Sketchbook - women's heads

While I spend a great deal of time painting or working with encaustics, I also enjoy drawing and sketching. 

Since I started out painting before learning how to draw, I find it challenging but rewarding and I'm still a rank beginner at drawing.  But sometimes it works and I've been happy with some of my pieces.
Lately I've been doing more women's heads, some perhaps for the Victorian women series in my encaustic

work, but some I'm trying to do as contemporary women.  I use photos as references since I've never been to a class where they have live models for figure studies.  Classes have been held  here occasionally but they never worked out for me.
I've been using some of Julia Margaret Cameron's black and white photos since she focuses on Victorian women.  She was one of the first serious female photographers in England and spent hours on her compositions, developing her photos at first in a chicken coop.
I like the way she poses the women's heads and takes photos from different angles.  They're more interesting than just full on front poses with the subject looking at the viewer.  Her women are often pensive or even melancholy.  Because her models were people she knew, they translate well to a contemporary look when not sketched in costume or the clothing of the turn of the century and with their hair down and natural.
Some I've done in charcoal and some in pencil.  She uses a lot of shading and high light and dark contrast. .  I chose to play it down in case I want to use any of the sketches for transfer onto beeswax and I'll be drawing the women in either charcoal or conti crayon which comes out much darker than pencil. . 

Playing with Abstracted Portraits

In between painting landscapes, I've been playing around with figures and faces. I'd call these abstracted portraits in some cases because the first two are abstracted from real people, but I don't know if they'd be considered abstract portraits.  I've always enjoyed

painting figures and have never painted them in much of a realistic style so leaning towards a more abstracted view of the human figure or face is much more to my taste, except in my drawing.
In painting,  I've been influenced  by many artists and they're all jumbled together in my head from the painters during the heydays in Montemarte, such as Modigliani, Van Gogh, John-Edourd Vuillard and early and late Picasso (not so much his Cubist period) to contemporary painters  Dave McKean, Nick Bantock, Ascenscio and Desjardins.
 I call it play and I don't know any of the rules, I'm just trying to capture an essence, a mood or even just the look on a face. I enjoy experimenting with distortion, exaggeration, perspective and perception.
 I started this current series painting my friend and fellow artist, Szag Randahl, who

has a very recognizable face and style. 
I guess I'd say these pieces are more like interpretations of the people I paint rather than they way they look in person.
Another one I did is of Chris Conner. It's so stylized its not a likeness many people may recognize.
This is of him in his role as performer, where he takes on often extreme characters. This pose is of a pause - a moment when he seems to be shutting himself in from the audience for a moment preparing to unleash the personas he becomes onstage, which are very different from his rather shy everyday personality.
The third one I've done so far is a woman whose expression is full of doubt.  I guess this is where I stand at this moment although it's not a self portrait. I'm much older than this woman and a red head.  I've come to the conclusion that I paint dark haired women when I'm trying to accept darker personas of my psyche - women who don't hesitate to display negative moods or experiences.

The woman is not of anyone in particular.  As I was painting her, I let the way the paint landed dictate what I would do next. This was more of a subcomscious, stream of consciousness painting, where I just followed the mood and painted without planning or forethought.  She's raw and rough but I like the way she turned out because she caught a mood I was trying to express.  One of doubts and questioning with a sort of stern and cynical
viewpoint as to what the answers might be. She's blue because I happened to have a lot of pthalo blue left over from a previous piece (I tend to use similar colors on different paintings completed around the same time). I used heavy oils on this one and larger brushes going for an overall look as opposed to details.

Encaustic Abstract Landscapes - Sunrise, Sunset

One of the more rewarding aspects of painting abstract landscapes is working with both sky and water in the

same piece.  And there's no better times of day to capture than sunrise and sunset simply because of the way an artist can play with shapes and colors in the way they work the reflections in the water.
After about two months of rain here in the southeast in South Carolina, I felt a need to move away from the misty and dream like landscapes I'd been painting to digging through my paintboxes and baskets to find some bright bold colors to play with as opposed to the muted blues and grays.

Working on both 4X4 and 8X10 cradled wooden art boards and on larger 16X20 canvases, I turned my attention to mountain scenes during sunrise and sunset. This gave me the opportunity to play with palettes of yellows, oranges and reds.  It

may have been dreary outside  my window and gloomy in my studio but it was bright and bold on my easel.
On these pieces, I did less of the scumbling and removing of pant that I do with the more misty panels and  instead focused on layering, often wet on wet with my oils using vermillion red, cadmium red, cadmium yellow, cadmium green, terra verte, thalo yellow green, Payne's gray, titanium white and  ivory black.
On the wooden cradled art boards I used oil and beeswax encaustic, while on the larger canvas piece, I simply used oils since beeswax will crack when the elements swell and shrink the canvas.
While I love the dreamlike effects on the more moody dusk or misty works I did in blue tones in the past, it's fun to play with cloud formations in the sky, along with the vanishing points to create moods and distance  in these sunrise and sunset pieces.
For materials this time I used Artist's Loft wood art boards from Michaels, a mixture of Grumbacher and  Winton oils and R&F white beeswax mixed with Damar resin for the encaustic finish.
After painting the landscapes with the oils, I allow them to dry for at least a week before applying the
encaustic glazing which adds dimension and texture to the finish.
The smaller 4x4 pieces serve as my "samplers" the opportunity to test out a concept and see if it works.  Since they will stand they are nice additions to a bookcase or mantle either in groupings or alone.