New Page: Sketchbook!

I added a new page to the site, today.

I hope to use the Sketchbook page to display some of my rough drafts and sketches that I've either turned into paintings, or that I plan to.

The first image up is one of my early sketches for "Iron Roughneck."

Color added

Still needs another coat of paint, but here is the piece I shared earlier in the week, with color!

I have several other paintings in progress, some with offshore themes, some different. In the next few weeks I'm going to try to space out posts.

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Productive week

I love flexible hours... This week I've been productive at work, productive in the studio, and I've gone out every night.

Tomorrow I'm going to try to make the Mia Borders show at the Acadiana Center for the Arts.  I'm a big fan of what they do, providing a space for art in downtown Lafayette (other than the numerous galleries and bars).  Judy Carmichael was excellent last week, and I'm excited for the new exhibit.

Started new offshore painting

Pipes.jpg

I'm still experimenting with painting offshore subjects in a Greek pottery style.  I started painting this one the other day, showing some of the piping that snakes around everywhere on a deep water drillship.  

I'm starting to settle into somewhat of a standard procedure  painting the subject in black, then glazing over in orange. I'm finding that this gives a very interesting depth to the black parts, and is more forgiving if I need to work over the details of the black parts.

In my other oil field paintings, I've been very painstaking in the detail, but here I tried to leave it rougher, and more incoherent, hoping that this gives a more ancient feeling to the work.

Iron Roughneck: Offshore Inspiration

This is the first image that comes up when you come to chaintongs.com:

I find that working offshore is excellent inspiration because it combines bursts of hard work with periods of boredom and goes on 24/7.  The combination of sleep deprivation and the contrast between focus on and off makes everything appear in a different light.

I try to keep ideas in a tallybook so I can work on them when I get back to Lafayette.

Introduction

So, I finally have a site now, and I'm excited to get started.

A little about myself for this first real post:  I'm a painter living in Lafayette, LA with a job in the oil field (Gulf of Mexico). I'm originally from up north, and I traveled around a bit in between.

I have a wide variety of interests, but art, drawing, and painting have always been important to me. I'm mostly self-taught, but I had a few classes in college that I took for fun. It's only been in the past year that I really started taking my painting as seriously as I do now. 

That might under-emphasize the amount of art that I grew up with however, since my family was always creating art when I was growing up.

I like portraiture, but I don't limit it to faces or even people. I think that inanimate objects can make fascinating portrait subjects, and I hope to talk more about that in this blog.