Cloudy with chance of showers

Painting clouds is an exercise in subtlety...subtle color and value changes, and clouds are not white and grey. This was a class demo in acrylic on stretched canvas (12'X17"). Acrylic paint does not blend nearly as easily as oil (acrylic paint dries within about 5 to 12 minutes!). I used flat brushes and a VERY LIGHT touch for color glazing and value blending. As California goes into summer so too does the it go into a drought. No wonder that every time it rains, I thoroughly enjoy the event!

Writing On The Body Of A Queen - fini

The dipstick (or is it diptych?) I have been working on to help raise funds for The Northern California Dance Conservatory is finished. Note that Marie Antoinette's fan has "real" jewels on it worth almost $8. My goal with this double acrylic was to reflect the glitzh and bling of Marie's world before those nasty, nasty revolutionaries put the kabasch on it all. I also wanted to reflect the female movement of this beautifully choreographed dance. Ninety percent of this painting was executed (no pun intended} with various sizes of flat brushes. The design on the dancer's dresses were painted using paper doilies and an air brush.

The Bastards Lost!

Several months ago, I wrote that I was commissioned in 2000 by the NBA Sacramento Kings to paint and design a poster to be printed and mailed to all the season ticket holders at the end of the season. A good friend and I spent three days at about three hours per day numbering and signing 7,500 prints in the executive office suite at Arco Arena here in Sacramento. In other words, my good buddy, Paul, picked up the first print from the stack and wrote 1/7,500 down in the left corner. He handed it to me, and i scrawled my signature next to the numbering. We finally finished at 7,5000/7,5000 followed by my 7,500th signature scrawl. Yes!...I added another fee for the numbering and signing! But I digress. The 2000/2001 season was the Sacramento Kings best and most awesome season! They were the darlings of the sports media world and the fans! The following years and up to the present, the team has not played very well, because each and every season, they choose a new artist to do the end-of-the-season poster! If they had only stuck with yours truly!! As I mentioned several months ago, they hired me back this season to paint Chris Webber and Vladi Divac for two poster to celebrate the retirement of their jerseys at Arco Arena. They both played on the dream team of 2000-2001! I wrote that the team was going to turn around, because I was back on duty!!! But noooo!!!!!!!...they just ended the season as one of the worst teams of the NBA! So much for the Lobenberg art mojo!!!! The bearded geezer on the right is me at the Divac jersey hanging game. The Kings played against the New Orleans Hornets. They lost by two points when a Hornet player sunk a three pointer in the last two seconds!!...bastards!

Kissing The Sky

Painting sunflowers was an assignment a few weeks ago in the acrylic/oil class I teach. This was a demo painting starting out with very simple paper cut out-like color shapes on a Mars Black painted stretched canvas. You can see some of the black peeking out. I think this helps to bump up the brightness of the colors. After I was finished with the paper cut outs, the sunflowers were taking on the look of a paint by numbers painting. But as I progressed to refine by softening edges and blending colors, that look was dampened. I am always challenged with big blue skies, but I like this one...praise be Brilliant Blue by Utrecht and Cobalt Teal by Liquitex plus some warm colors towards the right lower corner. I like growing the tall 12 footer sunflowers but the stubbies are kinda cool also.

Writing On The Body Of A Queen

This painting is my interpretation of a new ballet titled "Writing on the body of a queen" ( recently choreographed by Jennifer Bradford, director of the Northern Calif. Dance Conservatory) that in turn was inspired by the late, "great" Marie Antoinette. It's a diptych on two stretched canvases measuring 12"X24" per canvas for an overall size of 24 1/2"X24". It's about 50% completed...a work in progress. More later.

"The Pause That Refreshes"

In my City College Acrylic/Oil painting class last Friday, I handed out to my students bottles of Coke and plastic cups. The assignment was to paint them...an exercise in composition, color mixing, and paint application style. I believe that "The Pause That Refreshes" was a Coca Cola slogan from the i940's. I have always liked this slogan, and it definitely makes me want to down a coke! "Coke Is It" from the 1990's is lame. This is my demo painting on stretched 8"X10" canvas. About 45 minutes painting time. The bottles of Coke were for export to Mexico where they like their Cola sweetened by pure sugar cane...smart people.

Woof, Woof, Woof.

A fellow prof. (he teaches psychology) at Sacramento City College commissioned me to paint his two dogs which I did in about 3 hours. I first covered my canvas in a blazing hot blue. When dry, I did a relatively tight contour drawing on it with white pencil. Normally I just start painting in large, rough shapes and then refine but sometimes, and with acrylics, I'll take the somewhat paint by numbers approach. It always seems to work. Enjoy.