The Naked Silo

Twinkle, Twinkle 17" x 14", oil on Bristol board, 2020 I've painted my friend, Ashley, more than any other model I've used and this particular pose had been sort of "on deck" for about two decades, making many appearances in my sketchbook in various compositions with various items joining her, but only appearing in one other painting until now. Pencil sketch from 1999. In many sketches over the years, I've put all kinds of stuff on and around Ashley, and I gave her a full-colour sunflower "tattoo" when I used her in this painting from my Sunflowers series (about a year or so before I started painting in oils as well as watercolours): Corona Solis (papa) 15" x 22", watercolour, 2000 I've been revisiting much of my voluminous photo reference that I've been shooting since the early 1990s (on film until around 2012, then digital ever since), and this pose came up yet again and, as accompaniment, I final...

2018 theme: SPACE. This year is the sixth  Firelight Lantern Festival  here in lovely Picton, Ontario, and I'm happy to continue the motif of silhouettes of people on parade with their lanterns changing each year to reflect the current theme (here are  the previous five posters ). As with the others, this is a combination of ink and digital illustration. Even though there are probably less than a dozen examples of my extreme love of science fiction and real space exploration in my paintings, this affinity is clearly represented in many of  my scale models . 2014 Lantern Fest theme: AIR. This year I'll be once again strapping into the Mark 2  jetpack I built a few years ago... Upgraded. The Mark 2  was created in time for Kingston's Skeleton Park Arts Festival in 2015 and used the same fabric flames as the Mark 1, but everything else was built from scratch. Flight mode in Kingston.

Oiseau 11 , 16" x 20", oil on canvas, 2008 Oiseau 13 , 16" x 20", oil on canvas, 2008 Lately there has been a blue jay (perhaps more than one) hanging around our front yard, eating the seeds from the sunflowers we planted here at Small Pond early this summer (the flower bed frame was built and installed by Krista and Georga Ryan , our first Australian resident). I really don't mind their squawking call if it means I get to ctach a fleeting glimpse of their beautiful plumage every now and then. Below are a couple of photos I took at night during a full moon (which looks like the sun in the bottom pic), experimenting with long exposures using my new DSLR (having –only semi-reluctantly– forsaken my Minolta film SLR ). My initial shots looked like they were taken in mid-afternoon with green grass and shadows and everything, so I decided to add flashlights and get some shots that wouldn't be possible in the daylight. Getting the Big Dipper in the up...