Here is the first song on my new album, scheduled to come out early 2025. 3PlusOne is a latin inspired instrumental with a good, mid-tempo groove and a great guitar solo at the end by Al Kaatz. It feels like a sunny day dancing out on a grassy field. I play the main melody on electric and acoustic mandolin, Kelly VanCamp on drums and Walt Singleman on electric bass and David Parker on accordion.
Listen to this and many other songs on BandCamp: https://samalbright.bandcamp.com
This is a collaboration with Leah Vic Shelton. I created the basic music bed and Leah wrote the lyrics to fit, then I fleshed out the production.
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I have an interesting relationship with painting portraits. A loose, confident application of paint is required in watercolor to keep the paint fresh and clean while an accuracy in the positioning and drawing of the main features and structure of the forms is required to make it convincing. I’m after a balance between the cartoon and photo realism. This is the demo I did during a class I taught at our local gallery.
I’ve been teaching a Saturday afternoon oil painting class at GalleryOne in Ellensburg, WA. We started with a small still life of a lemon…. not so easy, but everybody did great. The second Saturday we got a good start on a landscape, learning to simplify and look for values. Next week we’ll dive into a portrait. It’s an interesting process to figure out where people are at and what they need. I hope I’m doing a good job.
When I’m a bit lost I remind myself to get back to the basics. Composition is the foundation for all that sits on top of it. Value is where form is described and color is like the flavors that make up a good meal. Out of many tiny thumbnails a few will stand out and call for more exploration and refinement. It’s design at this stage, pushing the shapes around and easy to adjust anything at a small size, no more than a few inches. Then after many small idea sketches a few will stand out and hopefully one will be interesting enough to take into a painting. This is just one process of many, but a good one to remember.
In my little watercolor notebook I start working this out. I want the brightest glow from the sky to just hit a bit on the right wall and around the figure. Perhaps the left wall is still too light. And I have to do a couple real vanishing points so the walls read correctly. And then the water reflection shapes need to be worked out as I don’t have a real photo of this, just a snap from a TV image.
Working on a new composition with the flowers, fence and pathways. But the smoke is giving me a headache even with a mask on.
My show is up on the walls at the gallery. A years work, thirty one pieces in total. Come and celebrate with us on February 7th from 5 to 9 at GalleryOne on Pearl Street in Ellensburg, Washington.
I’ve been working out this idea for a while and finally got the under painting pretty close. Then it started peeling off between the gesso and primer. I had to just take the whole thing off.
Redid the whole thing in about 2-3 days. Now to let it dry and start the next layers.
Karen, at Gard Vintners called me up the other day and said I could set up anytime. We hadn’t talked for 6 months at least and had never set a date for a show at their nice wine and music place in Ellensburg. I had two days to pull it together and hang a show of about 25 pieces. Looking through my older work, some enamel paintings and oil pastel drawings from the 1980s seemed to fit with some of the newer acrylics. They all had to be taken apart, cleaned up and reassembled. The glass and surfaces were really dirty, but with some cleaning the colors popped and I could see what I was going after almost 40 years ago. There is a continuity to these two eras, something that ties my work together that is only knowable after this many years.
