Artificial Heart

22" x 15", watercolour, 2016

I mention in this post the inspiration certain key artists that got me fired up about painting in general, and watercolours, specifically, but here I am, nearly 30 years later, starting to really learn from them.
The mood and the trees are heavily influenced by Jon J Muth's work in his Dracula graphic novel; it's my own scene, but I wanted to see if I could evoke even a tiny bit of Muthness in this painting. I think I did, in the trees, but the figures appear to be undeniably mine (for better or worse). I'm happy with the result.

Conceptual sketch.

In fact, it was after deeply considering the sketch above that I decided to go with a forest setting and carry that over to Things Are Looking Up and Lost in a Riddle.

Back in 2008 I did a very small series of paintings of some of my friends sitting on a green chair. The common idea was they all wore jeans, were barefoot, and my stained-glass-like matrix of geometric patterns was to feature prominently in the backgrounds as well as being seen through the subjects. This is Art and Lindy from one of the unused photos from our shoot for their painting.

For that series I also painted Krista, and Lisa. and Chris, and I shot Kimwun on a green chair during our Kitchen Warfare photo shoot, but I didn't get around to painting that back then...but I will be using two of the green chair photos I shot of her in a couple of upcoming watercolours as part of this current 13-painting run.

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