Lesli

Oil on board, 6.5" x 7.5" eBay item 111261600842

After the Storm

Gouache on Watercolor Paper.

Canna Lily I

                               Gouache on gessoed Arches 300 lb.
                               watercolor paper. I love the way you
                               can use gouache either opaquely or
                               transparently. This medium is so ver-
                               satile it's amazing.

Flower of Love and Hope (for Jane and Jean-Louis)

                           Gouache and gouging on paper                                                       5" x 4.5"

                                      I would ask everyone I know to pray for my friends Jean-Louis and Jane.

                                     Thank you.
 

Imaginary Fjord - (for Laila and Knut)



 

Gouache on Hotpress Watercolor Paper   7" x 5"

Last summer we went to Key West for a week, and met a great
Norwegian family who were staying in the same hotel. It was a
magical situation where you felt as though you've known each
other for years. We had a blast! --  I've never been to Norway, and
happen to be part Scandivaian myself (Danish grandfather). I would
love to go there someday. I guess in the meantime I'll have to
content myself with painting imaginary pictures of the place.

Egret on the Edge of the Woods

                                                                 Gouache on paper, 3" x 4"

                                                                 This is obviously a tiny painting. The
                                                                 interesting thing is that, because most of
                                                                 my gouaches are done in notebooks, most
                                                                 of them are small. This doesn't bother me,
                                                                 as I've always been attracted to small art.

Night Clouds and Moon

                                    Gouache on Paper, 5" x 4"

                                    Although I usually use a combination of
                                    washes and opaque passages in my gouache
                                    paintings, here I used it quite thickly - almost
                                    like oil paint. That is the wonderful thing
                                    about this medium: its versatility. If you've
                                    never tried it, you really should. It's easy to
                                    use, and a delight to work with.

A Billowing Cloud

                           Gouache on Watercolor Canvas, 4" x 4"
                           This is my first post in a very long time. I haven't stopped
                           doing artwork. I just stopped posting it. But I am hoping to
                           start posting fairly often again - I just need to manage my
                           time more efficiently.
                           ******* As long as I have your attention........

I will be teaching a workshop in Gouache Painting and Color in Durfort, France, from
June 3rd through June 10th. Durfort is in southern France, in the Midi-Pyrenees Region, about 30 miles southeast of Toulouse and twenty miles from Carcasonne.
For a week you would be a guest in an 18th C. house in a medieval town, surrounded by national forest. We would have a private chef, a 24-hour open studio, and field trips every afternoon. If you are interested in learning more about this, please visit the following website: http://gwengibson.com/workshops. It has all of the particulars about the trip. I am currently looking for six students, as the other spaces are already filled.
If you find that you have an interest, you can contact me @ ptreacy49@gmail.com.

                          

                           

A Canna Lily in Full Bloom

This is a gouache (opaque watercolor) painting on Fredrix watercolor canvas.
I used Winsor & Newton Aquapasto first, put on extra-thinly with a credit
car, because when I first painted, the paint crawled and beaded very badly.
This may be because the canvas was severaly years old. - The Aquapasto
created a thin film that allowed me to lay color down on the canvas surface.
I put in a lot of different hues of green and gold in the background and yellow
on the flower and let that dry. - After it was all dry, I put another layer of
Aquapasto on thinly with a credit card, but just on the flower. Then a put a thin
layer of a mixture of cad red light and peony red (Holbein). The medium allowed
me to create texture in the red, creating similar effects to those that one sees on
Canna Lilies, which often have bright, variegated petals. I love gouache!

Blue Cloud

Oil paint on Gessoed Dutch Archival Painting paper. I love the colos in this paintings, and even though it is very simple, it
gives  me a very good feeling when I look at it. It measurses about 7"x 5" , with a 3/4" white margin all around. I use a wax
medium with this, that was mixed with an alkyd medium. It dried very quickly, and gave a very matte appearance which is
pleasant in a serene compostion like this.                                                                                                                     BUY

Toulouse as a Poster

This is a lithograph of a friend of mine. It is a lightly hand-colored lithograph on
BFK Rives white printmaking paper. The hands aren't there because they aren't
supposed to be, in case you are wondering. I liked the shadows of the fingers, and
just suggesting some things better than drawing everything. It was particularly her
incredible eyes that I wanted to be the focus of the picture. This is not a portrait, it
is a work of graphic art, done for a particular purpose.                                     BID

Seated Girl Painted in Oil Washes



This piece was done in class in a technique that I have mentioned
before on this blog: "peinture a l'essence", or, in English, painting
with solvent. Just to quickly review for those of you who do not know
what this means - it is a way of using paint so that the linseed oil in it
(which in its natural state in the paint is very corrosve) will not damage
the paper. It is just necessary to lay your paint out on some heavy paper
such as printmaking blotters, covered, overnight, and the oil will leach out
       into the paper. The next day you scrape what is left onto your palette, and
dilute it with solvent. This manner of painting was very popular with Degas
and Toulouse-Lautrec - Lautec painted many of his paintingson carboard.
   You should give this a try - it is fun.                                                BID 

Chinoiserie Triptych

This triptych was inspired by a painting by John Waterhouse of The
Lady of Shallot, although I didn't realize it at the time. Years ago I had
a reproduction of that painting on my wall because I thought it was really
wonderful. Years later I did this. This is acually the second one I have done,
because the first one was never returned by an unscrupulous art dealer in
California. Yes, that is the life of an artist. I never got any money for the
painting, and I never even got the painting back, so that I could enjoy it myself.
So, I decided to do another, similar one. It was at that time when I was looking
casually through my daughter's book of John Waterhouse paintings and spotted
the exact same pose - facing in the other direction- of the Lady of Shalott! It is
funny how the mind stores things away. Some of them are identified clearly
day to day, and others dwell in this more dream-like, design-oriented (if you are
an artist, I suppose) area. I guess I accessed that area without realizing it.
The two palest yellow vertical strips are for the gold-leafed mat that a potential
framer would construct to go around this painting. It was done on board in oils,
and oil glazes, and will be mounted on wood.                                                                                SOLD

Bearded Iris

I keep all of my gouache, and gouache/watercolor paintings in Canson watercolor
paper spiral-bound notebooks. I have been doing this for about ten years. I like the paper,
because it doesn't wrikle very much, as long as I confine my composition to a fairly
small area, and it also takes the Cotman watercolors - which I like to combine with
my Caran d'ache gouache paints - very well. Sometimes, if I know I am gong to use
a lot of watercoor in a piece, I will use Liftng Preparation first and allow that to dry
before I start working. That makes it easier to remove any color I may want to. Of
course, this is not essential when working with gouache, because it is opaque, and
you can paint over anything, but sometimes you may want a more transparent area
in your work. I also really enjoy working with the new watercolor canvas that came
out a couple of years ago. You can do virtually anything on that - for watercolorists
it's a dream because it is really easy to life from. As long as you keep your compositions
very small - which mine are, just naturally - you don't need to do any preparation. But,
if you want to use a whole sheet, you need to stretch it just like a piece of regular watercolor
paper, or it will buckle and wrinkle on you. This can be most upsetting. - If you look at my
piece above, you can see that I used both opaque and transparent paint. I particularly like
the curled petal on the bottom right that is very lavendar with a highlight. Then, there is
a semi-transparent wash behind that, that really emphasizes the solidity of the curled petal.
I like the colors in this piece.                                                                                          BID

Black and White Chalk Drawing (after Robert Barret (?))

I have to say that I really like this drawing. The funny thing is, I don't even really remember doing it.
It's in a notebook I have of some rather strange, smooth gray paper, that I think may have been made
out of recycled paper, because there are tiny flecks of barely visible color in it that actually show up
more in a photograph than to the naked eye. Here I am using a very time-honored technique - a mid-
tone paper paired with black and white chalk or pencils. One could also use sepia, sanguine, really
any dark color that would serve to represent the shadowed areas of the form. That is the whole point
really, of using the toned paper with these materials. The toned paper functions as the mid-tones, or
evenly-illuminated parts of the body, the white expresses strong illumination, and the dark pencil renders
the form with more detail and shadows of different values, the degree to which it is developed is really
a function of the artist's style. Having said all that, what I really like about this drawing is the lines. BID            

Black and White Head of Hypnos

This is yet another drawing of my beloved Head of Hypnos. I do not know who sculpted it. Perhaps someone does? But I have never seen any attribution given in any book. Perhaps it is just too ancient, and was never signed, or was effaced at
some point, like so many works of art because of some disagreement, often beginning with a one of a religious nature as in
our society today. But I can't imagine everyone not agreeing on one fact - that this is a sublimely beautiful object of a bizarre
nature and endless fascination. It is utterly inspiring to me - but I have always found ancient objects to be artistically inspiring. I don't know why, and I guess it doesn't really matter in the end. Even though this is my own drawing I find it just
as hypnotic as the sculpture itself. That is a very nice feeling to have. I have done plenty of duds, but here I feel I captured how I see, and what I feel about the Head of Hypnos. and it doesn't matter to me what anyone else feels. If they like it, that
is wonderful, but if they don't, well, that is alright too. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" my mother always told me,
and she was right.                                                                                                             Buy It Now

Gabe in Class on Monday

Oil on shellacked Canson Paper, done while teaching Expressive and Gestural Figure Painting at the Art League School in Alexandria, Virginia. This sketch was about thirty minutes long.                                                  Buy It Now

Second Version of Caribbean Memory

Oil on Linen laid down on board, 14" x 20"

Pink Cloud Landscape

 Oil over Acrylic on 1/2" thick wood panel, 6" square                              SOLD

Drawing of Italian Woman in a Doorway for a Softgroud Etching

This is a drawing I have never posted before. I did it quite a while ago, but
I think it is interesting because most people would wonder why it is brown, unless
they are familiar with printmaking. --  I use a wonderful softground varnish made
by Lefranc&Bourgeois called "Vernis Noir Mou", which just means "Black Soft
Varnish". It comes in a small white glass jar and you scoop some out with a palette
knife and put it in a piece of nylon stocking. -- Then you heat up your zinc or
copper plate, rub the ground over the plate; it melts and you quickly roll it out
with a soft rubber roller into a uniform coating. Once it cools down you can put
a piece of paper over it and do a drawing. The ground sticks to the paper wherever
there has been pressure from the pencil - therefor exposing the plate in those areas.
The plate is then put in nitric acid (this was a zinc plate) and "bitten" until the
image is deep enough to create a print when inked up. --  The reason this drawing
is brown is that I used tracing paper and the brown is the color of the ground that
has stuck to the paper because of the pressure of my hard pencil. Complicated,
but rewarding.

Tomatoes for Betsy

Oil on Board

Burnt Orange

                                                                        SOLD









Oil on Board                                          NFS

Carribean Memory

Oil on linen    14" X 20                                                                      Buy it Now

This is another painting done from memory. I am just as interested in the

abstract qualities of the piece as I am in trying to reproduce reality. I am

also trying to create some subtle color harmonies, which is always an

absorbing challenge.

Thanks for visiting.

Painting for Candice

                                                            SOLD









Oil on board, 7" x 9 "  NFS

Painting for Candice

Oil on board                         7" X 9"                             NFS


Memory of Chicoteague

Oil on Linen laid down on board                                                    14" x 20"

I actually started this painting several years ago as part of a series that I have

yet to complete. It was meant to be part of a triptych. It was painted mostly

from memory, so that accounts for its very simplified treatment of certain

aspects of the composition. But I like it, and it conveys, for me, what I felt

was the delicate beauty of the marshes and the sky.

Memory of Chicoteague

                    Oil on Linen laid down on board                 14" x 20"

Memory of Chincoteague

Pear Demo over Grisaille

9.5" x 6.5"    Oil over black and white grisaille on gessoed cotton paper
 
This is a demonstration that I did for my "Beginning Painting and Beyond" class at The Art League 
School. First we paint in Mars Black and white, establishing the shapes and forms of the pears. After
that dries for a week, we glaze the grisalle ("gris" means "gray" in French) with Gamblin's Transparent
Red Earth, blot it where we don't want too much of the influence of that color, and then paint the pears
using a limited palette. This study was probably completed in about twenty minutes, but I still like it, and
think it is a successful, loose painting.

Two Life Studies of Alan from Class

6.5" x 8", Pencil and White Gouache on Brown Paper

I did this page of studies during a class I was teaching at The Art League.
It is called "Figure Drawing in Varied Media", and every quarter I have the
class try some new materials. This was done when we were using a combination
of pencil (could also be colored pencil and a different colored paper) and
white gouache highlighting on toned paper. I was happy with these studies
and saved them. -  I am so sad that Alan moved to Florida. He was such a
wonderful model, and a real gentleman. We all miss him.

Artichokes on a Pink Plate



Oil on Gessoed Ragboard laid down on wood, 5" x 8"   SOLD

I really enjoyed doing this painting. It was truly a challenge analyzing

the colors in the artichokes. Who ever thinks about actually mixing pink

and green together? Of course, they are complementary colors, but we

usually think about mixing red and green to create a muted, neutral

color. Here, I had to create many different versions of green, and some

spots were almost iridescent. I love these colors! -  I think I may keep

experimenting with artichokes, or, I bought some beautiful small

Indian eggplants at an amazing international supermarket that we

go to. They are a rich purple/rose color with contrasting green/brown

stems. Now I just have to come up with a composition that will do

them justice. Color is an amazing thing - it is almost alive in its

ability to interact and create any effect that you can think of.

Josef Albers was correct when he described color as being the

most "mercurial" aspect of art. But mastering color -- that is the

challenge that every artist faces, and for some it is a never-ending,

totally absorbing pursuit. I know that it is for me.



Boston Sunset for Teresa Toulouse

Oil on Board, 5.5" Square                                                 SOLD

If it seems as though I am obsessed with this image, that is correct.
Perhaps it is because I lived here for nine years, and looked out of
this window every day. I just find the shapes to be endlessly fascinating,
and the opportunities to play with color presented by creating skies to
be endless fun.

This was painted for a dear friend whom I have known for forty-two
years  - I can't believe it...time really does fly.

Caribbean Seascape for Patrick Toulouse

Oil on Belgian Linen, 4.5" x 7"
Sold

This is my first post since last August....it has been a long,
difficult and enlightening year. However, it was a year

without any artwork produced, and I am so grateful to

be painting again. I have so many ideas and subjects, and

mediums that I want to work in -- I wish I could work
twenty-four hours a day! Right now I am really interested

in producing landscapes and figure paintings, so that is
what you will probably see here. We'll see.....

Thanks for your faithfulness, and thanks for visiting.

Cloud #21 - Boston Evening Star

Oil on paper, 5" square

This is an image I have worked and reworked many

times. It is the view from my studio (and after that,

my newborn daughter's room...) when I lived in

Boston in the 80's and early 90's. Like some figure

poses, there is something about the shapes in this

image that I find endlessly intriguing. I witnessed

many sunsets from this window, and I could prob-

ably do 25 more of these paintings and never get

bored, mining my memory for colors.

This was supposed to be a "daily painting", but

ended up being a "two-day daily painting" because

I needed to create two layers.

Thanks for visiting today.

Cloud #20 - Ocean Sunset

Oil and Acrylic on Gessobord, 7" x 5"

Cloud #19 - A Potomac Afternoon

Oil on linen-covered panel, 5' X 7"

I really enjoyed doing this painting on linen panel today. I have

painted this composition before in gouache, and I'm happy with

the way it came out in oil. More colors, more complex water in

some ways. It is fun to make it up using what I know and remember.

Things like this aren't always successful, but it's a wonderful feeling

when it is.

Cloud #18 - Storm over Fields

Oil on Belgian Linen, 3.84" x 7.15"

I decided to paint on some of my canvas today for a change. The

texture of the Belgian Linen is so fine - it is just beautiful. It was

a nice change to work with bristle brushes instead of soft hairs.

Thanks for visiting.

Sharon Reclining Redux

Oil on board, 10" x 6.5 NFS

Andy in Color (hand-colored drypoint etching)

Drypoint Etching and Colored Pencil

2.6" x 3.8"

Andy was a great model who used to pose for

my figure drawing class. He had a beautiful

profile, and that is why I was inspired to do

this drypoint of him. I decided today to enhance

the print with colored pencil, and I am very happy

with it.

Italian Twilight

Oil/Mixed Media, 3.74" x 2.86"

This tiny mixed media piece depicts the last rays of the

sun illuminating a building in an Italian piazza. I lived in

Italy many years ago, and have always been fond of

depicting Italian scenes.

Thanks for visiting today.

Cloud #17 - Starlight over fields

Oil on archival gessoed ragboard, 5.25 x 5.25 "

bid here

Cloud #16 - Sunset over fields

Oil on Archival Gessoed Ragboad, 4.1" x 3.4" SOLD

I am continuing with this series, for as long as it lasts.

Thank you for visiting.

Cloud #15 - Storm in the Mountains

Oil on Gessoed Ragboard, 7.5" x 8.5" SOLD

Cloud #14

Oil on gessoed ragboard, 4.75 x 4.75" SOLD

I know it has been a long time since I have posted

anthing at all. A broken wrist and a nagging physical

problem, unfortunately, conspired to keep me from

painting. But, I am better now, and glad to be getting

back to work.

This is a continuation of my cloud series - apparently

I am not done with these yet. They are fun, I have to

say. Just free and easy painting on a small scale --

a good way to ease back into the discipline of regular

working.

Thank you for visiting today.

Wave and Reflections

Gouache (opaque watercolor), 4 1/4 x 3"

I'm teaching gouache again this quarter at school,

so I've been practicing the medium in order to be

able to give demonstrations in class.

I was quite pleased with the overall appearance of

this piece - particularly the reflections. (love those

little pieces of blotter paper!)

All of my work in this medium is small, and as a

matter of fact, I keep it all in notebooks. This was done

on Fredrix watercolor canvas, which I love. I cut

it out and pasted it in my landscape notebook with

all the other paintings. I love my collection of notebooks!

Thanks for visiting.

Woman from Giza

Pencil Drawing, 2 1/2 " x 3 3/4"

I went to Egypt in 1972 - many years ago. But

I still vividly remember the women and their

sometimes ornate, but usually, black, clothing.

I found this image in an old book about Egypt.

There was no credit for the photo, or I'd give it

here.

Thanks for visiting.

Reworked Iris

Oil on Archival Rag Board, 7" x 11"

bid here

I actually presented this piece quite a while

ago in my blog, but, the other day I was looking

at it and realized that it was not done yet.

So I got out my paints (particularly transparents)

and went to work finishing it off. There is not quite

as much pink in the background as it appears in this

photograph.

Every spring I get the urge to paint flowers - well,

actually I like to paint them all the time, particularly

in gouache. They have such wonderful shapes and colors,

and it is always a problem to figure out how to portray

their delicacy and ephemeral qualities, as well as the

color. This is especially fun in gouache, which can be

used either opaquely or transparently. One can

communicate a lot of information with this combination.

It is great.

Thanks for looking. Sorry about the lack of postings recently.

I've been on a small "vacation" from my work. Hope to be

getting back into it now.

Cloud 15 - Autumn Afternoon

Oil on Gessoed Ragboard, 4" x 4"

click here to bid