Oil Paintings and Photo Hogs

2009 has been a slow year so far, artistically speaking. I've been working on the same two oil paintings for quite a while now, making pretty meager progress. But last week, either via a burst of inspiration or a despondent desire to end it all, I finished and signed both of them! The large one that monopolized the majority of my time is the class project, a copy of a Daniel Ridgeway Knight painting called Hailing the Water Ferry.




The smaller of the two is a commission by a friend from work. An avid fisherman, he wanted a picture of a brown trout for his son's bedroom.



I'm pretty pleased with how both came out, though the Ridgeway Knight original was so detailed I could have worked on it forever and never come close to matching it. This semester the class project is a still life of a clay vase with flowers and random fruits scattered about - much more along my skill set, so I'm looking forward to it.

Side note: I took the pictures of the finished paintings this afternoon; whenever I drag out the camera my celebrity-wanna-be children all assume that it must be for their benefit and won't give me a moment's peace until the photoshoot they feel they need and deserve has been completed. So in order to buy myself the opportunity to take a picture of a canvas that wasn't being knocked down, stood-in-front-of, or smudged with a thousand sugar-besmeared fingers, we had our dramatic 3-shot rendezvous with the glitzy lens. Here is the only one worth showing: