6 Pedestrian Figures 29x23x1

5 pedestrians unpainted

Sketch for 5 figure Carving

9 Figure Sketch

10202012 15.5x10x3/4

Pedestrian Acrylic Sculpture

4 Sample painted carved acrylic figures

I have been carving figurative shapes from acrylic panel and painting on them with acrylic paint .  These are based on sidewalk pedestrian signs.

Art Attack Show

My friend, Ronn Lehmann, an excellent writer, stopped by the Art Attack be supportive and enjoy the event.  It is always fun to see yourself through someone else’s view.  I repost here what he wrote in his Blog,  http://ronnlehmann.wordpress.com/  You can also check out his web site http://ronnlehmann.com

Thank you for the kind words and observation Mr Lehmann.

Performing With Passion

In The Encore Effect, author Mark Sanborn suggests that everything in life is a performance, and our challenge is to be remarkable so that we will be invited back for an encore. Sanborn suggests that extraordinary results come from 5 factors: Passion, Preparation, Practice, Performance and Polish.

This past weekend I attended an art show at the invitation of my friend Ed Bock. I’m not generally known as Mr. Art, but I really enjoyed it. Over 200 artists were displaying their works: painting, sculpture, photography, jewelry and lots of other  things as well. It was a dazzling display.

Ed was showing his latest works in acrylic (check them out at edbockeditions.com), and as interesting as the works were themselves, what I really enjoyed was how he described his process for creation of each piece. You could fill a thimble with my art knowledge, but it was fascinating to hear Ed talk about his inspirations, how he discovered what works and what doesn’t, and how he is constantly learning.

Wandering around the exhibits and talking to the artists, I was struck that—like Ed—each one exhibited the factors that Sanborn describes. They prepared, they practiced, they performed and they polished their art. But most of all, they all had a passion for what they were doing.

Whenever you talk to someone who is doing what they love,  you hear that passion. It’s unmistakable. The converse is also true: when you talk to someone who is just doing a job, it’s the passion that is most noticeable in its absence.

Sanborn states that passion is the fuel for a remarkable performance. It is the desire to excel at what you’re doing. It’s the burning inside of you to learn more, do more, and do it well. With that definition, passion is within everyone’s grasp. It’s a matter of choosing it.

The artists had passion because they were doing something they loved. We can all choose to love what we’re doing, and be passionate about how we do it.

Today’s Fact-Cetera

Winston Churchill once designed greeting cards for Hallmark.

Airbrush Color on Polymer Medium on glass

Turtles and natural images are continuing to inspire me.  I’m hoping to have this image finished in time for my wife’s birthday in one week or at least ready to show her an almost finished piece.

Bonnie Cutts is a fabulous artist as well as a generous teacher and friend.  She spent some time in the studio with me demonstrating techniques with the golden paints and gels that I might use.  I especially was attracted to the use of the Golden Airbrush Color dropped into a thin wet layer of Golden Polymer Gloss.  The airbrush color wicks out in the wet polymer medium creating shapes reminiscent of microbial and planktonic life.  This is an image that fits well with my undersea turtle painting.  I will apply the skin of the microbial life as I did the printed turtle skin with soft gel gloss.  I will post a finished piece to my site soon.

Inside

This image is from figure studies done in 1985 and a painted image created in 2002.

When I first started showing my work a friend was confused and kept calling the images Giclée images which wasn’t true, I was making Giclée prints of my images.  I realized it might be clearer if I had a name for the style of image I was making at that time.  So I coined the term Fusionnée Image® to describe a style of image created by blending or fusing a photographic image with a painted image to produce a fused reality of image. Fusionnée (pronounced “fusion-ay”) in French means fused.

Simply put Fusionnée Image® is a style of image making and Giclée is a printing method.

Giclée is a term used to describe fine art prints produced by inkjet printing technology, much the way the term serigraph is used to describe a fine art image printed by silkscreen printing technology. Giclée (pronounced “zhee-clay”) in French means sprayed or squirted. Some call these prints by various names such as “original digital prints,” “inkjet prints,” “pigment prints,” “pigment dispersion on canvas” and “archival ink-jet on paper”. I’m sure the list of names will continue to grow as artists try to define what they do in a way that works for them.

I like to use the word Giclée because, among other reasons, it rhymes with the word Fusionnée.

I'm It too!

This image is based on a photo I took of Andy Warhol, when he was promoting his book in a department store window in 1977 in St. Louis, and a painted image I created in 2002 with watercolors and torn rice paper.   The book was “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol : (From A to B and Back Again)”.   In 1968 Andy Warhol gave a showing of one of his film efforts at the University of Miami where I was film student.   He had several projectors set up and kept starting and stopping them, overlapping the images and sounds.   It seemed rather random at the time.   I remember the big issue was whether he really was Andy, or the reported double that was rumored to give presentations for Andy Warhol.   This was my first contact with Andy Warhol’s work.   I have been very influenced by his style.   I also made another image, “I’m It”, using 9 frames from my black & white shots from that day.

I'm It!

fiber paste with digital ground and gold paint acrylic skins

My wife, Mary, had a very pleasant dream about swimming with Sea Turtles so I wanted to make a piece about that.  We went to The Mall of America to the Underwater Adventures exhibit and were lucky to get a few usable shots of the Sea Turtles as well as some great Jellyfish shots.  Even though I have a very very large image library it always seems there is more that I need for a particular project.  I think we will still try to go out to the Minnesota Zoo yet as they have Sea Turtles in their Atlantic Reef exhibit.

Meanwhile I have been continuing to make acrylic skins as resource pieces for projects.  In this image you see two skins, the turtle image on fiber paste and a clear gel made with Golden Soft Gel (Gloss) with a few drops of Golden Iridescent Bright Gold (Fine) paint added as I spread the gel with a palette knife.  I have purposely left the folds of the clear gloss gel wrinkled so that it can be seen but in the finished piece that won’t be noticeable.  This is just a starting idea with many layers. skins and paints to be added yet.  It will be several weeks or more before the piece is near completion.

The fiber paste skin had been coated with Golden Digital Ground White (Matte).  I had changed the drab background around the turtle to blue in photoshop before printing on the white  skin.  I have been making the skins using Strathmore Paper Palette, a poly-coated paper for use as a disposable paint-mixing palette.  I can apply the Golden Fiber Paste or the Golden Soft Gel (Gloss) to the paper palette, paint on it there or coat it with the Golden Digital Ground and run it through the Epson printer still on the paper palette.  When I am finished printing and letting it dry for a little while I spray the printed piece with Golden Archival Varnish Mineral Spirit Acrylic Aerosol to keep the printed image from smearing if it is on a glossy gel surface.  This allows me to handle it as I move it around when working on a piece.  The paper palette, although not very sturdy, holds up through all of this and the finished dried gel or paste peels up extremely easily with the aid of a palette knife.  I even use two pieces of palette paper poly side facing poly side to hold or store my skins till I’m ready to use them.  This turtle with gold image is just a starting idea with many layers. skins and paints to be added yet.  It will be several weeks or more before the piece is near completion.

acrylic skin fiber paste digital ground

I am learning to make digital skins using acrylic gels.  My friend Bonnie Cutts, an absolutely incredible artist, has been encouraging me to experiment and I am totally stoked about the possibilities.  I am spending part of this Labor Day weekend making skins and printing on them with my Epson printers.  I love the Fiber Paste for the texture and similarity to the torn rough watercolor paper that I like to use.  These acrylic skins can be applied to  canvases as part of  a finished piece.  Usually I would scan the finished watercolor piece to print it larger on canvas but now I can apply my photographic elements directly to a large acrylic work.    As I learn more, I will post working tips and guides to my process.    I’m sure I will be posting new work soon too.