Ellen C. Caldwell | ECLAIRE.me

In this Process of a Painting, artist DyaniWhite Hawk walks us through her step-by-step process from the very beginning in building the stretcher bars for the canvas to showcasing the finished piece

Because of this self-reflectivity, it is especially fitting that we follow Camille Hoffman in this Process of a Painting, as we move into her creative space, following her from sketch to finished painting in creating Buried High in Heaven.

Heidi Draley McFall creates monumental pastel portraits that are haunting and endearing, personal and startling. See her intricate process on New American Paintings.

Susan Logoreci captures that feeling beautifully in her drawings. In this Process of a Painting, we are looking at her detailed hand behind the creation of U.S.C. (Urban Swarm Contemplated), 2014. Using colored pencil on paper, she creates a wonderfully and surprisingly rich and bold palette, while exploring an equally intricate subject.

Thorson sheds light on her process in the following section and in her image captions, “My work plays off conventions of trompe l’oeil and the readymade, and it tests the boundaries between what we overlook and what we esteem. I’m currently working on an ongoing series entitled Bro Palace that depicts dirty socks. At the end of the day, I take off my socks and throw them on the floor. I’ve become interested in the aesthetics of this: I like the socks’ undulating forms, their stains and wear patterns, and the ‘compositions’ they make with one another on the rug.

In Reeder’s words, “This painting is the start of a new series. Prior to my Neighborhood Series, I had done a series of paintings based on electric substations and that industrial theme was something I wanted to explore again. As with the previous series, I’m drawn to the old, the worn, and the creaky. My studio is in a converted warehouse in an older Houston neighborhood that includes rickety 1920s single-family homes next to industrial warehouses – typical for unzoned Houston! Both are rapidly being replaced by $800,000 townhouses, also typical. The warehouse that inspired this painting is near my studio and I drive by it frequently. It has rounded vents that felt very anthropomorphic to me, like giant mouths opening. It is old, rusty, has broken windows and doesn’t even register to most people who pass it. I love the very mundane nature of this building and that’s what drew me to it as subject matter.”

What I love about Sherman’s process is that it is not necessarily what you expect, if you’ve only seen his finished works. It’s a fun, investigational journey, resulting in witty, playful, and wonderful painted finishes

In Brown’s own words, “this painting, Gloaming, is part of the ongoing Ice House series. The title comes from the pinkish colouration of the snow. It occurs from the light of the sunset reflecting on the snow. This acts as an additional symbolic element. The end of the day being poetically related to death. The snow is a seasonal metaphor for death…the paint is handled to create a state of transience. Basically, the work is a naturalistic vanitas.”

In Campgana’s own words, Plumule “is made largely from wood I gathered in the places where I have lived the past year. Mostly I used beautifully weathered wood that was collected from decaying outbuildings in rural Wisconsin. The outbuildings had been built decades ago for storing hay, grains, tools, and animals. These structures have a different way of breathing and translating light then the architectural structures we generally live in.”