Oh, and how can I forget the mandatory boyfriend duties of helping the lovely Jacklyn Boyland move out of her apartment on Tuesday, (She trapped me with the promise of a free dinner... it was good).
My large painting is showing some progress, after months of not working with oil paints, I was surprised to handle the medium pretty damn well. My goal is to finish this thing before the end of this month ready to be displayed for my July solo show (that's the 18th of July on your calendars).
I stupidly promised to volunteer in creating the Lowell House Opera Spring Scenes 2008 Poster. Stupid, because I'm so absolutely lacking in time and this promise took a considerable amount of sand from my hourglass. The idea was to take major characters from the Scenes and put them all together somehow in a famous painting. Ed Hopper would be so so....so...hm. what's the right word for this... I guess "pissed" would be appropriate. Anyways, here's the process:
The Best thing about replicating another artist's work is that they've done all the compositional thinking for you AND! they've already picked out the colors too.(Note: the preliminary drawings you see here are useless and disappeared rather quickly as soon as I started adding the acrylic on the panel
The longest part was painting the figures which I had no models for, so the figures you see piling up here were cooked up and vomited out of my imagination and Sarah E.'s description of them.
Ed Hopper would be a little ticked off that his isolated "nighthawks" now looks like a party of weirdos roaming the night. I mean my artist mind is telling me that the painting looked better when there were no figures in there at all, in fact my artist mind is a bit depressed at the final painting... but my normal mind is telling my artist mind to "shut the f*** up, what would be the point of replicating this in the first place without the extra figures?"
Anyways, the list of characters here are from these following Opera scenes,
Inside the diner...er barber shop...:
"Traviata" - Woman in a ballgown and man in a tailcoat toasting wine glasses
"Barber of Seville" - Barber with a vest and a pair of scissors
"Hand of Bridge" - Man and woman playing cards
Outside the Diner Barbershop:
"Dido and Aeneas" - Witch
"Boheme" - Two poor people walking hand-in-hand
"Magic Flute" - Papageno (dressed in feathers with bells on a stick)
Information about this event and to see this art work put into good use go to: http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/lho/2008spring/index.php
or look for posters of it around the Harvard Cambridge area.
Anyways, I have got to finish this large painting before May...July is right around the corner and I am nervous as hell.
