Christendom, Photos, and Murals

Here's another composition from my little St. Valentine photoshoot a few days ago. Sun coming in through the stained glass windows. As you can tell from the architectural style, this is a very 1950s/60s era structure. Not really my favorite look, but you go with what you got. I'd love a more gothic or baroque style church to shoot. The kind with lots of frescos, Ya know...

Speaking of beautiful churches, I'm going to see some church murals in the Millvale section of Pittsburgh this weekend. There was a story about them in last Sunday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Murals For The Ages - The Millvale Murals of St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church". Read it here.

The murals were done by Maximilian Vanka (1889-1963), and the church is having an open house this weekend to kick-off a fund-raising campaign to bring the murals local, then global attention. I hope to get many nice shots of the church as well as the murals to share.

Inspirational Photography

Inspired by the beautiful floral arrangements back on Easter Sunday morning on the altar at my church in sunny and fashionable Bethel Park, I decided to go back the next day and take some shots. As it turned out, because of the main lights being off, and me not wanting to lug a tripod around, the most successful shots were of the stained glass windows. This is the interior of the church next to the bell tower I posted a while back by the way. I'll share the many other decent shots from this little shoot in the days to come. I used my Cannon G10 for these. The G10 is a fantastic camera! I fell deeply in lust with it last summer upon hearing that, even though it's technically a "point n' shoot", it shoots RAW as well as JPG files. And as every self-respecting hack photographer knows - RAW RULES! Actually calling it a point n' shoot is an insult. It can do OH so much more! The settings for this particular shot were ISO 200,  f/3.5, 1/200 second with a 15.7mm lens setting. Then I processed it up really right using my Adobe CS4 stuff.

Everything Old is New Again

Do you like classic American illustration and retro news stories that reverberate with a certain amount of relevance even in todays world? Well there's this magazine that used to be around called "Liberty" that is being put into an online format. Great article about it along with a  slideshow in todays N.Y. Times. Read it here.

I love this cover image because it calls to mind a favorite quote I once read in a book about Mississippi:
"Love is like a potato - sprouts from the eye."

Providence

Shot this last Saturday at the place where it's all gonna' go down for me next month! I shot a bunch of pictures of the church at the same time of day that the event will happen to give to my photographer an idea of where the sun will be (should it be sunny) on that day. Now if I can only figure why the damn' things won't open for him...

Step 5 Finish

Here is the finished piece which is called, "Myron". He was easy for me to paint from the very beginning sketch because I have a tendency toward making things I paint more angular, and his features certainly were that! Womens soft facial lines always give me trouble however. That's why when I painted my wife-to-be years back, she hated it because she looked like a man!! That painting is now destroyed by the way. Looking at this piece now, I really should have done something more loose with the vignette edges. They really need softened, or um... vignetted more.

But maybe next time.

Step 4 and so on...

Step 4 consisted of further development of lights and darks, as well as working out colors some more, while getting into a little more detail. Not getting too dark too soon was the challenge during this step. Working from life you can appreciate the various shifts in both color and value in the dark areas.

Last night I set up some giclee' prints in a small display case at the Upper St. Clair library which is 10 minutes from my home. No one ever sells anything there, which is why my display is geared more toward driving some folks to my website. One of the local artist organizations I'm involved with sort of takes ownership of what work goes in there on a month-to-month basis. April is my month.

Other than that, I'm looking for a good Caravaggio book to read. The author of the last book I read "The Lost Painting" mentions some biographies in the back of his book, that he used. I must track them down!