This week’s painting is Dennis, which I completed earlier this year and which hung for much of the summer at Shoh Gallery in Berkeley. This is one of my favorite recent works. It has a vague feeling of loneliness to it that reminds me of an Edward Hopper painting.
As with a lot of my paintings, I found my inspiration for Dennis from a vintage photo. I bought the snapshot off of eBay. I liked its composition. When I received the picture, it came with a second snapshot that was clearly from the same photo session. That picture was much less evocative and much more direct – a full-frontal shot with a come-hither expression. I’m guessing that the pictures were part of a pre-Grindr hook-up ad printed in the back of some less-than-reputable periodical.
As a challenge, I decided to use the Zorn palette for this work, named after Swedish painter and William Taft portraitist Anders Zorn. The Zorn palette features only four pigments – ivory black, titanium white, cadmium red, and yellow ochre. Believe it or not, those are the only colors in painting. I learned a lot about mixing paints from making this.