Florida Sentinels

New shots of recent paintings. This is a plein air painting, 24" x 36", that I schlepped  a mile out to where the big ancient trees live at Corkscrew. This place is epic- the scale is staggering , the energy is charged- a must see or to paint.

Phthalo Blue and Yellow Range Drawdowns

Illustrated here are draw-downs of Phthalo Blue and the full range of the Cadmium yellows.

They are Cadmium Lemon (Utrecht), Cadmium Yellow Pale(Winsor Newton) , Cadmium Yellow Medium (Utrecht), and Cadmium Yellow Deep ( Winsor Newton)

Of these yellows, Emile Gruppe used the Cadmium Lemon and the Cadmium Yellow Deep.

It is apparent that Viridian equivilancies and Phthalo green shades are fully represented,

and the foreground earth richness which having Raw Sienna on your palette provides is equaled and surpassed by the Cad Yellow dark/Phthalo mixture- an almost Deep Green Umber color..

Figure Drawing Sketch Class

Recent figure drawings executed over the last few weeks.

Some of these were created in my Artistic Anatomy drawing class that is held every Thursday afternoon at 3:00  at the Barrett Art Center in Poughkeepsie. A few of these were created at the weekly figure sketch class held every Tuesday and Thursday night at 7:30PM at Unison Arts in New Paltz, NY. And a few others were created at my Artistic Anatomy class at the Woodstock School of Art held every Tuesday afternoon at 1:00.

More Florida Oil Paintings

I love the Florida landscape. I lived for a short time in Cocoa Beach and was instantly smitten by the light and landscape. The intense cloud formations are something to be marveled at.

Corkscrew Sentinels

Florida Verdure

Florida Palmettos

Everglades City Sunset
to purchase a beautiful framed print of any of these paintings or if you are interested in purchasing the original painting, visit my store here:

Florida Oil Paintings

Here's a selection of florida oil paintings that I painted in and around areas of southwest florida.

From a home base in Naples, I venture out with my paintbox and easel  to Everglades City, Corkscrew Swamp, Collier Seminole State Park,, Cayo Costa, Chokoloskee, Pine Island, and anywhere I can find some little bit of unspoiled Florida.

Florida Pines
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Florida Moonrise

Tamiami Trail

Thunderheads over the Everglades

Southwest Florida Palmettos

In the Everglades

The Abandoned Boat

Cayo Costa

Florida Watercolor Paintings

 One in a series of Florida watercolor paintings. This one is on  140 lb. Arches which, as you can see, buckles under sopping sky  washes.

South Florida Moonrise

For more scenes of Southwest Florida,see my gallery of:

Florida Oil Paintings

Unison Drawing Intensive

Here are a few drawings from the Figure Drawing Intensive at Unison Arts in New Paltz this Saturday....

October Oil Studies

A few oil sketches completed over the last few weeks of October

Emile Gruppe's Palette

Here's one of Emile Gruppe's original palettes. I conduct a plein air class to Rockport and Gloucester every year (Gunderson's Plein Air Rockport Workshop) and we always stop by Robert Gruppe's studio in Rocky neck to visit- a kind of a plein air artist's pilgramage of sorts. Robert is Emile's son and continues the Gruppe legacy in the studio that was his father's, replete with his and Emile's work. The studio on Rocky Neck has that special ambiance that is an inspiration to the plein air artist and is a must see for any artist visiting the area.. Jennifer Gruppe( Bob's wife) was kind enough to let me photograph Emile's palette which Emile had subsequently turned into a clock. Here one can see how the palette is organized- Cadmium Lemon Yellow at 2:00 and counterclockwise through Cadmium Yellow Deep, Cadmium Orange, Cadmium Red Deep, Rose Madder Deep, Ultramarine Blue, Zinc White ( at 6:00), and Pthalo Blue at 5:00. Also notice that Gruppe inserts Phthalo blue again next to the Cad Lemon Yellow at roughly 1:00 to facilitate the making of cool spring greens and the emulation of a high cool blue greens with a touch of white.

Emile Guppe's palette was idealy chosen to enable the swift color mixing required by his on site plein-aire technique.These colors gave him the highest vibrational chroma avaiable in pigment so as to facilatate his technique of mixing optical grays with complimentaries. Working rather large,( his canvases averqge a standard 18" x 24"), and using a relatively small palette necessitated by his traveling paint box gear, much color mixing was done right on the canvas as he calibrated value and chroma through a approximated cancelling technique. Each color has what is known as an antogonist, i.e., a symmetrical equivalent complimentary across the axis of the color wheel which cancels out the cromatic intensity and/ or value of the color, Gruppe could mentally gauge the antagonist of a chosen color area on his canvas and then"cancel out" the color to the degree of intensity and value he wanted simply by mixing that color into the color already on his canvas. This allowed him to mix "on the canvas" rather than take up valuable real estate on his palette usually reserved for tint mixtures( a color mixed with white) which could easily be contaminated by his powerful dark mixtures.

A list of Gruppé's colors from the book Gruppé on Painting. They are as follows:

Cadmium Lemon Yellow

Cadmium Yellow Deep

Cadmium Orange (added to the palette for convenience)

Cadmium Red Deep

Ultramarine Blue

Phthalo Blue

Rose Madder Deep

Zinc White

Each of the colors on his palette has only two of the three primaries.

Ultramarine Blue has red and blue

Phthalo Blue has red and blue

Cadmium red deep has red and yellow

Rose Madder has red and blue

Cadmium Lemon Yellow has yellow and blue

Cadmium Yellow Deep has red and yellow

Therefore, the purest green you can mix with this palette is Phthalo Blue and Cad. Lemon Yellow, because it has no red, which is the complement of green and would gray (the mixture) down. If I don't want my green to be that pure I use the Ultramarine or the Cadmium Yellow which have a little bit of red, and the color is not quite so pure.

In Gruppe's own words from Gruppe on Color with Charles Movalli, Watson-Guptill 1979:

On the Purity of Color:

"I also paint with pure colors. That means that each of the colors on my palette has only two of the three primaries in it. ( All the three primaries together in the same color would gray it.) Cadmium red deep, for example, has red and yellow, while rose madder has red and blue. Lemon yellow has a touch of blue- that;s why it looks greenish. Cadmium yellow deep has red in it and it tends a bit toward orange. Ultramarine blue has blue and red in it; phthalo blue has blue and yellow. We’ve already noticed the presence of all three primaries in a mix will gray the color. In order to fully understand how clean and pure my colors are, we’ve only to compare them to pigments in which all three primaries are thoroughly mixed; namely the ochres, siennas, umbers, and black. Such colors are always heavy and lifeless."

Emile Gruppe Studio

From my Septembers 2012  Cape Ann Plein Air class ... we visited the Gruppe studio on Rocky Neck.
Here, the gracious Jennifer Gruppe reveled the class with stories of Emile and her husband Robert- the legacy of the Gruppe painting family.It's quite thrilling to see the work and studio of Emile Gruppe, a legend of the Cape Ann School , and then to realize that it's  Robert Gruppe's paintings that are drawing you in. They say real genius emerges in the third generation painter and this is confirmation of this.The mastery of color and bravura technique evokes the work of Sorolla.

Watercolor Impressions

A few watercolors ....using high intensity Hydrus liquid watercolors along with my regular palette of tubed colors, I entered these two wc's in the October 2012 Garrison Art Centers, artist's on location event.

Planes of the Head 6

Some more refinement... working toward the back of the head now and the ears.

Planes of the Head session 4

A little more planar work,,, inserting polygonal modifiers with increasing frequency where it needs the detail, staying with simple planes where most effective.

The Larynx

Today's ecorche class was sculpting and visualizing the volume of the larynx- often neglected in the drawing of the neck.

From Wikipedia:
Sound is generated in the larynx, and that is where pitch and volume are manipulated. The strength of expiration from the lungs also contributes to loudness.^[4]
Fine manipulation of the larynx is used to generate a source sound with a particular fundamental frequency, or pitch. This source sound is altered as it travels through the vocal tract, configured differently based on the position of the tongue, lips, mouth, and pharynx. The process of altering a source sound as it passes through the filter of the vocal tract creates the many different vowel and consonant sounds of the world's languages as well as tone, certain realizations of stress and other types of linguistic prosody. The larynx also has a similar function as the lungs in creating pressure differences required for sound production; a constricted larynx can be raised or lowered affecting the volume of the oral cavity as necessary in glottalic consonants.
The vocal folds can be held close together (by adducting the arytenoid cartilages), so that they vibrate (see phonation). The muscles attached to the arytenoid cartilages control the degree of opening. Vocal fold length and tension can be controlled by rocking the thyroid cartilage forward and backward on the cricoid cartilage (either directly by contracting the cricothyroids or indirectly by changing the vertical position of the larynx), by manipulating the tension of the muscles within the vocal folds, and by moving the arytenoids forward or backward. This causes the pitch produced during phonation to rise or fall. In most males the vocal folds are longer and with a greater mass, producing a deeper pitch.
The vocal apparatus consists of two pairs of mucosal folds. These folds are false vocal folds (vestibular folds) and true vocal folds (folds). The false vocal folds are covered by respiratory epithelium, while the true vocal folds are covered by stratified squamous epithelium. The false vocal folds are not responsible for sound production, but rather for resonance. The exceptions to this are found in Tibetan Chant and Kargyraa, a style of Tuvan throat singing. Both make use of the false vocal folds to create an undertone. These false vocal folds do not contain muscle, while the true vocal folds do have skeletal muscle.
During swallowing, the backward motion of the tongue forces the epiglottis over the glottis' opening to prevent swallowed material from entering the larynx which leads to the lungs; the larynx is also pulled upwards to assist this process. Stimulation of the larynx by ingested matter produces a strong cough reflex to protect the lungs.

Artistic Anatomy Drawings

Here's a few demo drawings from the Artistic Anatomy class at the Woodstock School of Art
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Fragment of a Queen's lips

This is another fav.... this amazing broken fragment has a power that can only be classified as sublime.

Sleeping Eros

One of my favorites... the  bronze "Sleeping Eros" in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection.