My Summer Art Work- Highlights

I used to like to draw and paint a lot and did so especially when I was a student of Advertising Art at City Tech in Brooklyn in the early and mid 2000's-- 

I notice that a lot of my favorites of what I have done take place in summertime, and so here they are:

 1. "My Pets"--

Not owning a dog or a cat currently, I sometimes miss the ones I have had very much of course. 

I came upon this group of dogs all being walked at once, as they do it, on the Upper East Side....was struck by how dogs, like people, all have their own personalities.

My biggest regret with this painting is that I did not rework the black dog lower left a little more-- he really had quite an animated face but I did not know how to capture it.

 2. Madison Square, Manhattan-- right before they built the very tall narrow building south of the Park, and just north of the Flatiron Building. ( My painting of the Flatiron building did not work out that well).

I did this outdoors and really " on the fly" -- I chose a quiet table and chair like they have set out there but the minute I began to work the tables and chairs all filled up with noisy tourists. The noisiest was a group of young guys and gals right next to me who seemed to be competing to see who could make the weirdest noises and shout the most, often expletives... 

A really good artist can ignore these things, but I can't, so I finished this off and fled as soon as I could. All I wanted was a little memento, and that's all I got.

 3. New York harbor from Governors Island-- another one of those on the fly paintings/sketches which I just knocked out fast as I wandered around the Island, which is a free and fantastic place to visit when you are in NYC ( the ferry boat ride itself, free, is lots of fun, it only takes ten minutes or so).

 4."Nude"-- this is a watercolor I did from a mixed media chalk and marker Life Study drawing. I have a friend who is an architect who says as such he likes the way space is organized in the painting. If it IS organized as well as he says, it is more luck than skill on my part.

I want to go back and take another Life Study drawing class sometime. The human body is fascinating and has a beauty about it even with all its imperfections and with people who are not "perfect"