My Ordinary Style

I suddenly realized that most of you out there have no idea of what my ordinary painting style looks like. Here's a recent portrait, a studio model named Steve. Now you can see why what Kline ended up doing is so very different from my stuff. Everyone is told in class that "all painting is abstract," but some paintings are more abstract than others.



Kline went through stylistic changes too. He had originally wanted to be a cartoonist or illustrator (in the 1930s and early 1940s), did some mural work, and, yes, portraits too. Even in his most representational work, however, he pushed speed of stroke and image in complex layered compositions.

This 1941 landscape, "Palmerton", from the Smithsonian, shows the dull colors and themes of his early style. He was from the Pennsylvania coal country, and the imagery of trains, trestles, tracks, and hills were motifs he abstracted and explored in his monumental black and white works, many of which took names of trains or towns.

Here's my first attempt at doing something "monumental". I'll probably revise this, since it needs to cut in a bit from the very dark edges.



And want to work on some landscape images of my own, both in his black and white, and color on color modes.