After a long hiatus, I finally ran out of excuses and picked up my brush to start painting again. This time, departing from my usual impressionist city scenes and abstract structures, I experimented on figurative.

The works of Bay Area figurative movement artists like Nathan Oliveira, David Park, Richard Diebenkorn and others are always the source of inspiration.  Another influence is Willem de Kooning. It’s fascinating how these artists “expressed” the human form in their unique ways.

In the studies above, my goal is to  the capture the “allusion” of the gestural tension by substituting forms with mere “suggestions” thru bold brushstrokes, hence allowing an overall looseness of the composition. The two above smaller paintings (12×14) were done in about 5 minutes and the bigger one (16×20), modeled from the Crouching Aphrodite, in less than 10 minutes, which works well with acrylics on gessoed canvas using a very old dull, worn-out round brush.