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.

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.

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

“Diver on Cacao Leaf”

Artist’s Gouache, Gold Poster Paint and Silver Poster Paint on Cacao Leaf. 11 x 5 inches. By Marty McCorkle.

A particularly supportive friend sent me paints that I needed from the United States recently, reminding me of the occasions when I have run of art supplies here in a rural town in the Philippines.

In a pinch I’ve turned to painting plywood scraps with house paints tinted with color, and in this case, to painting a leaf with artist’s gouache paint last year.

A particularly enchanting cacao (cocoa) tree grows here in the back yard, producing bright red fruit whose seeds are turned into that delightful food of the gods, chocolate.

“Reflected Figure”

Oil on canvas. 44 x 42 inches. By Marty McCorkle.

Probably my favorite figurative painting. A varsity baseball player from San Jose, California, modeled for it.

The image suggests a painting within a painting or a figure reflected in a mirror.

I was existentially stung by Velázquez’ painting the court of Philip IV, “Las Meninas”, a portrayal of royal family members and attendants.

“Las Meninas” is a visual mobius; if Velázquez’s painting is a mirror, then where does the viewer stand in relation to such a paradigm?

Diego Velazquez unhinges reality, revealing it as a dream while banishing painting to a dream within a dream.

“Las Meninas”

Oil on canvas, by Diego Velázquez, 1656.

“Late Autumn Lotus Pond”

Oil on canvas. 22 x 32 inches. By Marty McCorkle

This painting is loosely based on Early Autumn (13th century), by Qian Xuan, a well-known example of bird-and-flower painting depicting the slow decay of lotus plants at the approach to winter.

Qian Xuan poetically alludes to the decline of the Chines empire following Mongol invasion during his lifetime.

For me, the imagery suggests inevitable mortality and questions our insight in accepting it.

I painted “Late Autumn” shortly after recovery from a hospital stay for treatment of a liver infection. I did not expect to die, but had lost the sense of permanence that good health implies.

Death of acquaintances, loved ones, and my own frail condition point out how our streams lead to this good pond, this beautiful place.

“Blue Pot of Flowers”

Acrylic on Gessoboard. 24 x 12 inches. By Marty McCorkle.

Summer in Samar, Philippines, is a chaotic jumble of flowers.

The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up. Oil painting on canvas. By JMW Turner.

Kitsch painting relegates images of the sun’s risings and settings to the corny, exemplified in the ubiquitous beach sunset painting hung over a plastic wrapped couch next to a plastic wrapped lampshade.

But something places Turner’s paintings solidly in the realm of the significant, the ennobled. Looking at Turner’s initially improbable depictions of atmosphere one learns to see the haze, ambiance, Continue Reading….