Live Event Painting Examples and other News

Paper to Pixels Fall Open Studios Art Show, November 6 – 8, 2015
~ Part of the city-wide San Francisco Open Studios
Sutton Studios & Gallery, 1890 Bryant Street #306, San Francisco, CA 94110 (cross street Mariposa) Click here for map

Jewel
2015, Live iPad portrait created at the Open Studios Show using iPad Air, Sketch Club and Pencil by 53

Photo: Margo Moritz

I exhibited a range of my work from “traditional” works on paper to innovative digital and mixed media paintings on canvas. Here are a few of artworks that were shown:

---

Mayor “Sunny” Jim Rolph Jr.
2004, 48″ x 72″, pigment ink and acrylic on canvas

This painting is a historical portrait, part of my Legendary San Francisco Mayors series. It commemorates the life of one of the longest serving mayors of San Francisco who oversaw the recovery of San Francisco following the great earthquake and fire of 1906. He was instrumental in San Francisco hosting the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), a world’s fair that celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal and the city’s post-earthquake reconstruction. The centennial of this exhibition is currently being celebrated at the de Young Museum with their exhibition Jewel City: Art from San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

---

2014, 44″ x 102″, pigment ink print on canvas

This painting depicts the magnificent view looking down on the San Francisco Bay from Divisadero Street at the top of Pacific Heights on the final day of the America’s Cup.

---

Marcus Shelby
2009, 36″ x 56″, pigment ink and acrylic on canvas

This portrait of bandleader, composer, arranger, bassist, educator, and activist, Marcus Anthony Shelby, is based on working from life in my studio while Marcus practiced. This painting is stretched (gallery wrap) without frame.

---

Rhonda Reclining
2015, 24″ x 20″, pencil on heavy weight cold press watercolor paper

This drawing was created during a recent life drawing session at Alexandra Palace in North London. It is unframed.

---

Ortigia Alley
2015, 40″ x 30″, mixed media on canvas

This painting depicts a scene I saw in one of the beautiful picturesque alleys of the ancient city of Ortigia, Siracusa, Sicily. It was created as part of a teaching demonstration for my Painter 2016 In-Depth Photo-Paint Workflow video tutorial (for PaintboxTV members). The inspiration of Sicily has led me to organize an iPad sketching workshop there: Sketch Sicily 2016. This artwork includes a beautiful museum-frame frame.

---

Gatsby Stroll
2015, 24″ x 19″, mixed media on canvas

This painting depicts a scene I saw at the Gatsby Summer Afternoon event in Dunsmuir Historical Estate, Oakland, where I brought students as part of the Great Gatsby Impressionist Workshop. It was created as part of a teaching demonstration.

---

Majestic Hotel, South Beach Miami
2015, 36″ x 24″, mixed media on canvas
This painting depicts the classic Art Deco Majestic Hotel, 660 Ocean Drive, South Beach, Miami Beach, Florida. Designed in 1940, this Albert Anis creation abandoned horizontal linkage and eyebrows in favor of a mimicry of the pre-deco Vienna Succession style, with recto-linear windows and arched cornices, seemingly straight out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Despite this digression, it maintains a style which looks decidedly Deco. The vehicle outside the hotel is a 1951 Kaiser Deluxe which participated in the Art Deco Festival parade on Ocean Drive outside the hotel.

---

Avalon Olds’
2014, 36″x 26″, mixed media on canvas
This painting depicts a 1956 Oldsmobile convertible parked outside the classic historic Avalon Hotel at 700 Ocean Beach Drive in South Beach, Miami. The hotel was built in 1941 in the late Art Deco style (in the subcategory of Streamline Moderne) and was designed by architect Albert Anis, renowned for designing many Art Deco buildings in Miami Beach and Chicago.

---

Gatsby Stroll, 2015, MacBook Pro + Corel Painter 2016 + Wacom Intuos Pro M

This painting depicts a scene I saw at the Gatsby Summer Afternoon event in Dunsmuir Historical Estate, Oakland, where I brought students as part of the Great Gatsby Impressionist Workshop. It was created as part of a teaching demonstration.

Ortigia Alley, 2015, MacBook Pro + Corel Painter 2016 + Wacom Intuos Pro M

This painting depicts a scene I saw in one of the beautiful picturesque alleys of the ancient city of Ortigia, Siracusa, Sicily. It was created as part of a teaching demonstration for my Painter 2016 In-Depth Photo-Paint Workflow video tutorial.

Halloween demo at the RileyStreet Art Supply Store in San Rafael was enlivened by a suitably costumed fellow Corel Painter Elite Master Rhoda Draws, who, as you see above, became one of my sketch victims, I mean subjects! Denis was my other subject. I used an iPad Air, Sketch Club and Pencil by 53 for both sketches. If you’d like to learn how to sketch with your iPad please see come along to one of my classes.

“Two iPad Sketches After Giacometti”, 2015, iPad Air + Sketch Club + Pencil by 53

These two iPad sketches were created by me from scratch inspired by, and based on direct observation of, Giacometti’s wonderful work on display at the show “Giacometti: Pure Presence”, London National Portrait Gallery (see the Curator’s introduction and this review). The dark blue horizontal banner at the bottom of the square image is from the NPG London web site.

On the left you see my sketches from 3 views of Giacometti’s 1955 sculpture of his brother Diego, and, on the right, my sketch of his 1950 painting of his mother Annetta.

Here are two replay videos showing the process of each sketch as it developed from a blank canvas:

Alberto Giacometti is known for his elongated sculpted figures with small flattened heads, but lessor known for his extensive series of portraits (drawn, painted and sculpted) of his family and friends which he created throughout his adult life, and which this exhibition focuses on. I was fascinated to see his early portrait work, in which you can see him experimenting with ways to depict what he sees when he looks at a person. One early sculpture of his father has a flat disc (flattened 90 degrees to the flattening of his later portrait sculptures) with a drawing scratched onto the disc.

The painting of his mother that I sketched caught my eye due to the way he treated the space and environment around her, with so much energy and structure. It was fun to mimic his loose scratchy lines, worked into again and again.

His sculptural bust of his brother fascinated me by the way it changed so dramatically as you walked around it. I wanted to convey that so I drew it from three different points of view, using very scribbly loose line work that evoked the way Giacometti picked at his sculptures, continually building up and taking away, sometime over months or years. I also just used two colors, charcoal black and a creamy white, to evoke the strong play of light and shadow in the sculpted forms. Interestingly enough, many years ago in the early 1980s, when I was studying sculpture at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford (as an extra curricula activity while reading for my undergrad degree in Physics), I was inspired by this very same Giacometti sculpture of his brother to create my own “Giacometti-style” bust (cast in concrete) of a good friend and fellow Oxford Physics student, Peter.

Coming up: iPad Figure Drawing class, Nov 14 (https://www.paintboxtv.com/ipad-figure-drawing), Paint on the Go! Dec 5th (https://paintboxtv.com/paint-on-the-go) and “Paper to Pixels”, my Open Studios Art Show & Sale, Nov 7/8, 11a-6p, 1890 Bryant St, San Francisco.

On October 15, 2015, I presented a short 6 minute mini-talk known as a “palorado”, and performed live iPad painting, at the “Hands On!” Conference in the magnificent and recently renovated Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. “Hands On!” is the international association of children in museums. The conference is attended by over 300 museum professionals from across the globe and addresses the latest developments in children’s education and engagement in museums.

I created live iPad portraits of conference attendees in the closing reception party which took place in the beautiful atrium area of the newly renovated Rijksmuseum. My iPad display, and my painting process, was projected in real time onto a huge screen suspended in the atrium for all to enjoy.

My drawing of Annemies Broekgaarden, Head Public and Education at the Rijksmuseum and President of Hands On! for this conference is shown during it’s creation above.

With Annemies and Paul and my drawing of them

Drawing May using Zen Brush 2

Painting the iPad portrait of Tanya whose birthday it was that same day! She was shy about sitting for her portrait (her friends convinced her) but who then loved the experience and end result!

With Joerg Ehtreiber, Hands On! Treasurer and Director of Frida and Fred Children’s Museum, Graz, Austria – my portrait of him showing on the big screen. Below my iPad portrait of Sandra and Anna.

Thank you to the Rijksmuseum and the Hands On! Conference team for inviting me to participate in this wonderful conference.

Teaching Young People in Museums

Palorado is Esperanto for talking. It is a way to present an interesting topic in a short time, with or without pictures. During the palorado session at the Hands On! Conference, presenters get six minutes each to discuss issues they are passionate about and to share new thoughts, encourage and inspire! My palorado, Kids, Art & iPads!, shared the incredibly inspiring results of teaching iPad drawing and painting to children aged 7 to 14 years old as part of a summer camp this past summer, which included taking them to draw in museums (the de Young, Legion of Honor and Asian Art Museums, San Francisco) and galleries, plus my experience teaching iPad drawing workshops earlier this year at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (one student shown drawing in the Weston Cast Court of the V&A immediately below), and at the Seoul Museum of Art. During these iPad art classes the kids gained invaluable artistic, as well as technical, skills and insights. They learned about art history; expanded their artistic horizons; learned first hand how to draw what they see; learned how to apply the principles of composition; learned how to work with patterns and symmetry; and learned how to use color in an expressive way. On the technical side the children learned not only how to use the apps and record replay videos of their creative process, but also the learned about the power of using multiple apps to create a single artwork (“app round-tripping”) to achieve a greater richness of result, taking advantage of the strengths of different media and tools. I’ve included some photos from the classes at the bottom of this web page.

The goal of my palorado presentation, Kids, Art & iPads!, was to encourage museums to bring together kids and iPad drawing, which some are already doing (such as at the multimedia lab of the new Rijksmuseum Teekenschool and at the Learning Center of the Victoria & Albert Museum) as a incredibly effective, empowering and engaging way for children to interact with, and learn from, the museums’ collections, using a medium, a mobile device, that comes naturally to them and through which they are used to engaging with the world.

Here are more photos (below) from iPad classes I have taught that involve young people in museums and galleries and relate to the topic of my palorado talk at “Hands On!”:

iPad drawing in the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

iPad drawing in the Brian Gross Gallery, San Francisco

iPad drawing in the Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco

iPad Drawing Workshop, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea

I was honored to be invited by DigiFun Art to participate in the DigiFun Art: Urban Scape Mobile Art Exhibition & Festival at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), South Korea. The art exhibition opened September 22nd and runs to December 13th, 2015. It is on the third floor of the SeMA Central location, Seosomun Main Building, (Project Room 3F) – please visit if you’re in Seoul between now and December 13th.

The exhibition features paintings created on mobile devices, including this one (below) that I painted live at the Smithsonian American Art Museum during their America Now! Innovation in Art event.

It also included a participative interactive installation called “Pixelscape” which you can see here:

These are the events I participated in:

– September 22nd: Opening Ceremony, Seoul Museum of Art

– September 23rd: Talk & Live iPad Drawing Demo, Project Gallery (3F), Seoul Museum of Art
Drawing on the Go! The Joy of Sketching on the iPad in the Urban Scape

– September 24th: iPad Drawing Workshop, Lecture room (B1), Seoul Museum of Art
Drawing on the Go! Learn how to draw on the go using the Sketch Club app on the iPad.

– September 25th, Mobile Drawing Workshop,gallery TOAST, organized by DigiFun Art.

Other artists participating in the Digifun Art Mobile Art Exhibition & Festival include Hong Seung-Hye, Hong Kyoungtack, Kim Yong-chul, Kim Yong-kwan, Park Gwang-soo, Lee Fi, Joanne Carter (TheAppWhisperer.com), Jörg Hinz, Ahn Seung-joon and Hong-kyu Kim. It was a pleasure meeting these fellow artists and getting to know the Korean mobile art community.

Thank you to Professor Ahn, Amy Chung and Sangwoo Kang of DigiFun Art and Ara Jo and her colleagues at the Seoul Museum of Art for organizing, and inviting me to participate in, this special mobile art festival. Thank you, WACOM, maker of the Wacom Intuos Creative Stylus 2 (one of the styluses I like to use), for sponsoring this festival.

I met Amy when I was speaking at the mobile Digital Art & Creativity (mDAC) Summit in Palo Alto last year. Thank you, mDAC, for helping bring together mobile artists from all over the world.

Photos included here were taking by various people including Joanne Carter, Ara Jo and Sangwoo Kang.

Seeing the recent ads in the media for the film “PIXELS” made me think of the transformation I have witnessed in digital painting: from the efforts to avoid the dreaded jagged pixelation of the early ’90s, to the fact that the “Pixels” brush in the iPad app Sketch Club (one that can make brush strokes made up of squares, triangles, circles or irregular cells) became the favorite brush of the children I taught iPad painting to this summer, as they created their purposely pixelated World of Minecraft characters.

The article that prompted this essay. I read this in USA Today on July 20, 2015.

“Victoria”, 1991, digital portrait I created from life using Mac IIfx, Wacom pen tablet and PixelPaint Pro software. One of my earliest digital paintings – notice pixelation when zoomed in slightly. At that stage in computer graphics the file sizes were limited and the natural media emulation brush engines still gave some pixelation.

Student in my Introduction to iPad Painting class this summer (August 2015) uses the Pixels brush in Sketch Club to paint pixels in a Minecraft “papercraft”, later printed out on card and used to generate a three dimensional character.

Pixels have transformed from crude graphic pariahs to rock stars clothed in a new found hip coolth and basking in unexpected popularity. The underlying source of bitmap imagery has emerged from being a hidden actor to taking center stage.

“Pixelscape”, an interactive installation at the “DigiFun Art: Urban Scape” Festival, Seoul Museum of Art, Korea, in which visitors create pixelated drawings which then become part of a larger collaborative artwork.

Following a quarter of a century that has seen the pixelated crudeness of the Pac-Man and Space Invaders early arcade video game imagery supplanted by the smooth semi-photo-realism of modern day internet virtual reality games, the return of pixelation in games like Minecraft comes almost as a nostalgic nod to the roots of digital imagery, a tap of the hat to an “old skool” era that predates the Millennials and Generation Zers now playing them.

Screen capture of the video arcade game “Space Invaders” c 1979

Screen capture of the game Monument Valley, one of the games, besides Minecraft, that my young students this summer liked to play in their breaks. Notice the combination of smooth surfaces and crude pixels.

I must admit that, inspired by my young students, I have started enjoying playing with pixels as image elements. In fact when I was painting portraits recently in the Heineken stage of the Forecastle Festival in Louisville, Kentucky, I started using Sketch Club’s “Pixels” brush myself! I really enjoyed the rough elegance of the big geometric shapes and chose an option that created brush strokes made up of triangles instead of the perfect squares that my students preferred for their Minecraft characters.

Portrait of “Noah”, 2015, digital portrait created from life at the Heineken Art Castle in the Forecastle Festival, Louisville, Kentucky, using an iPad Air, Sketch Club app and Pencil by 53 stylus.

I am glad the hardworking pixel, which has given us bitmap painters so much pleasure and illusion over the years, now has it’s time back in the sun.

With happy pixelation,

Cheers,

Jeremy

Peggy and I taught two short (each 75 minutes) plein air landscape painting sessions to two groups of participants at a company team building retreat in the historic Villa Montalvo, Saratoga, CA. The class took place in the beautiful Love Temple / Italianate Garden. You can see the results in the two group photos above. Each student painted from direct observation of the scene before them and created their own unique artwork that reflected their individual artistic vision.

We introduced the basics of composition, color mixing, and use of materials. We showed artwork examples by Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse to illustrate the principles and act as artistic inspiration. Everyone had fun and, no matter what their experience or background in art, everyone created wonderful artworks full of life!

I was impressed by the incredible richness and diversity of the results. With about sixty participants in total they created sixty completely different and unique interpretations and points of view. This is the power of paint, whether traditional or digital: the power to give everyone the opportunity to express themselves in a unique and personal way. Big thanks and congratulations to everyone who participated!

One student, who hadn’t painted for many years, shared how excited she was by getting to paint and that this class was a turning point for her and that as a result of the class she was going to continue to paint.

Thank you to Entire Productions and everyone involved in helping make this such a successful art class!

More than any of his colleagues, perhaps, J.M.W. Turner hugely enjoyed and exploited varnishing days, reveling in the sociability, and in the opportunity to paint in a public forum.
– Art on the Line: the Royal Academy Exhibitions in Somerset House 1780 – 1836 (editor David H Solkin).

My Tableau Vivant performance of British artist Joseph Mallord William (“J.M.W.”) Turner pays homage to his love of live painting in the closing moments of the Varnishing Day prior to the opening of the Royal Academy Annual Exhibition held in Somerset House, London (the Academy later moved to its present location at Burlington House). The “Varnishing Day” was actually three days which were allowed for artists to add a touch of varnish to their paintings, or more than a touch in the case of Turner!

My Turner “Varnishing Day” Tableau Vivant performance was part of the de Young Museum’s Musical and Art Exploration Friday Night event, August 14th, 6 – 8:30pm. It took place in the Piazzoni Murals Room. This event celebrated the J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free exhibition which is up until September 20th and is well worth seeing. Here are photos and the video slidehow from the “Varnishing Day” tableau vivant performance:

This is the slide show that played on the screen throughout the performance. It is an eleven minute loop that shows the current Royal Academy as well as historical documentation related to the Royal Academy Annual Exhibitions and the Varnishing Days in particular.

The six paintings I displayed “salon style” in this performance tableau were, clockwise from top left:

The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (‘Whitehall Stairs, June 18th, 1817’)
by John Constable, exhibited 1832
Apparently Constable worked for thirteen years on this painting. A contemporary of Turner (born one year apart) they had an ongoing rivalry throughout their careers, trying to outdo each other at the annual Royal Academy Exhibitions. (more info)

The Thames above Waterloo Bridge
by J. M. W. Turner, c.1830–5
This painting depicts a rather similar scene to the Constable and makes one wonder if there wasn’t a little one-upmanship involved…
(for more info see Gaurdian article, Telegraph article and the Tate page)

Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway
by J. M. W. Turner, 1844
The scene depicts the Maidenhead railway bridge, across the Thames between Taplow and Maidenhead. The bridge, which was begun on Brunel’s design in 1837 and finished in 1839, has two main arches of brick, very wide and flat. The view is to the east, towards London. This painting makes me think of the impact of the industrial revolution on country life, how it shrunk the country and brought the city to the countryside.. (more info)

Self Portrait
by J. M. W. Turner, 1799
Painted when Turner was twenty four years old and a rising star. (more info)

Going to the Ball (San Martino)
by J. M. W. Turner, 1845
This painting was one in the first of two successive pairs of pictures (each depicting Venetian scenes in twilight and dawn going to and from a Ball) created by Turner in response to requests by potential patrons, William Wethered and Francis McCracken. The second pair were created after the first met with derision and rejection. The second set of pictures also drew negative reviews and the patrons got cold feet and ultimately reneged on their commissions. The paintings remained with Turner, unsold and unwanted, until his death. If only Wethered and McCracken could look back now on how much their rejected commissions are valued and lauded…(more info)

Sir William Chambers, Joseph Wilton and Sir Joshua Reynolds
by John Francis Rigaud, 1782
This portrait depicts the three leading members of the Royal Academy in 1782, Treasurer, Keeper and President respectively, each foremost in their different fields. Chambers the architect holds a set square and points to an architectural plan, Wilton the sculptor holds a mallet and Reynolds the painter leans on a portfolio which includes an outline representation of Reynolds’s portrait of Chambers which the artist gave to the Royal Academy. (more info)

Two of the three Turner’s I included in my tableau were featured in the J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free exhibition in London but did not make it to the American leg of the exhibition tour.

While I was performing, an artist, Jeannie Mecorney, who had attended my iPad Figure Drawing Class at the Mobile Digital Art & Creativity (mDAC) Summit the week before, drew me on her iPad and here are the results which she has kindly permitted me to share:

I was in the Royal Academy Library earlier this summer doing research in preparation for my Turner “Varnishing Day” Tableau, I came across the oil painting by artist Charles West Cope shown here (immediately below).

Painted around 1828, it is the only known image created from life of Turner painting in Somerset House, London, the home of the Royal Academy of Arts during Turner’s life time (the Royal Academy relocated to it’s current location in Burlington House, near Piccadilly Circus, in 1868). The other images at the top of this page show imagined cartoon recreations of Turner on Varnishing Days but are not thought to be drawn from life. According to Cope’s son, this little oil sketch on card made by his father shows Turner demonstrating his skills while acting as a ‘Visitor’ in the Royal Academy Schools, ‘with some of the porters or sweepers looking on’. Though not actually a varnishing day “performance”, it captures the showmanship that Turner brought to painting in front of onlookers. He was an early, if not the first, live event painter!

Big thanks to Peggy for video and photography!