Thick Oil Painting

My mission is to do something with my old pictures that are just hanging around. Since starting this blog I've had no success, but I'm certainly working on it.
We just got back from a great driving trip to see our family in Farmington NM. No, they have no more room on their walls for more artwork--Emli is an artist herself, and so are her boys; Paul's a poet. I've always given artwork to all our family, it's been "cheap man's gifts" for me to give.

I did hang in their hallway the last two ink and watercolor portraits of their boys, that I gave them for Christmas: William Jaeger, above, and Thorin Jaeger, right.

And I had time to study the Christmas present I gave them the Christmas before that, a large thick oil of Shiprock, where they took us on a trip a couple years ago.
Shiprock (shown below) was an experiment, I always wanted to goosh onto on my pallette all my reds (14), purples (14), yellows (11) and oranges (7), and use them all as fast as I could, slapping them on with all my brushes, not mixing them, getting them as thick as possible while still letting the underlying acrylic colors show through, not worrying about drawing. So that's what I did, it was a frantic painting frenzy that was lots of fun.


I was trying to emulate the style of our favorite artist, Darren Vigil Grey, a New Mexico painter who uses thick acrylics to create myth-like scenes of pure, frantic color.
I always loved Kandinsky and those wild expressionists, I bummed my way to galleries around Europe, in Germany, Belgium, Spain, England and France to see original thick paintings. I even got kicked out of the Louvre for touching a thick Rembrandt (that oil was definitely dry). My bad!
As I studied the oils on Shiprock in my daughter's living room, I discovered that lots of them were still wet, the thicker layers were firm on top but soft when you gently pushed them. I love the sculptural quality of oils, I don't use any medium and don't varnish or protect the finished canvases. The paintings are literally alive and vibrant, and subtly change over the years.
Next post I want to talk about some other art I gave away in the past couple years, especially since I may find a way to move a dozen more of my old pictures.