Creative Cogitation

I am often asked about my fram­ing options-I don’t offer a whole heck of a lot-I usu­ally frame with a white or off-white mat in a nar­row black cor­po­rate style frame. If the work doesn’t need a mat I usu­ally frame with a sim­ple wooden frame hav­ing no fancy fil­lets, coves or bevels.

Peo­ple ask why I don’t frame my very col­or­ful images in black, “After all, the color black makes the col­ors in the paint­ing really pop!” Black is a color and it is an emo­tion­ally charged color at that. I don’t want peo­ple look­ing at my art say­ing “Wow, look at that art in that black mat.” Or “Wow look at that art in that fancy frame.” Peo­ple notice a black mat, a wide black frame or an exces­sively gaudy frame.

Vari­a­tion of mat and frame show­ing how a white mat and a sim­ple frame sets of the art more neu­trally than a black mat & fancy frame do.

I want my art to be the cen­ter of atten­tion. I don’t want peo­ple pay­ing too much atten­tion to the color of the mat and the frame; these things are a vehi­cle for get­ting the paint­ing on the wall and set­ting it off appro­pri­ately, with­out become the star of the show. Mats and frames should be effec­tive, unob­tru­sive, and hope­fully not clash with the fur­ni­ture or the art­work. In my opin­ion the eas­i­est way to accom­plish this mis­sion is with the sim­plest dis­play with the least emo­tion­ally charged col­ors and styles pos­si­ble. I accom­plish this mis­sion with a white mat and and sim­ple frame.

And that is why I don’t paint my art black with a black mat and or fancy frame.  I have lots of art in nice neu­tral frams for sale at my web­site, I hope you will check it out.

Yours in Art

Jake, Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The artist has fed­er­ally copy­righted all the art­work in this blog. The artist retains all repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights. You may not copy, re-distribute, imi­tate, derive OR oth­er­wise use these images in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

I am gen­er­ally paint things tight.  Every brush stroke and color has a pre­de­ter­mined place to land. I don’t usu­ally paint out­side the lines.  I have been work­ing on becom­ing more painterly, more expres­sion­ist.  One  stretch in this direc­tion is paint­ing abstrac­tions, but the other is just paint­ing a lit­tle looser.

My lat­est foray into expand­ing my painterly aspects includes the fol­low­ing 2 works.  First up, Mak­ing a Splash!

Mak­ing a Splash! Run­ning white horse paint­ing by AZ expres­sion­ist artist Jake Beckman

This paint­ing actu­ally started off as an abstract in gray and blue.  As I splat­tered paint on the paper I was reminded of island pony round ups in var­i­ous places in the world.  Although I have not painted a horse in quite some­time the sub­ject is quite famil­iar to me.  One pony was kind of bor­ing so I added two more.  I left the splat­ters show through the white paint, and only edited two small blobs around the ponies’ heads.  After  the paint dried my cat laid on it — I took it to mean that she thought it was done.

The sec­ond work is Golden Light.

Golden Light, land­scape with cranes by AZ expres­sion­ist painter and bird artist Jake Beckman

I did an impre­cise wash in pri­mary yel­low and magenta as I had the inten­tion of por­tray­ing the golden light in some man­ner.  I again chose to splat­ter the paint­ing with a grayed out yel­low ochre.  The gray got me think­ing and pretty soon I had roughed in the trees and leaves on the wet paper… the paint bloom­ing a lit­tle, soft­en­ing the edges. I had “extra“light gray paint so I a pal­let knife to rough in some scenery in the back­ground, let­ting a lot of the wash show through. Next I worked it over with a darker gray, again I used a pal­let knife and painted the grass in the fore­ground.  The final touches were the wad­ing birds, they are sup­posed to be cranes, but if you see a heron or an egret… At this point the art looked “done-ish” but alas my cat refused to pro­vide com­men­tary. I posted it on Fack­book, and an online “cat”, Kathy Char­ron, pro­nounced it fin­ished. 

In both cases I cer­tainly could have added lay­ers and lay­ers of paint until I achieved a more pho­to­graphic appear­ance, but in both I chose to embrace the flow of paint, brush­work, and the indis­tinct edges.  My can­vas is not lay­ing on the ground scream­ing, “Stop paint­ing on me!”  It is very hard for me to let them be, partly because don’t have that sure feel­ing that “this paint­ing done.” But I have resisted the urge to paint them to death.

Mak­ing a Splash! sold within sec­onds of hit­ting the internet-sometimes that is the way it goes.  I think the fore­short­ened imagery, and energy of the piece grabbed the buyer’s attention.

How­ever, Golden Light is for sale.  Con­sider mak­ing an offer if you like it.

Yours in Art

Jake, Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The artist has fed­er­ally copy­righted all the art­work in this blog. The artist retains all repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights. You may not copy, re-distribute, imi­tate, derive OR oth­er­wise use these images in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

One of my favorite fables is the one of the Scor­pion and the Frog. It basi­cally says some will be true to their nature no mat­ter how they are treated or what the con­se­quences are.   Vari­a­tions of the story swap a youth, man, kan­ga­roo or tur­tle in place of the frog, and/or a snake in the place of the scor­pion.  The tale? A scor­pion and a frog are at the shores of a river, when the scor­pion asks the frog to ferry him across the water. The frog is afraid the scor­pion will sting him, but the scor­pion assures him that he will not and they begin the jour­ney across river. In the mid­dle of the river the scor­pion stings the frog, and as the frog founders in the water he asks the scor­pion, “Why? Now we will both drown.” and the scor­pion sim­ply replies, “I am a scorpion.”

So the story came up in con­ver­sa­tion sev­eral times in one day and being true to my nature as an artist I got a cou­ple of ideas.  Aimee Davi­son, @onehundredjobs on twit­ter, asked, “Why don’t you paint it?” and so I did.

The first ver­sion, The Scor­pion & The Frog, is rather literal.

The Scor­pion & The Frog 14 x 11 inch acrylic paint­ing on water­color paper by Phoenix, AZ artist, Jake Beckman

There is a golden spi­ral in the back­ground, which coin­cides with the tip of the scorpion’s curl stinger.

One of my online art bud­dies, Dave Con­rey, told me on Face­book that he has a tat­too of a scor­pion on his back ref­er­enc­ing this fable.  As for me I think doing a paint­ing or two is enough.

The sec­ond ver­sion, Scor­pi­ons & Frogs, is a lit­tle more abstract.

Scor­pi­ons & Frogs, 14 x 11 inch acrylic on water­color paper, by Phoenix AZ Artist Jake Beckman

The pat­tern is a Pen­rose Sun, it is a tiling based on 2 tiles, in this case a scor­pion tile & a frog tile.  I have left two tiles blank.  One is pre­sum­ably from the escaped scor­pion in the image and it is up to the viewer to won­der where the frog got off to.

Both works are for sale.  Make me an offer.  I hope you like them. 

Yours in Art

Jake, Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The artist has fed­er­ally copy­righted all the art­work in this blog. The artist retains all repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights. You may not copy, re-distribute, imi­tate, derive OR oth­er­wise use these images in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

Just a lit­tle some­thing new I just finished

Winds of March, 14 inch x 11 inch abstract paint­ing in yel­low, orange, salmon, pur­ple and blue by Phoenix AZ artist Jake Beckman.

Its called Winds of March.

I’ve been work­ing on 11 inch x 14 inch cold press water­color paper because I bought a brick of 75 sheets of Fab­ri­ano water­color paper in this size. I usu­ally coat both sides of the water­color paper with gesso; oth­er­wise the paper itself sucks up a lot of paint, which can be a fun effect, but not usu­ally one I am look­ing for. Also hav­ing gesso on the reverse makes the paper a lot more water-resistant than it would be with­out the gesso coat­ing. I have play­ing with my new Golden Liq­uid Acrylic paints since then too.  My goal, if I can stick to it, is to paint on every sheet of that paper until it is gone before mov­ing onto some­thing else.

For Winds of March, I painted a almost water­color wash of light salmon with a bright yel­low spot.  Then I got out some heavy gel medium, and a pal­let knife and laid in nice loose swirl of man­ganese blue and medium vio­let.  I then removed some of the paint with the pal­let knife reveal­ing the pale salmon pink under­paint­ing in the carved swirls and dots.

I then painted a ring of  cad­mium orange, a mixed shade of light pink and some pri­mary yel­low mixed with the heavy gel medium and carved in some swirls spi­ral­ing inward to my bright yel­low spot.

It sat that way for a few days but I was not happy with it.  I got the idea to break up the lighter area with painted vio­let swirls and dots pick­ing up the carved pat­tern.  The work has got some tex­ture to it.

Winds of March, angled photo to reveal tex­ture in this abstract paint by Phoenix AZ artist Jake Beckman

Winds of March is for sale, make me an offer.

Yours in Art

Jake, Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The artist has fed­er­ally copy­righted all the art­work in this blog. The artist retains all repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights. You may not copy, re-distribute, imi­tate, derive OR oth­er­wise use these images in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

When I first started doing art all those years ago I drew pic­tures.  Even when I painted I more or less drew pic­tures.  But one day I became a painter, and my first foray into the paint­ing realm was using water col­ors.  You can get all kinds of nifty effects using water color but because of their trans­par­ent nature once you do some­thing you are kind of stuck with it.  Sure you can do lifts, etc, but I ulti­mately tran­si­tioned into acrylic paint because it dried fast, was opaque and allowed me to do “water­color” the way I wanted to do it.  How­ever there are a few things that acrylic paint does not lend itself well to that water­color did bril­liantly — it did not do the wet on wet fuzzy blend and it really did not run very well.

How­ever things have changed in the land of acrylic paints.  More medi­ums and types of paint are now avail­able than ever before.

Recently I spend a decent chunk of change on some new art sup­plies, Golden Fluid Acrylics.  I pur­chased 18 bot­tles of paint and some flow released for about $300. Some of you out there are prob­a­bly think­ing, “Wow that is a lot of money for that paint.  I can pick up my Series 7 for a lot less than that.”  I have used Series 7 and other stu­dent grade paints.  They tend to have a much lower pig­ment load so it lim­its what you can do with them. I find using pro­fes­sional paints and medi­ums to be fairly cost effec­tive, and a lot more versatile-I can’t go back to using cheap paint hav­ing expe­ri­enced using the good stuff. I also pur­chased locally instead of online, which prob­a­bly could have saved me some coin, but I have another phi­los­o­phy about sup­port­ing local retail­ers when I can.

Had to show an image of my new art sup­plies. We artists get excited about things like that-Jake Beckman

Any­way, the rea­son I did this pur­chase is because I wanted to play with runny paint.  As I move into the abstract realm with my art I felt a bit lim­ited in the effects I could achieve using my heavy bod­ied paints and medi­ums.  Some­times I like splat­ter­ing, drip­ping and runny paint.  Of course I started play­ing with them right away.  So far I have deter­mine if you use the flow release as directed, you do indeed get paint that is as watery as you want it to be.  It splat­ters well out of a mist­ing bottle.

One way I have been using the flow release is to make a 10 water to 1 flow release mix in a mist­ing bot­tle then spray it onto the wet paint on the can­vas.  Gives you a bit more con­trol over fuzzy blend­ing effects.

I have also mixed paint and flow release in a small cup (I got some dis­posi­ble 2.5 oz plas­tic cups at a restau­rant sup­ply to use for mix­ing small quan­ti­ties of this or that) and then drooled it on a ver­ti­cal can­vas.  Very nice.

If you want to drip paint ala Jack­son Pol­lock, thin­ning down tar gel & paint mix in a squeeze bot­tle cre­ates a thicker stringier paint strand.

The fluid acrylics have nice high pig­ment load & a slightly vis­cous con­sis­tency. They paint smoothly. Because of the pig­ment load you can use water as a thin­ner with­out hav­ing the color break.

In the abstract paint­ing Solar Flare I made use of the spray­ing flow release and water on wet paint & drool­ing paint tech­niques I just describe to cre­ate some nice ran­dom pat­terns on my painting. 

After I decided it was drooled on enough, I splat­tered it with orange paint, then used a fine brush to pick out edge detail I liked.  Some­time the idea of doing the con­cen­tric cir­cles occurred to me, and then I worked it over to unify the paint­ing better.

Solar Flare, abstract paint­ing 11 inch x14 inch in red, yel­low, orange and brown acrylic paint on water­color paper by Jake Beckman

I hope you like it.  Solar Flare is painted on a sheet of 11x14 inch cold press water color paper, which was painted on both sides with gesso before apply­ing the acrylic paint.  Solar Flare is for sale, make me an offer.

Yours in Art

Jake, Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The artist has fed­er­ally copy­righted all the art­work in this blog. The artist retains all repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights. You may not copy, re-distribute, imi­tate, derive OR oth­er­wise use these images in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.