Monthly Studio Update - November, 2002

 

 

MONTHLY STUDIO UPDATE: NOVEMBER 2002 (Updated November 3rd, 11th, and 12th)

 

The details of the rocks on  Venus have been worked on.  I am not pleased with the mountains behind her and I plan to work much more on them.

 

 

 

Progress on Artemis is inching along.   With winter coming in Rhodes and the model's summer jobs finished  I will be able to work more hours with the models for Venus and Artemis.

 

 

 

Slowly the pastel portraits are progressing.  These two,  Valia and Voula, will be used as studies for the Dinner painting.

 

 

 

 

I don't remember if I posted this pastel interior before.  It is a study for the Dinner painting and it was drawn in my dinning room in Greece. It is unfinished, I will have one more drawing session.

 

 

Some weeks ago I looked through many pastel drawings that had been tucked away because I wasn't sure about them.  Meaning I felt there were some wonderful aspects about them combined with some things I didn't like.   I did a little re-drawing on them, a bit of cleaning up here and there.  In some cases I went too far and messed the drawings up, which then made it easy to throw them away.  In other cases I really liked what happened.  Here are a few of those.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of my biggest influences as a young artist was the work of Picasso.  The others have been Rembrandt, the French Impressionists, and Michelangelo.  Though they all have radically different styles it wasn't the style that I was interested in but in what was common among them.  Without exception they all are masters of working their images spatially. Right now I am making a series of pencil drawings. It is an homage to Picasso.  In this series I am recalling many of the lessons I gleaned from the study his work.  You will not see stylistic similarities with my work and Picasso's but you might see  the accent on spatial connections between all the objects. Plus one more aspect, the balance in the compositions; how everything is composed within the space of the paper.

 

Sold

 

Sold

 

Unfinished

 

Sold

 

 

 

 

Denouement Giclee Reproduction

A few days ago I got back the final reproduction proofs of Denouement 22" x 31 3/4" and Absorption 22" x 27 1/2". I couldn't be more happy with the results: incredibly fine detail, a strong sense of depth in the space, and wonderful clean color.

 

 

 

 

 

This is a small acrylic portrait, 10" x 14", it was left unfinished but I like it nonetheless.

 

This charcoal drawing is from the Mourning and Rebirth series from 1992.  It and the following pastel, Rocks, have recently returned into my possession.  The Rebirth image is 20" x 29" and the wonderful heavy wood frame is 31" x 39".  The Rocks image is 19" x 25" and the frame is 25" x 31".

 

 

All these works are available, contact me for more information.

 

 

 

This is the Ginger Jar, a limited edition lithograph.  The edition has been sold out.  But one of my collectors has two of them and she would like to sell one of them. Again, if you are interested contact me.

 

 

Right now, November 1st, I am in Santa Monica staying with a friend and collector.  Denouement is here and I thought you might like to see its setting.

 

While in L.A. I visited another collector's home and re-visited a few of my undocumented works that I had not seen in a long time.   In fact,  I had no recall  how two of them  looked. My fine art education was postmodern, I had  no classes that taught fundamentals, and it was unstructured--I was left to my own devices to work representationally. When I taught Life-drawing and Drawing and Composition at Otis I taught a class using a classic technique of charcoal drawing. The only problem is that I had never used that technique before!  As they say the best way to learn is to teach. 

Anyway I so much enjoyed teaching this technique that I did a whole series of works with charcoal and paper. What ware surprising to me was how easy it was to capture the subtlety of light and the super fine detail that could be drawn. Here is a self-portrait in this medium.

 

 

Also in this collector's home were the following two undocumented works. A pencil male torso and very small acrylic painting.

 

 

 

Last night, Nov. 11th, I visited another collector's home and I took along the digital camera. Here are three more pieces that have not been documented:

This is a self-portrait I did at 20 years old. I had just quit U.S.C. and  my tennis scholarship to devote myself full-time to art. I also, on my own,  had moved to Europe to start my new venture in life.   This piece was one of the works I submitted to the Royal Academy in The Hague, Holland.  I had a strange admissions interviewer; the man criticized my work for not being perfect enough.  And I commented to him: "What is the point of going to school to learn if you already do perfect work? To learn is what I am here for."

He rejected my application.

Ironically, I think the work is wonderful.   I like the composition very much. My head is slightly off-center which is balanced by the off-center canvas.  And if you have been following these updates you will know I am keen about spatial relations between the objects in the painting. Notice the spatial relationship between the edge of the canvas and the nose. At this early age my interest in this aspect is clearly visible.

 

This is another self-portrait two years later. I remember I was holed up in a hotel room somewhere in Germany, which I only left to get something to eat. I did nothing there but draw in that room.  Being a hermit is one of my favorite past-times: no people, no noise, no T.V., just alone with my thoughts and drawing.

 

This work is also from 1977, oil on gesso covered cardboard. I can imagine that many of you that lean towards realism won't understand anything about this piece.  But it is a gesture done in paint, something like writing out ideas for a project on a restaurant's napkin.

 

That is it for November.