2017 in Review

This year started with landscapes, rolled mid-year into 2 family weddings, and finished up with 24+ Inktober ink drawing/paintings (whatever you want to call them) and into November and December with acrylic and gouache paint portraits. So, the past 6 months I've seen some improvements in my work as I've really started to get back into daily drawing and painting. You make time for what's a priority for you. Here's a good TED talk on controlling your free time and using it to get better at something: https://www.ted.com/talks/laura_vanderkam_how_to_gain_control_of_your_free_time

Cheers all!

Clouds and Landscapes

With 16 or so paintings finished from this new series started in Spring 2016, I'm seeing turn from a focus on singular cloud forms, to multiple cloud forms and to including the landscape as well. I've always been interested in abstraction especially in landscape forms. I think it stems from watching the clouds and landscapes change over the length of a car trip and how the land forms change across America and Canada as I've seen in my travels over the years. I remember the first time I went to Colorado as a 16 year old with a camera and being amazed and how many shots I took of the landscape. It was a sky I had never seen before with a more intense blue and brighter sense of light. That trip informed my work for years to come as many of my more recent trips still do. Just last year I painted a scene based on a trip I took to the beach at La Push, Washington back in the early '90s. You can really get a lot of artistic mileage out of traveling with your eyes open.

Rocky Top Cloud Dancers, acrylic, 12x12in, © Tom Sain, 2016, 

New Series Started

At the beginning of the summer I started on a new series of abstractions based on singular cloud forms. The imagery staples the line between representation and abstraction. These paintings have built up transparent layers to make the colors shimmer a bit and give a sense of light. I'm also using a bit of masking and stencils that create a sort of motion trail effect. These are works in progress (WIP) right now but I have plans to do at least 24 of these in various sizes. I'll have some (or all) on the site in the Fall.

My studio and a dozen paintings of the new series shown in progress.