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Holiday Group Show: Small Wonders at Austin Fine Art Gallery!

I have the good fortune of 7 of my paintings being included at Austin Fine Art Gallery’s annual holiday group show of small arwtorks called “small WONDERS”! All works are framed and ready to go on your walls, or, given their relatively small size, they’re easy to ship to friends and family who might appreciate authentic art from an Austin artist.

BLACK LAB | Graphite on Paper | 11×13″
BULL CREEK, AUSTIN | Oil on Board | 6×8″
DOG TIRED | Oil on Board | 16×12″
JUST THE RIPE SIZE | Oil on Panel | 5×7″
SPRING POINT LEDGE LIGHTHOUSE | Oil on Board | 8×6″
POPCORN | Oil on Canvas | 14×11″
SOMETHING BLUE | Oil on Board | 12×9″

Small WONDERS will consist of over 300 mini works by over 35 greater Austin artists, ranging from 5×7’s to 16×20’s. Everything will be PRICED to GIFT with prices ranging from $100 to $600. Don’t miss this wonderful show to start or add to an art collection for you and your loved ones!There will be an opening reception on Saturday, December 9th from 4-7pm. There will be holiday treats, drinks and live music during the opening reception. The show runs through early January.

For more information about the gallery and this show specifically, go to www.artframingservices.com, navigate to the “small WONDERS” show announcement, and consider dropping by for some holiday cheer and say hi during the opening reception.

Artists showing include:

BERN ABPLANALP
UMBREEN AHMAD
TOM BENTLEY
VICKI BREVELL
TAMMY BROWN
HOLLY CRAIG
ALAN EHRLICH
PAT FLATHOUSE
ANN FLEMINGS
JULIA FLETCHER
SALLY FRASER
OLGA GORALEWICZ
LACY HUSMANN
JESSICA GREENWOOD
PING IRVIN
CRAIG IRVIN
CHRISTINE JAMES
CAROLYN KILDAY
MELISSA KOTZEV
SCOTT LEOPOLD
MARCH MATTINGLY
LINDA MONTIGNANI
M MURDOCK
EDD OGDEN
NANCY PATON
RICARDO ROBLES
JOYCELYN SCHEDLER
ANASTASIA SHIMANSKAYA
CELESTE SMITH
CONNIE TAYLOR
MINDEN TEN EYCK
LILIANA VASQUEZ
LINDA WELLS
JOHN WEST
ELIZABETH WILSON
WALKER WINN
RENEE WOMACK

#artbern #berntx #crashboomzip #abplanalp #atxart
#austinartist #austinart #originalartworks #austingifts #texasartists #austinfineart #austinartframe #artforyourhome #texasartist #instaart #artoftheday #smallwonders #christmasartist #christmas #holidaycheer #gifts #giftideas

December 4, 2023 by Bern Categories: dogs, Drawings, Events, Landscapes, still lifeTags: art, art show, Austin art, books, christmas, drawing, Events, food, gifts, holiday art show, painting, photography, poetry, travel, writing Leave a comment

In the Old Fashioned Way… Plus Smoke

_{SMOKY OLD FASHIONED | Oil on Canvas | 6×8″}

SMOKY OLD FASHIONED is a recent commission piece, something I love doing, especially when it’s for a gift or something sentimental. In this instance, the painting is for a gift for someone who apparently has everything. Painting to the rescue!

My process for custom work involves a number of preliminary discussions followed by sketches that give compositional options. Just like blocking in the value structure of the actual painting is key to a good outcome, with a custom piece, coming to an agreement on the core elements and structure of the composition is vital.

I’ve painted a number of libation-based still life compositions, but nothing with smoke. It required me to investigate if painting smoke was similar to creating fog, mist, or larger fire-based plumes.

The answer, it turns out, was an emphatic NO! It seems that once you pump smoke into a cocktail glass, weird shit happens and it becomes lifelike and animated. Looking at reference photos further complicates matters, introducing possibilities of upward windy smoky tendrils, or smoky bits that spill over the edge toward the table. Come to discover both of these considerations are smoked red herrings! Smoky tendrils are “fresh” burning anomalies, and the only smoke that sinks seems to be dry ice based smoke, which you can imagine is in a lot of cocktail glamour shots.

The trick with this piece was clearly… smoke! But before getting to that challenge, there was the issue of compositional tension. Technically, an Old Fashioned isn’t so much a cocktail as an origins story of composition. The Meehan’s Bartending Guide, my personal true North for all things cocktail, notes “the cocktail was first defined on May 6, 1806, in The Balance and Columbian Repository as ‘a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters’. By the time it showed up in a professional bar manual for the first time in Theodore Proulx’s 1888 The Bartender’s Manual, it was already “old-fashioned”.” My personal preference is rye whiskey, simple syrup, bitters, 1 cherry and an orange twist. Now back to the painting…

The request for this piece was to incorporate Luxardo cherries, orange peel, and a large round ice cube. Figuring out how best to structure this as a piece of art was trickier than I thought, even without the smoke. Once you put all that stuff into a lowball glass, it’s impossible to not notice the tension of so many things jammed into a small space. To tackle this problem we simply talked through various sketches that presented different solutions, and we ultimately landed on cherries on a toothpick, angled into the glass, orange peel also on the toothpick but above the whiskey line, and lastly a demotion of the round ice to the background. As a pleasant surprise, once the smoke was added, it significantly improved the compositional structure because it broadened the view and seems to have further reduced the tension, essentially granting the viewer a larger viewing room.

Lastly, the smoke technique. I still need to refine the approach, so stay tuned for more smoky cocktails, but the core approach seems sound. The smoke is not white, that’s the first thing. Turns out it’s about 20 variations of gray, leaning warm (cad yellow deep) above the glass, and a little cool (lemon yellow) below the rim. The brushwork boils down to a lot of push and pull between the light grays and the black background, using a lot of scumbling with an oversized round brush. As the smoke expands above the glass, it was important to make sure there was a very thin layer on the outside edges of the core smoke to lend it a sense of movement. The person who commissioned this piece has a cocktail smoker top, which sits on the top of the glass and is then pulled off in a flourish when the smoking is done, which pulls some of the smoke up and out of the glass. It’s all very entertaining, until you try to paint it!

#oldfashioned #cocktail #bourbon #agedandcharred #thecraftycocktail #cocktailsmokers #buffalotrace #whiskey #whisky #artbern #berntx #crashboomzip #painting #art #abplanalp #austinartists #atxartist #atxart #atxlife #contemporaryart #abplanalp #bernabplanalp #stillife

November 30, 2023November 30, 2023 by Bern Categories: still lifeTags: art, cocktail, drawing, oil painting, old fashioned, sketch, smoke, still life 2 Comments

Waiting to Sail

SPRING POINT BOATS | 10 x 8” | Oil on Canvas Board

This is a follow-up to a previous post while in Maine. SPRING POINT BOATS was started en plein air, the session just long enough to allow me to lay in a solid structure and composition that was interesting. There was some artistic license taken in terms of boat placement and colors, but the remainder of the setting is, believe it or not, an accurate depiction.

While the paint didn’t effortlessly jump off the brush, something did click regarding boat shapes and structure. I’m not happy with how some of the areas look a bit chalky, but that should be easy to improve in future efforts. I believe I relied too much on Titanium White to lighten values throughout the piece, as opposed to reserving it primarily for the boats. However, the sense of a strong mid-afternoon sun on a calm day came through pretty well.

The last self-critique, and it’s a big one, is the compositional structure. I didn’t notice until the work was done, but now I can’t “unsee” it, that the lighthouse jetty looks artificial because it comes into the painting in a parallel that’s very distracting. It needs to be more angular, or at the very least, I need the sight line to be above the jetty so you can see the side and top, not just the side. I have to laugh, though, because I was so proud of my artistic licensure of the boats, yet I ignored the massive rock jetty in the background. Oh well, there’s always next time.

Thanks for reading!

#artbern #berntx #crashboomzip #painting #art #abplanalp #austinartists #atxartist #contemporaryart #southportlandmaine #abplanalp #bernabplanalp #springpointledgelighthouse #lighthouse #maine #portlandmaine #sailboat #marina #sailing

October 6, 2023 by Bern Categories: plein air, SeascapesTags: art, boat, Casco bay, Lighthouse, maine, painting, Sailboats, sailing 1 Comment

Juicy Kernel

POPPED PERFECTION | 14 x 11” | Oil on Canvas

In the spirit of fun and interesting still life subjects, please welcome this tasty kernel… POPPED PERFECTION! This is my second popcorn themed composition, but unlike the original, which featured 3 pieces of the corny goodness, the focus is a single, beautiful popped kernel.

Popcorn is a tricky subject to paint, in large part because there’s nothing standard about any of it’s shapes or surfaces. Had I tried to paint this as a novice I would have found a new hobby and never painted again. That said, when you get it right, it’s a thrill!

There are a number of ways to add artistic interest to this type of still life. I wanted to emphasize the transparent elements of a nice big juicy piece of popped corn, thus the focal points with orange and yellow where light can penetrate. To really make the piece pop (sorry, couldn’t help myself) I used a blue background, which is the complementary hue to orange and therefore provides a strong contrast without having to worry too much about the similar values. Furthermore, the piece is very simplistic in terms of having nothing else on the canvas, which is meant to help it jump off the canvas from across the room.

Thanks for reading!

September 26, 2023September 26, 2023 by Bern Categories: still lifeTags: art, painting, popcorn, still life 4 Comments

Sailboats, Ospreys and Bird People

SPRING POINT BOATS | Oil on Canvas Board | 8×10”

SPRING POINT BOATS is a work in progress from a gorgeous day on a pier overlooking a marina adjacent to Spring Point Ledge Lighthouse. This initial session was about 2.5 hours, half of which was spent establishing the composition structure and a practice sketch to verify the arrangement of the boats. Note that boats move, even when they’re tightly anchored in the marina, so photos of each boat in the desired position are essential to finishing a seascape like this in the studio.

The temperature was perfection in the shade, my wife was with me enjoying the outdoors and providing very helpful compositional tips, and there was a family of Ospreys on the other side of the marina (right behind us) that are the talk of the town… amongst bird people at least. I’ll admit they are interesting to watch, as the parent (not sure which one, I’m not up to speed on Osprey gender identification) was busy dropping off fresh caught fish for the two babies. At some point, one of the bird watchers rounded the corner of the pier where I was painting, said “hi”, and I was convinced she was about to ask to see what I was working on, only to then question “why aren’t you painting the Ospreys?” Of course I told her I hate birds, was dismayed at the tankards of shit they spray all over town, and that their screeching was something of nightmares.

Of course that was with my inside voice. My public self, using my actual voice, told her instead that the Ospreys were entertaining but difficult to paint, an answer she seemed to deem acceptable – perhaps she hadn’t considered the complexity of painting moving birds in a nest of twigs atop a 75’ pole in the middle of the bay. She giggled and shuffled away, apparently never having noticed I was painting. Perhaps some grumpy plein air painters – you know who you are – scared her off in the past and she’s afraid to ask. I digress…

As to this painting, I had already decided this was going to be a 50/50 job, namely half outside, half in studio. The goal was to lay down a solid structure and really balance the massive blue expanse of the sky and sea with the focal points of the boats. The lighthouse should give perspective and some added interest to the piece, but the intent to so give the sense of place sitting on the water watching the day go by. For me, this is still very difficult because virtually all sailboats are dominated by white, either the sails or the top deck, so the brush strokes have to be very intentional and the values need to shift much stronger than what I see “live”, at least that’s how I think it should be done.

Stay tuned for the completed work, which I’ll keep very loose and painterly in an attempt to put the viewer outside with the boats.

Thanks for reading!