Pink and Red color study

 

Over the weekend I’ve been busy painting as I mentioned earlier. I love these little canvasses. This one is 50cm x 50cm. 100% linen canvas.

The never ending saga: paint on canvas or on plywood

I have canvas on a roll, I have all the tools like a mitersaw and even a compressor with brad nailer. But this time, I needed to make some paintings fast for an upcoming presentation, so I had to buy. I bought a Lefranc Bourgeois canvas 100% Linen size 60cm x 120cm, price 58Euro, that's like $70. I think that's a hefty price to pay for canvas. Okay, it's the best quality out there but still. For an artist budget, not knowing if you will ever sell this painting, it's a lot to spend. Made me think again of using plywood to paint; there are so many advantages, it's cheap, strong, doesn't warp or stretch or sag like canvas, and when the surface is prepped well, you have a super finish in your works. It's certainly something I will look into. Of course the prep work is going to be time consuming, priming & sanding. I will try it out anyways, I'm sure the result is going to be awesome.

Reminiscing Hazel Dooney's issues with paint fumes

The entire weekend when I was painting I had to think of Hazel Dooney, a successful painter from Australia (twitter: @dooneystudio) that writes a lot about the nauseating experiences she has daily from working with the paint. Normally I don't have issues with it, but I was painting in an small enclosed space, very concentrated and paying attention to detail (with nose almost on the canvas). My eyes were actually tingling, burning and itching, stronger than when you peel an onion. Geeez. I had to take a headache pill. Today I worked outside in the yard, and left the paintings to dry overnight outside as well. (I wanted to prevent that, cause there are a lot of mosquitos and there's a great chance they will stick on it, but I don't have a choice. I working on a cool set of paintings.

Just made one piece of art available through imagekind.com

A very successful piece, The Lady, Blue Green work. I decided to use imagekind.com to distribute this art work, since I have nothing to worry about. You click, customize how you want it, and they ship.
I am also going to put the link to buy on the right of the blog.

My DJ Buddy, DeeJay Sash

My buddy just started his new blog http://deejaysash.blogspot.com he plays the latest house music in different venues on St. Maarten like Holland House on Front Street, St. Maarten and Mooi restaurant at Puerta del Sol, in Simpson Bay, St. Maarten. He plays there upstairs in the lounge. You should check it out too.

Art book on the reality of the art world

I am reading an art book that I bought on Amazon.com called "How To Become a Famous Artist and Still Paint Pictures" by W. Joe Innis.

I randomly buy books like this for my general interest and maybe pick up an idea or two.

I always had my suspicions of the workings of the art business in terms of the amount of publicity certain artists get, the artists being accepted in the gallery or museum system and so forth. My suspicions were the existance of "Le Circle" that Joe Innis is referring to. The writer brings the true and harsh realities to light about the art business or "Le Circle". An artist can dream to be a full time painter, be represented by an art gallery, do exhibitions everywhere etc, but don't put your faith in the traditional system. You have to do it yourself and he has a couple of ideas on how to get there. The book is a very interesting read so far. I am not done with it yet. I greatly suggest this book to any artist though to get promotion and be successful in the arts. The link to the book is on the left.

My latest pop art painting "Innocence"

Here is a glimpse of the current work. It takes a lot of time to produce this work, certainly the collage took a good while. The risk for this type of painting is if you screw up painting over the collage work, well... there's no way to replace the collage by just painting over it. I like it the way it starts to look. Why I am painting this is explained in an earlier blog.