The Blind Swimmer » crayon

Another crayon drawing

Gordon Fraser — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 02:21:12 +0000

Crayola on arches
30″ x 22″

Drawing 20110827

Gordon Fraser — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 01:45:59 +0000

I started this drawing on Saturday. Again working with crayon and seeing what I can do with it. Find myself thinking about passages and movements of color across the surface. Pushing and pulling areas with warm and cool colors. Basically just responding to the surface, it’s not necessarily spontaneous as I stop and consider/appraise what is happening on the paper and what I think might be interesting to add. I’m also not thinking about feelings or trying to dump feelings onto a surface. The drawing begins with wandering graphite lines creating a movement or structure to the piece. I continue by adding colors in a sort of improvisational manner, sometimes thinking what color to other times just looking down at the box and seeing which color catches my eye. In both cases I think about where the color may be needed. Occasionally I’ll just start adding it someplace and see how it affects the composition and respond by what seems to be needed at that point.

Let me know what you think!

Tags: improvisational manner, crayon, warm and cool colors, graphite

with a brush and a blowtorch

Gordon Fraser — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:36:32 +0000

Ron Ehrlich / Emerald Glimpse / 2006 / Oil, mixed media on panel / 59 x 59 inches
© Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Camino Real. www.gallerycaminoreal.net

Excerpt from Gallery Camino Real

American painter Ron Ehrlich achieves rich surfaces and subtleties of tone by melding the three dimensional techniques of vessel-making with the spontaneity and vitality of painting. Working on panel, wielding a blowtorch as well as a brush, the brilliant colorist creates an art both vigorous and contemplative.

Ehrlich attacks his work with an energy that is exciting to behold. Watching him paint is an electrifying experience – marking, gashing, splashing, burning, tossing, scraping, and brushing. Ehrlich moves around his studio with an astonishing vitality: enlisting paint, raw pigment, wax, and marble dust to add to the pastiche of his surface materials. He reaches to add an elegant curving line of crayon, hurls an industrial size brush-load of paint in a sudden graceful arcing toss, then meticulously blowtorches a melting stream of paint, flames trailing his gesture.

With a rare level of skill and this complex methodology he tackles his paintings with a contrasting muscularity and intellectual vigor.

The art of Ron Ehrlich is suffused with the vitality and power of nature, which seems to be his underlying narrative. [Read more...]

Tags: colorist, color field, Artist, energy, www.gallerycaminoreal.net, american painter