Holiday Special: Lunch Time at the Cunningham Studio

I've been taking photos around Dick's studio, kitchen and apartment in general continuously.  Most of them are food related, as I have a habit of documenting my plates and cups, and their contents. Images have accumulated and since the holiday season is about sharing, among other things, food, I've decided in that spirit to put together a slideshow of lunches, teas and cookies, and scotches I've shared with Dick recently.

The image above is from a Chinese restaurant downtown I went to during the weekend.  The table there has a holiday look all year long. The empty bowl once had a delicious soup.

Now, lunch break at the Cunningham studio is the time Dick and I move over piles of documents, books and other objects on the table and set our plates generally piled with sandwiches or other delicious concoctions we created or Kitty supplied.  While eating we plot the next edit in the video or skim through a book Dick recommends, or plan the next blog entry.
Please enjoy the photos as a set here and as a slideshow here.

Enjoy the holidays.

The End Game Never Ends, and Self-Portrait

While I'm editing portraits, Dick is among other projects working on the three figure painting, which yesterday got its first spots of color. He's also touching up some nudes that we'll video very soon.

And then the most novel and fun for me at the moment, Dick has been pulling out various paintings from years ago which exhibit such variety of style. One of such paintings is a self-portrait as a "married buck right out of art school" with some early painting in the background done from the head, not nature.

Portraits: Floyd Woodbeck

Our second video, Portraits: Floyd Woodbeck, in the series about the models Dick has worked with and painted over the years, is ready. Floyd was Dick's neighbor, friend and he helped maintaining the Berkshires summer house, studio barn and land. If you want to watch or re-watch other portraits(one other at the moment), here is the playlist for the series on YouTube.

December 2-16, 2009: Progress on the "three figure painting"

Dick is beginning with the oils today on his new painting of three figures.
We've been documenting the progress and here are the stages from December 2-16, 2009.
From the map,

through the underpainting,

and more underpainting,

to the finished underpainting,

Portraits: Mimi Scherb

The video introduction to our new video project, Portraits, received a bit more feedback from you than our previews videos. Thank you. We tried to cover more in each of the previews video and they took longer to produce and put up on YouTube. So, this time we're trying something different, shorter, rougher- more frequent, more focused videos. This time the subject is the models Dick has worked with over the years. First, Mimi with whom Dick worked from early in his career and whom he painted many times.



Your thoughts and reactions are as always welcome. Comment here, email or even snail mail. Watch for more videos here and on our YouTube Portraits playlist and Dick's YouTube channel.

New Painting and Portraits-Video in Progess

We are starting another project. Dick is painting every day; his model is here four days a week and I'm here shooting video, editing and writing the blog once a week. Hopefully we'll have more to show by the new year.
In the mean time we're posting two images of the new painting showing work in progress and a rough cut of the introduction for our new video.

[Images from December 2 and December 9, 2009]

Studio Interior Sheffield (2009) Still Life Videos: Berkshires, Golden Section, End Game

This is our final word on the "Studio Interior Sheffield"(2009) painting and videos, the three videos have been so far called Summer '09 Still Life. See our entry on how it all started in the summer in Sheffield.



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Summer '09 Still Life: Studio in NYC. The What It Is, End Game.

Final, part three of Summer '09 Still Life is up on YouTube. I'd had some trouble uploading the big file, higher quality video, so I decided to lower the quality just a bit. You probably can't tell, except in a few places where the camera moves too fast, when painstakingly following Dick dancing around "the stage" in front of the paining, explaining "the what it is" and the "end game" of the painting process in general and particular.