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 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.
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.