Yesterday and Today: Looking To The Past In A Group Showlife during wartime

Yesterday and Today: Looking To The Past In A Group Show

Beginning October 7th, the new Christopher Queen Gallery will be having a show with a very interesting concept. If you've ever visited their website, you would have seem that they show many Early California painters. For this show the gallery asked us participating artists to create a piece of art based on an inspiring piece of Early California artwork. The new artwork and the one which inspired it will be showing side-by-side. The reception is October 7th and the show will be up for a few months. It's really interesting to see how literal some people interpreted the paintings and how far others loosely interpreted their chosen piece.

Front cover of the brochure: F. Michael Wood.

Here is a video leaf-through of the brochure so you can take a glimpse at what everyone else did:

http://youtu.be/pM9Mq2NqftI

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When I was in Monterey(more accurately, Marina Dunes), I hiked around the area to gather reference for the painting I chose to do. As I was exploring the area, I found myself in a "bowl" created by the valley of the dunes. When you look east you can see the Salinas Valley and the Hollister Hills. Looking west you will see the vast Pacific Ocean. I think I took a risk with the format and composition of these, especially with the "Looking East" one. I'll leave it to you to decide whether or not it was successful, but I'm proud of myself for not taking the safe route.

"Hiking The Dunes, Looking West," 12x40 in. oil on linen mounted on board.

"Hiking The Dunes, Looking East," 12x40 in. oil on linen mounted on board.

The painting which inspired these 2 paintings: "Windswept Dunes" by Charles Chapel Judson.

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This painting is meant to be the "little sister" to the larger painting by Robert Van Vorst Sewell. Even though the gallery doesn't have a ton of figurative works, I wanted to take on a painting that I could showcase my skills in this regard. It let me play with the of my favorite subjects: females, patterns and profiles. The Sewell is about 3 feet high, and this painting is a mere 12 inches.

"Chinese Vermillion" 12x9 in. oil on linen board.

"Chinoiserie" by Robert Van Vorst Sewell.

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This painting was inspired by the way the mysterious darkness of the Jonnevold painting and the beautifully designed curves of the trees. Out of all the paintings, I learned the most by doing this one. In the early stages of this painting (the plein air part of it) I had broken up the silhouette too much and put too many skyholes in the mass of trees. This broke up the design needlessly. Darkening the skyholes and simplifying the silhouette improved this painting immensely, and I probably would have not thought to do this without referring to the Jonnevold.

"Farmside Silhouettes" 12x16 in. oil on canvas board.