but there are upsides. paintbrushes can now be cleaned with water instead of turpentine, and the lack of authentic smell also means a lack of the bad-for-my-brain chemicals. this is also a benefit for the cat and the husband who often accompany me in the studio.

my favourite feature is the unbelievably fast dry time. there’s no next-day stickiness, even with sap green and yellow ochre. most of it is even dry enough to work on top of within several hours, and i’m finishing smaller paintings in record time. i have yet to take on any large scale pieces with the acrylics, but imagine that will be the ultimate test. until then, i’m hanging onto my gamblin oils, just in case.

mural painting is, of course, very different from the paintings on canvas i typically do, and i often found myself sore in the mornings from the previous day’s contortions. aside from the difference in scale and mobility, i worked in acrylic housepaint, a much faster drying medium than the oil paints i’m used to.

as far as being finished, i doubt the mural is. i envision myself revising and adding creatures over time, aiming for that ever-elusive perfection.

lastly, i was kind enough to document my work throughout the process, so enjoy the timelapse video:

ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present the amazing work of aron wiesenfeld.

besides the familiar subject matter, i also find myself intrigued by his use of light, particularly in the charcoal pieces. it’s a beautiful style mix reminiscent of illustrator chris van allsburg and painter john currin.

after today’s productive time in the studio, i’ve performed the first site update since its launch late thursday evening, adding new in-progress images to the twelve paintings of the midnight in the garden series.

working smaller allowed me to get caught up in the details of painting, but my new, larger canvases are forcing me back into the habit of being a big picture painter. sure, the eyes still get more attention in the early stages than my art school teachers would approve of, but i’m following my training with a combination of sketchbook planning and loose underpaintings. thus, no part of the painting is left unplanned, though all is loose enough to allow for the natural evolution of artmaking.

so enjoy a first look at the paintings of the “midnight in the garden” series.

the first eight paintings were done without any conceptual aim or purpose. technically, i was going to push myself into new territory. the scale of the pieces was dramatically smaller than anything i had previously done, though not quite as small as the princess tinies, which were also beginning at the time of this series. i was forced into a discomfort zone i’ve known since my introduction to painting class; i was forced to paint in a scale that was nowhere near life-sized.

i began without the series in mind. i perused the pages of vogue, dog-earring images with models worthy of being painted. the first several paintings were far less traditional than usual, and instead bordered on illustrative. i took this a step further, destroying the illusion of space with pattern. in several of the early pieces, the pattern overwhelmed the figures, making them feel very much unlike the rest of my paintings.

then came the move to seattle. i let the paint dry, cleaned up the brushes, and discovered a trend amongst the paintings, so titled the series along with the individual pieces accordingly. “the treehouse club”, subtitled “less than admirable characters”, depicts villains and less-than-noble protagonists as females [though several, like “holofernes” and “the caterpillar”, are male in stories].

without necessarily planning to continue the series, i began painting on a new set of canvases. i still had no goal in mind, except to learn something about how and why i paint. so i painted, and the seattle females had quite a bit in common with the last of the saint louis females. so they joined the series, and found appropriate names - “baba yaga”, “goldilocks” and “rapunzel”.

the moral of this series is obvious as i wrap up: creating pretty things is not so much of a challenge when the conceptual is an afterthought. while it is important to just paint, to practice regardless of a specific goal, ultimately i don’t want the audience to view a piece or a series and leave thinking only “that’s pretty.” so as i move on towards my next set of paintings, “midnight in the garden”, i’m giving myself more time to research and gather source material, to work in my sketchbook, and even to sketch more on the canvases themselves. “the treehouse club” remains precious, but more for the process of learning than the product.

my most recent executions have been smaller than usual, the smallest being the princess tinies, and the larger being a less thematic than usual series of female figures. but as much as i enjoy a finished piece, the goal is not in the product. it’s in the learning, and sometimes there’s no better way to rediscover inspiration than ditching all thoughts of the office for an evening.

siren

holofernes