Happy Anniversary Painting

Happy Anniversary © 2005 Jeff Thomann, Media: Acrylic Painting
Happy Anniversary © 2005 Jeff Thomann
Media: Acrylic Painting
Artist’s Statement: http://jeffthomann.cwahi.net/artfolio/HappyAnniversary.shtml

I created this work as a wedding present for my wife. It hangs in our bedroom. The painting was done based on a blown up copy of one of our engagement photos. To copy the basic outline of the photo on to the canvas I used the Pounce Method of Image Transfer with some crushed up charcoal wrapped in a cloth. This method of image transfer is a great way to start a painting, but only if the image you are transferring from and the painting you are transferring to are the same size. With the advent of digital photography and printers that are able to print any size photos, there are tons of possibilities for this ancient method of image transfer.

I do not believe that I have never exhibited this painting in any shows, and do not plan to do that at any time in the future as the work is very near and dear to me, and I’m almost hesitant to put it on my website and blog. However, since I wish for these online locations to outline the type of work I love to do, I feel like this needs to be here.

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http://january2013scanphotographartetc.shutterfly.com/

http://january2013scanphotographartetc.shutterfly.com/ – link to a little bundle of pics I uploaded to shutterfly tonight. Most of them are ancient sketchbooks from the late 1990s, but the acrylic paintings, encaustic paintings and photos are very recent stuff.

I might crop some of them and put them here on the blog later. Some of them are multiples of the same image because I like to shoot several pics of one work and pick the best of them with fewest blurs, bad contrast, etc. for various things. I’m not sure – I may have scans of some of these somewhere in the blog already?… Oh well, multiple images of the same thing isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Lighting was not very good on many of these… I was using interior lighting and that’s never good for shooting art. It’s too cold to go outside, and I don’t trust the wind outside when shooting photos of artwork on paper since paper tends to catch in the wind too easily. A few years back (a couple of months before we moved out of Boonville) I did try to shoot a bunch of artwork outside and a lot of it got caught in a big gust of wind. The same day a wind gust knocked over the tripod and busted the screw connector at the bottom of the camera that was on the tripod at the time. That poor camera finally died on me about a month ago or so… it’s had a hard life. I haven’t thrown it out yet in hopes that maybe it will get some life again someday… (I think something’s gone wrong with the battery connection or something).

Shooting photos of art is much faster than trying to scan them. I also scanned a bunch of my ‘morning pages’ today from the last year or so. I have not consistently done that every day, but there’s still a heck of a pile of paper. I probably won’t publish that to the public since there’s a lot of private thoughts on it… but might upload it somewhere secure for a backup like in email or google docs. Scanning those is not super time consuming since I’m going on very low resolution of 100 dpi or so for the scans since there isn’t any real big drawing/painting to it even if there’s a sketch or two here and there from dream scapes I tried to outline the architecture of, etc. Many of my dreams have a very architectural feel for them… various locations tie in together in various ways with hallways, placements of architectural elements, etc. It can sometimes get intricate in how I try to detail my ‘morning pages’/diary or whatever you want to call it because of that… Jung had archetypes. I have archetypes and architecture that those archetypes act in. All the world’s a stage…

Painted a little…

I went in to the ‘art room’ and painted a little today for an hour or two. I will probably do more of this in ‘spare time’ from time to time. It’s going to take a little while to get my skills back up to speed, but I can do it. I also have decided that eventually I probably will add learning to play my midi keyboard as a goal/challenge for myself. I’ve had the thing for years, but never have done much with it. The first few months I had it I got to the point I could play jingle bells, and then quit. I pound a few keys on it here and then, but haven’t done much. I have ways to record it to the computer that I didn’t have a few years back due to low computer specs/speed even though I had the software and connectors to make it happen. I originally got this thing thinking I’d go in to making my own music for animations I put together, but I let that goal of making animations die slowly and let the goal of making the music sort of fade away over time. Now that I’m challenging myself to live better, I want to make these goals a little more of a reality in my life. I may never become Mozart or whatever, but I would like to learn the basics a little more than I can do them now. Even if I never do an animation, the background music for still images in videos and/or slideshows could have some potential. Closest thing to doing some artsy video like that way back several years ago was this little thing I threw together… not very good, but it’s catchy tune, at least to me, lol…

and these little annoying things…

In the future, I might try to do more of this type of stuff… I wanted to back then but didn’t have the time, nor really the computer power that would allow me to do much since putting this sort of stuff together would max out cpu/gpu back then and/or ultimately cause computers to crash if the machines got too hot. Nowadays, this sort of stuff is nothing on the cpu usage… so more can be accomplished. Now just got to get myself to work towards the ‘work’ part of making those accomplishments become accomplished realities.

Bottomless Self Portrait


Bottomless Self Portrait
Acrylic on Canvas
© Y2K, Jeff Thomann

This was an acrylic painting that I created when I was entering my ‘bottomless paintings’ phase. I was really interested in trying to figure out ways to create compositions that had no one right side up. I still get on that kick sometimes.

A few scans…

A few sketches and acrylic paintings I’ve started the last while. I don’t consider Drips an Acrylic Landscape done, but do consider Bottomless Landscape Done, and the pen and ink sketches are just doodles.

Live
Live

Drips
Drips

Bottomless Landscape
Bottomless Landscape

10.25.2011
10.25.2011

10.24.2011
10.24.2011

Acrylic Landscape
Acrylic Landscape

11.21.2011
11.21.2011