Dogs

At last: another update of paintings! Of course they've been on my official website for a while now, but haven't featured them here.

All of these continue the set I did on board, taking advantage of the brown ground.

I suppose I should have positioned the images side by side, since they are sort of companion pieces; you'll get the idea, though.

Open Parenthesis - 11 x 14 inches - acrylic on board

Closed Parenthesis - 11 x 14 inches - acrylic on board

Side by side, you get a better idea of the parenthetical theme and the top-bottom, rug relationship between the two paintings. Open them up in separate windows! Shuffle them around! The dogs are Morgan (open) and Oxnard (closed), whippets, who were my family's pets.

This next one is a pharaoh hound. I had a commission years ago to do a drawing of this fellow and recently (compared to the date I began the painting) came across some of the images for that work and thought to myself how interesting it would be to play the color of his coat off against the color of the board, connecting the lower and the upper, less developed sections of the board, foreground and background with the patterned, dog cushion dividing the image. I applied more paint to the dog area than originally intended, but am not dissatisfied with the result.

Pad - 11 x 14 inches - acrylic on board

I had originally intended that all in the set of paintings on board would be less finished in not just the background areas, but in general, with an overall sketch-like quality. Ah, well...

"Things that are Fuzzy," was supposed to have a background in the same manner as the grakle paintings, but I wasn't liking it, so I made it darker.

Things that are Fuzzy - 12 x 16 inches - acrylic on canvas

This is the only dog of the bunch that is still alive... my sister's little poodle, Tyrone. Anyway, after I darkened the background, I thought, "it looks like one of those George Rodrigue, Blue Dog paintings!"

It may be blue poodle paintings from here on out...