Orange Fire

Do not call for the Firesquad! This is the name of a Daler-Rowney color, a very strong one, a quite devious one... A wonderful one if you come to master it... In this Karin nude I don't really know if I did... But the color is there and I like it. Van Gogh - they say (and he says it himself in one or two letters) loved yellow chrome. Me, I like fire orange or orange fire. Of course, I'm not Van Gogh but in the sense that anche io sono pittore. My paintings are not, in all probability, to be ever sold with the record 75 (or 82 in other sources) millions USD as The Portrait of Dr. Gachet did, bought by Mr. R. Sato (or some other japanese name soundin like it)... By the way, the record sale was topped in 1994 by The Boy with a pipe (a "periode rose" painting) by Picasso... Tough luck!
Even if I will cut both my ears and even do a Bibitt thing, I won't succed in egalizing Van Gogh posthume fame. People are kind of accustomed with all possible atrocities, after the 2 world wars, a Holocaust or two, not to mention the more recent wars and atrocities. A cut ear AND a suicide will bring you, MAYBE, a small article in a local newspaper (about the same attention Van Gogh ear got in Arles). So I better keep my ears and continue to love fire orange... At least, the possibility is not totally excluded I'll "fire"up the heart of some collector...

Raw Nude

What a nude of mine looks like before I work it over? I already showed you one or two... Here is another one, of a model called Marie Lise, not a perfect one, physically (some small spine defect and getting fatter) but nice and with sad eyes and a nose that French call "un nez retrousé" (snub-nosed?)... In all, a pleasant enough model to draw - and then to paint...

Right now, I'm experimenting with mixing acrylics, watercolors and oil pastels (I made a hole in my budget and bought a few Rembrandt and Holbein oil pastels) but the results aren't yet that conclusive (they usually aren't at the beginning... You can see one sample at my other site "Danu's Small World" This combination, acrylic colors and inks, watercolors and oil pastels (or dry pastels - but with then it's a bore to fix...) is a very promising one and I think Degas would have loved it. I often fantasize what some great artists like Manet, Renoir, Monet, Cézanne or Van Gogh would have done with today art materials... acrylics especially...

2005 Nude...the beginning...

Maybe this Nude is not the very first one where I started to mix acrylic inks with watercolor, where I've started to define my technique to paint the nudes... But it's one of the first...Rapid sketching was always, since my childhood, one of my greatest pleasures and if I did not have often the chance to draw after a nude model it's only because there weren't a lot of models in Romania of my youth... In fact, it was a very prude (apparently) country and to find a young, well proportioned "model" was very difficult even for the Art Schools (I remember that ours had to employ one of the young secretaries, who needed badly the money).Here, in Québec, after the "révolution tranquile" doesn't seem to be a problem and the models are almost always good enough and young enough. But in communist Romania, model would very easily translate into "whore" or "person of lewd conduct"...When I was in the last year at the ART School I remember that a group of us, preparing for the University, managed to convince (sacrificing a lot of our economies) a lady to pose. But she was fatish and oldish and not very clean and that wasn't an experience either of us - four boys and two girls - remembered with pleasure. Sure, we laughed a bit (cruel as teenager can be) but it wasn't a pleasant experience... Not even a good occasion to exercise our draughtmen/women talents since the lady was even more jumpy than ourselves and emphatically FORBAD us to draw her face... All we got were some headless (or faceless) sketches of a poor, scared, fatish woman...(Now, I understand her: I wouldn't wish myself to pose for 6 teenagers!!!) Something like the "Sorrow" Vincent Van Gogh did after Christine, the drunken prostitute... I will post something alike and a 2005 nude (where I started to use color in my nudes).

Irises 2

I don't paint a lot of flowers. Not that I don't like them... It's just that I find people (and nude ladies) much more interesting... But this Irises were different: first of all, they surprised me. I know Van Gogh painted some (probably one of the most famous painting of the National Gallery in Ottawa...) and that's really a major challenge and then, I stumbled over some Irises in the parc of the private Institution were I teach "artistical expression". In fact, some pupil of mine, told me about... I took some pictures (and I was surprised that they were living practically in the mud or even in the water)... I've painted a series of 3-4 painting with those photos as an inspiration. I've already let you see one (with a grasshopper in it) and this is another one.... It,s an acrylic painting with a few watercolor touches.

The mean me...

I did not post a lot of drawings here... caricatures even less. This is a rapid sketch taken at a show I've participated. A show for artists 50 years old & +, in the basement of Sherbrooke Cathedral. It was the last day of the show & I was cranky since I hadn't sold a thing, not even to cover the registration fee (and there were some nice paintings there)! I kind of resented all the friends and relatives of some other painters who did go straight for their relatives paintings without even taking a look at my stuff... So I took revenge in drawing their wrinkled asses (sorry!) It didn't help much, but still... I could gather my unsold paintings with resignation... Van Gogh himself didn't sell much either, eh?

Portraits

Van Gogh - if you'll visit me often you'll hear that name a lot! - loved to paint "modern portraits" and was all the time in the search (and need) for models...for, he said, "the study of the figure is the most useful of all" (letter to Emile Bernard, 23 of June, 1888). For a couple of years now, I'm doing portraits, the summer, in the parks of the city I live in, Sherbrooke (Québec). I'm doing it with a friend, Clement Bolduc (he's drawing with sanguine and pastels, me, I'm working with acrylic inks and watercolor). We kind of complete each other, him doing more the "traditionalist" portrait and me, more the "caricatural" (exaggerated) one...But, judging by this "sample", you can see that I'm not UNKIND to my models...

... and YES, I DO TAKE COMMISSIONSContact me on my email, send me a photo and I'll do my best for you... For CA$ 50, you'll have an acrylic ink & watercolor portrait of 9 x 12 inches, on acid free Strathmore or Arches watercolor paper, about the same as this one... I won't work more than 2 hours on a $ 50 portrait but it will be a nice, good portrait....And if you want to see more portraits of mine, go to:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNnSyrGxeTI