This is one of the rare instances where I painted from one of my photographs. The scene is from the river district in Suzhou, China. It was 2010 when I took the reference photo for this painting from a boat in a canal. I painted the scene the same year, but only recently (2018) added color.The framing with the window is one of my favorite effects.  I did a series of windows a few years back, which were donated to charity, but I forgot to photograph them. There’s a good chance I’ll create another version of it on a large canvas.

This painting of Olga, a model from Russia, has a looser play on the large square stencils I’ve been using.  The messiness, which is part of the process, didn’t overwhelm the painting (It could have).  I found the dark blues over black to be quite satisfying from a color balance perspective. It also, unintentionally, gave the painting the effect of a person looking out a window with city lights reflected on the glass.  There is also a bit of motion as the linear continuity takes the viewer in a spiral, but not the 1.618 the masters sought after.  Well, I suppose you can do a little creative accounting to arrive at such a curve.

Boilerplate mumbojumbo:

Almost all the paintings on this site are for sale. Currently, I’m working a small‘preliminary’ paintings that I will eventually show to my art dealer and then decide on what would translate well to large canvases. If you’re interested in collecting my work, please contact me or Glenn Aber, owner of Ai Bo Gallery.  Please see contact page.

Ah! Sunflower
William Blake, 1757 – 1827

Ah! sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done;

Where the youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves and aspire;
Where my sunflower wishes to go.

After Emma Gonzalez’s teacher delivered my painting to her, she was kind enough to get her picture taken with it.  With her permission, I posted it on social media and soon discovered that there were thousands of others that felt the same way as I did, namely that Emma is a hero.

Click here to download a print.