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 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…
 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.
 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.
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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.