Wax Fruit

Interesting to me was that my grandmother always had bowls of wax fruit used as decoration. This painting is based on a bowl of real fruit, but is painted with wax.
Encaustic paintings are created with pigmented wax applied in layers. Top layers are fused to underlying layers with heat; usually a heat gun, propane torch or iron. Check out Joanne Mattera's blog. She is a quite well known encaustic painter.
This painting, "Wax Fruit (Nectarines)" is 30" x 40". Click on the image for an enlarged view.

Good Ol' Barney

I rarely paint celebrities. Too often the focus becomes the subject of the painting rather than the painting. When I say the focus of a painting should be the painting, I don't necessarily mean technique, but in a sort of Clemente Greenberg way I mean its formal properties - you know, surface, support, paint, size, texture - all that sort of stuff. (Yea, I know, Greenberg would have hated this painting.)

Don Knotts was a master. For all his inanities, he was able to switch and pull off an emotional and melodramatic moment. John Candy could do this also. I, personally, have never seen Jim Carrey do it convincingly.

This oil on canvas is 20"x16" and painted in 2005.

Abstract vs. Nonobjective Art I

I am mildly nonplussed when one of my art friends corrects me while discussing abstract art. The preferred term, I am informed, is Nonobjective Art. As I understand it, abstract art, as we know it today, arose from late 19th century art movements and initially represented varying degrees of deviance from representation of real objects. This, in contrast with earlier ideas of art which held in high regard exacting verisimilitude in painting, often drew the ire of art critics and collectors. As the art form developed, abstract art became increasingly independent of reality - to the extent that in some works there is no recognizable reality. This is nonobjective art. But even this becomes problematic as we'll consider in a later post.
The two paintings here are abstracts. "Larry, Daryl and Daryl" (2007), a 20" x 73" encaustic triptych, may be considered nonobjective. "Kiss in the Forest" (2008) is an abstraction of reality. It is oil on canvas and 30" x 40".