Here is my latest painting. "Dance School" is a mix media painting of pastel over watercolor. I love the story , who is the woman in the window? It's a little haunting and mysterious. I think the dark ceiling adds to the drama.

The color palette is limited to shades of orange to browns with touches of mauve and blue. There is a strong architectural element to the building and the window.

What I'm trying to decide is if I will use this as the sketch for an oil. For sure if I do this in oil I won't be changing anything but the lettering on the sign. I would be very careful with the perspective on the lettering.

I am using paint to tell a story. It's up to you to fill in the characters and story line.

Here is my completed painting. The background was muted to give some aerial perspective. I had to take out the ashtray and the cigarette pack. I could not get the ashtray to sit on the table. Yes, painting 3D in a 2D media at times can be difficult, or in this case impossible. I thought that the clothes were a little boring, so I added some color to them, picking up the red of the table and some lighter blue for high lights. I could go on painting this forever, but I've reached that point where I don't think I can paint it any better. As a life long learner, there will always be room for improvement. But, I am happier with these faces and hands. So yippie for that. Now it has to get frame and then get started on a new painting. I have an idea for a new "voyeur painting", so it's back to watercolor to get the idea out of my head and on to paper.

I am really starting to like this painting although I am my worst critic. As a hobby painter I see what the professional artist are doing and think maybe I should get some lessons somewhere. But, when I look at all the paintings I've done I see that they have a distinctive style. What I like about this painting is that the faces and hands are more believable. Faces and hands have always been a nightmare for me. Now it's the cigarette pack and the ashtray I can't get the perspective right so they aren't sitting on the table correctly. I am almost ready to take them out of the painting. If it doesn't work in my next painting session...out they go. I have much more work to do and it does have to dry before the WRAP show. Well, I better get going.

Cafe Intervention

This is the start of the painting. Here is where I start to change how this painting will look. The background is too vivid which doesn't show aerial perspective of distance. I will change this to blue/gray hues. Your eye goes directly to the tire on the truck. The main focus should be on the people. Next, the color of her dress is too garish and gaudy, this happened because I did follow one of my basic rules, limit the colors and blend them. Well I am on my way with this painting. It will be exciting to see how it will change tomorrow.

Cafe Intervention

Here is the original sketch, it was put on with permanent marker and then covered with two coats of white gesso. Through trial and error I found that the sketch has to been coated or it will show through and require a lot paint to stop it. But if you are like me and need to see your sketch for awhile this is really nice. The marker sketch will be completely covered usually by the time the underpainting is done.

Cafe Intervention

Necessity or procrastination, could be the motivation for what might be my "Manic Panic" phase of painting. Not having a current painting to show for critique night at the monthly meeting of the Waukesha Creative Art League (WCAL) I went into this phase and produced "Cafe Intervention". This is a 22 by 30 inch watercolor on Arches 400 lb cold press paper.

This watercolor is the sketch for an oil painting entry into this year's Wisconsin Regional Art Program (WRAP). So far I've sketched this painting onto canvas (36 by 48 inches) and the underpainting is done. This is where I start to change the color composition. I will be posting the progress of this oil painting, which should help to keep me on track. I already do not like the color of her dress and the vividness of the background scene. The dress color wasn't a mix from the color palette I use and it really looks garish. Some aerial perspective is needed for the background to make the street scene appear to be distant. We will see where this goes, it will be interesting to see how much it changes before it's completed. I will be posting photos of the progress.

Andy Warhol The Last Decade at the Milwaukee Art Museum

What an exciting night for the MAM to show Andy Warhol, an icon of Pop Art. Half expecting to see soup cans and Marilyn Monroe I was given the opportunity to see the last decade of his work. During this time he was his most prolific, producing more art than in his forty year career.
Although not given the critical acclaim that made him famous, this art was more exploratory and introspective. This decade he returns to painting, experimenting with his own ideas of morality and what his legacy should be.

One of the first projects to draw Warhol away from the precipice of the has-beens was his Shadows series of 1978-1979, big, looming chasms inky strangeness shot through with candy colors. There’s little to overtly suggest space or depth, but we get sensations — a passage, a room, a figure, perhaps? They’re unknowable and esoteric and connect with the Warholian contradiction of picturing nothingness, yet imbuing it with substance. As Keith Hartley suggests in his catalog essay, though Warhol deemed these works “disco decor,” their murky and mysterious nature, particularly when installed as a long, continuous frieze, becomes fraught with possibility and uncertainty.

Andy Warhol, Yarn, 1983. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 40 x 40 in. (101.6 x 101.6 cm). The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Warhol’s interest in abstraction is documented in a number of series. The Rorschach paintings are like psychology tests writ large – as much as 13-feet-tall large. The Oxidation Paintings and Yarn canvases also shun ordinary, painterly approaches; the former reveals the chemical reactions between urine and metallic pigments, and the latter grew from a commissioned project into giant canvases of squiggling, entwined, twisty lines. The quotations are unmistakable — the impulses of performance art and Dada on one hand, and Abstract Expressionism Warhol-style on the other.
The most poignant images throughout Andy Warhol: The Last Decade are the self-portraits, and it’s almost impossible to look at this exhibition and these pictures without a poignant sense of death over your shoulder. Warhol explored self-portraiture in his youthful glory days of the ’60s, again in the late ‘70s into the dawn of the ‘80s, and lastly in 1986. These images have an unsettling power that transcends the context of their time. His face is often blurred and repeated. Skulls hover as reminders of our terminal mortality. In the last portraits, his iconic shock of silver hair appears electrified, and he is simultaneously hidden and revealed within a wash of camouflage. These are modern parallels to the arc of self-portraiture by predecessors, such as Rembrandt van Rijn, wherein the youthful, self-assured and somewhat cocky painter is transformed through the unabashed frankness and exposed spirit in an older self.
It’s as though Warhol, a master of understated drama, fortuitously embarked on these themes just in time, as though feeling the sands of time were slipping. He was also re-energized through his work in the early 1980s with younger artists, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente. These collaborations served as catalysts for Warhol to pick up actual paintbrushes once more.

Andy Warhol, The Last Supper, 1986. Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 78 x 306 in. The Baltimore Museum of Art, Purchase with exchange funds from the Harry A. Bernstein Memorial Collection. Photo: Mitro Hood.
The exhibition reaches a final crescendo with The Last Supper works, which originated in a project for a gallery in Milan, housed across from Santa Maria delle Grazie where Leonardo da Vinci painted his famed fresco between 1495 and 1498. These last images, as well as Warhol’s provocative Black and White Ads, give glimpses into the hidden Andy Warhol, suggesting his Catholic devotion and personal commentaries.
This exhibition, developed by former Milwaukee Art Museum chief curator Joseph D. Ketner II, who now holds a named chair at Emerson College in Boston, summarizes the final years of Warhol’s career neatly. The richness of experimentation and exploration of Warhol’s last decade is tantalizing, and it seems this story is only beginning to be told.