Mint Museum Uptown Grand Opening in Charlotte, NC

I am very excited to be creating a diptych painting inspired by the NEW Mint Museum Uptown! I will finish it during the Grand Opening weekend, working on it Saturday, October 2nd from 10AM to Noon in the 2-D studio. I do hope you'll mark your calendars for this momentous event in the history of Charlotte, North Carolina!!

Saturday's events are FREE! (BUT, it will be a crazy busy uptown with both the Grand Opening and Race for the Cure going on at the same time:-o) Here is a link to find out DETAILS... www.mintmuseum.org/grand-opening

After accepting this invitation to create a new piece of work inspired by the new Mint Museum Uptown, I was treated to a private preview of most work installed up to that point. The Danny Lane commission was almost complete and WOW is it incredible.

I also saw their American Art Collection literally in a new light... they have conserved ALL these paintings and many look like new works, with their details and colors exposed!

SO... following is a peek into my process... I'll write some brief explanations and will post more later.

I am inspired by Chuck Close, Julie Heffernan, Romare Bearden, Eric Fischl and Danny Lane among many others in the New Mint Museum Uptown collection! For the grand opening celebration, I am painting a diptych inspired by these artists, compositionally based on a photo of a woman and fabric in water (seen at the top area of this photo below... along with a smaller pastel painting of this image).














1) Above you see my pencil sketches from the original paintings in the Mint Museum Uptown Collections... and one 16x20" painted pastel board underneath.











2) Here (above) you can see my process... acrylic paints in palette (with pencil sketches from actual works of art in the collection and dark pastel board).














3) Above you can see my process of first painting layers of acrylic metallic washes that will peek through the final pastel layers. (I will then hand brush a layer of clear pastel medium over to give surface some "tooth" to hold soft pastel.)











4) Above is a detail of an experiment with Hosho paper & acrylic paint. Underneath is a glazed pastel board.

5) The two final photos are also details of experimentations with various acrylic washes and metallic paints on this same Hosho paper. (I was thinking I would collage some of these-Bearden style-to the pastel board.... then, cover them with pastel medium and add pastel on top, BUT the thin paper did not collage too well.)