This is a small acrylic painting I just completed. I am including a photo I took of the under painting. A little glimpse into the process on this one
Head On
Tag: texture
Texture self portrait
This is an older painting. I built up a heavily textured substrate and painted over that rough surface with acrylics.
Longhorn (commission)
This is a small acrylic painting I am doing on commission. It is 6″x6″ and I decided to do a couple of them while I was at it. I will post the second one later in the week!
Totem
Sometimes I will do little abstract studies. I generally only reference them for color or interesting brushwork or mark making. This one stuck with me a bit. It led to a lot of other representational ideas but not sure they captured the simple allure of this.
Know Your Place
This is an especially contemporary acrylic painting for me. I was experimenting with materials and ideas with no clear destination.
I won’t lead the viewer, I had a lot of ideas when painting and composing this image. Now looking at the finished piece I have other ideas. What does this painting say to you?
Shadows of the West
I’ve wrapped up my herd of cow heads so now I’ll move on to other paintings. I’ve decided to use this particular painting for the promotional card for the show “Shadows of the West”. The show is going to start March 31st of this year. I have a lot more work to do before now and then! I will post more information about that as the date looms closer.
I am attaching an image that shows three other paintings that are part of the 5 cow heads I recently completed. I still need to take final photographs of one of these.
Look Ahead (candy)
Look Ahead (Candy)
This is an 18″ x 18″ acrylic painting that I recently finished.
Before I took the final photograph I took a snapshot with my iPhone in the studio. My subjects have been bouncing around from minimal landscapes to portraits of cows (cowscapes)? I thought it was interesting seeing the latest cow portrait next to “Cloud & Sea” on my easel. Wondering how these paintings will relate to one another in the context of a gallery show. Each painting was done by the same hand, same mediums and the same general approach. They are different paintings but they both are sort of a simplistic study of isolation/solitude. These two in particular had a nice relationship and set my mind at ease to some degree.
Building a collection of paintings for a show is both exciting and a bit daunting. I am always wondering if I shouldn’t narrow my scope and make a really tight collection of paintings with a very specific subject holding them together. The problem is when I’m working I always get excited about “the next painting”. Often this leads to something seemingly unrelated to the previous piece. Tangents and random explorations are part of the creative process and lead to new ideas and often new approaches. In a perfect world I would love to have a massive space where I could hang paintings to really get the overall feel. Then I would replace paintings that were not bolstering the show. Remove paintings that felt redundant or didn’t enrich the overall feeling. Create new paintings that would fill out the collection in just the right way. Of course this is not a perfect world and that is just a daydream. So ultimately I will follow my gut when choosing pieces and have a little faith…
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…
Other Spaces #2
This was the second in a triptich that I did called “Other Spaces”. The images were simple and bleak but interesting, particularly together. I used paint brushes and a 24″ squeegee to create these paintings that are 20″ x 20″ each.
brian sostrom 