Ju-Dee-Too

Salt Shaker

My first job after high school was bartending at the Fifth Street Yacht Club in Racine. What this has to do with my artwork is that some of the members commissioned me to do paintings for them. Two of them asked for paintings of their boats. These two paintings were among them. Both of these are acrylic paintings on canvas. I had photos to work from for reference, but I did not just copy a single photo. I worked out my compositions and used multiple photos to get the details right. I want to apply this idea to doing portraits now, but haven’t yet started the first of those. These paintings are in an extremely realistic style. Not “photorealism” because that style does aim to look like photographs, so you can see the effect of the camera lens distorting things. I tried not to have that. Even though these are very detailed, I’m not sure they qualify as “hyperrealism” either. I prefer realism to other styles of painting and drawing, but realism is just another tool that artists have to capture their ideas. It is the idea that is important in the end. Of course, the idea of these was just to capture my clients’ boats, but I did use the compositions I created to build a sense of speed and space. In “Ju-Dee-Too” I used the angles to achieve this. In “Salt Shaker” I used the long cinematic horizontals to emphasize the speed. I had a lot of fun painting these, being able to add touches like the fish jumping out of the way, people waving, Dan smoking his pipe and flags waving. I would love the opportunity to do more like these and some of cars if anyone will contact me.