An empty chair is a vacant place. To some an inviting spot to rest their bones. When I paint one it is a lonesome nowhere (maybe that’s just me).
Author: Brian Sostrom
Blspaintings@gmail.com
The show must go on! The show is over.
This weekend I flew up to Ketchikan to help pack up the “Empty Spaces” show. It was a great experience in a beautiful location. The town has a very active and engaged artist community.
I sold six paintings and it is nice to know those pieces will be part of Alaska. Some of them will reside on the waterfront with views much superior to The my studio.
I hope to make it up to this country again.
Happy Halloween!
A lot of my work tends to be autumnal. This one in particular seems appropriate for a Halloween post. The subject is a monkey skull in an old iPhone box. The juxtaposition seems to say it all.
Decomposing Light
I have done a lot of small paintings around the theme of decomposing light. Using the interplay of texture and color to convey that sense of daylight transition to darkness. I recently took some photographs of some that I am preparing to send to a miniature show. For this show they can be 6″x6″ as the largest dimensions. These also aren’t the hyper-realistic, super detailed type of paintings that true miniature painters make. They are simply small but mighty?
Still
This is yet another chair painting, something sort of sad about a chair sitting alone… of course this one doesn’t exactly seem to be sitting. This was another early experiment with glass beads on an acrylic painting. The image was created with a lot of thick translucent layers of acrylic, giving it something of an encaustic. This painting was used on the promotional flyer for the Confluence Gallery in Twisp, Washington this year. The show was called “Shifting Baselines”.
Empty
In this painting I experimented with the addition of glass beads to the surface of my work. I’ve done this a number of times but this was a fairly bold version. I am always trying to find new ways to manipulate the light and cause visual changes and shifts with the angle of view.
Forgotten Words
This is another painting that went to the Tieton 10x10x10 show. Antique devices like old typewriters and phones are intriguing subjects to me. Heavy equipment so far removed from the age we live in, communication wasn’t always so easy…
Place
This is a 10×10″ acrylic painting I did this year. It was selected for the Tieton 10x10x10 show which is an annual competition held in Tieton Washington. A pretty interesting exhibit, they publish a color catalogue with the show!
The Artist is Present
When I was photographing the Agrestic Macabre paintings there was some curiosity around their presence. I couldn’t resist the urge to take a cat/bird photo, it also puts their scale in perspective.
Agrestic Macabre #3
This is the third painting in the series, I will probably move onto other work but these were fun!
brian sostrom 