Traveling Music

 My third in this series, Traveling Music, was inspired by a Howard Johnson's ad.

The colors in this vintage advertisement are what drew me to the image. I also liked the swath of orange and its placement near the blue steeple. The two triangles begged to be offset by a few circles.

The inclusion of the circles reminded me of vinyl records and allowed me to remove the people from the scene, reducing their heads to mere circular shapes.

A New Soft Look

 Second in my series of experiments, A New Soft Look, was inspired by a vintage lipstick advertisement.

I fixated immediately upon the repeated portrait image on the right. I isolated the faces in a square crop and softened the focus to achieve this plan for a painting.

By continuing to blur the image even more, I find that it needs more saturation to keep the image from completely degrading. It is definitely a softer look!

Put Some Zest in Your Nest!

I am starting a new project today. It is based on the abstraction of ads from the era of Mid Century Modern. For example, today I took the following advertisement and pulled shapes and colors from the artwork on the walls. Instead of merely mimicking the modern art, however, I added additional strips gleaned from the clothing of the model. This allows me to maintain the color palette that originally

 appealed to me. Here is the before shot:

And the after:

Because the resulting concentric squares resembled a squared off nest, I decided to title the final painting the same as the headline of the original advertisement. I like the design, basically, except for the juxtaposition of orange and purple. There should be a clearly defined pink stripe between the two colors, and I am not sure that I like the placement of the squares in the bottom right corner. So I played with the design a little more:

I like the resulting complexity, but not the way the black squares are too rectangular. I think that all horizontal lines should be more continuous instead of slightly off. In other words, the top half should contain more symmetry perhaps. I will continue to tweak the design as I wait for new square canvases to arrive.