Longfellow Fall

Easily one of my favorite commissioned paintings to date is the painting for American Anchor. The job parameters were wide open. Boston skyline with a widow washing squeegee wiping a path clear in the image.

All I was told was that it needed to be on a razor blade. Knowing that the company was based here in Massachusetts and specialized in installing anchor systems for high rise window washing gondolas, helped to bring things together quickly. The result was the was the Boston skyline with a widow washing squeegee wiping a path clear in the image.

American Anchor

After finishing this painting, I found that there was still a personal need to revisit the Boston skyline as a topic. It took some time but I eventually settled on a view of Boston from the Longfellow bridge. I love this view of the city because it shows all of Back Bay including the Hatch Shell. I also decided to show the scene during the fall season to really feature everything that New England has to offer.

The painting would be my fourth industrial landscape and while some techniques were already hashed out like the development of the water from 'Mors Ex Tennebris' and the breakdown of the buildings from 'Through Sabine's Eyes', I was still anxious to develop some of the shortcomings of those same techniques. For example, in the American Anchor painting of Boston, I tried a scratching technique that was hopefully going to allow me to get some very fine details. What I found was that the paint that I was using hand a slightly rubbery surface tension. That caused it to pull larger amounts of paint up rather than simply create thin lines. With 'Longfellow Fall' I was able to take that and mix in a reworkable illustration paint with my normal colors. This allowed me to incorporate the scratching technique successfully this time around.

Mors Ex Tennebris

Through Sabine's Eyes

 Each painting has to be a step forward. Even the smallest move forward compounds with the next making each painting better. There are mistakes and failures in every painting, it is what we take from those shortcomings that created the successes in future works.

The next series of paintings to come have their steps forward in the presentation more than the actual art. I truly love painting incredible cars and this new series will tie together a bit of the actual history of these cars. Stay tuned!!

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