This Blog is Moving to My Website!

It’s been great here blogging with wordpress.com. I arrived here with hardly a blog entry to my name and they took me in and taught me the ropes. I do not hesitate to vociferously recommend wordpress.com for starting your own blog.

I’m moving my blog to my website at corkstudio.com/wordpress so that the search engines can find my brilliant paintings a bit easier.

Same blog, but different address.

Canvases Stretched While I Painted

I was in the lap of luxury today as

Richard, a local fellow, was employed in the arduous task of stretching canvases onto wood stretcher bars that a carpenter created.

Until now, I have been cutting, nailing, assembling and gesso-ing the canvases myself, so this was an enormous treat and allowed me to paint inside.

Richard stretching and stapling the canvases.

A tiny canvas made of the scraps of wood from the bigger stretcher bars.

Larger stretcher bars awaiting canvas.

Finished canvases awaiting gesso-ing.

Although Richard had never stretched canvas before, he was a quick learner and helped enormously today, putting two coats of gesso on the canvases.

Now I have plenty of canvases to play on and won’t have to worry about creating a masterpiece every time, a sure way not to do so.

Painting is groping in a dark room for the light switch, tripping over paint cans and oneself. This help with the setting up gives me a larger room to grope in, so to speak.

Progression of My Painting Style

Figure Squatting by Pool, 2006, Oil on canvas, Marty McCorkle Larger Image

Introducing digital imagery to painting leads to dead ends and open doors.

To simply generate images on a computer as the basis of paintings offers dubious means to communicate with a viewer. The thrill comes when the computer image and oil paint blend into the unexpected.

For some artists, using a computer to paint would seem a dreadful punishment. At times, it is for me: it does not make painting easier, sometimes leading to failure and dead ends. But manipulating images on a computer generates the unpredictable by introducing the random, like throwing a bowling ball into a crysal boutique.

My relation with the computer became confusing as I continued to use …Continue reading