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Portraits

Welcome! Here are a bunch of portraits of friends and fellow students, all painted with oil on board over the last five or six months.

Hope you enjoy them.

Eddy (after Edouard)

My homage to Edouard Manet and portrait of my good mate Eddy, based on Manet's portrait of his friend Zola.

Mid-afternoon Chicken-wing Manoeuvre
My good friend Adam sometimes demonstrates his new jujitsu moves on me and I thought this would make for an amusing portrait of two old friends goofing around.

Tim "Woodzy" Woods

What can I say.. Tim plays for the Rockdogs on occasion so I took the opportunity to take a nostalgic trip to the footy card collecting days of my childhood. I still need to get his autograph.

I made this gigantic piece of gum to go with it (Gum used to come with footy cards. Does it still?)

The following are a bunch of quicker and sketchier paintings I did after tiring of the more detailed style of the above works.

                                              Adam with Smartphone

    Harry

    Jacob

   Tristan

    Nick

Paintings March - June 2015

The first semester of my painting degree has wrapped up. Here is some of what I've been up to in the studio since returning from Taiwan (the better stuff!). I'll add the sizes of the works when I get around to measuring them.

The Angels of Lanyu
Oil on two attached boards

I'm considering this painting to be the last of my Taiwanese series. It's based on my short time on Lanyu (also known as Orchid Island) and references the sometimes difficult relationship between the island and the mainland. The old mural in the lower half of the image is a government sponsored promotion of modern hygiene and health among the population using local imagery of traditional dress and fishing boat. The rental scooters in the foreground symbolise the burgeoning tourism trade on the island, towards which the population holds an ambivalent attitude. The aeroplane is the link between the mainland and the island - in winter it is the only link due to rough seas. The dancing girls in the sky are taken from a series of photographs documenting the local cultures in the 1960s.

Copy of Liu Xiaodong
Oil on board 
I made this small copy of a Liu Xiaodong for an assigned project. This painter is my Chinese namesake. Liu is the surname and Xiaodong means "Little East". In Taiwan I had to choose a name so I went for Li Xiaonan - "Leigh Little South", since I'm from the Southern hemisphere. Apparently in Chinese it sounds incredibly dopey. Needless to say I think Liu Xiadong is a great painter, and I was lucky enough to see one of his shows in Taipei. A nice segue to the next painting....

Taipei Tourist (Self Portrait)
Oil on Canvas
Me standing in front of an outdoor poster for a Vermeer show.  The old frame within a frame trick!

Cartoons on Glass
Oil on louver window slats
The idea behind these small figures was originally to create a series of caricatures or stereotypes - the businessman, the skater kid, the tough guy poser, the hipster, etc., but I got some requests to do other students so around half of these are tiny versions of fellow students. I had fun with it. That's me top right.

      

Retaining Wall and Cafe Still Life
Oil on Board

I like these two together as they share a colour family. It might not be all that apparent but I was taking inspiration from an American painter called Neil Welliver whose technique involved expressive painterly shapes and distinct tonal separation between them.  Hard to explain but well worth checking out his stuff. I was trying to model objects with lively colour relationships and tonal values and keeping blending to a minimum.

Skin #2, Skin #3, Skin #1
Oil on board
These are more abstract but continuing in the same vein as the previous paintings. I used close up photos of spotted gums on St Kilda Rd as inspiration for colour and shapes.These are all wet on wet one-session paintings.

Mirror
Oil on plastic aluminium composite
If I did this one again I would buy acrylics for the graphic background. It was an interesting material to work on. I made it challenging for myself by leaving the shiny surface unmarked as the white in the image and attempting a cleaner style.

Still life in Studio
Oil on canvas

Hot Tap
Oil on Canvas
A couple of square still lifes on canvas, the first painted from life, the second from a photograph.

I'm now working on a few portraits so I should have more pictures up here soon folks!

Dec 2014 paintings

Recent oil on board paintings:

Val at Gaomei Wetlands

Summit of Jade Mountain

Noodle Man on Yongching St.

Entrance Pot Plant

Limited palette and other experiments

Having amassed more colours than were genuinely useful I decided to experiment with simplifying my process and painting some pictures with a limited palette.

One of my teachers a few years ago had our class paint self portraits using paine's grey, burnt sienna and raw sienna, an exercise I found instructive.

After some experiments I decided to roll with the "Zorn palette" named after the Swede Anders Zorn. (He was known as the Swedish Sargent - check out his self portrait in red, it's a real ripper). The combination is similar to my teacher's, but with a punchier red. The palette is ivory black, yellow ochre, and vermillion red (a middle red containing mercury... highly poisonous... ancient tubes still obtainable at my art store here in Taichung!)

 A surprising array of colours can be attained with only red, yellow ochre and black (and of course white). The red I used was a mix of alizarin and cadmium red light. The black was a mix of ivory black and ultramarine blue, the blue helping to attain greens when mixing with the yellow ochre.

Self portrait - my first foray with the Zorn palette

This palette is great for skin tones and portraiture but not so great for landscapes - I had to cheat and add some blue to get a greener green for the landscape I attempted.

There is a lot to be said for simplifying the palette. By making colour decisions so easy it frees you up to concentrate on other aspects of painting. It unifies the painting as almost any colour on the canvas will contain the same ingredients as any other. It makes life easier. I've enjoyed the experiment greatly and while I wouldn't use a limited palette exclusively, it seems to me a great way to make a sketch or lay out a painting that can then be expanded on with more colours.

Serious artists eat their eggs with a palette knife.

 I added some blue to the palette with this one to get stronger greens. This composition is successful but the sky could do with some livening up, and I could sure use some more practice painting trees!

I cheated by adding some blue for the tie on this painting of my parents in law.

After all that limited palette stuff I felt like busting out the cadmiums for this one. I was going for the Margaret Preston type black outlines... not sure if it was too successful... but it was certainly fun.

I had fun with the lurid green on this one too. Meet Claire and Jason's wounded puppy!!

I am still fooling around with this painting of an everyday Taiwanese scene. I was surprised at how difficult it was to get the colour of lamplit ashphalt. The board is a little small for a lot of detail so I might not do much more...

Val's beautiful smile

Copies

Since completing the last exhibition series I've had been painting a variety of things on smaller boards. The pictures below are small copies of paintings by some artists of the past that I particularly like. It's been instructive in terms of colour mixing and paint handling - without having to worry about original composition it is much easier to concentrate on those things. The dead guys can teach you stuff!

The artists are Levitan, Sorolla (detail on canvas), Repin, Seago and Neel. (I don't claim to own the copyright to these images so, y'know, go easy on me...)

"Shadows" Exhibition

The "Shadows" show has been up at the wonderful Lei gallery for all of this past month.  We had a brilliant opening and the show also served as the backdrop to a very fun album launch concert by local outfit Vicious Cabaret and friends.

Vicious Cabaret

Yours truly!

Here are the images of the paintings shown. All are oil on canvas except for Yellow Slicker (acrylic).

Four Scooters (91x72cm.)

Around the Bend (72x60cm.)

Old Guard (91x72cm.)

Shadows (80x60cm.)

Demolition (91x65cm.)

Yellow Slicker (91x72cm.)

Yellow Slicker 2 (35x27cm.)

 Dusk, People's Park (35x27cm.)

Statue (35x27cm.)

Xitou View (80x60cm.)