Did a couple of paintings for Eco Gallery in LA. The owner, Peter Schulberg, makes painting surfaces for artists out of discarded billboard material and exhibits them in his gallery on Pico near La Brea. I’m glad he asked me if I wanted to do some paintings, as it had been a while since my last involvement with the gallery. Here are the paintings that resulted:
Dawn, 24″ x 24″, acrylic on billboard material
Dusk, 24″ x 24″, acrylic on billboard material
Peter initially was going to give me just the orange surface, but then I saw the blue one next to it and immediately had this brain storm thinking of a night/day kind of theme. Since he’d already asked if I’d like to paint some birds, I had to do some research on which morning and night bird I wanted to paint. There are a ton of morning birds to choose from, but not so much with the night birds. It’s pretty much just the owl. But there are so many different kinds of owls! I definitely wanted to paint one with discernible eyes–the ones with small dark eyes kind of freak me out. But anyway, I was really happy with the way they turned out. It had been a while since I’d painted realistic objects and I wondered if I’d be really out of practice, but it turns out it’s just like riding a bike.
The opening reception was last Saturday night, Nov 14th, and quite a few people I knew showed up, which is always nice. In addition to finished paintings there were a couple of artists doing live paintings on enormous panels as well as a sculptor working on his cool bended-wood sculpture things. He makes lamps and things with these and they look really cool. There was also a big reveal on a billboard behind the gallery. At around 8pm we all went outside and did a countdown, at the end of which they dropped the curtain on the billboard to reveal three paintings by different artists. That was fun, like a New Year’s Eve party. Here’s a link to some pics from the opening.
Stephanie Han Art & Design 