The largest painting that I have done so far...

This is a repost of something I had previously written a couple months ago...

I thought I would blizzog about this painting because it is the largest that I have done so far, but also because the material comes with a bit of a story...

My wife used to work for a property management company downtown... one day her maintenance guys were cleaning out their storeroom and came across 3 big panels of masonite with odd stripes of tan paint randomly placed here and there with some black marker 'tags' scribbled over the top of some of the paint. Each masonite panel had been drilled in each of the 4 corners (for hanging, I assume), and all of the corners were all banged up and some were broken. It turns out that the panels had been a 'gift' to one of the previous employees from years before, and they had been left behind, unwanted...

Well when my wife saw the panels she instantly thought of my paintings so she saved them and asked me if I could use them. The next time I was at her office she showed me the panels... I looked at them curiously and began to lay them out on the floor side by side until I could make out the pattern of the stripes in order to try and understand what the 'artist' was trying to do. It ended up being graffiti... I guess... I hesitate to call it that because I am a HUGE fan of graffiti as an art form, and I absolutely HATE to see it poorly done. The 'artist' had used tan paint on brown masonite board, applied it very sloppily in thick random stripes, and THEN with a black marker they had done little 'gang-style tag' signatures here and there all over the pieces. I enjoy graffiti in many forms & styles, and this was pretty lacking in every way... needless to say it was going to be thrown out anyway if I hadn't claimed it for material purposes.

So I took the panels home and they stood against the pole in my garage for months til I was finally ready to start something so large. Because of the size of it I knew that I wanted it to be well done and not just thrown together. I had also debated about whether I would paint 1 piece across the 3 panels as the original 'artist' had done or if wanted to do 3 individual pieces on each of the 3 panels. Well I eventually decided on the latter choice... I laid the panel out on one of my biggest tables and primed it with white to try to help cover the previously applied paint.

Once it was primed, and I had settled on a basic theme, composition & color-scheme, I started the piece... I did the planet textures, shading & highlights on the 1st night and then let it sit for a couple days -- I knew that the rest of the painting would take a little while and I wanted to make sure that I had plenty of time and wasn't rushed. And a couple days later I started again... I finished out the atmosphere, the mountains, & the foreground relatively quickly, definitely sooner than I had expected when I started that night.

As far as the finished product... I ended up being really happy with the piece. I wasn't sure when I started it... I figured I'd either love it, or consider it just another space painting and add it to the pile. But instead I ended up cherishing it. Because of it's size I dont know if it will ever sell -- at least not until I can get it into a gallery or large venue (larger than my usual gig anyway)... but I'm happy just having it for myself - and it's definitely a great size to have at shows because it really gets ppl's attention!

Here's the painting (below), althought the image doesn't really do it justice... now that I'm happy with the 1st panel I can't wait to get started on the others! Perhaps the next panel will be a landscape!

"Untitled - 10347" Reclaimed Masonite, approximately 34x60