Reston, Virginia

"The Nest", three-dimensional watercolor

From the year 2000, this three-dimensional watercolor titled "The Nest" was a commission depicting the client’s home in Reston, Virginia.  I love how the colors of autumn were captured.  I worked with Old Town Editions to make a limited addition digital print (giclee) of it measuring 28 x 28 inches framed.

The Coronation of Mary

Three-dimensional mixed media, 35" x 35" x 2"

 





























Progress on The Coronation of Saint Mary has been intermittent but now all that remains are the finishing touches on the face and the construction of the mat, frame and substructure for the drawing panels. 

I started research for this commission about a year ago and discovered a rich two-thousand-year-old history of painting the mother of Jesus collectively known as the Marian Paintings.  As an artist, it was difficult finding a unique vision for such a popular subject.  For additional insights, I explored the etymology of key words associated with Mary and discovered an interesting connection between Mary and the devotion of the rosary said in the Catholic Church.  I found the word rosary came from Middle French rosaire meaning rose garden.  In France in the 1540s, the conceit of the day was to name collections of things bouquets, laurels or gardens.  For example, a book of poems was called a bouquet of poems and a collection of prayers a garden of prayers.  And because the rose was often used to symbolize Mary, the main focus of praying the rosary, the notion of a rose garden evolved and by the 1590s the sense of the word came to mean the beads used in praying the rosary.  Inspired by this information, it seemed fitting to place Mary in the composition surrounded by roses.

The Face of Saint Mary

The Face of Saint Mary, color pencil

Excited by a debate about "raw symbolic" marks articulated by Kev Ferrara and Chris Bennett on David Apatoff's blog Illustration Art, I was inspired to push my "dead pen" technique further.  The sequence below shows some of the steps used in rendering the face of a portrait commission I've been working on of Saint Mary.  At a distance, the white lines appear to blend with the colors of the skin, giving a luminous aura to the face.

Pencil sketch on tracing paper

Grayscale and embossed marks on museum board



Close-up showing embossed marks using the dead pen technique

Color pencil rubbed over embossed marks

Finished base colors