In today’s newsletter I’m sharing works 9 to 19 of 34 works chosen for a recent grant application, following twenty years of art making, 2003-2023, and a bit about each work:

As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to reply to this email, email me at David@DavidOSmithArtist.com, or use the Contact Page of my website.

This watercolor painting was part of an ongoing practice I developed while in Philadelphia, painting the figure in monochromatic watercolor, in successively darker washes.  Payne’s Gray is the color, a bluish-tinted gray, which has the dual benefit (at the time) of being a chromatic gray and cheap.  This work was made from the live model, and is part of a series of the first or second time I experimented painting the figure in this way.  I lived in Philadelphia for three years, 2012 to 2014, but had not yet begun art as a full-time career.  Projects like this one were intermittent, not consistent.

To date, this is probably the most compelling commissioned project I’ve ever been lucky enough to work on.  A friend came to me asking if “I thought it would be weird…” if he asked me to paint him and his then-pregnant wife in the nude.  I said that wouldn’t be weird at all - it would be the coolest, most engaging project anyone had ever asked me to do.  Of course I said yes.  We began by doing one in-person session, where I had them try different poses, and I made watercolor sketches very similar to “Child’s Pose”, monochromatic, quick studies of twenty minutes or so.  We found a pose that worked really well, so I made just a graphite outline of it, and took reference photos (for my eyes only, of course).  I then used the photos to fill in the graphite drawing, getting the go-ahead for the final piece from the client.  I worked from my sketch and from the photos to create this piece.  I started with a very tight graphite outline, and a full underpainting in monochromatic Payne’s gray.  I added color on top of the gray, which at first gave everything a terrible green tint (and I thought I’d ruined the piece!), but I kept at it, successive layers, over and over, and brought in considerable warmth to the final painting.  Although I no longer work in photo-based portraiture, I remain proud of this piece for what it is and what it means to me.

This painting was not made en plein air - but is instead a studio piece, made from a reference photograph I took.  It began with a graphite drawing to establish the major shapes, and then was worked on in successive layers, overall much more slowly and deliberately than I work today.  On the plus, the final effect is decent, and gives some sense of place.  The disadvantage, to me, of working like this from photographs is that it does end up feeling a bit more like a photograph than the experience of being outside, the gift that painting en plein air gives, a direct conduit to the experience.

This drawing was made from pure imagination, spilling ink on a page and extending this vision out of the initial randomness.  I had a ton of fun working on this piece, using black and white inks both to create opacity and increasingly specific layering, building up a nighttime vision of figures crowding along an illuminated street, megastructures in the far distance, obnoxious holographic advertising in the foreground.  Such an image owes much to my favorite science fiction and fantasy media, always in my subconscious.  Drawing from pure imagination is very fun, and there is something in works like this one that audiences seem to connect with, beyond even the very well-crafted representations of the real.

This painting is a combination of a plein air piece, the sky and initial hilltop made from life as the sun went down, and a studio piece, as I took a reference photograph of the hillside, to be able to take my time later that night to flesh out the buildings’ silhouettes.  It was very enjoyable to work on this piece, an early-days piece of having declared myself a full-time artist, fall of 2018.  As part of that declaration I made a commitment to produce a body of work, and I knew that plein air (or plein air and studio) watercolor landscapes would be one aspect of that step up in my art practice.  The view is from the roof of my family’s houseboat on Eastlake, looking West to Queen Anne Hill.

This commissioned posthumous portrait was one of four pieces of the same scale, same media.  I made these in preparation for a memorial service, all within the same few days of continuous work, with (at the time) no backup plan and only four sheets of paper.  Each piece had to be successful.  I began with establishing likeness in graphite from photo reference, and worked over the graphite using washes of Payne’s Gray, my (at the time) favorite monochromatic painting color for the watercolor medium.  These pieces were very personal and meaningful to make, and I wanted to put significant effort into producing the best portraits I could given the constraints of time and my abilities.  The work was well-received by the client, a family friend.

This painting was made purely for fun, at the end of a long day of working on the next painting, “Netmen”.  It is impossible for me to look at one of these plein air watercolors from late summer / fall 2019 and not think of their counterpart - the massively time-intensive studio piece that was “Netmen”.  This view is from the roof of my family’s houseboat on Eastlake on Lake Union, looking west towards the ship canal.  It was fun to make plein air work like this at the end of an intense day of 6 or so hours (or more) of completely indoors studio work on the aforementioned other painting.  It was also enjoyable to get back in touch with artwork and making artwork as a fun, almost recreational activity, not a serious “job”.  Seattle has many such gorgeous evenings over Lake Union, especially in the summer when the sun sets late.

“Netmen” is to date the piece I’ve probably put more effort into than anything else I’ve done.  It was a commissioned piece made for someone who wanted a re-interpretation of a fairly famous Seattle photograph of Croatian-American fishermen hauling a net over a dock, including a younger man in the foreground lifting and coiling the extremely heavy lead line - a cable made of lead.  To make this piece, I of course was looking at the original (blurry) photograph as a starting point… but wanted to make something that would go beyond a photographic copy.  I used photo reference of myself in various poses, and used imagination and invention to fill in the gaps between the photos I took and a reinterpretation of what these men were going through, hauling in the net, the physicality of the work.  To create their individual portraits, I invented their stories in my head, what had brought them here, to this moment, and what were they thinking about, what was their experience, and where would they go from here?  As I used no white gouache, every bit of light you see in this piece is the light of the paper.  I had to work very precisely with the watercolor, making sure especially with the finer filaments of the net to not accidentally darken any areas I didn’t mean to.  The months of work I put into this piece paid off in the sense that it did achieve the effect I wanted it to - and I could feel in the strain of the men the strain of my own body and mind, creating this piece alone in the dark.  The client was pleased with the end result, as well.

This is a portrait of my friend and former USA National Rowing Team teammate Shane, commissioned for his birthday by his wife, Katie.  As I introduced the two of them, this piece was very personal, and very enjoyable to make.  I began this only a few days after completing “Netmen”, and though it was another studio piece, made from (a very good) photo reference, my mood working on this was pressure less and light.  I laid in the lightest palest colors in an initial wash over a rough pencil outline, and worked darker and more precisely over no more than two or three days of work.  It came together quickly, almost spontaneously, I think in some part because I was so relieved to have “Netmen” behind me.  Katie and Shane both really enjoyed the final result.  It’s atypical as a portrait because I opted not to show Shane’s face… but instead, his immersion in, as Katie puts it, “his happy place”, in more sense than one.  He is both autonomous as well as tied to the environment of rowing, of racing abroad, of fine-tuning equipment, completely absorbed in the task at hand.  Of all the competitors I’ve raced with and against, Shane remains one of the most ferocious racers, a most demanding teammate, as well as being one of the kindest, most thoughtful, outward-looking friends I have.

This portrait of sumo wrestler Takanohana Koji was made by first toning a large square of heavy watercolor paper with orange ink, leaving a bit of a pattern, very chromatically strong and striking just on its own.  I had the toned paper for a few months, I think, not knowing exactly what to do with it, or how to best put it to use.  A book in Third Place Books in Ravenna, a commemorative book of photographs for Takanohana’s retirement from competition, signed by Mimi Gates, no less, gave me the inspiration for this piece.  The portrait itself is slightly larger than life size, an over-scale piece to match the immensity of the man, both his physical appearance and his superlative winning record.  I really had fun with this.  It took a huge quantity of ultramarine blue watercolor paint to even get close to a darker blue, I had to go over the paper again and again in large, full-body movements.  I had to stand astride the painting (working with it flat on the floor under me) to render any of the interior details, performing the splits and squats for hours and hours.  I enjoyed working at this larger scale, and the physical challenges that came with it.

This is one of my last, intensive studio watercolors from photo reference.  I began with studies for color and a tight graphite underdrawing.  In successive layers I did my best to more or less re-create the reference photo within the painting.  In some ways, this might have been the last piece I made in this way because I got all I wanted out of working in this method: it was no longer a challenge for me, no longer truly fascinating.  This was also before I went to Santa Fe to study oil painting with Tony Ryder at The Ryder Studio, so this piece is “pre-optical” for me.  At the time, it represented the best I could really do, working from photographs in watercolor.  I gave this to my mom as a present, because she enjoyed it so much, and said it reminds her of Seattle, the commonplace ritual of driving in the rain.

Thus concludes works 9 to 19 of 34 works demonstrating 20 years of continuous art making.  Next up for Wednesday, I’ll go over works 20 to 27.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to reply to this email, email me at David@DavidOSmithArtist.com, or use the Contact Page of my website.

Cheers,

David