Born of Fire by Jake Beckman

This week­end, now nearly over is the big annual down­town Phoenix Art Show called Art Detour now in its 22 year.  The event kicks off with First Fri­days, which has become the tail wag­ging the dog so to speak.  Although Art Detour was the big event for many years, the monthly party called First Fri­day receives a lot more atten­dance on the whole these days. I had planned to go to First Fri­day but just couldn’t make myself join the mad­house that event has become. It really doesn’t seem to be about art, but more about the party, which is fine — but not nec­es­sar­ily some­thing I auto­mat­i­cally think is a great idea on any given day.  But I still felt like I had to make it down­town at least once to see the peo­ple who rou­tinely sup­port me at the local art shows I do.  So I force myself to be a social ani­mal and kicked myself out of my studio.

It was good to inter­sect with sev­eral peo­ple I had not seen in a while, but while the stu­dios were open I think many artists/owners were absent & recu­per­at­ing from the night before.  It was a quiet day to be about, but it was a clear-blue-sky brag­ging weather day in Phoenix AZ.   Gor­geous, absolutely gor­geous.  So, I didn’t just go to the stu­dios but did a gen­eral walk­a­bout in the down­town Phoenix area to inves­ti­gate how the Con­ven­tion Cen­ter remodel went, to see how the new ASU down­town cam­pus came together and the over­all progress of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion.  It appears gen­tri­fi­ca­tion was well under­way but the reces­sion has def­i­nitely halted things for now.  As for the art stu­dios, some that were open before are closed now, some have changed hands, some have moved, and maybe there are a few new kids on the block as well.  The Art Detour Head Quar­ters was listed at the Phoenix Cen­ter for the Arts so I was expect­ing a pretty decent dis­play there; in the old days it had a sam­ple of art from all the par­tic­i­pat­ing gal­leries. Unfor­tu­nately this year it was lit­er­ally a trol­ley stop with a few brochures — no art that I could see.  My over­all impres­sion of Art Detour on Sat­ur­day was under­whelmed. Any­way I took lots of pic­tures and edited them when I got home so you can check them out here if you like.

In the last few min­utes I have receive a cou­ple of tweets regard­ing this final day of Art Detour 22 1) Bring an Umbrella and 2) Greg Esser is pro­mot­ing his new ven­ture at West­wind Stu­dios, 16th Street and Cypress. I didn’t make it over to West­wind yes­ter­day; I wish Greg all the best.

So onto new art. While I was work­ing on 2nd Story Job, which will be posted next, I did not have a sec­ond paint­ing to par­al­lel process in mind.  I got a piece of water color paper out, gesso-ed it on both sides then thought­fully dripped, drooled and spat­tered paint on it while I waited for lay­ers of paint to dry on 2nd Story Job.

As 2nd Story Job neared com­ple­tion the abstract aux­il­iary work looked like this.

Born of Fire under­paint­ing (by Jake Beckman)

The color gamut of this pic­ture appears a lit­tle skewed toward the blue, and the range of the photo does not do the under-painting/background jus­tice, but I think you can get an idea of how it looked.

I have been on a major bird kick for years and I often default to some­thing related to that — in this case a bird-like dragon.  It took me a few min­utes to sketch the crit­ter out on to my can­vas.    I did a glaze of man­ganese blue to fill in the bird-like dragon’s body for no other rea­son than I had a big glob of it on my wet pal­let left over from pre­vi­ous Social Media Bird paint­ings and I intended to make the dragon dark.   I did not antic­i­pate I would love the effect of the under-painting show­ing through, but I did.   I very care­fully applied glazes of black to the ser­pent to define its struc­ture while retain­ing as much of the trans­parency as was possible.

Detail of Born of Fire by Jake Beck­man show­ing the under­paint­ing revealed through the glaze

Born of Fire, by Jake Beck­man, A dragon gazes sky­ward, obliv­i­ous to the fiery inferno that sur­rounds it.

So this results from me not hav­ing a plan when I start paint­ing. What do you think?

Update: Details about Born of Fire, size etc., can be found on its art page at AKAJake.com

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.