I’ve been working on this self-portrait for the last few weeks and have finally gotten it to where I think it’s finished.  This is acrylic on canvas, 48″x24″.

I recently finished a dual portrait of my aunt and uncle.  Acrylic on panel, 20″x16″.

I finally took some paints outside and did this landscape study on a beautiful Thursday morning last week.  The painting is an acrylic on canvas, approximately 9″x12″, and was painted in Mercer County Park (in a location that’s rather a pain to get to on foot).  This is my third painting using Golden Open Acrylics, the new acrylic product from Golden that stays open much longer than traditional acrylics.  For plein air painting they’re quite handy, as you can use a paper palette and the paints will still stay juicy (as opposed to traditional acrylics, where they’ll skin over unless you mist them frequently or use a stay-wet palette).  This time, I remembered the OFF! spray

I’ve just finished a new painting.  This is a portrait of my father.  It’s 20″x16″, acrylic on panel, painted with the new Golden OPEN Acrylics (these are a new formulation of acrylic paint that stays open and workable much longer than traditional acrylics, facilitating paintings like this one where smooth blending is required).

I’ve just finished a painting entitled, “Arising” (30 x 30 inches, acrylic on panel).

I’ve just finished another painting in the “Strange Loops” series.  In this one, I’ve tessellated an overlapping triangular pattern, turned it into a loop, and then painted it with color progressions in such a way that you might detect a slight rotating motion if you look at the painting’s periphery.  (It’s a very weak version of a documented kind of optical illusion called the Peripheral Drift Illusion or the Fraser-Wilcox illusion; for an incredibly strong version of this effect, see Akiyoshi.)

A few weeks ago, a massive branch from one of the trees in our backyard fell down.  After going to work with the chainsaw to clear up most of the mess, I was left with a beautiful piece of wood that I thought might be interesting to work with.  I sliced off a few disks of wood with the chainsaw and then used a sanding disc attached to a power drill to smooth one of the surfaces.  I sealed the wood with a couple of layers of clear acrylic gesso and then began work on this painting, “Zentral Park.”  It’s based on a photo I took some years ago in Central Park of a peaceful scene in NYC.  This kind of piece makes for a nice change of pace from my abstract paintings.

I finally managed to take my new French easel outside to do some plein air painting. (Well, I went out last week to give it a go, but when I reached my destination it turned out to be a wind tunnel and much colder than it had seemed when I left my house.)

I set up shop in Mercer County Park and began to work. Rather than using acrylic paints, my normal medium of choice, I worked with Pan Pastels (specifically, the 20-color landscape set). These are super-soft pastel pigments that come in small plastic containers rather than sticks and are applied by using special “soft” sponge-like brushes (or fingers, stomps, paper towels, etc.). I enjoyed working with the Pan Pastels as they are easy to apply and very soft on the page. However, there are a few challenges: the landscape set that I purchased doesn’t come with many darks, so it was difficult to get as much contrast as I would have liked into the image (note to self: next time, bring some charcoal). Also, because the pastels are so soft, getting any kind of a hard edge is a challenge.

I worked for about an hour and a half, until the mosquitoes (or gnats?) found me and I remembered that I forgot to bring the OFF spray!

I have just finished a new painting entitled Sheer Doing. The phrase “sheer doing” is common enough, but in this case it comes from the Daniel Gilbert book, Stumbling on Happiness. In this painting, the thumbnail doesn’t have enough detail to really capture what’s going on, so to see more you’ll need to click through to the detail page.

I have finally managed to properly photograph my painting Strange Loops 5, which was recently on display at the Mercer County Artists Show at The Gallery @ Mercer Community College. This painting is the fifth in my mini-series of “Strange Loops” paintings. The phrase “strange loop” comes from Douglas Hofstadter, first described I think in Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, but elaborated on more fully in his 2007 book, I Am a Strange Loop.

The notion of a strange loop refers to a kind of recursive hierarchy of multiple levels of abstraction that eventually loop back to where you started from. Hofstadter often uses as a kind of metaphor the idea of pointing a video camera at a TV showing the output of the video camera — it’s possible to end up with rather startling feedback loops that seem to take on a life of their own. Hofstadter talks about “The Self” as being a kind of strange loop within the brain. My paintings in this series try to capture some of this, though I don’t think you can look at them in any sense as “pictures” of strange loops. But, as Hofstadter is a big fan of Escher, I use Escher-like tessellations of patterns, wrapped around in one or more loops of various kinds as the foundation for these paintings. I also try to imbue the works with multiple levels of colors, layers, and patterns that might click differently depending upon how you look at the work.