10 Year Anniversary: The Painting Diary, Day 2 of 30

Painting Diary Day 2 of 30: Eye to Eye, 2010

I started this in 2009 but didn’t finish it until well into 2010… For this painting I decided to try something new. I went through the painstaking process of making a detailed pencil drawing first, scanning the drawing and then making a completed digital painting in Photoshop. The digital art was projected on a wood panel and then finally painted in oils. Originally it was going to be a small oval painting and I had it all projected on the board and was ready to start when I realized that it deserved to be much larger, so I reprojected it on a rectangle board almost three times larger. Like that little floating tree painting (Roots and Branches) it took a very long time to paint. I was at a stage of my development when I was striving for the highest level of craftsmanship I was capable of. I was being pretty hard on myself because I had already done it the other way for many years, painting fast and sloppy with no real plan at all. I was very unsatisfied with the results from those years and so moving into 2010 I was slowing it all down, dialing in and trying to paint like the masters that I admired most, Beksinski and Yerka for example. After about 6 months of work or more, including much head scratching, down time and working on other paintings, I finally singed it and moved on.

The concept is pretty straightforward. It’s the circle of life. As it would turn out this is apparently my favorite theme in my art. Life and death in nature, balances. However when I first drew this I wasn’t thinking about the concept, I was just sketching and having fun. I liked the composition and that it seemed to tell a story; some long dead entity is interfacing with the living, an unsuspecting honey bee flies in for a landing on a mysterious lone flower, not fully aware that a communication is about to take place… 

I made a YouTube video about the making of this painting, you can watch that here.

There are also still some 16x20” Giclee prints available in my store here.

Eye To Eye, Final Oil Painting on hardboard, 2010

Eye To Eye concept sketch, 2009

Eye to Eye digital color study, 2010