This is my first painting post. As background, I took private painting lessons from a local artist a few years ago.

I paint in oils on canvas covered masonite board with a palette knife. This technique interested me because I loathed the idea of cleaning brushes in turpentine. The clean up is simple, I wipe the palette knife on a cloth and remove oil paint from my hands with baby oil. I am a beginner painter, I barely got started trying to hack through a few still life paintings when I realized that I didn’t enjoy trying to depict three dimensional objects in two dimensions. Since I don’t enjoy drawing I thought this type of painting is best left to those who do it well.

This first painting is from a couple of years ago when I was trying to figure out what, if anything, I liked about painting.

It turns out that what I liked is color – without form. The immediacy of color is something that is hard to come by when working in fibers. It takes quite awhile before you see results, before you have something big enough to know if you will like it or not.

P1010019

.
.
I like the dynamic in the above painting between the warm and cool colors and the highly an less saturated colors.
.
.
This is the first thing I painted after a couple of years break. I liked the above orange painting and thought I would try another version just to get familiar with the tools again.

P1010013

.
.
Once I got started the ideas starting coming and now I love painting. Each square is 1″, so these paintings are 12″ x 12″

P1010025

.
.

P1010023

.
.
So, this whole thing seems odd to me, who plops down little squares of color on board? Why am I doing this? And yet, I feel compelled to do it.

P6120008

.
.

P1010016

.
.

P1010028

.
.
This is Paul Cezanne’s Still Life with Apples and Pot of Primroses

h2_51.112.1

.
.
This is a detail of the painting as seen in an engagement book from the Metropolitan Museum of Art 2002.

P6130001

.
.
I love the colors in this image and focused on an even smaller detail than the original. .

P6130001-mod

.
.
I made this painting a few years ago. I liked mixing up my “impression” of a color that corresponded to an area on my grid.

P6130004

.
.
Recently, I took a stab at placing the forms of the original detail, the squares of this grid are 2 1/8″.

P6070001

.
.
And now I’m filling in the squares over the outlines – which I darkened using a sharpee pen.

P6120010