David’s Oath of the Horatii was the painting that initially inspired the Lebowski Cycle, for reasons I explained in my first post on the series. It was also the first one I started painting after I planned the series and stretched all the canvases, so it has undergone a lot of changes in the four years [...]]]>

Oath of the Horatii • Joe Forkan 2006-2010 Oil on Linen 72" x 40"

David’s Oath of the Horatii was the painting that initially inspired the Lebowski Cycle, for reasons I explained in my first post on the series. It was also the first one I started painting after I planned the series and stretched all the canvases, so it has undergone a lot of changes in the four years it’s been on and off the easel.

Oath of the Horatii Jacques-Louis David 1784 Oil on canvas 326 cm × 420 cm (128" × 165") Louvre, Paris

I’ll post more about the process soon, but wanted to get this up on the blog.

Below is an early sketch playing with the rhythms of the compostion, and the overall palette of the painting.

Oath of the Horatii • Joe Forkan 2007 pastel on paper 24 x 18

I’ve added 15 paintings from Ireland to my main web site joeforkan.com.

Here are two more from the same series.

Downpatrick Sunset I • Joe Forkan 2010 oil on gessoed paper 11.125 x 3.125

I managed to finish quite a few paintings in Ireland, and made many sketches to work from later, as well. County Mayo is a beautiful part of Ireland and a varied and dynamic landscape. The light and weather changes there so quickly that it helped to work smaller and try to complete paintings in one session.

Ballycastle [...]]]>

Ceide Fields • Joe Forkan 2010 oil on gessoed paper 15.75 x 11.375

I managed to finish quite a few paintings in Ireland, and made many sketches to work from later, as well. County Mayo is a beautiful part of Ireland and a varied and dynamic landscape. The light and weather changes there so quickly that it helped to work smaller and try to complete paintings in one session.

Ballycastle Trees • Joe Forkan oil on gessoed paper 4.5 x 4.5

Revisiting a painting on a second or third day usually meant a complete renegotiation of the palette, composition, and the general focus of the image. Often, the weather was extreme enough to preclude it entirely. That’s always a possibility of that with outdoor painting, but it seemed especially so in Ireland.

Ballycastle is a small village, about a mile from the edge of the North Atlantic, surrounded by working farms and pastures full of sheep and cows, many that edge up to or jut out above the ocean. The people were great, and the area was lush, even in a summer that lacked rain (to the degree that water rationing was suggested for parts of Mayo, until the rains returned in July).

The residency was quite an opportunity. Many artists came and went while I was there, as my stay was one of the longest this summer, and it was really interesting to see how other artists responded to the same environment. Una Forde and Christine Tighe from the Ballinglen Arts Foundation were very helpful and generous with their suggestions and information about County Mayo and places of potential interest for the artists.

North Atlantic Cloud • Joe Forkan 2010 oil on gessoed paper 7.5 x 11.5

The sea cliffs were stunning, often with drops of hundreds of feet to the ocean, and the bogs (where peat is cut for heating and bog cotton grows in the summer), reminded me of the tundra in Alaska. Viewed from a distance, the yellow/brown colors and low growth on the bogs gave a look closer to parts of the desert southwest in the US than I would have expected.

Many places I painted are on private land, but are open for hiking (or painting) as part of a system of Looped Walks throughout Ireland.

It is quite a transition to go from the population density of southern California to areas that I was able to explore in Mayo, where often I would not see another person on a three or four hour hike through areas of absolutely stunning beauty.

Many days while working near the Atlantic, where the wind is strongest, I made drawings or took notes. Other days I struggled against the wind with my easel on the cliff edges, beach rocks or bog. It’s a tough way to work, but a spectacular place to attempt it.

Here are a few of the paintings. I will be posting more later to my regular web site.

Downpour • Joe Forkan 2010 oil on gessoed paper 11.75 x 5.5

Painting the Sea Cliffs near Ballycastle, June, 2010

My residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ireland has come to an end.

I was lucky to be in Ireland for a very temperate summer, and was outside nearly every day painting, exploring, or both. With daylight lasting from 4:30am until 11:00pm, there was plenty of time to work and enjoy being in such an [...]]]>

Painting the Sea Cliffs near Ballycastle, June, 2010

My residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ireland has come to an end.

I was lucky to be in Ireland for a very temperate summer, and was outside nearly every day painting, exploring, or both. With daylight lasting from 4:30am until 11:00pm, there was plenty of time to work and enjoy being in such an amazing place.

I had planned on posting paintings to the site while in Ballycastle, but decided I’d rather be wandering around Ireland than staring into a computer screen.

I’ll put some work up soon.

(I finally got to see Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ, which was in Rome when I arrived in Dublin. It is now back at the National Gallery. It was great to see it in person, especially after basing one of the Lebowski paintings on it.)

After worries over airport closures due to volcanic ash, and the long trek from California, I made it to Ireland and finally [...]]]> The updates have been slow lately, as it’s been an extremely busy couple of months. I was a visiting artist at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in Philadelphia in March, and spent early April preparing for a 6 week artist residency in Ballycastle, Ireland with the Ballinglen Arts Foundation.

After worries over airport closures due to volcanic ash, and the long trek from California, I made it to Ireland and finally to County Mayo. It’s such a lush and beautiful country. The colors are rich and deep, and full of atmosphere and drama so different from the stark, sharper light of California. The skies are constantly changing, revealing subtle color dynamics as whole portions of the landscape drift in and out of view and in and out of focus.

I arrived in Ballycastle to a great little cottage just up the road from the studios, and did a bit of drawing, but really just took a few days to explore and soak up the environment, the light and the color before getting out in the landcape with my paints.

It’s only about a 2.5 mile walk to the Atlantic ocean from the studios, past pastures and a graveyard down to empty beaches and up to the great sea cliffs at Downpatrick Head.

I’ll be posting paintings and drawings here over the next couple of months, but until then I’ve posted a few random photos on my Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/25783201@N05/

The Lebowski paintings are coming along, with one painting painfully close to being finished before I left for Ireland, but it still needs a bit more work when I return later in the summer.

More soon…

The redesign of joeforkan.com has been completed, and is now up and running, with images of many recent paintings that haven’t made it to the painting blog.

It’s certainly been a while since I’ve updated my regular website, and I’m glad to have new work up, and a clean, new site design by Crystal Yachin Lee.

Spurgeon 6:20 pm [...]]]>

Bush Street, Standing Water • Joe Forkan 2010 Oil on panel 16" x 14"

The redesign of joeforkan.com has been completed, and is now up and running, with images of many recent paintings that haven’t made it to the painting blog.

It’s certainly been a while since I’ve updated my regular website, and I’m glad to have new work up, and a clean, new site design by Crystal Yachin Lee.

Spurgeon 6:20 pm June • Joe Forkan 2010 Oil on canvas 34.5" x 48"

New paintings from the Spurgeon series and The Lebowski Cycle can be found there, as well as other landscapes and cityscapes. There’s still more to post, including recent work from Italy and Switzerland. Look for those updates soon.

Here are a couple of recent paintings from the Spurgeon series that are part of the update.

The demands of perceptual based painting are very different from the demands of more open-ended studio work. Large figurative paintings like those in The Lebowski Cycle can be in progress for years, and undergo significant revisions, but perceptually based paintings are more direct expressions, and the entire process of painting them is compressed into [...]]]>

The Warmest Day of Winter • Joe Forkan 2010 Oil on canvas 12" x 12"

The demands of perceptual based painting are very different from the demands of more open-ended studio work. Large figurative paintings like those in The Lebowski Cycle can be in progress for years, and undergo significant revisions, but perceptually based paintings are more direct expressions, and the entire process of painting them is compressed into a very short period of time.

Trying to capture the specifics of an experience of a place, or of the presence of a person in one session forces you to really focus on what you want to capture in the painting, to make quick decisions and to jettison extraneous information.

Regardless of the quality of the finished work, I always remember a place that I have painted much more vividly having painted it than if I had just spent the day there as an onlooker. Interpretation demands engagement in a different way. Painting is a way of knowing.

Landscape painting also offers a counterpoint to the more solitary nature of studio painting. Yesterday, after spending all morning painting in the studio, the warm weather encouraged an afternoon run down to Newport Beach to paint at Crystal Cove. It seemed a shame to spend such an amazing day inside painting three figures in the interior of a bowling alley.

It was great to see Jeff Bridges win the Best Actor Oscar last night for his performance in Crazy Heart, 38 years after his first nomination. I’ve always enjoyed his performances, but my appreciation for his acting has certainly grown since watching The Big Lebowski innumerable times while working on The Lebowski Cycle.

The image above is a detail [...]]]>

Oath of the Horatii - detail (in progress) • Joe Forkan 2010 oil on canvas 72" x 40

It was great to see Jeff Bridges win the Best Actor Oscar last night for his performance in Crazy Heart, 38 years after his first nomination. I’ve always enjoyed his performances, but my appreciation for his acting has certainly grown since watching The Big Lebowski innumerable times while working on The Lebowski Cycle.

The image above is a detail from The Oath of the Horatii, based on the Jacques-Louis David painting of the same name. The full painting is almost complete and I’ll be posting it soon.

This painting is based on Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus from 1601, which illustrates a dramatic moment from the story of Jesus’ resurrection. I was interested in Caravaggio’s take on the story because of his depiction of the moment of discovery, when the disciple’s “eyes were opened”, and for his symbolic use of the still life to [...]]]>

Supper at Emmaus (After Caravaggio) • Joe Forkan 2006-2009 oil on linen 96"x 38"

This painting is based on Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus from 1601, which illustrates a dramatic moment from the story of Jesus’ resurrection. I was interested in Caravaggio’s take on the story because of his depiction of the moment of discovery, when the disciple’s “eyes were opened”, and for his symbolic use of the still life to reinforce the central idea of his painting.

Supper at Emmaus Caravaggio 1601 Oil on canvas 141 cm × 196.2 cm (55.5 in x 77.25 in) National Gallery, London

The symbolic references used in the paintings of this time period are somewhat obscure to us now, it is still clear from looking at the work that each figure, element, and gesture was an important consideration in the presentation of the story, all subsumed into the final image. One of the qualities that I most enjoy about narrative painting is that there is a clear story to be presented, but the specific events of the narrative give you great latitude for formal, conceptual or expressive shifts and digressions that can set a different tone or shift the story’s implications.

In my painting, I was looking to create a kind of visual and narrative tension between the figures, the dramatic space, and the still life, one that is suggestive of a larger narrative, and that hopefully moves beyond the specifics of the Jesus story, the Lebowski story, or the Caravaggio story, but retains a shifting, if uneasy relationship between all three, in addition to where I am trying to go with the content and the formal elements.

Detail from the Supper at Emmaus • Joe Forkan 2009

I hesitate to be any more forthcoming about my intentions for these paintings, in that I don’t want to set a specific read for anyone else. Painting is, after all, a language of its own and in this regard, I will let the paintings speak for themselves.

This painting was one of the most complex of The Lebowski Cycle. Its scale was daunting (96″ x 38″ / 243.84 cm x 96.52 cm), with 3 main figures that are slightly over life-size, and a deep space that I wanted to paint in a specific way. I wanted the background to be largely empty, but not in the way that Caravaggio’s paintings are empty, through the use of chiaroscuro (the contrasting effects of intense light and deep shadow). I was looking to represent space and to convey a sense of light and shadow through the relationships of large color shapes, rather than using a more dramatic recession into shadow.

This painting will be included in the Laguna Art Museum‘s exhibition The OsCene 2010 –  Contemporary Art and Culture in Orange County from February 21st – May 16, 2010.