, calling my name into the evening because I’d been out too long and gone too far. I heard the water gurgling through the tunnels, its pitch rising as it rushed at the light, sweeping its prey towards our little troop of boy soldiers. I tried not to blink but my eyes burned. I stared and stared down that hole, the shriek of the water ringing now in my ears, chanting softly to myself, “Don’t let it be me. Don’t let it be me.”
Saturday
Speaking of Painting Glasses of Water: Variations on a Theme
A couple of days ago I posted an article on how to paint a glass of water. In keeping with that theme I thought it might be cool to discuss how I come up with a theme for a body of work.
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| To Half and Half Not, oil/canvas 36"x48" |
Painting is one of those art forms, like writing a song, or a book, in which a central theme can unify and interest both you and the viewer. I think that if you pick a motif or symbol that you find fascinates you, your paintings will be sincere and perhaps satisfying pictures that can excite the artist to get into the studio and begin working.
My paintings start with a concept and most recently, I’ve found that sometimes working with a single theme and exploring variations on it, I’ve been able to come up with a series of cohesive paintings that are interesting for the viewer and for me to make. I’ve always been attracted to the works of some older Netherlandish masters such as Brueghel and Bosch who worked with allegories, proverbs, and parables. This lead me to explore the idea of working with similar ideas, most notably the cliché of the “half glass of water.”
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| Decision, oil on canvas, 36"x48" |
I started my exploration of the theme of “Is it half full or half empty?” with a photo shoot of my friend Jim and my wife Valerie. Since my work is slightly fussy realism and I can’t really afford to have models sit for the forty to fifty hours it takes for me to make a painting I work from digital photographic reference. I actually take somewhere between two to ten images and work from manipulated and blown up photographs and use these in place of close up details etc. You can read about how I use photographs here.
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| Velasquez, Water Carrier 1619 |
I got my ideas for the pose initially from two paintings by two Baroque masters Caravaggio and Velasquez. “Boy Being Bitten by a Lizard and The Water Carrier of Seville have long been two of my favorite paintings because of the heightened sense of chiaroscuro (dramatic light and shadow) and also because both of these artists included a clear glass of water in their paintings. What I found so great about this theme is that it embraced all of my strengths and none of my weaknesses. It also was a bit of a challenge for me to paint a clear glass of water. My first painting of this theme was an image called “Decisions.”
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| Caravaggio, Boy Being Bitten by a Lizard, c1600 |
For the pose in “Decisions”, I asked Jim to think about different points of view or emotions about the glass of water and I moved him around the table. I was able to take several of these images and put them together in a cohesive image.
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| Two Landscapes, 36"x48" |
I asked my wife, Valerie, to do the same thing and she was actually even a bit more dramatic. In the final piece, I thought about the fact that I wanted to comment on her two poses and so I added an additional element to my paintings of her, some paintings in the background. In “Two Landscapes,” I wanted the landscapes moods in the background to reflect something of the feelings I thought she was communicating in her poses. I liked the motif of extra images included in the paintings to communicate additional feelings or ideas in the images and I built on this in additional paintings.
In “The Middle Way,” I actually set up a slide projector with a blue slide aimed at the left side of my model Heidi. In the photos I took, I found that the blue was too intense and so in mixing the colors I toned down the cool blue on the left side of her flesh tones but still included quite a bit of it in the drapery.
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| The Middle Way, oil on canvas, 36"x48" |
Raphael’s painting is an allegorical representation of two basic but opposing philosophical schools of thought. The two central figures are the keys to unlocking his allegory. The figure on the left represents Plato, who points heavenward as a symbol of searching for the “ideal” or “platonic” world that is the world of ideas rather than the physical one. The figure on the right, who gestures downward, is Aristotle who’s philosophy lead him to explore and document the physical world through logic. I’m no Raphael but I’m trying to learn from him.
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| Raphael, School of Athens, 1509 |
Taking a page from much better artists than myself I decided to try out some allegorical themes and so my “half glass” paintings deals with points of view.
“Radio Flyer” explores the world of a ten year old boy.
“Polly Anna” is meant to reference the clichés dealing with the 1950’s housewife. (This painting was used on the cover of a book by Hannah Gerber "How to Grow Up."
One of my most recent painting using the “half glass of water” theme is called “Two Schools.” In “Two Schools” my aim was to incorporate some of the things I had learned about color and integrate it in with some art historical ideas and symbols used in Raphael’s famous painting “The School of Athens.”
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| Two Schools, 36"x48" oil on canvas |
Here's a couple of links to more of my "How To" articles about painting.
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