Sunday, January 22, 2012

Rainbow Chihuahua

I wasn't sure what to call this Chihuahua.
He's so full of color, I thought Rainbow Chihuahua was appropriate ... at least for now.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Florence Meets Rome

I absolutely love old architecture.  If an old building has a dome, I love it even more.  I occasionally sketch architecture from photos, and have done the occasional painting.  I have a few pastels (among other things art-related) lying around.  I've barely used pastels, except to dabble, but I am so inspired by Michael Newberry's beautiful pastel drawings, I sketched this on my lunch hour today.  When I visited Florence this summer, I was enraptured by the city.  The cathedral in Florence is unlike anything I've ever seen.  I didn't have a photo reference, but who can forget that orange-ish dome?!  The base of this sketch was completely made up, but it reminds me of the photos I've seen of the Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, hence the name of this sketch.  This sketch is unfinished, but I kind of like the semi-abstract nature of it, so I think I will leave it as is.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Evolution of a Canvas

Originally this canvas was of a painting I painted in an Abstraction class I took at Otis College in Los Angeles.  We were exploring Cubism, and I chose architecture.  I painted a mosque that had really cool geometric shapes.
This is how it looked initially.
It looked like this for several years until I decided to re-use the canvas for the still life set-up from my previous  entry below:

I wasn't happy with the direction of that painting, so I decided to re-use it again for this painting of a tree in Palisades Park in Santa Monica which overlooks the ocean.  So far, I'm happy with this one.