My Dear Neighbor, Martin reading a paperback fiction

Here is Martin. We all love him. Martin is originally from New Zealand. He first came over to America to attend college at Berkley. He is a seismic engineer, and a structural engineer. At the present time, he is working on Building No. 7 (WTC), the Chinese Ferris Wheel (largest in the world), and many other projects – but I would have to ask him about those.

Martin is truly a “man without guile”. His “mate”, Christine says that she has only seen him mad twice in 25 years. He is a jewel here in Austin, and I hope that you will get the opportunity to know him.

Hannah is the daughter of a good friend of mine

This is a studio painting that I just did from a photograph of Hannah.  She really did not want her mom to take her picture. Both her mom and I just loved the photo; we can all identify with the raw and stubborn posture. I just love the transparency of emotion that are portrayed here. Kids are not good at faking things just to make nice, and bless them for that.

Karla was in my studio watching the movie, "Hopscotch"

My good friend Karla came over this weekend. I decided to paint her while she watched one of her favorite movies, “Hopscotch”.  It was the perfect opportunity to add to my new series of paintings: Now I am asking people to pose “live” at my studio, and trying to get a likeness in 90 minutes or less. I would really like to do a lot of these, but I have lots of kinks to work out.

]]> http://lavanna.com/2009/09/14/90-minute-paintingkarla-pfennig/feed/ 3 lavanna Karla-Pfennig http://lavanna.com/2009/09/08/i-painted-the-retired-military-man-at-epoch-coffee/ http://lavanna.com/2009/09/08/i-painted-the-retired-military-man-at-epoch-coffee/#comments Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:07:46 +0000 Lavanna Martin http://lavanna.com/?p=1867 ]]>

He was only there for fifteen minutes

I thought that I was going to have a nice, long time to paint this man, but he got a phone call, and left shortly afterwards. He was dressed in civilian clothes with a cowboy belt, but the look was definitely influenced by many years in miitary. He had on chinos, khaki double flap pocket shirt, and brand new sueded, desert boots. He might have put some off in such a bohemian setting as Epoch, but I was very happy to see him. After all, my father-in-law was a Lt. Colonel in WWII, and I absolutely love him.

I caught a bit of conversation with the baristra – he asked Ben if he had seen the movie, “Grand Torino”. Then, when he sat down with his laptop, his cell phone rang within minutes. The conversation involved the borrowing of this man’s boat. He packed up and left abruptedly, called to duty by someone wanting to use his boat.

I painted Justin in my studio this morning

Justin is my young friend that works at the neighborhood King Liquor, where I buy wine. He is a professional wrestler. I asked him to come over so that I could paint him before he left for school later today.

Asking people to pose is a new venue for my blog. I would like to see where these fast poses that are set up at my studio will lead me. I’ve painted in the coffee houses for over a year now, and now I would like to also incorporate painting live from the studio along with this work.  I haven’t quite decided how I will coordinate this with prospective models; wish me luck!

Was it business or personal?

The tattooed man was there earlier, sitting outside. He had a brief conversation with the baristra, Ben.  The man on the right showed up about fifteen minutes later, and they came inside and sat opposite each other. I could only hear “she blah-blah-blah” running through their conversastion.

It is difficult to capture two people who aren’t posing for you – you don’t know when they will leave, and the person that you mass in first gets more attention, with the second subject looking like an after-thought. I apologize for the proportion differences, but the likenesses are fairly accurate.

These days, it is difficult to find people in deep conversation anywhere without their laptops or phones, so I was so happy to be at Epoch at the right time. Thank you, Epoch, for allowing to paint.

Would you like to hear a little about technique and decisions that I made as I did this painting? The walls at Flighpath Coffee are sunflower yellow. Why did I not portray this? Well, when I painted the man with dreadlocks the day before, I added in a subdued yellow background, and just hated the way that it competed with the figure. I really am not the type of painter that can deal with a lot of screaming color. In fact, I have a theory that television, and computers with their oversaturated color has actually desensitized us. We think that we need more and more color!

Aerial perspective teaches us that colors gray as an object recedes into the background plane. So, if I paint her as she is, in muted colors and shape wedges, why would I paint the walls in mustard? Well, I could have  chosen to do this, but, it’s just not me. And, I don’t think that it would have done this beautiful girl justice.

I never go back in to the paintings when I get home, so there are always imperfections. I simply try and take a sample from the social petri dish.

She was sitting at the opposite end at FlightPath

Whew! This is really hard. She was sitting at the opposite end of the coffee house, at a direct right angle from me. I am shocked that I didn’t get caught painting her, because I was craning my neck to capture her.

He had such a nice face

This is the first time that I have painted at FlightPath Coffee. I’ve been in there several times, and always wanted to paint at Flight Path, but empty tables are hard to come by. This morning, I stopped in and asked the owner if I could paint there. This is also the first time that I have asked to paint. I came back this afternoon, and this fellow sat down at his table as the same time as me. He was a great subject!

Enough said

I’m not even going to pretend to know what was going through his mind. If he were native born, I could probably conjure up some explanations such as: poor screwed up SOB, had a fight with his wife on a beautiful afternoon, and had no where to go so he ended up here. Who knows what this man has been through? I can’t pretend to know…