11 X 14 inches Acrylic
This is one of my favorite paintings. I like its feeling of isolation. Lone man standing in front of a wall with his hand line trying to get a fish for dinner. (In this part of Mexico, it is more common for local residents to use a hand line rather than a fishing rod.) But, it contains something I often use in my work and that is an abstract painting within the painting. The water viewed by itself is quite abstract yet the painting is figurative.
Sometimes I like the acrylic sketches more than or as well as the finished paintings. At times, I stop at the sketch stage, sometimes I push onward to what seems a finish. This is a closeup sketch of the fisherman. It shows how I begin to paint in shapes. Yes, at this stage the shapes and their relationships are much more important than the object or figure. When working from a photograph, I will often paint parts of the painting upside down to further divorce myself from the object and see only the shapes. Accurate depiction of shapes will naturally make the image real once turned right-side-up.
