I'm painting again

I'm beginning my first oil painting in nearly fifteen years and possibly second oil ever. I've been a watercolorist for a long time and was also satisfied with the seemingly limitless agency of pen & ink.

Now, for an individualized instruction (that is not unlike an apprenticeship of old without the gopher/studio management and more self-development), I am painting oil. I continue with a series I had begun with 5 by 5 inch square heavy cold-pressed watercolors handling the subject matter of my recently passed grandmother and a book by Pessoa, posthumously reknowned and published entitled "The Book of Disquiet."

I have been working with the wheels removed from my easel on the third story of my farmhouse which I have recently learned to have once been host to a small rural beauty parlor. The aromas are once again rich and slightly intoxicating as were the perms of the late seventies and early eighties that were set in this space.

I am working less abstractly with oil and more voyeuristically. I am setting my goal on Hopperesque abstracted realism... thin layers, stacked with little caking, roughed architectural edges and skin that glows from within.

In honor of my cousin, a CT man turned Brooklynese, bachelor soon to be groom, I have included this image of his favorite and the most famous Hopper; "Night Hawks." Of course, this is an adaptation or appropriation of such. Please let me know of other parodies, but what I'm really looking for is a play put on that mimics this scene. I have already had some of my middle school art students bringing life to these characters in skits and one-acts.

I will include pics of my work as it becomes more... becoming.