TOYS...

  
Fe Fi Faux Fowl
acrylic on canvas, 30" x 30"
Chris Beck

I got word over the weekend that this fun fellow will be flying east in a few weeks. He's been accepted for the show TOYS: Re-Invent, Re-Imagine, Re-Discover at the Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center in Solomons, MD (about 60 miles southeast of Washington, DC on Chesapeake Bay). The show runs from October 14, 2011 to January 8, 2012 and includes 62 works by 32 artists.

This painting was quite a departure for me -- both size and medium. I made a brief foray into the world of acrylic a few years ago but scurried back to watercolor with no regrets. I do like the oversize presentation here and the fact that it doesn't need to be framed under glass, but I prefer the process of painting in watercolor to that of acrylic.

Spring Peepers - now supersized!!

 Spring Peepers
watercolor, 10" x 13"
Chris Beck

These days, everything gets supersized -- even the Peepers painting!! (OK, so supersized may be a bit of an exaggeration, but hey -- all things are relative!!) I revisited this subject this past week because the original challenge painting was a tad small for exhibition purposes. And actually, this is the second go at this size -- the first one met a sad end when I added a wash without thinking it through beforehand. We never become immune to these little "oops" moments I guess!!

I'm painting away, glad to have broken through the block that has been stifling me for quite a while now. It feels great to be back in the studio.

Watermedia Showcase award...

Snail Mail by Chris Beck
watercolor, 6" x 6"

"Snail Mail" is currently showing on the Watercolor Artist Blog because it won an honorable mention in the Watermedia Showcase international competition. You can view the show here. The winners will also be published in the February 2010 issue of Watercolor Artist magazine.

This painting was the happy outcome of an invitational challenge from Jelaine Faunce back in the early part of the year. My watercolor buddy Pablo Villicana Lara and I joined oil painters M. Collier and Jelaine in this challenge to create still-life paintings using a plain white envelope as the common object.

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All in good time...

Snail Mail, 6" x 6"
watercolor
Chris Beck

I just got word that my painting, Snail Mail, has won an award in an international competition. I can't say any more about it now, but I'll let you know when it goes public. This painting came about when Pablo Villicana Lara and I were invited to join a challenge posed by Jelaine Faunce and M. Collier back in March using a plain white envelope as the common denominator for our paintings. I had a great time with this subject -- one of the snails in my collection of vintage tin toys almost crawled off the shelf to volunteer its services!!

Rare Bird...

"Peck-peck"
6" x 6"
acrylic on gallery-wrap canvas

I had so much fun painting this one! There's just something kind of sassy about this little bird. The bright colors and the fun, cartoony shape go so well together. To top it off, this toy is just plain fun to watch in action. It's very basic, but the hopping and pecking just make me giggle. I have to confess I'm a total eBay addict at this point -- trolling for cute tin toys and silly salt shakers almost daily. It's gotten so a lot of the offerings are sadly predictable, but every once in a while, something like this jumps off the screen. Delightful. Click here to go to the auction and a chance to place your bid.

"Zoom-zoom"

6" x 6"
acrylic on gallery-wrap canvas

I'm thrilled to have my first auction underway. This little vintage toy snail was itself an eBay auction purchase. I love the patterned shell and the little wheels and I'm sure it goes faster than any snail known to nature. (A note about the image: my scanner is so sensitive that it picked up the minor variations in the weave of the canvas, giving the wee beastie a rather streaky look. That's not visible when you view the actual painting.)

Click here to go to the auction page.

Almost there...

Hang on just a few more seconds. I've got the auction listing all ready to go, but it seems absurd to have it end at 11:15 p.m. some days from now. So I've saved it and will post sometime tomorrow. Look for this little guy at auction, starting tomorrow:

Zoom-zoom
6" x 6"
acrylic on gallery-wrap canvas

As for the CafePress tote bags: when I was setting up the print files, the online preview image was very dark. I spoke with a customer service rep who told me to adjust the image file until it appeared right on the screen. Sadly, when the bags arrived on Monday, they looked like they'd been through 20 laundry cycles -- the images were so faded and blah. A call back to customer service revealed that instead of telling me to lighten up my print files, the first rep should have reassured me that the actual prints would be MUCH LIGHTER than the online preview. In fact, she probably should have told me to darken up my files. Fortunately, CafePress has a fantastic customer service program and I'll have new bags by week's end, no charge. As soon as I see how they've turned out with my revised print files, I'll either be opening my shop doors or crying in a beer.

Still alive

In some twist of fate, the weekend for the fine arts festival broke all heat records for this area. A week before, we'd been turning on the heat to take the chill off the house in the morning and we're back to doing that again. But two days before the festival, the winds switched from the prevailing westerly direction to the east, bringing all the heat of central California to our normally temperate area. We set up the booth in near 100 degree heat; the next two days were slightly cooler, but still hot. I had the good luck to get assigned to a partly shady spot at the edge of a cluster of booths and we were able to bring some market umbrellas to add extra shade. There was a steady breeze most of the time, making it seem more like a vacation than work. The show organizers did a fabulous job. Everything ran smoothly, lunch was provided both days, and there were booth sitters to give the artists a break if they wanted one.


I snapped this photo just before opening time the first day. The crowds were lighter than usual this year and people were clearly mindful of the state of the economy, but I had sales nevertheless and a lot of interest in seeing more of my work. Both the show and my gallery are in the same town, so many of the visitors had already seen my gallery show. It was a nice chance to meet some of my patrons.

Meanwhile, the gallery show is in its last week. One of the joys of being in a cooperative gallery is the opportunity to be involved in all aspects of staging a show, including designing a window display. It's a chance to be playful, and especially for this show of vintage toys and silly saltshakers. I scanned the vintage tablecloth from my main show piece of saltshakers – "Heirlooms" – and scattered a couple of dozen rubber duckies on the windowsill, surrounding some of my small paintings. It's been a total kid magnet if the small handprints and noseprints at the bottom of the window are any proof.



The small paintings are from the "Cute as a Bug" series. My plan is to begin posting these paintings for auction in the next few weeks. Stay tuned.

Swan song??

Ta-da!! So here's my big surprise, finished just in the nick of time. I put in my first all-nighter since college to get this little fellow done for my show and I'm here to report that I recovered a lot more quickly at 20 than I do now!! This is a snapshot taken under less than perfect lighting conditions, but it came out pretty close to the real thing.

Fe Fi Faux Fowl
30" x 30"
acrylic on canvas

The idea for this painting grew out of the show of small works that we hung last fall. I was one of the people who pushed for that show, so when I chose "Out of the Ordinary" as the theme for my feature show, the logical creative step was to "supersize" the little toys I'd painted in the fall.

I love the concept of taking a very small toy and blowing it up to such a large size, but the technical challenges of painting this in acrylic made for many frustrating moments and a lot of very long painting days. I know that working in oils would have made this a much simpler task, but I have a long history of chemical sensitivity that has made me wary of oil paints. As it turns out, I may have to back away from acrylics too. By the time I finished this piece, I was feeling weird and woozly at the end of every day. At first I thought it was just because of the long hours in the studio, but a few days after I finished it, I opened the sealed palette-keepers that I stored my paints in and the odor of the acrylic just about knocked me over. So, in addition to loving watercolor as a medium, it may truly be the only one I can tolerate. But I'm hoping that if I back off acrylics for a while and only work on small pieces when I start using it again, it may be OK. Acrylic has so many unique properties that I really want to be able to play with it some more. I feel like I've barely begun to discover what it can do.

Now I have to get ready for next weekend's outdoor show. There's a whole bunch of framing to do, prints to make and mat, and assorted other tasks. I've recently redesigned my publicity materials and have to update my booth signage to match. It should be a busy week.

Homage to Homer

No, not the famed author of antiquity, nor the renowned 19th century watercolorist. I'm paying homage to a much more recent Homer: infamous donut-eater, father of Bart -- yes, the Simpsons. I am particularly fond of Homer's signature exclamation -- D'oh!! -- as a way to express a moment of sudden enlightenment. (I suppose some might argue that this is really nothing more than awareness of prior stupidity, but it sounds so much better cast as enlightenment, don't you think?)

So this week, I started on an acrylic painting that dwarfs my usual efforts. Using the same brushes that I use on my 6x6's, I gamely started on the larger piece. Frustration multiplied by frustration!! In desperation, I finally resorted to some stiffer brushes designed for acrylics that I've been avoiding because I don't like long-handled brushes. Paint moved when I wanted it to, stayed where I put it, blended together easily!! Truly a Homeresque moment.

Since I'm going to keep that painting under wraps until my gallery show, I'll share the most recent 6x6, just being varnished today.

Quack-quack
6" x 6"
acrylic on canvas

Enjoy the weekend. I gotta go paint now.

My Monet period...

Back in the fall, my gallery decided to do a group show of 6x6-inch canvases. I was eager to try my hand at acrylics and decided to experiment with a looser, more impressionistic style after having followed Karin Jurick's blog for a while. Things started out well -- this little snail was my first painting:

Zoom-zoom
6" x 6"
acrylic on canvas

Notice the painterly approach on the shell, the suggestion of treads on the wheels, of light reflected on the face. I was pleased. I started on the second painting:

Buzz-buzz
6" x 6"
acrylic on canvas

Notice the slightly more controlled style! But there are still impressionistic elements in the piece. I started on the third painting:

Waddle-waddle
6" x 6"
acrylic on canvas

OK!! At this point, there's no denying that I've completely returned to my realistic roots. And in only three paintings!! A veritable nano-period in the history of art. Ah, Monet, we hardly knew ye....

Whew!!

I've done battle with the blog setup options, and I *think* I won.... It really is mind-boggling. If all went as planned, you can now subscribe to a feed and see updates when I post them.

This week has been a flurry of computer work here at the studio -- website and blog all in one week. And the unfortunate downside is that I'm paying for it with back spasms caused by sitting in front of the computer for about 18 hours a day. But I'm being good and taking care to move around more, so things are improving.

For anyone interested, I used iWeb to set up my website. I found it to be easy to use and lots of fun. But I set it up on my studio computer and then wanted to copy it to my laptop so I could work on it outside the studio. To my utter amazement, there is NO WAY to simply move those design files, and a trip to the local Apple genius bar confirmed this. I can laboriously copy over individual elements and rebuild the site page by page, but c'mon.... computers are supposed to be here to serve us! Right?? And as a longtime Mac user, I can't believe they put out a piece of software that is so unfriendly. Very un-Mac!!!

To close, a little eye-candy from my upcoming show:

Peck-peck
6" x 6"
acrylic on canvas

Now, I'm off to update our gallery website for the new month's featured artist.

It's about time

After owning a domain name for a longish while (Don't ask! It isn't polite!), I'm finally getting my work into cyber-circulation. I'll be posting occasionally at first and eventually I'll be putting small works up for sale or auction here.

I'm in the midst of getting ready for a feature show at my gallery starting at the beginning of May, and for a weekend fine arts show (Los Altos Rotary Show) on May 17-18. Here's one of the paintings I'll be showing in the gallery:

Quackeroonies #2
6" x 8"
watercolor

Stop over to see my brand new website and then plan to come meet me in person at my gallery reception (Saturday, May 10 from 2-5 p.m.) or the Rotary Show on May 17 and 18 if you live in the Los Altos area.

p.s. I was honored to be featured in January as Artist of the Month on The Artist's Magazine website. They keep their features active for several months after the initial appearance so you can still view the page by clicking on the link in my sidebar.