More background!

As I said in the last post, I decided it might be time for a change- the travel was becoming burdensome for the family, and I was beginning to resent always being the last contractor on the jobs, clients breathing down your neck, designers at the end of their ropes, etc.

A friend of mine was a director for animated films, and he suggested I look into painting backgrounds for animation, since I seemed to have a feel for environments and stories. I found a class at a small art school that caters to illustrators and animators (the LA Academy of Figurative Art) and I began staying late at the studio to bone up on things like value studies, rendering and perspective. It was one of the best classes I've ever found, taught by a couple of guys from Disney animation, with an emphasis story telling by visual means, and it really rocked my boat. I began seeing everything in terms of foreground, middle, and background, and I began sketching a lot, including in the car on the way to and from jobs around LA.

 

110 Freeway, 2000, watercolor, 4"x 14"

This led to a whole series of drawings and paintings from the road, which in my case meant the urban and industrial landscape of Los Angeles. I accumulated a large number of images in that first year, and worked a lot on honing my watercolor skills, and finally I proposed a series of large paintings for a guy I knew whose family was in the oil exploration business. They centered around imagery of a refinery that's near the harbor of LA, and I surrounded them with decorative backgrounds including found objects and mounted them on boards topped with actual pieces of pre-cast moldings on which I mounted lights. Once these 6 paintings were finished, I mounted a large show in a gallery space that this guy just happened to own in San Pedro.

Veneto, 1999, Acrylic and Oil on board with found objects, 64"x 96"x 14"

From this show, I got a great commission from a local trucking company, for whom the imagery of the harbor, roads and industry was a great fit. They ended up commissioning over 50 watercolors and several large scale paintings for their lobby and board room. It was a very rewarding and enriching engagement, and I got to know a number of people in the company through being on site and sketching people at their jobs. I noticed that people are much less inhibited to be drawn than they are to be photographed. They seemed to very much appreciate being noticed, especially when their likeness ended up framed and hung in the corporate lobby.

Sorting, 1999, watercolor, 11"x14"

After that came another very nice commission from another trucking company, this one located in Tacoma WA, for which I traveled and had to do photos because of limited time I could spend there. Nevertheless, it was a  real pleasure to meet the people involved in all levels of their business, and it was great to see a corporate environment where things seemed to be going well at all levels, though I've heard the last few years have been very tough for them, with rising fuel costs and the general state of the economy.

Mechanic, 2004, watercolor, 20"x 14"

In 2003 I put together a show called "10,000 Vehicles" for the Palos Verdes Art Center. The title was based on an idea I had about doing 100 paintings of 100 cars, which I never actually got around to, but which still interests me. I had one more show about driving at the Torrance Art Museum in 2006. It had work that I did from photos, but the sources were all blurred images that I found mysterious and engaging. They were very challenging to translate to watercolor, as I wanted to maintain the immediacy and fluidity, which can be really tough when the image is high contrast but blurred. I had to approach them with a Chinese brush painting type of style: everything ready to go and working very fast and intuitively. Alfred Leslie's "100 Views Along the Road" was a major influence on these pieces.

Foggy Night, 2006, watercolor, 16"x 12"

Next up- How I got back into it