Skip to main content

Elaine on Stage

36" x 26", oil on canvas, 2002, private collection

With the opening of my Field to Canvas show of local farmers portraits just over a month away, and since I'll be previewing that show during all of May with details and in-production images, I thought I'd wrap up April with the last full-image painting you'll see here until June.

This portrait is of Elaine Secord, lead singer of Squirm, a five-piece Toronto band that played the clubs in the '90s and recorded one CD (for which I created the artwork) before disbanding by the year 2000 or thereabouts. I used to see them perform a lot; we were friends, but I also thought they were quite good and enjoyed each show (no matter how smoky the venue).

I planned to paint more rock 'n' roll pictures with Squirm as my subjects, but I never got around to that. However, I took dozens of photos for the CD and decided to use many of the shots of Elaine in a whole bunch of paintings (like this one) and possibly more to come.

This painting's made up of two photos: one of Elaine, and a separate one of Tim Martin, guitarist, which adds much-needed interest (and rock 'n' roll ambiance) in the background.
Also of note: this is among my first figurative works in oil made right after my Interiors series and you can see that I'm still figuring out the medium.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Axel Foley's Chevy Nova (1/25 scale model)

Multiple tributes, here. I remember first seeing  Beverly Hills Cop  on video at my friend Chris K's house, 'cause his family had a VCR and we'd watch tons of movies (and record music videos) together. The summer of 1984 was a special time for us (having created a strong bond in school since Grade 6 a few years before), going on biking adventures around the 'burbs and into the city, etc., and home video played an important role from then until I moved to the opposite end of Scarborough just before we started high school. We liked the movie a lot, both of us fans of Eddie Murphy from his  Saturday Night Live  days. I don't think I'd seen the movie since then (it would have been 1985, probably summer, since the movie came out in late 1984) and I became curious to see if it still held up. It did. It does. I found Murphy as charming as ever and the comedy (and even the action) holds up very well and its very re-watchable and very entertaining.  Beverly Hi
5 comments
Read more

City of Angels

17" x 11", watercolour and digital, 1999 Ah, City of Angels . I thought I was getting cool film noir but got a cheesy musical instead (Google it if you must). Still, it was fun to make the poster and associated images, mostly because the research consisted of watching real films noir and buying a great book on movie posters of the genre. I made tons of sketches and a few digital mock-ups. For the final poster above, I made three separate watercolour paintings (one of the couple and one each of the two black and white heads) and composited them in Photoshop, where I also added the text. In true movie poster fashion, I wanted the actors names to be the top two names, but I lost that battle and had to use the characters' names instead. It looks fine, but it implies that "Kingsley and Stone" are the lead actors in the show. Oh, well...it's only community theatre... By making the "angel" above half black and white and half colour, th
Post a Comment
Read more

Small Pond Arts Puppet Wagon (1/24 scale model)

I dreamed up the Small Pond Shipyard for my fanciful scratch-built sci-fi airship creations (which still only exist in sketch/Photoshop mock-up form (and boxes in my closet) for now), but more and more ideas kept coming ( this wind turbine , for example, will be part of a rather elaborate diorama I'll be working on this winter). But the Puppet Wagon was a sleeper surprise, to be sure. [Really, though, I don't know why I was so eager to build this right away since I was planning to slowly develop my modelling skills with simpler builds first and the work my way up to more complicated projects.] Not all parts were used/needed. Most of these ideas have come from watching modelling videos online, and when I saw a review of this sweet little Japanese "Ramen Shop" food truck by Aoshima (right-side drive!), my brain started making jokes about customizing it to the weird food truck ideas I'd been posting on Facebook. But the more I thought about what the co
2 comments
Read more