Quent Cordair Fine Art

Now that I’ve got one quadrant of the picture to basic completion, I thought I’d include a visual breakdown of my overall composition.

Attached is an image that illustrates the composition I’m working with, in abstract form. As I finish more of the painting, you should be able to see it fit in generally with this abstract design. If I were an abstract painter, my painting wouldn’t need to go any further than this simple design, and the composition would be essentially the same as my finished realistic one. Of course, the content and theme would then be lost, and my friend, Josh Petty, would probably be a lot less happy with the results of his modeling for me.

Notice that the composition is, for the most part, divided into quadrants. Notice also that visual flow is going to be provided by different devices: color, similarity of form, and the diagonal cross cutting of an actual object within the painting (the guitar neck).

The upper left quadrant (the buildings) and the lower right quadrant (the wine bottle and glass) are connected visually by sharing elements of color, complexity (you’ll have to wait to see the lower quadrant), and a strong vertical use of line and form. Flow between these areas is going to be created by use of the color blue, which will join them together. The other two quadrants provide balance to the first two by being simple (no complex details), and by lacking any blue color.

These areas–the upper right and lower left–are in balance with each other not by being similar in value, but in being opposite; dark versus light. The dark bottom area helps to anchor the composition and create more visual balance, but will hopefully not be too heavy in contrast to the very light quadrant opposite it. Flow between these two quadrants will be created by the neck of the guitar, which will traverse the distance between them.

I’ve also included a second image, which shows the upper right quadrant, which is an Italianate sort of textured, stucco wall. This will fall into place when I get the decorative tiles on the wall’s base done, as well as the reddish Spanish tiles on the floor. That, combined with the wine and glass, are meant to go hand in had with the sort of modern version of an Italian Renaissance visual theme, which is again reiterated by the guitar and, as you will see, the rolling locks of the somewhat cherub-like figure. All these things, including the forthcoming splash of bright blue shirt, are meant to drive home a subtle “Renaissance” feeling in the picture. For me, the skyscrapers in the background are a great addition to that visual theme.

Here’s a trade secret you may have never heard before:

If by Step Four your painting doesn’t look like it’s going to be a masterpiece, you should immediately paint a big red square over the top of it, complete with streams of paint dripping down the face of it, and proclaim yourself a genius to the first person you see who looks like they really need a friend.

Just kidding, of course. I’m sure no one would actually believe you if you attempted such a boldfaced… and… oh wait. What’s that? Oh really? You don’t say. Well, never mind then. My publicist has informed me that this was already done a long time ago and that the perpetrator is far more famous and successful than I can ever hope to become. Looks like I need a new publicist.

In any case, we are at the oh-so-important Step Four and things are looking fine, so no need for any sudden arrivals of giant geometric shapes in the studio. (And Linda breathes a sigh of relief) It’s a shame, though, seeing as how this would be the final step if it had come to that. And I have several more episodes of Firefly waiting for me to watch them. Sigh. Those Giant Square guys have it so easy.

You’ll have to forgive the wobbliness of my included visual aids this time. I assure you that it’s all in the camera man (*bad* pizza delivery guy!) and not in the actual painting. The last completed image is pretty close to the painting itself.

This building has a lot more complexity than the first one, but one thing I keep in mind is that the right-hand side of the building is going to be partially covered by the figure’s hair later on down the line, so I’m not going to fuss too much over that half of the building. The important thing is to get more of the yellows that were used in the first building into this one to act as a nice visual foil for the blues. Other than that, I just try to keep things straight and sensible. I am at heart an organic painter, i.e. I like things that meander and flow and do not include a lot of hard, straight lines. As you can imagine, freestanding architecture does not exactly fall into the “organic” category. At least, not the kind of architecture that I tend to find appealing. Or safe. So this kind of work does find me gritting my teeth, gripping my brushes a little too tight, and every now and then I might jump from my stool, shake the kinks out of my fingers like a wet dog, and do a lap or two around the room. But this is a lot better than working on a painting like, say, Gold Standard 2, where the work was 95% jumping jacks and lying on the floor groaning into the night, and 5% real effective work. If I painted 4 Gold Standard subjects a year, I’d be ready to compete in the Olympics, although I’m not sure there’s an official event for “stressed out oil painting rituals” yet. *Yet*, mind you. Yet.

And so the background is essentially completed. Bang! Whoosh! YAY! See you next time.

As you can see, I’m continuing my progress from far to near by attacking the buildings in the distance next, but in a much less destructive way than, say, a giant robotic Godzilla might.  Which reminds me of the time my father, who is a realist landscape painter, decided, just for kicks, to paint a Godzilla monster coming over the mountains in the distance of a large landscape that had been commissioned of him.  He had finished the painting and wanted to see what his patron’s reaction would be if he just presented it to him for approval with the added monster looming back there.  The patron, while inspecting it, apparently said nothing at first and just stared in silence for a while before calmly stating that the painting was very nice, except for something back there that he couldn’t quite figure out.  “What is this next to the mountains?” he asked, or at least I’m sure he said something close to that, anyway.  And my father’s reply was simply “That’s Godzilla.”    Of course, he painted it back out before sending it to the patron for good, but if art conservators ever do a routine x-ray of that painting, they will inevitably find Godzilla lurking under the visible paint layer, which I’m sure will be a surprise not unlike the “real” Godzilla coming on a stroll over the hill.

And so here we have the execution of the central skyscraper.  My plan is to fade the colors of this building from light on top to dark on the bottom to go along with the same hint of evening light that I already established in the rosy-colored lower clouds.  The process itself should be fairly self-explanatory by viewing the image provided.  I apologize for the inconsistency of the photos.  It turns out my regular studio photographer who I keep on hand 7 days a week had to step out for lessons in Portuguese and I was forced to train my butler to take my photos for me.  Perhaps I’m just not a good teacher.  Or perhaps it was just a spotty, clouded day when I took these shots.  Yes, I’m sure that’s it.

Right, so down to business. I’m cooking a lentil dish as I write this, so pardon me if I seem a little distracted. I’m making it with garam masala and spicy garlic pepper sauce and lime juice. It’s something I’m inventing as I go along, so let’s all take a moment of silence and wish for a big success.

Okay, I think that’s long enough. Thank you for your kindness.

First off, it won’t do at all if we just leave the sky unpainted now will it? I’m building the color scheme for this painting around the color blue, which is both calm and optimistic, both of which are qualities that I think work well with the subject’s theme, “precision”. So naturally, the sky must be blue. And because I like to paint a painting’s various elements from far to near, and because the sky is the furthest thing in the painting away from the viewer’s perspective, it logically must come first.

I’m also planning to put in some rusty red colored tiles on the ground in the other corner, so with color balance in mind I’m going to get some red into the quarter of the painting that hosts the cityscape and sky. I’m not sure I like the idea of bright red skyscrapers (perhaps just because I’ve never seen one), so the red will have to be worked into the sky.

A blue sky with red in it? Are you mad? That’s it, I’m not reading any more of this insane person’s little painting blog thingy!

Whoa whoa, now. Keep your shirt on, pal. The fact is that I’m already planning to have the sun low in the sky so I can put a nice interesting color fade on the central skyscraper, which means I can easily place some low-lying reddish-orange clouds in there, which are the first victims of an impending sunset. You see? No problem. And to give the reddish clouds a little more of a logical place in the sky, I’m also including some of their friends, floating higher in the sky, which contain a slight amount of reddish warmth closer to the bottom, and none at all at the top. A nice easy transition.

Well, it’s time for those lentils, so I’d better get going for now. Sorry to rush off, and we’ll see you all next time around. I’m sure the lentils will be delightful.

Let me begin by saying that Bryan Larsen has in his studio the most impressive easel I have ever seen. It’s quite nice.

Now granted, despite the fact that I make my living as an artist, I do not lay any claim to being all-knowing when it comes to easels. And I’m far from having anything remotely resembling a finger on the pulse of modern easel technology, if there is such a thing. I tend to buy an easel, and if I like it I use it without actively looking for better alternatives. The same is not so for chicken fried steaks, but that’s a story for another day. The point is that, as far as I know, they’re building easels in the Netherlands that are capable of following an artist around the studio, asking whether or not he feels well, and perhaps offering a slate of helpful remedies if he is, in fact, feeling a bit down at the news of some ill happening or other. His mother might be ailing. Who is to say? A dog bite. Lots of things happen. But regardless of all of that, Mr. Larsen has, given the somewhat limited breadth of my own knowledge regarding the wide world of commercially available easels, won my personal award for Best Easel Ever. He is not aware of the honor as I write this, but he will soon come to know it when his blue ribbon arrives in the mail. Ask him next time you have the chance if he received such a prize and then we’ll discuss whether or not I’m just pulling your leg. It’s that impressive.

My own easels are not half as sexy as Mr. Larsen’s. I know this to be true because I’ve never scored any sort of social points based purely on the grandeur and impressiveness of them. Mr. Larsen has, the evidence of which is the very fact that I am now writing of the shining brilliance of said easel and attempting, probably unsuccessfully at that, to avoid showing any signs of envy. “Easel envy” is not a formal condition that I’m aware of, but I tell you with the utmost sincerity that the damn thing has *pedals*; four of them. I wouldn’t be surprised to drop into his studio unannounced one day and see him driving the thing around in circles, navigating door frames and singing a little song of delight as he went along his merry way. And his delight would be very well merited if I do say so myself. If he installed a good siren on the thing, he’d be the idol of every boy in town.

That aside, I’m certainly happy to be back in the Artist’s Studio here at Quent Cordair Fine Art, deplorably inept old clunker of an easel that I work with and all. I really do need to upgrade, is what I’ve been thinking for a long time. I’m pretty sure I had plans to import a very fantastic easel in months past, but it wouldn’t do any of us any good for me to go into that here. I think it worked on gas hydraulics, actually; an electronic brain of sorts. I should really try to remember where I wrote that down. With my luck, I jotted it on a nearby canvas and it got painted on and turned into something pretty. Now that I think about it, that’s most likely exactly what happened. This has been the case more than a few times. I missed my own mother’s birthday this year for the same reason and I’m fairly certain that I ended up living in Texas because I brushed over a note that was supposed to remind me of a very important reason for why I absolutely *must not* leave Scottsdale at any cost. I can only hope that in the future, when the conservation lab is doing a routine x-ray of one of my paintings to discover the deep dark secrets of an artistic mind that was once very prone to going off on terrible tangents, they will find my note to myself scrawled under the paint layer and say to themselves, “Now look here, what’s this? Good lord, this is a direct reference to the Easel Magnum 3000, all the way back in 2007! Our greatest artists have been using those things for 7 generations and this ‘Denys’ person was trying to order one while they were still in the early stages of development! Capitol! We must posthumously elect him Genius Of The Universe at once. All in favor, say ‘ay’.” And yes, I’m aware that I’m probably allowing this to go too far. Ah well. More than likely they will just unearth the scrawled name of a restaurant in Arizona that serves a platinum-quality chicken fried steak.

And so here we are, ready to begin a new project that I’m calling Precision, which will hopefully prove that when I’m holding a paint brush I’m capable of being far less oblique than when I have a keyboard under my fingers. I’ll get into the nuts and bolts of the subject soon enough, but for now please enjoy the accompanying sketched composition as it appears on the primed canvas. As I’m sure we’ve all seen many sketches before, I don’t think there is too much for me to ramble on about this time. And for that I’m sure we’re all very grateful. I’ll be back for more in the near future, and I hope you, whoever “you” may be out there in electronic data land, will join me. Until then, thank you for tuning in and goodbye for now.