Today's Painting: Fort Myers Beach Artist Pauline

 

 

Invited by a classmate of my FGCU Painting course Pauline, I visited Fort Myers Beach Art Association for the first time. I really like their studio.With large wall-to-wall skylights on one side, the room was very spacious and bright. If one row of florescent lights are turned off, the source of light would be very focused and it would be perfect for portrait painting. Since everyone was busy with her own project today and there was no model for portrait, I simply took Pauline as my model while she was working on her own painting. At first I painted her looking down at her painting. It was a good pose. Unfortunately, she didn't come back to the same pose very often. Therefore, I scraped the half done image and started all over again. That is one you see now.



Back in Florida

I am back in Florida. First thing first. I need to clear in my yard the jungle which has grown during my nearly three months' absence. On my way back home, I grabbed three sketches at the airport.

 

Eating Lunch before Boarding the Plane

Geek at the Airport

Geek at the Airport

Drawings at Bryant Park

Today I went to Bryant Park. It was probably the last time I visited it before going back to Florida. I did a few sketches on my way to Metropolitan Museum. Today I didn't spent a lot of time on Impressionist paintings, but I studies very carefully masterpieces by Velasquez, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Rubens. I couldn't help but admire them.

Before I could finish the sketch, she was gooooooooooooooooooooooooone.

Reader at Bryant park

Business Talk

Talking on the Phone

 

 



New Drawings

Mother and Children on Subway

Wishes

Tourists Standing in Awe at St. Patrick's



Recent Drawings



Oil Study: Wrong Place Wrong Time (14 x 11)

 

 

After I painted in New York over the past two months, I have consciously come to the awareness that my best niche in art might be genre paintings. I understand, while technical improvement is a life-long process, to me genre painting provides opportunities to tell stories from real life with coordination of figure-painting and landscape. More importantly, I love the visual dialogue in which I and viewers are involved in a kind of game play. I like to drop clues in the painting to provoke thinking, to tease with tongue in cheek humor, or simply to share my feelings about reality. 



Oil Study: Napping in the Shade

Oil, 8 x 16

 

 

It was an experiment with managing the colors impacted by light. Before I started to paint, I studied how Quang Ho handled colors interacting in the sun. Interestingly, when I was painting, I totally forgot about Ho and simply worked as Mo. I'll try again and really want to learn how he did abstraction in coloring.



Oil Study: Great Self-Confidence

Yesterday, as I promised myself what I would do before I go back to Florida, I went to the northern part of Central Park which I had never visited. Harlem Meer's view was stunning. I saw Frederick Douglass's statue right out of the Cathedral Parkway station. For the first time I noticed a street named after Malcolm X.  Evidently the place was permeated with African-American culture. As a result, I made this picture. One thing I am happy about the painting is that I managed to handle the border of different color blocks so that it reflects the sense of space even though, unlike Renoir, I didn't blur all the borders. Another thing I did was my efforts to focus on large strokes instead minute details. Glad I did that.



Oil Study: Bus Stop

 

 

New York is a fascinating city. There is such a great variety in every way of life that it is the best place to do people watching. The city seems to encourage humans to push everything experimentally to its extreme and then to see whether its value would eventually be accepted by the society. People are highly individualistic and don't care whether you like them or not. The atmosphere appears to have been creating an amazingly wide spectrum of characters.