8 Reasons To Enjoy Painting Portraits

When I was in art school (I went to Mount Allison University, in New Brunswick) I painted a lot of industrial subject matter and things that were dark, and used lots of browns and greys in my work.

During one of my painting critiques in second...or third year, I cant remember exactly which, I had a classmate remark that I need to use more colour. At the same time, our painting professor was encouraging us to make a painting a week. He said we had to consistently deliver, and to push ourselves. 

I got into a habit of working quickly with colour and doing colour sketches on cardboard. I shifted that into a project where I would paint 50 portraits of people I knew in 50 days..so that I would (hopefully) begin to work very quickly and looser with my paint applications.

I painted a lot of my friends in this time. I took a lot of photos and worked from those as reference. I like this because each one has a story behind it. More stuff at www.jonshawpaintings.com

This is my friend Mike. We used to work together at the Keg restaurant in St.Catharines where I grew up. One time we came home from the bar to crash at my house, but my parents have really loud dogs so instead of risking waking them up he crashed in the back seat of my old car. My dad asked in the morning if I knew that there was a person in the back of my car. It was an odd talk because it was 7am and I was really hungover.

My buddy Hal. This friend is an exceptional artist and we used to jam on drawing back home all the time. He backpacked south through South America and is one of the more travelled, interesting artist friends I know. 

I went to art school with my friend Jessie. She always had this amazing ability to paint bright, vibrant works with minimal brushwork. I always envied her marks and how she could confidently build up colour areas with variety and geometry of paint. It was so cool to watch.

This is a self portrait I did. I really like the angle of this. I won't talk much about myself, as there is plenty of that on this blog already!

This is my friend Jono, who I still jam with here in Vancouver. I have painted him more than anybody else, maybe 5 or 6 times. One time I painted a 4' x 4' picture of him playing his bass with his tongue hanging out. He loved it and put it in his apartment. His girlfriend disagreed.

This is my friend Lynn who graduated a year before me and now runs a gallery and artist-run-centre in Lunenburg called the Power House. Our friendship began out of a mutual interest in metal sculpture and time spent in the metal shop, which is also what explains my initial painting direction before adding colour. Lynn and I have been known to use grinders and drink coffee at the same time.

My old roommate Neil. What a fellow. I remember painting this piece when I was watching Snakes on a Plane at my old house. I also remember this one flowed so well and came together so quickly. Must have been from the quality of that movie in the background! The first time I met Neil was when I was unpacking my bag upon arrival in first year at our residence room. His parents were also there. The first thing that happened was my big glass bong fell out of my bag onto the floor and we all stopped and looked at it. That was awkward.

This is my friend Sarah. She was really into theatre and also modelled for some of our life drawing classes. It was always awesome when a creative person modelled because they didn't act weird about it, and when you saw them around campus things wouldn't seem strange. Sarah's a great actor and cool gal.

At some point with my new working styles I will definitely go back and make more figurative work. It's just a matter of time now! You can scope whats currently new at www.jonshawpaintings.com

My Discombobulated Obsession with Turkey Vultures

Visit my site, www.jonshawpaintings.com, to see other animals that I've obsessively painted!

As an artist, I inevitably develop particular visuals and recurring images in my work. This is referred to as a "visual language", and many creative people have it. For visual artists, this can be certain subjects that pop up time and time again, and particular brush marks and line styles. 

I got really into the visuals of turkey vultures (aka Cathartes Aura). These creatures are just so weird. They have scraggly skin, weird bumps, holes through their heads (ie nostrils) and freaky pointed beaks. They are bald and look like death. I was told by a friend that they can even projectile-vomit at other creatures. How cool is that! For me, this of course meant I got to focus on all the fun, intricate lines when drawing. 

For this particular painting, I worked on a cool horizontal composition. The canvas is 2' x 4', a size orientation I hadn't worked with before. There were some compositional questions to be ironed out before any painting started, so I worked with some thumbnail sketches and played around with paper cut outs to establish the look I wanted. Since I worked from several source images, I found this to be quite necessary so that nothing looked amis.

This image became somewhat of a travelling icon of my work for a little bit after I made this painting. First, the actual canvas itself has been featured in two shows. One at last years State of the Art show in Whistler, and most recently in a group exhibition at my old haunt, the Gam Gallery, in Vancouver. This picture below is right when I arrived in Whistler to set up my work in my space. What you can see just to the right is my snowboard. As soon as these works were hung I was on the slopes :)

Once I realized I loved the image of the vultures, I used it for other displays. I was invited to participate in a group print show in Vancouver called Design 24. We each created a single image that was hand screened into limited editions. 

I created a black and white profile sketch with just ink pens, scanned it, and vectorized it in Illustrator so that it could be used at any size. The original drawing was actually the same size as the final printed one..although tracing the image meant that all the lines would be 100% black. This is the final design once digitized:

Upon finishing this print, I decided to try putting the design on a t-shirt. I have a friend named Trevor (he runs a great biz called Evon Aves Apparel) who is a talented artist and printer himself, who helped me do my first run of shirts. I sold a number of them, still have a few left on my shop (shop.jonshawpaintings.com) but ultimately decided to limit their creation out of effort and needing to order large up-front stocks. I still really like what happened with their design though, and I keep one around for myself to sport from time to time (goes great with a blazer jacket :)

In the end this "Travelling of the Vulture Heads" seems to represent how I can obsessively dig into something that I find so cool and work with it in different ways to explore the look. Guess thats what us artists need to do to be satisfied! haha.

www.jonshawpaintings.com

Top Reasons Why It's So Cool To Paint A Dumpster

www.jonshawpaintings.com

The alleys in downtown Vancouver are quite notoriously beautiful and interesting. They have all kinds of cool character to them, and the collection of graffiti, colour, form, bricks, wires and exposed metal is so intriguing.

One of the subjects I've taken a keen interest in painting lately are dumpsters. To me, these objects are big behemoths of hidden necessity. Think about it - we use them, but we hide them away from sight and let others deal with the mess. They serve a very functional role in our urban lives, and at the same time they just kind of sit there and rust, get banged around by big vehicles and filled with junk.

As I continue to explore the city, and capture images of what I find to be special, I get more and more excited about the means to generate a piece of art.

I've always had a love of complexities when it comes to subject matter and composition. For example, when I was younger in high school art class, I always drew well rendered still-life compositions of many complicated objects. I would arrange them in a cool way, light them, and sit and draw them for hours. Single objects usually didn't thrill me too much, but when I started having items and objects interacting with each other, things became more interesting!

With dumpsters that have rust, texture, graffiti, stickers, and other crap built up on their surfaces, I have an opportunity to express my joy of creating a larger composition out of so many little bits. I get to take liberties and composite more or less of these elements as I see fit for this particular piece. I add more bits to build up certain areas and break up the visual plane, which makes the image more interesting to our eyes and minds.

My approach to this piece was a bit experimental. There were some new elements I added and explored. I find that when I'm making a series of work, there is a slow evolution within the overall body of work, while maintaining the same look and feel that holds the overall series together. For example, in this work, I started the work out of a single, very wide brush mark of a rusty red-orange. As the work progressed I printed a ring shape on top with the back of an old yogurt container.

I got quite liberal with some of the brush marks in this piece as well. I find sometimes as I'm making these works I just get really spontaneous, exciting urges to quickly drag some heavy paint through an area, uninhibited. This gives the work such a sense of immediate energy and spontaneity that contrasts the tight ink lines so well.

In this instance, this purple swiggle represents the mood I was in that evening at the studio. I remember being so high on endorphins (happens when I'm painting and full of beans) and I was listening to really loud Led Zeppelin. The studio was empty, and I made these two marks so quickly and without thinking, and felt so good about that decision right after.

That is something I often tell people about my work - I "make a mess" with the immediacy of paint, then "clean it up" with the ink lines..and selectively decide which areas get really cleaned up, and which remain spontaneous and loose.

Final work and more viewable at www.jonshawpaintings.com

The Cool Result of Combining My Drawings and Animation

I made a 30 second video for a radio commercial a little while back. The radio station I made it for is called The Peak, and they are a rock station here in Vancouver. This is the finished video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcKTv1xO8j8

The contest involved making an ad in any medium. I noticed I was one of the only entrants to animate. I didn't win anything, but at least I made a cool video.

For me, making this video was awesome because it allowed me to deal with two themes that are prevalent in my paintings now - technology (mostly music in this instance) and the city - specifically Vancouver. 

Each of the assets was handdrawn, scanned, then turned into vector art via illustrator. I had a lot of fun making the original drawings, as they deal heavily with the black line work I enjoy working with. Since I work as a web and graphic designer, I enjoy using the Adobe suite and therefore making my drawings digital is fun. 

When I look back at this piece, it makes me want to do a few things. It makes me want to work with this look of solid colour and black and white drawings on top. Perhaps this will become a painting experiment soon! It also makes me want to make some more cool animation, although I don't see that happening as quickly as the painting. The other thing this makes me want to do is to make very busy, clustered art works on wood panel. Again, this might just pop up in the coming months! I love to experiment.

The look of the work is pretty branded - the blue colour choice was picked from the radio station's logo - this WAS an exercise in branding, afterall!

Here's the link to the final piece on youtube: The compression is a bit down because its YouTube, but the original is quite sharp! (Just as the photos are above - they are screen caps from the actual animation). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcKTv1xO8j8

The Sun Tower

See the work in my gallery: www.jonshawpaintings.com

One of my favourite works from the last couple of months of work has been the painting I made of the Sun Tower, a very old and super cool building in downtown Vancouver.

The building is on the edge of Chinatown, the Downtown East Side, Gastown and upper-scale downtown. It's in this weird melting-pot area that has beautiful old buildings, drugs, hipsters and exercise divas.

This painting is titled "Nine-To-Five". I work as a graphic/web designer during the days and the company I work for (MacLaren McCann) is located in the Sun Tower. This building houses a lot of creative and marketing companies.

The overall design of the building is what struck me to want to paint it, and that awesome coloured roof. I heard a story that the roof was painted that colour because the owners wanted it to look expensive, but since it isn't actually made out of copper, it wouldn't oxidize like the other cool buildings of the day.

The design elements are great. There is a common use of the these circular elements (I'm not sure the exact term for them) which are very organic, floral, ounded and highly decorative. Recreating them in this painting was a very enjoyable experience.

My colour palette for this piece is pretty representative of the actual colours. I always take liberties with expanding the colours at least a bit, so as to create an interesting visual. For this work I definitely wanted to maintain the look of the roof and masonry so that people would recognize it as the Sun Tower. Often I change the colours a lot, but here I've maintained pretty closely.

The building has a really cool view. One of the things I've discovered by working here is that you can get onto the roof, and then scale up the side of the tower via the fire escape (its one of those old zig-zag metal staircases). There's a pretty excellent view at the top.

When I was up close I got a very cool view of these details on the roof. Being so close to them on our adventure was awesome, as the little details aren't noticable from the street!

Overall this has proven to be one of my more popular pieces and I'm very proud of it. It looks great on wood panel and is currently hanging in a show called "City:Life" at the Pendulum Gallery in downtown Vancouver.

Enumerative Painting Process

I made this new painting rather quickly. Part of that was because I was really excited about the process, but the other part was because my show was quickly approaching and I wanted to get ONE MORE piece done :)

This piece is called "Enumerative", which relates to the concept of counting and calculating and tracking numerically.

The subject is a city parking meter. The cool thing about working with this is that it has neat little additions to work with - stickers that people have placed on the post, brand logos for Visa/Mastercard, and a Starbucks cup sitting on top (I really like adding these little pieces of urban trash or "remnants").

The process of this piece is what's most exciting for me. I slightly altered how I create these works. Often I work from photographs (some sourced online, some shot myself) and then I prepare the panel drawing first. In this instance, I altered that starting point. I did a small sketch of the image I wanted to work from with simple pen. The way I sketch is quite loose and pretty representative, although I usually have a minor level of play with the line work.

After I sketched it, I projected that sketch large onto the prepared wood panel. This is interesting, because there are lots of subtle lines that go unnoticed and are part of the subconscious process of drawing. When they are projected, however, they are larger, more prominent, and can be worked into the new image in a more interesting way!

The line quality changes at such a large scale. It becomes very organic, and I trace over a lot of them (some I omit too) and they become very different. They become large structure components and the way that the image re-builds itself is quite layered, organic, surreal and distorted. It still maintains a particular level of representation too, however.

What I find, when I compare the ink drawing (before I paint over top of it) to previous ones, is that this one is more exciting visually. It has these cool components that only became a part of the work via the particular process I chose to produce the work.

When it's time to paint the rest of the work, I approached it the same as my other works. I paint in different ways - some broad, single brush marks to start and establish cool shapes and colour areas. Upon drying, I will dump liquid paint in pools on various parts of the work, and let it dry flat (with a heater underneath) so that the pooling creates a different visual look then brushmarks.

I stencil heavy acrylic paint through perforated paper to create the dotted, half-tone effect that is present in most of my works.

I then render certain areas with a higher degree of shadow and highlights. I really enjoy painting lighter areas with transparent white - lots of painters only use white as thick top-layers, although I really enjoy what happens when I fill areas in with white that is see-through and has visible brushmarks.

I usually finish my works with some light drops of colour over certain light areas to break up the highlights. This gives another layer and cool look to the piece..sometimes I will blot it dry with a towel when it is semi-dry, which leaves a cool "ring" effect.

My final step is to re-ink a lot of the black areas, which have become a bit matted from the paint over top of them. This step is favourable and fun because its senseless linework that is often completed with the company of a fine bottle of wobbly-pop.

I sign, document, varnish and wire my pieces at the end.

Lonely Only

This is an old seafood cafe on Hastings Street in Vancouver. The Only, as it is/was called, was a staple destination for decades. It was shut down over allegations of drug trafficking from the owners. Now, the sign stands idle, as a monument to the shifting look of the Downtown East Side and a reminder of the glory days of the infamous and decorative neon signs that still light up certain parts of Vancouver, but decay and rot in others.

As time goes on and I prepare many new pieces in my urban/city series, I feel as though I'm taking more of a critical/careful look at my connection to the places and images I'm working with. I like that this sign was a marker on my walk to the old studio, so I have that personal connection.