During November of this year I did a series of small space pictures, painted with airbrush and conventional brushes. I've been doing these for many years, but not much recently. My airbrush is still usable, though it's a bit dusty and corroded. It seems almost archaic to use airbrush and paint to do space pictures, when you can do the same thing even better using digital media like Photoshop. But even in this digital age, collectors still like an artwork done with physical media and by hand. This piece is one of my recent series. It's called "Space Aurora." It features one of my favorite colors, the ecstatic, hallucinatory light blue-green I call "Aurora Green." Auroras happen because of energetic particles from the sun striking gases in the Earth's upper atmosphere and causing them to glow. There are no auroras in space, but there are emission nebulas, which are sort of the same, made of gases that glow when energized by light from a nearby star. This is an image of an emission nebula. "Space Aurora" is acrylic and colored pencil on illustration board, 10" x 8".

Posted at 3:17 am | link

My ambition for August of this year was to create art which would preserve the essence of summer for the whole year. Sometimes, for various reasons, I don't get to enjoy the real summer as much as I would like. I have always wished that I could create some way to return to summer in the middle of the winter. I've tried sun lamps, humidifiers, indoor gardens under lights, turning the heat way up, drinking hot drinks, most things except taking a trip to Australia, which is a bit beyond my means.

I can always paint something though, even something which is highly realistic. I worked on this piece throughout August and part of September. It's a real scene that I experienced and photographed in the Blue Ridge area of Virginia. I tried to capture the soft colors of landscape seen through warm humid air. I'd like to be able to walk into a picture I created and sit on a summer porch for a while, in December. Where's that Holodeck when you need it? At least I have this painting, "Summer Pastorale."

Well, I don't have it right now, because I have deposited the original with a dealer who will try to market it to expensive restaurants or fancy inns in the Blue Ridge area. I do not have to own the original artwork to get the summer effect, as long as I have a good photograph of it. Maybe I'll sell it to a tourist or Virginia resident who wants to capture summer as much as I do. You can see a bigger version of this image here.

"Summer Pastorale" is acrylic on board, 20" x 16", September 2009.

Posted at 2:09 am | link

Here is another version of the Blue Ridge scene I posted on August 8. This one is also acrylic on masonite, but slightly larger than the earlier one at 14" x 11". It's called "A Quiet Place." I hope to do a number of these Virginia country scenes, some with buildings and cattle and some without, and market them in upscale country and resort restaurants. Another possibility is small town tourist galleries, though there is a lot of this kind of art out there and I would have to choose carefully. I like painting these scenes because it is peaceful. I may keep a few of them for myself so that I can remember summer as it should be, not as it is for me in the city.

For the painters who might be reading this, here are some technical notes about this piece. I created a background under layer on pre-primed Masonite with colored gessos by Matisse Derivan, an excellent Australian supplier. These gessos are already in realistic landscape colors and the white can be tinted with whatever other color you need, in my case sky blue. I also added the lighter greens and golds for the field in this medium.

When the background colors were dry, I added in details of clouds with "regular" acrylic paint, from various different suppliers such as Matisse, Liquitex, and Winsor Newton Finity. After that was dry, I added in a flat layer for the mountains, again in the Matisse gesso. The idea is to get the basic color down in the colored gesso so that the area is covered, and then work over the dry background in semi-transparent acrylic. This solves a constant problem with acrylic, namely that most acrylic paints do not cover and have to be re-painted two or more times to get opacity.

The rest of the landscape was done in regular acrylic, using chrome green as the basic color and different versions of "Naples Yellow Hue" to vary the lightness. The darkest tree shadows were done by mixing black and dark blue (ultramarine) into the chrome green. Chrome green is a great landscape color because it is opaque. It is one of the few acrylic colors where you get results on the first coating. This is the color that the French landscapist Camille Corot used to create his ideal-real images. Unfortunately, back in the 19th century, chrome green was not a stable color and it oxidised to greyish black. I don't pretend to compare myself to Corot or even imitate him, but at least my modern chrome green won't fade. I finished the picture by adding in the fence with more opaque gesso acrylic and mellowing the color with a transparent acrylic burnt umber glaze. Lots more to follow in this series, I hope.

Posted at 9:29 pm | link

I just finished the first of my new set of Virginia countryside paintings. This month I plan to do a series of them based on my travels in the Shenandoah valley. This piece is acrylic on Masonite, 10" x 8". It is small because it is a test of my color matching and sky painting strategies. The others will be larger. I want to convey a feeling of summer serenity with these images.

When I exhibit them, I need an "artist's statement." This is what I composed as explanatory text for this series:

"I think of the Virginia countryside as a landscape in perfect proportion. There are the distant hills in the blue of atmospheric perspective, then the closer hills in dark green, and then the radiant green of fields and vegetation closer to the viewer. I also love the endlessly changing light, color shades, and forms of clouds, in fair or stormy weather. This landscape is beautiful in all four seasons. I also like to include traditional architecture in my country scenes, because I love the geometry and textures of farm buildings. In these paintings and sketches, I try to convey the colors and feeling of a moment in time. In nature, the scene will change in the next minute but by the power of art, it will be captured, saved, and preserved in the viewer's memory."

Posted at 8:29 pm | link

This is a new painting in my abstract space series. Its title is "Fragments of an Alternate Universe," and it is acrylic on primed Masonite, 12" x 16". It is an experiment in using bright yellow with dark blue and black. The idea here is that the dark blue, light blue, and black as well as the brown areas are all fragments of another universe, which can only be seen against the background of the bright yellow which would represent an energy field or the surface of a star or some other exotic physics phenomenon. There may be other universes, but they may be completely unreachable. In my concept, there is a connection, but the information about the other universe comes to the experimenter or viewer only in fragments, where all times of day and night, as well as landforms, atmosphere, and starry sky, are visible at the same time.

Posted at 12:52 am | link

This is the companion picture to "X Cubed." It's another mathematically inspired artwork. It shows two intersecting graphs, one red and one blue. When equations ask for "less than" or "more than" a targeted number, they are called "inequalities" and are graphed in regions rather than lines or curves. If you have more than one in a problem, the inequalities intersect in the region that shows solutions to both of them. That is what is happening here (with some artistic license). The purple areas show solutions that fulfill both the red inequality and the blue inequality. The graph grids are also bent and twisted by strong gravitational fields. There must be some heavy mass around here somewhere. Though this picture shows intersections of red and blue regions, I intend no political meaning.
Painting is in acrylic and acrylic marker on black illustration board, 9" x 12".

Posted at 1:43 am | link

Finally, a painting from me in "traditional" media. That is, acrylic on illustration board. Acrylic isn't really "traditional," as it is a modern paint medium, but it's actual paint rather than digital imaging, which is the traditional part. I am back in the studio with the water and the brushes, making a series of my characteristic abstract mathematical space paintings for a convention (Balticon) next month. I also want to build up a stock of these so that I can get a gallery show.

"X Cubed" is based on the graph of the basic cubic function y = x³. This graph, on the Cartesian grid, soars up from negative infinity, makes a whiplash turn on the X-axis, and then continues soaring up to positive infinity. (If you don't do anything else with the function, that is.) My Cartesian graph, done in white, also divides the picture into four quadrants, each of which has something mathematical going on in it. The brown cube floating in the upper left has another graph on it, showing a trigonometric cubic function of y = sin³x. This makes a wobbly wavy version of the usual up-and-down sine wave. I got these graph forms from a graphing calculator application on my computer.

The painting is done in acrylic gouache, which has a nice flat non-shiny surface and covers the background real well. White lines were put in using acrylic pen markers. "X Cubed" is 9" x 12".

Posted at 1:53 am | link

Here's an interesting project which is quite unlike what I usually do. A longtime friend of my family from Massachusetts loves jazz. He plays the saxophone and jams with other jazz-loving friends. Over the years he has commissioned me to do a number of interesting artworks, often with text incorporated into them. The latest of these commissions is a graphic "illumination" of a verbal riff he wrote about jazz itself. Though he expected it to be done in hand-drawn calligraphy, I decided that it should be done digitally, with all the entertaining resources that Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop CS2 could provide. Here are the two pages of the illuminated text, each of them done in CS2 with clip art, photocollage and typeface elements. One note of information: Adolphe Sax (1814-1894) was the inventor of the saxophone.

And here is page 2. Each of these is about 8.5" x 11", the size of an ordinary sheet of paper, so that it could be printed in a folio form if requested.

So far I haven't heard back from the client, though I sent him printouts more than a week ago. Perhaps this isn't what he was looking for. It's hard to convince some people that work done in a digital medium is really "art." They are still looking for hand done calligraphy. But I assure anyone who looks at this, that this kind of visualization took a lot of work, perhaps as many hours as it would have taken to do handwriting and collage. I think it came out well, if no one else does. Illustrator and Photoshop are not the easiest programs to work with.

Posted at 8:30 pm | link

This was done in acrylic gouache, November 2008. Seems like an age ago. I chose these colors, yellow black purple, as my "official" colors of 2009. Its dimensions are 12" x 16".

Posted at 11:06 pm | link

Welcome to the new re-creation of the Pyracantha Weblog. The name of this blog is inspired by my day job as a signmaker at Trader Joe's, where I often do signs advertising nutritious fruits and vegetables. I hope that the art and writing which I will be posting here will be nutritious too. My main subject will be visual art, including painting, graphic design, comics, and other media, but I will also be writing about philosophical, religious, literary, and other topics. There might be a bit or two about science and mathematics, too. There will be plenty of my art to look at, and I hope to post images of significant pieces as they are completed.

This picture, "The Photons of Pentecost," has been in development for 2 years. I did the original design digitally in 2006, and then drew it onto the canvas in pencil. Then it languished for two years, stuck in my studio while I neglected it for other projects. I finally decided to finish it so that I could show it at my annual exhibition at DarkoverCon in the Baltimore area.

I don't usually paint on canvas. The reason I used it was that it was real cheap. I could get lots of already stretched canvases on sale. But these canvases were primed with a rather non-absorbent primer, and keeping the paint from sliding around was a problem. I used an airbrush for the background, and the spray didn't stick either. So I struggled with the technical problems, but finally managed to do more or less what I had envisioned. The digital version is more luminous than the final, since, after all, it shows itself on a glowing screen rather than paper or paint. I did my best to match the colors anyway.

The idea of the Photons of Pentecost came from a theological/scientific question. Well, perhaps it's a scientific/mythical question. Some of you readers may be familiar with the Biblical New Testament of Pentecost, where the Holy Spirit descends onto the apostles of Christ in the form of tongues of fire. (Acts of the Apostles, chapter 2) The question is, what happened to the photons (quanta of light/energy) emitted by these divine flames? Were they just ordinary photons such as come from the sun or a flame? Or were they divine photons which had a special status rather like the Catholic Eucharist, a "real presence" of God in the material world?

Scientifically, of course, this question makes no sense. The flames of Pentecost were not real, they were a symbolic literary event, so no photons were emitted. Everything in the Bible, and in religion in general, belongs in the realm of "things made up by people" and so there was no connection between the photons of Pentecost, which cannot be measured and thus don't exist, and real photons, which are measurable and exist.

If any of you remember my old essays from ELECTRON BLUE (July 2006) you know that I believe in a "real" mythical world, in which Pentecost, the photons, the Apostles, and their miracles exist in their own coherent and logical universe. That's the world I'm most happy with, and that's the world that I hope shows up in my paintings. Even with the technical problems, a painting belongs to the "real" material world. It's something which conveys information from the mythical world into the material world, and even scientific types can look at it without compromising their principles.

Posted at 2:38 am | link