The Vampire Of San Marco - stage 4

 I have kind of overpainted the buildings across the water as I want them to be dark and semi-silhouetted but will have a lot of fog/mist over them soon but I still want some of this detail to be there. Bear with me...

Solo Show

 My solo show "Home Land" opens today at the Abend Gallery, Denver CO comprising 15 symbolic landscape paintings in panoramic format all oil on canvas. All can be seen on previous posts over the past year in this blog.

The Vampire Of San Marco -stage 3

 After giving most of the painting a desaturated blue/green wash I painted the first colour pass on the sky. As the painting is based around a blue/green - red/orange colour complementary I might put in a touch of lemon into the lighter area of the sky - decision will be made over tomorrow's breakfast coffee.

Colours used so far: Phthalocyanine Blue, Phthalocyanine Green, Dioxazine Purple, Burnt Sienna, Permanent Orange and Warm White.

The Vampire Of San Marco - stage 2

 Finished the tonal underpainting ready for a desaturated blue/green wash tomorrow and make a start on the sky. The plan is that the brightest parts of the painting are the moon and the lights in his eyes with everything else fairly dark and foggy so that it looks like as the viewer walks along the canalside pathway a Nosferatu vampire suddenly emerges from a narrow alleyway. I want it be fairly scary... and kind of beautiful as after all it is Venice....

The Vampire Of San Marco - stage 1

 I now have a chance to get some paintings done to take to IX later in the year (if I am able to get them to the USA now tariffs are complicating things) and thought I would paint another in my occasional series of "Vampires Of Venice". I must explain that I find Venice quite a mysterious place particularly at night and on foggy days and do not associate it with romance! I love walking around it at night and due to the age of the city it occurred to me some years ago that the whole place could be inhabited by vampires who each have a certain campo or canal etc that they haunt looking for unsuspecting tourists like me to empty of blood...

This is set in the sestiere of San Marco on the side of the Grand Canal looking towards the Salute - in fact this is impossible as there are no walkways on the side of the Grand Canal in this section of San Marco but hey it's Fantasy right?!

This is halfway through the initial tonal underpainting and didn't have time today to get it all in so I will finish it tomorrow. It uses my usual mix of Burnt Sienna and Dioxazine Purple thinned with Liquin and applied with a rag and brush.

Oil on linen 22" x 16".

Lunar Triad

 Now that I have finished the series for my upcoming solo show at the Abend Gallery I thought that I would get on with some paintings to take to IX in October and fancied doing another Star Wars Tatooine panorama. Luckily I was doing some research and discovered that it it has three moons in addition to the two suns so that was a perfect theme for this painting. It is quite evident here that it is not much of a jump for me to go from an Orientalist desert scene with a mosque and minarets to a Tatooine Science Fiction landscape - the building style is Futuristic Mosque just as the architecture in the movies is a version of Islamic North Africa where they were filmed. The deceptively simple sky took a long while to paint as it is made up of glazes which I kept adding to until I was happy with the light.

Oil on canvas 31 1/2' x 12".

There is a step-by-step progress through this painting in previous posts on this blog.

 

Lunar Triad - stage 9

 Painted in the foreground rocks at left and made a start on the buildings/space port ready to hopefully finish tomorrow. Glad I've managed to get some variation of colour in the landscape.