Two reviews

Landscapes and figure drawing

Cocaine Bear. The review. It was a fun little film that will be forgotten by the next cycle of new releases. I don’t mean it was bad but it just wasn’t way over the top enough to stand out as the next set of shiny things comes down the lane. I enjoyed it in the moment. My buddy Mike secured the tickets and the early entry for the 10 or 15 people in our group. He also dresses up for these things as well. He had a bear paw and looked like he had gone on a hike/bender with the cocaine bear… minus the scratches or film credit.

That’s my review.

I like to do an occasional landscape or two. I don’t know if I could do it all the time, but it can be very satisfying. A few weeks ago I saw the Edward Hopper show at the Whitney. Truly inspirational. That’s another deep review you get right here. I use all the words to describe the world. I saw a Hopper exhibit in the early 90’s that blew me away. I want to say at the Guggenheim? I love shows like this. Seeing a large sample of an artist’s work is thrilling. You see some style thing in early work that manifests later on and so many other little things you pick up. Hopper’s sense of composition seemed to come out in his early work which remained throughout everything he did after.

I noticed shapes that he’d find in various compositions and how he’d frame figures to isolate them, or emphasize them? The colors were always right where and what they needed to be. There were more interiors in the show and I was really inspired to just go home and paint after the first 10 or so paintings. I do not recommend going on a roadtrip through Pennsylvania the day after saturating yourself with a show like this. I was all over the road as I started having flashbacks of inspiration as I passed through layered landscapes of barns, hills, trees, fields, and more barns with a topping of fluffy clouds crashing into distant mountains. Fortunately it was just the clouds crashing and not me!

This is a Cognac vineyard not far from Angouleme, France where I had been attending the comic book festival there. Gouache on paper.

Central PA near the town of Benezette where the elk run happens in the fall. a few years later this mountain top was strip mined and the well water was ruined by fracking near by. Gouache on paper.

Warehouse off of RT 81 North near Binghampton, NY Gouache on paper.

Lighthouse on Presque Isle state park in Erie, PA. This is at the area called Waterworks. Gouache on paper.

RT 80 East somewhere in PA.

RT 80 West

All art is POR (Price on request)

And figures at the bottom.