Bicycle paintings



I have put plenty of miles on my Specialized bike since getting it about 8 years ago and especially the last 4 years I have become a year round rider. In winter if there is snow and ice on the road I don't go but most of winter the snow and ice is kept off the roads, so I'm out there. I dress more or less as I would for cross country skiing- layers and nothing too heavy. You definitely see things you don't notice when driving. Cyclists have become a subject of my paintings and happily my bicycle  paintings have found an audience.

Exactly how many art supplies are at arm's reach when I am making a painting? And how much do those supplies cost?

Something artists do not like to think of when making art is how much is how much is it costing me to make art? Granted I spent most all of my travel budget to London, Amsterdam and Paris on paint in the London Windsor and Newton store on a trip years ago and still have one or two of those tubes left. Other than that I am always buying new paint.

So for me it's about $1100. in supplies on hand at all times.

Paper:  $50 worth of full watercolor sheets on hand

Paint: Watercolor professional grade Windor and Newton
$450 worth of watercolor tubes are always on hand. Much of watercolor painting involves putting pigment down and then removing some or nearly all of it while still wet- not very eficient but that’s how it is.

Paint: Acrylic  professional grade larger tubes
$214 worth of large tubes on hand

Color pencils
$150 worth  in Prismacolor pencils. Iindividual pencils cost $1.40 each.

Watercolor Brushes
$150. in watercolor brushes on hand (some are dead and just keep for the memories)

Acrylic/Oil Brushes
$80. In acrlic/oil brushes on hand

Other stuff I am using during painting process- papertowel, soft erasers, vine charcoal, pencil, digital camera, computer, prints of photographs.

House Portraits

Do real artists paint house portraits?
This artist does.

I can either visit your home to sketch and photograph it,

or I can work from your photographs. Here are some examples of my house portraits:

I sometimes like to paint a house at dusk when the lights come on inside. This is the house my cousin and her family lived in for several happy years. They are planning to build a zero energy home and  they wanted to have a portrait of the home they loved so much. The new owner also loved the house portrait and they purchased a high resolution digital print.

I met the owner and saw this house in the summer but felt it would work well as a winter portrait. The owners collect house portraits of all the places they have lived. They bid on the chance to have me paint a house portrait of their home at a fundraiser for Fox Chapel Crew Club.

This was a going away present from one family to another. I am guesing the parents and children had some great memories together in each other's homes.

This was my most recent house portrait. The young children of the family were seated on kitchen stools waiting to see the painting of their home. Their mom opened the cardboard portfolio while I watched and it was such a pleasure to see their faces light up with pleasure when they saw it!

I work in many different ways and I am comfortable with the mix of work. I recently enjoyed this piece in the NY Times  about Wayne Thiebaud who has worked in many areas of both applied and fine arts even if most people know him for only his paintings of pastries.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/arts/design/03wayne.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=wayne_thiebaud

One part of the  long article which gets at what I mean is this..."Mr. Thiebaud’s original aim was to be a commercial artist, a field he deeply respects. (“I still paint as if an art director is looking over my shoulder,” he said.) Over the years, he has worked a sign painter, a theatrical production designer, an art director, a poster designer, a fashion typographer and illustrator (his subjects included lipstick and shoes), a comic strip artist, a cartoonist for the Rexall Drug Company in Los Angeles and, fleetingly, as a teenage “in-betweener” at Walt Disney Studios filling in the figures of Dopey, Pluto and Jiminy Cricket."