Card Players

I wanted to do another interior, and a lot of table-related things have been on my mind lately. I've been thinking about still lives, paintings about eating, people seated, and the fact is that tables are a great gathering spot for people. When art becomes part of life, tables are just as relevant as any other item to paint, and including models/figures becomes easier than ever. Just tell them to sit down and do something. I told my little brothers to sit down and do stuff. It began with one of them playing a board game, which made me think of all sorts of board-game related things. Checkerboard patterns, how painting becomes like a board game in terms of moves, etc. So I began to paint and when I looked at it again, the composition reminded me of Cezanne's Card Players. This made me think again of my recent adventure with making playing cards out of woodblock prints, and I wondered whether or not my subconscious was linking things together. Either way I told my brother to sit down and play solitaire while I painted him. Then he got bored so I got him on my laptop and he ended up playing Plants vs. Zombies which for all intents and purposes could count as a modern card game. People play solitaire on the computer all the time! Technicalities aside though, I became very absorbed in the levels of space in the room, the floor, the plane of the table, the window in the back and the world outside. Makes me think of how during a card game everything seems to be in this little world of paper and spades and chance, and outside the window the world still exists. People are absorbed in their own little worlds. Card players, painters, writers, athletes, anyone.

The first take is this:

The little guy to the left at this point was playing a board game which turned into solitaire. The fellow at the end of the table is writing something. I tried a more limited palette to begin with.

Take two eliminated the central figure and related some mugs on the table to a certain dual approach to the painting that I began to see creeping out of the way it was set up. I had my eye on the green square at the top left and was measuring the other colors off that from time to time.

What I decided was the final take had something to say about different color dynamics. I thought the red and the yellow had taken a prominent role in the painting thus far, but I thought it needed some other major players in terms of space, so some cobalt blue took over and made some interesting comments on what had been the green square at the top left but that was eventually considered to be too irrelevant. Clarification was also the name of the game. The figure remains, surrounded by cobalt blue and payne's gray, and the mood of the painting seemed to become a slightly brighter nostalgia. A pair of shoes appeared under the table.

24"x30" Card Players, oil on canvas.

Woodblock Printing, Continued

For the next set of woodblock prints, I started with a sketch I had made some time ago of my two little brothers sitting at the table.

I used the reverse side of the board I had used to carve the other block print for this one. I carved out some negative spaces, making texture and depth decisions partly intuitively, partly thinking about how it would look when reversed and printed.

The great thing about this type of printing is the guided loss of control. I have a certain amount control over the carved  image, but not in the same way I have control over a drawing. Then, once I begin printing, I have little control over how exact the image plays out. I have a general control over how thick I put the ink or paint on the block print, but once I pull the paper off the block, I am always pleasantly surprised by how the print turned out. It's a nice dynamic between specific, static marks carved into wood, and a complete dependence on how materials react when mushed together. It's a nice study in letting go, and letting the materials do the work for me. Also I still get to make color decisions, with a similar attitude. Here are the full set of sixteen woodblock prints, all around 5"x7", acrylic or ink on 140lb. watercolor paper:

Ching + Feet

I've been drawing a little more lately, not much else in terms of mediums, but i'm trying to focus more on composition, as I mentioned earlier. This is a drawing of Ching sitting on the futon and reading several things over the course of about 40 minutes.