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For now, I’m trying to transfer what I have already accumulated from my old, tired website to this new blog. I have much to move, and I’m sure this site will change significantly over time.
It’s a cold winter here in Portland. I want to pull out my paints and start something but the cold is so debilitating. That and the short days. I’m working on it though.
I’ve been getting daily updates from this site on their twelve participating painters who have committed to creating a painting each day. This has been going on since 2006 and not all of them still create a daily painting. I’m enjoying the updates.
Clearly these people are prolific.
Carol Marine is definitely one of my favorites (if not my absolute favorite) painter in this group. She’s an oil painter who, like Aaron Lifferth, creates angles where one would not necessarily expect to see them. Her work is hugely inspirational. She doesn’t push the angles as far as does Lifferth, which appeals to me quite a bit. She also blogs her daily paintings which is hugely appealing to me. Her work is wonderfully painterly although one often sees the canvas grain through her applied paint. It’s just painterly enough. I will follow her closely.
Qiang Huang (pronounced Chong Wong), also an oil painter, does work that sort of has me divided. His work is gloriously painterly and very well rendered, and I love looking at it. What throws me off has to do with the fact that he does so many flowers. I can take flowers in small doses but admit I’m just one of those people who’d rather see a cow than another flower. He is so good at everything he does though. Nonetheless I definitely need to watch him. He has a very wonderful talent.
Abbey Ryan is very talented in my opinion, but I definitely lean toward more painterly effects. I like her daily oil subjects a lot, but the canvas is very stark with no visible brush strokes, and I love piling on the oils. Her work is very illustrative and photo realistic. I appreciate her obvious skill nonetheless.
Jacqueline Knott is a watercolor artist whose daily paintings seem largely focused on flowers. Unfortunately, both subject and media aren’t particularly exciting to me. She’s definitely in my opinion very good at her craft, however.
Michael Naples is definitely a preferred painter in my opinion. His daily work is painterly and well drawn. I really like his work a lot.
Belinda Del Pesco appears to be primarily a watercolor artist. Her website redirects visitors to an unwieldy mac.com site that is difficult to navigate and bereft of information. Her palette isn’t one I would gravitate toward.
Edward B. Gordon, an oil painter I believe based in Berlin, Germany, primarily paints figures, although his skill extends into other subjects as well. He paints with a very dark palette, rendering his subjects with a somber aspect, but he has some extremely interesting pieces. I really like his approach to painting, and I will definitely follow him out of intense interest in his work. He is able to articulate pretty much how I myself feel about painting.
Stephen Magsig, an oil painter who appears to focus primarily on landscapes and cityscapes, doesn’t at this time have his own website and so it’s hard to delve into his thoughts around painting. I’m not sure if it’s his palette or his subjects, but for some reason his work just don’t seem to speak to me at all.
Those are my thoughts today on these six contributing painters.