watercolors /  by Joe Olney

 redhead2

drawings /  by Joe Olney

continuous line nude1

A sample of ink and charcoal drawings from this semester's Life Drawing class at VCU. I'll be adding more stuff soon.

Putting a Cork In It /  by Joe Olney

Putting a Cork In It oil on masonite 8x10 $150

Throughout this summer I've been working with several friends on various art projects. The projects are usually fairly simple and normally revolve around a theme or an object or even a podcast that is used as a starting off point for making work.  The point of all of this is to keep each other motivated during the summer and make work on a daily basis. This is not always an easy thing to do, but most artists will tell you it's crucial. As Chuck Close puts it, "Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up to the studio and work." Meaning, good work doesn't come to those who sit on their laurels waiting for inspiration. Rather, it comes from doing the work itself. And so these projects are designed to keep us working everyday with the understanding that eventually good things will come.

The painting above is from a project where you had to somehow incorporate a wine bottle into the piece - again, a very simple idea. I chose to talk about the decision I made a couple of years ago to severely curb/quit drinking. In the colors of the walls and the freezer, I've tried to incorporate as much variation as possible as this seems to be more like the way we experience color.  Other colors were exaggerated for cohesion or emphasis.

Sketches /  by Joe Olney

A few more drawings in various stages of completion. I was hoping to finish the chair drawing, but I am now nearly 1,000 miles away from that chair and feel uneasy about finishing the drawing without having the actual setup. Should have taken a pic before I left. Oh well, another learning experience. Lesson: photograph all setups just in case something happens. The drawing of the chair was done with Prismacolor pencils (very time consuming but gratifying); the nude was done from life with graphite; and the pipe smoker (my aunt's grandfather Fred) was done from a photo with a Bic pen.

Sketch /  by Joe Olney

This is from my last FSCJ, Vinny-hosted drawing group session. Being a part of the Sunday drawing group has been such a joy, and I will miss all the highly skilled models and fellow artists who offered critique, inspiration, and camaraderie. Although I've been told bic pens are not archival, I really do like the look of it and how you can get some good line variation with it. I wonder if there are archival ink, ballpoint pens of various colors. With using ink, I also like the commitment involved. You just have to put down your mark and move on.

Painting Sketch /  by Joe Olney

This is a little sketch done after checking out some images of Anne Gale's work. She has an amazing ability to make her subject matter(people, mostly) diffuse into the atmosphere around them in such a skillful way. Her paintings remind me of the give and take that occurs at the boundaries of objects. In geology, it's refered to as weathering, but I don't necessarily think of surficial deconstruction when I look at her stuff. But maybe that's part of it. Anyways, I attempted to achieve some of this effect in this painting. Unfortunately, my colors started to get a little muddy and the composition leaves something to be desired. Just a sketch, though, so not a ton of planning went into it. I think I'll try a few more in this style. I like the idea of using small building blocks to create an image that shows a subject exchanging something with the space around it. Those small exchanges of light and shape, and, at a much smaller scale, matter and energy that are found at the boundaries of all things are fascinating to me.

Oil and Turbines /  by Joe Olney

Oil and Turbines linocut reduction relief print 7.5 x 11 $50 ea.

For our final project in printmaking we had to create an image that dealt with the themes land, sea, or air. I chose sea and wanted to do something pertaining to a current event either in my personal life or in the news. So after wrestling with an image (I went through several), I ended up with this one. And obviously it's about what's going on in the Gulf of Mexico. It looks like despite our best efforts that mess will take a very long time to clean up, and many aspects of coastal and ocean life, both natural and human-related will be greatly affected.

Hangers4 /  by Joe Olney

Hangers4 oil on masonite 5.5x5.5

I think these particular hangers showed up in the second painting I did of hangers. Their the cheap ones with the flimsy, cardboard tube at the bottom. As hangers, they kinda suck and don't hold up very well, but as subject matter, I think they offer many possibilities. I also really like how they read as somewhat abstract objects initially.

Black Chair with Drapery /  by Joe Olney

Black Chair with Drapery oil on masonite 5.5x10.5 $120

I'm not sure exactly why I'm so interested in chairs these days, but they make for fine still life subjects. I worked on this one after taking a look at a bunch of Degas paintings. His interiors have so much open space, especially his paintings of ballerinas practicing in studios. I never really noticed that before, and so I wanted to make a painting that viewed a subject from as far away as I could get. So I cleared a path in my studio and got to work.

Yellow Chair /  by Joe Olney

Yellow Chair oil on masonite 8x10 $75

In this one, I wanted to show two different views of the same object without changing the setup or the lighting. This meant that I needed to change my vantage point from a seated position to a standing one. Actually I had to stand on a wooden box and lean my easel toward the chair to get the image I wanted. When I was working on the top portion of the painting I was seated, comfortable, and relaxed, and the image was easy to render. The bottom portion, though, was a little unnerving since I thought at any moment I'd lean too far forward and accidentally topple the easel, my painting, and the chair. And this caused some hesitation and frustration in more than a few strokes. I think I'll do a few more like this since I like the somewhat abstracted read from farther away.

Painting Sketch - Van Gogh style study /  by Joe Olney

A little study of an iron. I didn't have the right colors to make the local colors of the iron itself (ran out of white), so I said the hell with it and painted the damn thing anyway using whatever I had. I also wanted it to be a bit more volumetric than other paintings I've done, and so Van Gogh's seemed like a good style to copy.

Jacksonville Buses /  by Joe Olney

Jacksonville Buses oil on masonite 36x48x2 $2000

My biggest painting yet. What drew me to painting this was the composition of a graphite drawing I made a few months back. From afar the drawing read as an interesting abstraction of shapes that only slightly reminded me of buses or train cars. So I tried to keep that ambiguity in the painting and not let myself get too tight. In reality, the layout of this Grayhound station is not a perfect square but more like a trapezoid, and in my admittedly "wonky" perspective it's greatly exaggerated. Working on such a big painting was really freeing, and I hope to do many more this size.

Sultry /  by Joe Olney

Sultry lino cut 8x10 $45 ea.

Here's another print. This was a collaborative project where the drama department gave us a written description of an unidentified character's body position and we had to interpret it and put it into a context of our choice using a linoleum block print.

binding ties /  by Joe Olney

binding ties monoprint 20.75x15.75

The following four posts are pieces I made in my printmaking class. Just about everything we've done has been a big departure from my usual mode of image making. I am very much a planner, and so I generally do not embrace spontinaeity until after I have a compositional structure in mind. Very rarely are my paintings and drawings done on the fly. However, in my printmaking class, we are encouraged to build the image as we lay the different elements down. Although this process has caused me some frustration at times, letting go of that control and working as you go can bring about some interesting results that may have otherwise not been produced. In most of these prints, risks were taken that would have been avoided had I planned it out. Some of them have some craftsmanship issues such as improper registration and variable clarity in the pronto plate pieces, but for the most part I like them. I think breaking from the norm is a good way for me to push myself (and be pushed) in order to see different ways of making work and solving the various problems that come along.

Scissors /  by Joe Olney

Scissors oil on masonite 4x6

This is definitely a Diebenkorn-inspired piece. I couldn't help myself after seeing his paintings of the same type of scissors. I think everyone can connect to those older style metal scissors. They have a certain heft to them and they look dangerous. They're the ones your parents told you not to run with. I also used an old Gauguin trick by putting a hot red in the background to jump forward a bit visually and to challenge the calm of the blue, green, and yellow in the cloth.

Roads /  by Joe Olney

Roads oil and acrylic on baltic birch 19x23

This is a larger piece that I recently completed for my painting class. The assignment was to incorporate screenprinting with oil painting. Working on a larger scale is kind of new for me, and I like it. I was definitely out of my comfort zone on this one for a lot of reasons - abstraction instead of painting from observation, a first time for screenprinting, the larger scale, gouging into the surface of the painting to explore different effects, the subject matter, etc. This one's about the roads we drove in Iraq and the IEDs that we encountered or, perhaps more importantly, the ones we didn't encounter. It's taken me a while to find the visual vocabulary to talk about this stuff, and I'm still very unsure of what it is I'm trying to let out. Perhaps that's why I chose abstraction over representation - the picture just isn't that clear. I don't imagine I'll make a ton of these paintings, but it's nice to let a little out and see how the process translates the thoughts I have about that time.