As one by one withdraw the lofty actors.

"As one by one withdraw the lofty actors."

Acrylic and newspaper on canvas.

16x20.

Ideas for new series sometimes come to me in bits and bites. I will see things pop up again and again. Pictures of riots and revolution. Civil War images. The poetry and life of Walt Whitman. They pop in my head and ruminate and, for me, the biggest challenge is to figure out how they will fit together. To find a new language of figures and symbols that will tell the story that I want to tell. 

This is my first attempt at painting Ulysses S. Grant. Not bad, but not what I wanted. I wanted more. More drama, more expression. He's been through a lot and he's sad and tired.

Blocking in shapes and color. This has more drama.

More details in the face. Adding white to pull out the profile.

Added more blues and blacks and lots of water. Started painting in the Greek rioter being knocked down by a police officer. The writing behind them is Walt Whitman's poem "Death of General Grant."

The last steps were to add the first line of the poem (also the title of the painting) across the top and make it look like it's been sitting on a wall for a long time-it almost faded away. Then the flowers-they represent Whitman's transcendentalism.

Works in Progress

This piece is from my 52 weeks painting project. Started with some basic strokes with some very watered down black.

Step two actually takes a lot more time than it looks like it should. Add some blue spray it with some water. Let it dry, then do it again and again until you get something that looks decent. There is a lot of waiting in this stage.

Finished (I'm bad at taking more progress shots). I drew out the shape of her face on a page from the news paper and cut it out. Attached it to the canvas with some acrylic matte medium and started painting drippy layers of color over it. I really wanted more drip on the face, but sometimes it just doesn't work the way you want it to.

This is a piece from my recent solo show. Sometimes you can start a piece with a clear vision of what you want, but the muse has something different for you to paint-this is one of those cases. Step one-just saying in some color, it really doesn't matter at this point, its just to give it a bit of interest.

Step two is to do a white wash. Now we have little bits of color popping through-see interest...

My original idea was to do something along the lines of this smaller piece, but with Dorli Rainey, the 84 year old woman that was pepper sprayed at an occupy protest. I wanted her in the middle and the two people that were helping her to safety done in the same way I did the hand in this painting. Paint the area black, then when that is dry put some white over it and then draw the figures with a sharp pin or something-removing the white paint and showing the black paint under. But....

....the muse took over.