Latest Paintings

My latest paintings are available in my eBay store. Click here or the image above to see them!

Open Studio

This friday evening, as part of the monthly SOWA Artist's Guild first friday events, I'll be having an opening in my studio in Boston's South End. These are great events featuring dozens of artists all under one roof, working in many different media and styles... something for every taste.

I'll be showing about half a dozen new paintings (still lifes and landscapes) next to the 20 or so that are currently on display.

Details are here: http://www.jeffhayes.com/art/events.asp. Everybody is welcome; if you're in the Boston area, be sure stop by and say hello.

Stunning...

I have an ugly little confession to make. For the last 18 months, I've been displaying paintings in my studio under flourescent lights. Mind you, I'm always very careful to paint under natural light, halogen, or incandescent, in that order of preference. However, when I got my Boston studio, it came with 3 rows of flourescent tubes overhead. Since they were coated and "color corrected", they didn't quite give the place the appearance of an all-night laundrymat, so I basically just got lulled into a false sense of security, and stopped fretting about it. Over time, you can get used to just about anything... interia is a powerful force of nature. It was always in the back of my mind to fix it, but it certainly didn't seem like an emergency.

Friday evening, I was playing around with some 250-watt halogen work lights I have there, and started pointing them at paintings on the wall. I was shocked. While these coated flourescents don't distort the color, they do have the effect of draining off it's intensity. A lot. I've heard a number of people talk about my muted color schemes, which has always puzzled me a little. While there are some paintings where that is intentionally the case, there are at least as many where the color is fairly rich. I should have taken the hint.

But, as I said, you can get used to anything, and I'd quickly stopped noticing the nature of the light in there (which is admittedly a pretty sad thing for an artist to say). I can only imagine, though, what kind of first impression the room's been making all along... dark, dull, dreary, a little depressing. In hindsight, I'm surprised people have been coming in the door at all.

Well... dark and dreary no more. I spent a good chunk of my weekend outfitting the studio with good strong halogen spots suspended from 8 to 12 feet above the floor. The fixtures themselves may not be the prettiest, but now my paintings are basking in nearly 2500 watts of crisp, clean, near-sunlight. It's glorious. The transformation is almost unbelievable... rather than just lounging on the wall, the paintings nearly leap off and into your face. This friday is my next event there; I can't wait for people to see it.

Great Russian Painters

It's Synchronicity. Two of the art blogs I read with some regularity, Lines and Colors and William Wray, have both posted about Russian art over the last few days. Since I'm a budding fan, I thought I'd chip in my own $0.02.

My first serious exposure was a book I found more or less randomly at the local library last year. Unfortunatley, I don't recall the name or author (my bad), but it's focus was pre-revolutionary century Russian painting. I was floored... not just by the technical prowess so many of them exhibited, but also by that uniquely Russian warmth, earthiness, and deep spirituality that appeals to me in so much Russian music from the period (think Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky).

A couple of my favorites, in no particular order, were Ivan Shishkin, Ivan (Hovannes) Aivazovsky, Ilya Repin, and Isaac Levitan. I have to thank Olga's Gallery for being one of the few deep resources online for these great artists.

A couple of other good resources I've found are: The State Russian Museum, The Andreev Collection, and The Austin Gallery.

This is great stuff; A lot of people appear to be delighted to be discovering it -- I certainly am...

Fresh Paint: Glass, Brush, Plate

Newly Completed Work:

Glass, Brush, Plate
Oil on Linen
11" x 14"
December, 2005

"Glass, Brush, Plate" is a composition consisting of a pilsner glass, a large artist's brush, and a blue Mexican plate. This is a showcase of my love of painting glass and the effects of light, distortion, and refraction on glass, and is a companion piece to my painting Apple, Glass, Brush

Now available. Click here to bid.

Fresh Paint: Tree Study #3

Newly Completed Work:

Tree Study #3
Oil on Linen on Panel
6" x 4.5"
January, 2006

"Tree Study #3" depicts a large oak growing in my neighbor's back yard, immediately after a snow storm. It was painted from a second-story window, looking down, which gives the piece unusual perspective.

New Painting Demonstration

I haven't done a movie or demonstration in a while, so I thought it might be fun to do so. I have a new painting demonstration page on my website, featuring the steps to create the following painting:



Enjoy!

Fresh Paint: Cloud Study, Popocatepetl

Cloud Study, Popocatepetl
Oil on panel
4.5" x 8"
January, 2006

"Cloud Study, Popocatepetl" is a study of the effects of daybreak light on the clouds over the great Mexican volcano Popocatepetl. From where I was staying in Cuernavaca, the mountain was nearly 40 miles away, yet it still dominated the horizon. Because of its great distance, it was often visible only at sunrise before the haze set in, yet it was still one of my favorite sights.

2 artists, same view

William Wray is a California painter whose pleine air landcapes with an often industrial theme appeal to me. He just did an interesting post where he placed his own rendering of a scene in LA next to a painting of the same scene done simultaneously by another member of his painting group.

They're both good paintings. Hers is very gentle and serene, with several near-parallel lines, an emphasis on the natural elements and crisp morning light unifying the painting (I would never even know it was in LA). His includes the overhead power lines and employs a much more angular, plunging sense of perpective, giving the painting a gritty, urgent feel.

I just love these kind of side-by-side comparisons of two artists' interpretations of the same scene. It really reminds me of the extent to which the painter's personality gets involved in filtering out and selecting different elements of exactly the same objects, resulting in completely different paintings. Anybody know of other sites which display similar side-by-side comparisons?

Ben Franklin

Whenever I've played the game of trying to pick the ten people living or dead you'd like to have over for dinner (if our dining room held that many people), Ben Franklin has been pretty much near the top of that list. The range and depth of his activities is continually surpising and amazing to me, and combined with a rakish but fundamentally good-natured character (or at least so it seems to me), he's pretty much one of my favorite figures out of history. I was even delighted when we recently moved to a house on Franklin Street.

And... today is the 300th anniversary of his birth here in Boston. Everybody knows his more important accomplishments, but I've always been intrigued by a less familiar invention of his; a musical instrument called the glass harmonica (or armonica, depending). It exploits the well-known effect of running one's finger around the rim of a wine glass and producing a tone. Except he reconfigured it so that the glasses became bowls, and they were all supported by a rod that ran straight through their bases, effectively nesting them together like a open-ended russian easter eggs. When the crank at the end of the rod was turned, all the bowls were set in motion, and one simply had to touch the spinning edge to get the sound.

It was a typical Franklin stroke of genius; taking a simple curiosity and turning it into a usable musical instrument. The effect was ethereal and other-worldly. For a little while, it captured the imagination of musicians world-wide; Mozart and Beethoven composed short pieces for it.

So... happy birthday Ben, dinner's in the oven.

Fresh Paint: Salt Shaker

Newly Completed Work:

Salt Shaker
Oil on panel
5" x 3"
January, 2006

"Salt Shaker", is a study of a small glass salt shaker place on a neutral grey surface. The painting is full of the effects of reflection and refraction of the strong light hitting the shaker.

Web Site Upgrade

I've finally had some time to implement some of the upgrades I've been thinking about for my website. Although I did add a new paintings section which has a running list of the previous 60 day's work, most of the changes were behind the scenes. Basically, they make adding new pieces to the site a much easier process. Hope, it should enable me to keep the site a little more up to date, rather than lagging about 6 months behind, which has been the case. Check it out, and let me know what you think!

Fresh Paint: Rose Study #2

Newly Completed Work:

Rose Study #2
Oil on linen on panel
7" x 4"
January, 2006

The Conquest

Totally off-topic, but what the hell...

I've always been interested in Mexican history, and every time I go there I come back wanted to learn more. My latest order from Amazon arrived today, with two related books. The first is The Conquest Of New Spain by Bernal Diaz. It's a first-hand account of the conquest of Mexico by one of Cortes' captains. The second is even more interesting: The Broken Spears, The Aztec Account Of The Conquest Of Mexico, which is the recording of the oral tradition passed down by the descendants of the Aztecs, preserving their view of the events. I'm trying to force myself to eke some time out of my impossible schedule to do some reading. This is admittedly ambitious, since I rarely finish reading the books I start, but it's intriguing enough that I have a chance of getting through both.

I had lunch today with Chris, and showed him the Broken Spears book. He flipped through it and was initially surpised at the level of detail that had been preserved through an oral tradition lasting over 400 years. But we then talked about the Homeric epics, which preserve a very high level of detail, yet initially existed as an oral tradition. I also vaguely remember hearing about some asian epic (Uyghur, maybe?) that has never been written down, and is 10 times longer than the Iliad and Odyssey combined. I don't think you get through that in one night...

New Painting: Glass on Blue

Glass On Blue
Oil on linen on panel
7" x 6"
December, 2005
Now available. Click here to bid.

Mexico Trip

I've put together another blog that has pictures and brief comments about my recent painting trip/vacation to Mexico: http://centralmexico2005.blogspot.com/

Because of it's size (250 some odd pictures), I've broken it into multiple posts. Navigage using the previous posts listing in the right-hand column.

Enjoy!

Fresh Paint: Wires #2

Newly Completed Work:

Wires #2
Oil on panel
5" x 3"
November, 2005
Now available. Click here to bid.

Shaving Brush

Shaving Brush
Oil on panel
6" x 4"
October, 2005

Fresh Paint: Rose Study

Newly Completed Work:

Rose Study
Oil on panel
6" x 4"
January, 2006

Fresh Paint from Mexico: Church in Guanajuato

I recently spent three weeks painting in Central Mexico, and will be posting some of the resulting works over the next several months.

Newly Completed Work:

Church in Guanajuato
Oil on linen on panel
7" x 4.5"
December, 2005
Now available. Click here to bid.