Wednesday, May 2, 2007

"The Bean IV"

6 x 6"

oil on masonite

sold

Chicago's my favorite city, no doubt, and "The Bean" is my favorite stop. And one of my all-time favorite subjects to paint. Officially titled "Cloudgate", it sits in Millennium Park and draws in people like honey to a bee.

This subject is great to paint for a couple of reasons - certainly it's fun and challenging, in that it's made up of shapes and colors, warped and unreal - so the challenge is to rely on your eyes to make all the shapes and curves and colors make sense in the end. Which, I guess, is what the challenge of painting is, no matter what you're depicting.

5 comments:

Todd Bonita said...

I visited "The Bean" last year and recognized it in your painting immediately. You've done a lot of looking to pull this one off the way you did. Great job.
Best,
Todd

James said...

I love your paintings of "The Bean". I've never seen it in person, so the first ones seemed so futuristic and unlikely. You might want to call it "The Bean IV". :^)

Jeff Mahorney said...

Karin (or anyone who knows),

Do you paint only from the photographs that you take? Do you ever or often do plein air paintings or Pochades to get more color information that you can from photographs?



Thanks,
jeff

Karin Jurick said...

Jeff - I have to look up 'Pochades', I'm not familiar with that - but as for plein air painting, I don't have the freedom, with time, to adventure out and paint on the spot. I run a business, on top of my painting business, so when I have an hour or eight hours, I have my information right where I need it.
It's interesting to me to think that real-time painting would provide me with more than a photograph would. I don't see it that way - but maybe that's because I haven't experienced something that you have. I do, however, insist that imagination plays a big part in the colors that are applied - in my case. I tend to start a painting from a photo, work thru about 80ish% of it and put that photo away. What happens after that is partly habit and partly experimental. I really enjoy that aspect of what I do. It tends to sharpen my observations as I'm out and about - and rely on memory more than I thought I was capable of.

David Bogart said...

this is stunning karin.