Skip to main content

Hat Trick

24" x 36", oil on canvas, 2017, (after Johns)

Peter and Alice of Blizzmax Gallery had asked if I would like to participate in their One 5 Oh Canada show celebrating Canada's 150th birthday this summer and, always happy to be part of a Blizzmax show, I said yes, not knowing right away what I could/would/should submit for inclusion. With an eye towards positivity and celebration (rather than grim political commentary) I settled on aping a couple of Jasper Johns paintings of American flags and giving them a Canadian twist.

This one is a riff on his Three Flags (1958) which I did in oil (rather than his encaustic on canvas) and is much smaller than his work. Because I used a different medium, I had to create an illusion of depth as well as rely on many layers of gesso and paint for actual texture. My flag paintings are less complex as a result, but no less fun and whimsical.

My other painting is a Canadian version of his White Flag (1955) which I titled Snowblind.

Creating the illusion of stacking.

Over a few layers of gesso (for added texture) I did as precise a tracing as possible of the maple leaf in our flag because accuracy was important here. The design of the leaf in the Canadian flag is almost impossible to draw freehand and almost no one can get it right.  The proportions of the other elements vary in my flag paintings, but the leaf HAD to be correct.

Then after I covered the surface with orange acrylic for my ground colour (as usual), I reinforced the shadows of the two top flags with black acrylic to give the illusion of stacked forms (Johns made three flags and stacked them while mine is decidedly flat).

Almost there...

As with my white flag, I applied some dark acrylics for depth and to assist in illusion of shadows, then went straight to oil colours getting to this point, which is pretty close to what I want –another few hours of touching-up (some reddening of the reds, some darkening of the shadows, and some brightening of the whites) once this stage is dry and I'm happy and the paintings is ready for the show.




Comments

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

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

U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701-D (1/1400 scale model)

Seven decades after Kirk. I'd been hooked on Star Trek since I was a wee lad in the 1970s, watching reruns of the original series from the '60s, and I enjoyed the movies that came out afterward. When a new series was announced to debut in 1987, I was excited and interested, even though I felt the subtitle "The Next Generation" was cheesy. Nearly 30 years later, I've definitely gotten used to it (but "TNG" is easier to say and type), but I still find it kinda bland. Anyway, the show had fresh new technology and a spanking new design for its main ship, the U.S.S. Enterprise , NCC-1701-D, now the flagship of the Federation. Andrew Probert 's design took some getting used to for me; it had the same basic elements of the original Enterprise  (saucer, neck, cylinder, and two cylindrical engines on pylons), but the shapes and volumes were distributed differently, weirdly. Everything looked squished and soft. The organic look of this new ship had me