Next year during the Spring semester at Sacramento City College, I will be teaching a pen and ink drawing class. This has never been a medium I work in, but I do like to teaching it. I'm not sure why! This is a self portrait I did in india ink in my pen and ink drawing class, circa 2006.

Early Morning Street Corner

This is an acrylic on stretched canvas painted mostly with flat brushes over a five day period. It was a great exercise on how to take a rather prosaic scene and turn it into an engaging painting. I started the painting with an art instructor at The Art Institute, Sacramento who is taking lessons from me to loosen up his painting style. We worked from a reference photo I snapped about two years ago. I played with light, color, added graffiti and telephone lines to help engage the viewer. This was a challenging exercise for the both of us!

I followed my nose.

Yep, I followed my nose. A few posts ago (in October) I was at the stage in this watercolor when it was a relatively simple portrait of a young Hmong girl from Vietnam. I had no idea where to go with it next except to keep going and as my father used to say when he didn't want to look at a road map (remember those?), "I'll follow my nose". I followed my nose my working on it throughout October and this month . . . just a little bit each day or so.  My nose lead me to this final stage. Hope you like it dear readers.

My Hurler friend is now a World Series Champion!!

He's the young guy on the right in case ya didn't know. That's my watercolor painting of him on the wall in case ya didn't know. SF Giants rule.

Some of my favorite food comes from this young lady's neck of the woods.

I stumbled on some striking photos of southeast asians on the net and decided to watercolor one of them. This is only half way completed . . . way more to go. I'll post the finish soon. As my friend Nicholas Simmons  (internationally renowned watercolorist) says, and I paraphrase him, "watercolor should be allowed to do what it wants". Permit me to also quote David Lobenberg (that's me), "watercolor can be described as controlling the flood". Watercolor just loves to flow and move about. Don't fight it . . . go with the flow (bad pun, but oh so appropriate!)

A little drawing never hurts.

Drawing from life is the best way to see a heck of a lot deeper than one normally does. You are drawing for god's sake! You need to see those contours, shapes, values, hues, angles, and proportions otherwise those details are simply lost. Bottom line . . .  exercise your visual perception, and you will paint better. I like that since I paint in both acrylic and watercolor. I teach drawing and painting at the college level and in my many workshops here in California and out of state. I present to you a quick charcoal gesture (the things at the end of the figure's upraised arm are charcoal sticks), a more detailed rendered nude in lovely charcoal as well as a very jazzified line and ink wash of my left hand (I call my left hand "Handsome Hand"), and a student busily toiling his easel (also done with ink and wash). All four are from life. I was going through some of my drawing files and thought these might amuse you. You are amused, I hope??

Rough to finished

This is a commission I have from a Catholic church (I'm a pagan, hard drinking, foul-mouthed artist by the way). The nun started out cruder than this, and at this stage, I still have a lot of work to do with color variations and values. One starts rough and ends at whatever refined stage is appropriate to one's style. The priest is finished and reflects my loose style of painting. The medium used for both paintings is acrylic painted on stretched canvas. You can see in the priest photo the small black and white reference photo I had to work with. Sometimes I think it is better NOT to work from a color ref. photo so that you must exert your own personal color scheme . . . good practice! These canvases are 18 by 24 inches in size.