Time has little meaning or disappears completely when you’re working in the studio. I looked back at photos and realized this oil painting has been on my easel, untouched, for nearly a year. Yeah. That’s how I work on things. There was just a single session left to finish it, but I let it sit there, until today. And it didn’t feel like a year. So I finally patched the last holes and called it a day. It started as a canvas I revamped from a painting I had started probably a decade prior. This artwork takes me back to a Friday at the Art Institute, when a friend of mine and I played hooky from work and drove to Chicago to take in the culture and see Death Cab for Cutie in concert. It was amazing, exhausting, and unseasonably warm, so oddly enough the Institute smelled of linseed oil. My guess is they had something wrong with the climate control system. (YIKES!) That aside, I like catching people having an intimate moment with art. Painting it becomes my moment. The angles were tricky but you know I like a challenge. What artist do you gravitate toward in a museum? I’d love to hear.
Session 1: Marker, just straight up drawing the composition onto the canvas.
Session 2: Blocking out mid ground. Finding the mid range colors that I can add shadows and highlights to.
Session 3: Adding tone. Enriching the colors to get them closer to realism.
Session 4: Details, details, details. Tightening loose screws.
Session 5: Adding those last flecks of life and adjustments to make it pop.