The Naked Silo

In Part One of my look back at my 25 years of painting, I talked a bit about Jon J Muth, Kent Williams, and Bill Sienkiewicz, the three key artists who inspired me so strongly that I absolutely needed to paint in watercolours as a direct result of seeing some of their work in the medium. Because I saw their work exclusively in comics, there was naturally a lot of figurative and portrait-like content for me to consume, and I loved the way they all handled skin tones/textures a little differently from each other. In my last two years of high school, however, I was lucky enough to have a good teacher for once, Anthony J. Batten , who worked primarily in watercolours, and became another major inspiration for me. Admittedly, my approach to learning how to paint people wasn't very effective since all I did was look at my photo reference (from magazines, what else? I hadn't started shooting my own reference yet) and try to paint what I saw. The results were okay, but I would...

Sportski en Plastique (Bulls) 26' x 20", watercolour (on Yupo), 2009, private collection Michael Jordan 16" x 14", watercolour (on traditional watercolour paper), 1996, private collection Here's another couple of paintings whose subject matter is separated by thirteen years. I did paint (but can't find) another basketball painting I did that was reminiscent of my early football painting , but the portrait of Michael Jordan (as #23) complements the action painting of him (as #45) better anyway. You can see my technique "loosening up" in the earlier Jordan painting --and it isn't too bad. In retrospect, I should have explored that avenue further at the time, however, I think it'd be interesting to try my loose, spattery technique I'm employing for my Yupo-based paintings on regular watercolour paper and see how that works out. Neither of these paintings is based on my own photography.