new ink paintings

I just finished some india ink paintings I've been working on in preparation for Open Studios next week.

This is a detail of an ink painting on a 30" X 40" piece of paper:

This is ink dropped into wetted triangles on 22" x 30" paper:

This large painting is actually a practice piece done in preparation for a large (12 foot x 30 foot) wall painting I will be doing at Space Gallery in mid-December. I did this painting to test the brush size, gauge how much I could scale up the patterns I usually use, and estimate how much time something big will take to make. This probably took me 4 or 5 hours to make. I'll have 4 days to work on my wall painting, so I think I won't get overwhelmed, maybe just tired.

I'm in the picture for scale reference.

Upcoming Events

Please stop by for these upcoming events:

Conversations with gallery artists at Susan Maasch Fine Art, 567 Congress Street, Portland, Maine, Thursday December 2, 2010, 6:30-8:30PM

Participating Artists:

Anne Ireland, Tom Butler, Kate Russo, Jemma Gascoine, Elizabeth Jabar, Clint Fulkerson, and Jan Pieter Van Voorst Van Beest

Open Studios at The Artist Studio, 536 Congress Street, Portland, Maine, Friday December 3, 2010, 5-8PM

Participating Artists:

Greg Day, Kelly McConnell, John Knight, Lisa Pixley, Tina Purves, Sage Lewis, Joe Begnaud, Christopher Campbell, Lucinda Bliss, Stephen Benenson, Tim Clorius, Tim Keeshen, Roz Gross, Annie Larmon, Clint Fulkerson, Pickwick Independent Press, Cat Jensen, Jenny McGee Dougherty, Edwige Charlot, Kim Convery, Hilary Irons, Shoshannah White, Sean Newton, Kate Cleaves, Martha Miller, Carol Morrissette, Kevin Moquin, Elizabeth Chapman, Catherine Lo, Greta Bank, Jim Lynch, Kris Johnsen, Timothy Wilson, Joshua Loring, Edie Ware, Sean O'Brien, Devin Dobrowolski, Maria Wolf, Michelle Livingston

Two more drawings just finished

This is the fourth ink painting (or drawing) I've made by dropping pure ink into wetted triangles and having the overall form look like clustered cells. This time I made the ink droplets around the same size, to help make a gradual value change from a distance. I also used slightly gray water for the triangles to ensure that the overlapping edges would show up as light gray lines. You can see these in the second image:
For this second drawing, I made a preliminary layout to space the placement of my starting points or "seeds". The spacing is based on the porportions of the paper, and dividing areas in half.

I hardly ever make layout guides, but for this drawing I wanted things to start out regular and end up more irregular by way of compounding small scale inconsistencies. The drawing isn't quite done, but looks close enough to done for a blog post. The edges will get denser with a couple hours more work.