Paintings

Cups2 /  by Joe Olney

Cups2 oil on masonite 8x10 $120

A little painting done for my painting class. I like this one almost exclusively for its unusual composition. A lot of my work has a fairly central composition, and so I've made some strides to get away from that mode and explore different ways to balance my paintings and drawings. In this one, I've attempted to use pattern of the fabric as a counterbalance to the large, simpler forms of the coffee cups. I've also tried to use the direction and rhythm of the fabric patterns and cups to move the viewers eye around the whole image. So that's the stuff I like about this piece. What I don't care for is the fact that got a little tight (which may have been due to a stingy use of paint) and that I didn't start with a solid drawing. Had I spent a little more time with the underpainting, I would've saved a lot of time (I ended up repainting several areas several times). Also the reflections on the surface of the cups are not what I was aiming for. This is perhaps due to being stingy again or just being impatient. Or both, not sure. All in all, though, I'm pleased with it.

Hangers2 /  by Joe Olney

Hangers2 oil on masonite 8x10

Here's another painting for the Feb. 4th "Heavy/Light: Exploring a Dichotomy" show at the Adele Grage Community Center.

Hangers /  by Joe Olney

Hangers oil on masonite 8x10

This is one of three paintings I'm doing for our "Heavy/Light: Exploring a Dichotomy" show that is opening a the Adele Grage Community Center on Feb. 4th. I haven't really dealt much with concept art, so this was something fairly new. For this one, I was racking my brain for an idea that fit our theme: Heavy/Light. I wanted to work with a subject matter that itself was either heavy or light, but whose presence signified the opposite. In this case it was bare hangers. They themselves are light, but what they symbolize to me is loss or absence - be it former tenants of a forclosed home who took everything except for a few dangling hangers or perhaps a significant other that is no longer in the picture. Also, these paintings allowed me to experiment with a color mixing technique I hadn't used that made for some nice variation in the grays, I think. So far I haven't come up with a title I like, but that'll come.

Olivia Moon /  by Joe Olney

Olivia Moon oil on masonite 6.25x7.5x1

A little portrait of my lovely new niece Olivia Moon. I finally got to meet her in person over Christmas break. She was so quiet and peaceful and HUNGRY. When she wasn't napping she was feeding. She's an absolute joy and I feel very lucky to be her uncle. Technical notes: I think I learned a bit more about the importance of edge state of certain features of the face with this painting. Initially the edge of the bottom lip was too strong of a line. Her lips looked like those kooky wax lips you can buy at Spencers, and that old Sargent quote "A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth" kept echoing in my head. I went back and forth between the photo and the painting trying to figure it out. The thickness, local color, overall shape, and orientation seemed right, but the lips were still too strong a feature. First I tried to highten the tone of the lips so that the contrast between the lip and skin color was less severe. This helped but it still didn't look right. So I looked some more and realized that by breaking up the lip/face boundary with a few small brush strokes in a couple areas I could achieve the effect I was looking for. Perhaps not a total success (what is?), but I think I learned a couple things from this one.

Territory /  by Joe Olney

Territory oil on masonite 16x20 $250

I was trying to work in reflections of war planes into this one in order to comment on how far from nature we are in the way we resolve our conflicts and so on, but I couldn't make it work without looking cheesy. Too much going on with the ripples and reflected clouds and obviously the planes would come from another source. I may return to the war theme in this work (if not, certainly in others), but for right now this is how it looks.