One Minute Tutorial

Halloween 2013, oil on canvas 24 x 32 in.

The current show at City Art will remain up until January 25 2014, and will include a group of my oil paintings of musicians. I have wanted to show this group of paintings together there practically since I started in 2007! Please don't forget to go, and when inside, look above the front windows.

I was recently asked about giving painting lessons. I think it would take about 5 minutes to explain my technique, but part of it is rules to work by and here are a few of mine:
I start by placing the heads in the composition, then adding the line of the shoulders and plane of the torso.
In the end, if the faces look weird, the whole painting will.
I don't use paint straight out of the tube: most colors need to be mixed.
I don't use every color in the rainbow in a painting:  if you leave out part of the spectrum, even one color, the painting will have atmosphere.
A few years ago I took a workshop with Stanley Goldstein and he gave us his own set of rules to work by - it changed my life! One was that pure white paint may very well only need to appear on a painting when representing the light source (such as light bulbs or flames).
And. . . get your artwork professionally photographed (unlike what I have done here).