Kevin's Painting Blog

I looked all over the web and couldn’t find this info. For future reference sake, here are some standard metric canvas sizes found here in Japan. I believe it’s the same for Europe as well as I recently attempted to copy a Renoir and what do you know, the original was “exactly” F15 measurements! The more I am forced to deal with metric, the more I am liking it I must say!

Standard Canvas Sizes (unit=millimeters)

My last blog entry before this one was posted on  February of 2011, I had finally got back into a painting cycle and was producing.  Well, not a lot, but I pumped out a few and I was happy how they were turning out.  Then at the end of February I went back to Arizona for a visit and then returned back to Japan on March 8th.  Just three days later, life as I knew it changed when the earthquake hit.  I live in Iwaki city, Fukushima.  To say it thrashed my apartment would be an understatement. Well, what can I say about that?  It was an enormous catastrophe! I personally know people who’s homes were washed into the sea. The small village where I used to surf was wiped out. 20,000 people within 100 miles of me died. It’s sad, I can’t even begin to say how sad this was. It changed me.  If it was only the earthquake that I had to deal with, I would have been fine but where I live is only 28 miles from the three nuclear reactors that melted down.  Long story short, I ended up in Kyoto for one year.  One could end up in much worse places than Kyoto – Kyoto was a dream!  So for one year I had this life of being in an awesome place, but simultaneously I was under stress like I never had to deal with before.  I moved into an apartment, I didn’t own one stick of furniture, not even a fork to eat with.  It was an unfamiliar place to me, I had to spend a lot of money and spent months re-establishing myself.  Then after one year, I came back to Iwaki, which was an adjustment all over again.  That was last April, things are now calming down, and I finally feel ready to get back to painting.  Have been fixing up the web site so I can post images easier, etc, getting everything prepared.

That’s my excuse for not painting. I think it’s better than the dog ate my homework but still, I should have painted more I admit.

Here is a simple copper cup. Simple, except that it hat 500 tiny dents in it and it was a pain in the ass to paint.  I picked a blue background to contrast with the orange color of the cup.  The spoon handle and head deviate from each other at an angle, that gave me somewhat of a fit for a bit but just had to look at it more carefully.

Copper Cup & Spoon - F3 Oil on canvas

Bought a bunch of smaller canvases, would like to paint a bunch of smaller paintings that I can knock out in a short amount of time.  The goal is to paint more, nit-pick less.  Looking through my collection of fake flowers and stuff, came up with this:

Set-Up

Thought this would be a good contrast of yellow and purple.  After two hours, this is what I ended up with, I’m kind of pleased with how it turned out.

Sunflowers in Violet Vase - 22cm x 27.5cm oil on canvas

Things seemed a little lonely so went to the convenience store and bought my first pack of cigarettes ever.  Bottles in background were put in from memory.

If I were to do it again, I’d probably get rid of the apples because it doesn’t really fit the theme well.  That said, this is the first painting I’ve done in a long time so it felt good to get back into the groove.

"Henry McKenna" - 46 cm x 38 cm oil on canvas

Spent about 3 or 4 hours, this went in pretty quick.  It’s going to change a lot from this however. Will let it dry a few days and next chance I get, will continue:

Basic lay in...

Here’s my pallet, what a mess: