1990: My First Photoshop

I was rummaging through my archives and found my first serious work with Photoshop version 1.0.

LA-Skyline-Mac

This is a little time capsule of obsolete technology. I took the photo of the Los Angeles skyline with a Polaroid SX-70 camera. The image itself is 8-bit dithered, I don’t think Photoshop did 24 bit color yet.

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2014 Crop Report

Although my 2014 crop of green peppers has been disappointing, it was still a productive year. Some years, each plant will only produce one or two large peppers. The plants flower early in the season, setting some early fruits. But none of the subsequent flowers set. I think they dropped off in the heat. Also there was a bad storm and the plants were torn up badly.

CropReport2014

Yesterday, I went to the grocery store and found huge green peppers for 30 cents. I could buy four huge green peppers at the store for about the same as the $1.19 I paid for my four pepper seedlings.

1994: The Copyist

Twenty years ago, I produced a painting study for my class with Gelsey Verna. She gave an assignment to copy from a painting. I decided to work from a Raoul Dufy painting I saw at the Art Institute of Chicago. Here is the original on the left, with my study to the right.

DufyAndCopy

I wasn’t really interested in using his distinctive style of flat colors with black lines over it. I was interested in how he actually painted it. How did he get such strong black lines over wet paint? That’s called “painting wet on wet,” it’s tricky.

I had a very difficult time replicating his technique. I finally used a pinstriping brush normally used in sign painting. I could load the brush with a lot of paint and lay down flowing black lines. But it is long and floppy, so I could not get the fast, consistent strokes that Dufy used. Oh well, that is his primary style, he is well practiced and I am just a painting student, trying to reverse engineer it. I am sure he used a different brush technique than I did.

While making this study, I did learn a lot about wet over wet painting. I thought I did a few spots well, like the red couch on the left. It took the yellow and black overpainting just like the original. And a lot of my black crosshatching in the center seemed fast and rhythmic like the original. But some of Dufy’s color choices are rather strange. I just could not match that pale gold in the upper right or the purple on the lower right.

I only copied parts of the painting I wanted to analyze, simplifying the overall composition. You can’t make an exact copy anyway. What if it turned out brilliant, and someday someone thinks they found a long lost Dufy work?

Art students have a long history of copying paintings, and many museums have a long traditions of allowing Copyists to come into the gallery with their easel and oil paints and work right in front of the real painting. I always wanted to go to the Art Institute and copy directly from the original Dufy. But after I completed this study, on my next visit to the museum, the painting was not on display. Even today it is still not back on display.

© Copyright 2016 Charles Eicher