"Tyler", painted with the Zorn Palette

I'm finding this limited Zorn palette quite fun! Here is my second portrait using it, painted from a model. Tyler seems quite melancholy, perhaps wishing he was with his sweetie.  This is another 12" x 9" oil.  Hope you enjoy meeting these folks. (This makes me wonder if people ever buy portraits of people they don't know?)

Portraits in Oil using the Zorn Palette

Lately, I've begun to paint portraits in oil which has been quite compelling because I half way feel like I'm creating a new human being.   This is partly because they sometimes don't look quite like the model, i.e. a "new" person, which I find quite fun and intriguing.  Being new to painting portraits, I'm learning with two painter friends.  We've been watching a DVD by Jeffery Watts on "Painting the Gesture Portrait" using the very limited palette of Anders Zorn, who lived near the turn of the century in Sweden.  The portraits are painted with only four pigments: White, Black, Yellow Ochre, and Cadmium Red Light.  His portraits using this limited palette are truly amazing and beautiful!  My goal is both to learn to paint rich paintings with only four pigments (and no blue) as well as to paint with greater gesture in my brushwork--to loosen up!  This is how it works:  Black is very cool and therefore offers a subtle blue;  yellow ochre and black make a green of sorts; cad. red and black make a purple of sorts, yellow ochre and cad. red make an orange; yellow ochre, cad. red and black make a brown. So there you have it.  Now to transform those four pigments into a loose, gestural portrait.  This is my second oil portrait ever and the first with this Zorn palette.  It's "Andrew",  12" x 9", oil, from the model.

Painting is "life-long learning" and learning always adds to much to life.  Remember, I always appreciate your thoughts and comments.  Please forward this to your friends who might be interested.

March Is My Watercolor Month

About two years ago, I got very interested in painting in oil after meeting some local oil painters.  Until then, I had only painted watercolor (which I still love).  So I amerced myself in this new medium (to me), fell in love with it, and didn't paint another watercolor until this month.  A few months ago, I was invited to compete in an international watercolor competition.  Now, all of a sudden, I had to submit the watercolor and I hadn't painted a single watercolor since, well you know...  So, consequently I decided that March would be my watercolor month, everything I painted had to be watercolor.

It's always good to stretch yourself by trying new things, and to also retrying something you haven't done for forty years?  How time flies, doesn't it!  Well, I know it is a good thing to do this, but I'm not sure it's good to put these fresh starts on one's blog.  But I think if blogs are to be a record of an artist's life, then it's good, but the viewer needs to see these visual efforts in the context of artistic stretching.

I did this very thing with my last blog at the Eiteljorg Museum when we painted from the model in Western get-up.  It was the first figure I ever painted, having not even drawn the figure since college until a month ago.  Oh my.  And I had to paint the figure in, you know, watercolor.   The cowboy was my first effort at this, and this portrait from the model is my second watercolor figure painting.  However, in this one, the watercolor juices are beginning to flow again, and I felt more comfortable with it.  It was just the portrait part that was new.  Hope you enjoy it.   Tomorrow I'll show you the painting I submitted to the international invitational competition.   If you'd like to see my watercolors before oil painting came into my life, just click on the link to my web site.