The Young Locals

 The Young Locals

       20"x 27.5"

Watercolor on Arches

In the winter of 2008, I was fortunate enough to travel to the temples of Angkor Wat located near Siem Reap, Camboda. Angkor Wat was built in the 12th century and is the largest Hindu temple complex in the world.  One day while on a tour of the Bayon Temple, I was greeted by a group of three local boys who said they would be my tour guides and show me the temple where the movie Tomb Raider was filmed in exchange for some American coins. They led me down a faint path through the jungle and along the way we crawled through a ruin of an old temple where the sun shined through a small window illuminating the space. Inspired by the unique shadow pattern created by the fragmented light, I asked the boys if I could take a photo of them which became the reference for this painting.

Abe and George

Abe and George

8"x14.5"

Egg Tempera on Illustration Board

This was a class assignment I did some time ago during my undergraduate studies. Forgot exactly what the assignment was , but this was the end result. This is one of a few Egg Tempera paintings I have ever done. The final image  was completed by applying the tempera in splatters and layers , and by later scratching away the portraits of Abe and George.

Happy Birthday Isabella

Belle

8x10 Acrylic on Arches 

It was my nieces sixth birthday on sunday. As a gift, I did this little painting of her with a painting that she did with me some months ago.  Love this kid with all my heart.  Happy Birthday Isabella!

Grampa Pat

Grampa Pat 

Acrylic on Saunders Waterford paper

This painting was done by  applying liquid acrylics in transparent layers ,  similar to the way I would handle traditional watercolors. I wanted to try this technique out for quite some time now , and think it could be worth exploring. The image is of my grandfather Pat Rossi, who fought in World War 2. I have been wanting to paint it since I saw the photograph some time ago. Grampa was a brave man, a great grandfather, and is missed very much by us all! 

KRS ONE

I have been continuing to mess around with Corel Painter 10, when I have a chance. I had an older acrylic grey scale painting I did of KRS ONE, in which I was going to paint over using oils. For now I went ahead and painted it on the computer instead using the oil bristle brushes. Not sure about his likeness, pretty distorted, which I like.A fun experiment for me either way!

Portrait of KRS ONE

Digital

Piet Mondrian follow up

A while back I created a post with some potential portrait projects. One of them was a gray scale study of the painter Piet Mondrian. I decided to take this one to a finish using Corel Painter 10, a digital painting program. I scanned the gray scale painting( seen below) and painted right over it on another layer on the computer.

Mondrian gray scale painting

9"x15"

Acrylic on board

As I have always been fond of Cezanne's painting , Portrait of Uncle Dominque (seen below), I decided to use it as a color guide/palette for my painting. I began blocking in color using the Oil Bristle brush within painter, and selecting color from Cezanne's painting with the eye dropper tool.

Paul Cezanne

Portrait of Uncle Dominique

What I ended up with is the painting of Mondrian below. I still plan to go ahead and paint over the original grey scale study in oils. As of now I want to learn more about digital painting ,so this made for a good exercise.

Portrait of Piet Mondrian

Digital

Life painting

                               Below are a few recent paintings of mine that I have worked on at the New Britain Art League on Saturday mornings. Check out the New Britain Art Leagues web site of you are interested in joining our group.    http://www.alnb.org/

 Portraiture is an area of art that I have always enjoyed looking at and partaking in. From early on in my life I have been interested in the portraits of Rembrandt, Ribbera, Goya, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Velasquez, and Rubens. Currently I try and continue to pay attention to portraiture and figurative painting. As one of my life painting teachers , Joe Funaro expressed,  that if you could master painting and drawing the figure you can master anything as the figure is one of the most complex forms imaginable. 

  Some of the figurative painters I have been looking at lately are the works of the many great Russain painters such as  Ilya Repin, Ivan Kramskoy, Valentin Serov, Konstantin Korovin , and Geli Korzhev to name a few. All of these artists were on display a few years back at the show titled"Russia" at the Guggenheim. A few other contemporary American painters that I have always enjoyed the work of are Phil Hale, and  Kent Willimas.

   Due to a number of different reasons it has been 6 weeks since I last painted with the New Britain art league.  It is a Saturday morning painting group that I started painting with this past summer.

They are a great bunch of people and  hire some really great models. I plan to make it tomorrow morning so we'll see how that goes after the long break. I hope to post more of what I am up to with the art league as well as some of the other members work here on my blog.

The paintings I am showing here were all done with the New Britain group except for the one nude. Most were done in one 3 hour sitting except for Courtney the girl in the yellow sweater. Personally when it comes to life painting I feel my best paintings are the ones that are completed in the shortest time. There is something fresher and much more alive with them . I find when I work for 2 or 3 days on a portrait they become tired and overworked, losing some of the initial spontaneity .