Mount Baker Sunset

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Today I finished a new commission.  A 10′ long stretched canvas painting of Mount Baker from the San Juan Islands. The painting was commissioned by a gentleman who recently sold his boat and wanted to capture his and his friend’s boats in a calm evening scene. The boats are depicted at anchor with one heading out in the background.

Mount Baker is painted larger than life in order to create a sense of grandeur and to cast a golden backdrop to the painting.

 

A canvas of this scale can be a great alternative to a wall mural for many reasons, not least of which that you can take it with you if you leave. The cost of such a piece can be slightly more expensive due to materials and construction time but is often the preferred choice for convenience and for future mobility.

In the studio I am able to paint canvases to a maximum of 8’6″ x 16′ but can also build and stretch on site for situations where an even larger painting is required.

If anyone witnessed the amazing sunset we had on Thursday night last week you will have seen a much smaller Mt. Baker to the north glowing gold on the horizon.

The art of the ceiling.

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I am lucky enough to be married to an occupational therapist. This obviously was not something that I specifically planned but it has worked out rather well. I love my wife with all of my heart and soul regardless of her occupation. But being married to a therapist has definite advantages…..like free traction!!

Michelangelo apparently reclined atop his scaffold, not quite lying down completely. Lying down while painting a ceiling is problematic in a number of ways, not least the paint that gets in your eyes (or on your glasses) How do you look at your palette? How do you see more than three square feet of the thing you’re working on?

I’ve always found that standing either on the scaffold or on a ladder is the only way to truly get the best out of the project. My slightly stooped posture is a testament to the more than 40 ceilings I have painted in my career as a muralist, but boy….that traction sure does feel good at the end of the day!

Yesterday I had the pleasure of painting a small nighttime ceiling for a couple on Camano Island. The room is to be their theater room and they are doing most of the work themselves. The ceiling is just an added touch, designed to not interfere with the movie watching and to add a little interest when the lights are up. This was a one day project and was a lot of fun to do.

Ceiling murals can range from a day to several weeks worth of work depending on complexity. They can be done directly on the ceiling, or on mural canvas and then installed. There was a time when I would do several ceiling projects in a row (hence the stoop) but these days,(since turning 40), I try to spread them out to a maximum of one a month.

There have been some elaborate pieces over the years from this one on Cougar Mountain, in Newcastle WA,

Everything seen here is trompe l’oeil, no moldings exist in this room.

To this one in a restaurant in Connecticut.

The ceiling below uses trompe l’oeil to create the illusion of vaulting.

Ceiling murals can be very grand but can also be a fairly simple addition to  small space. Essentially they lift off the top of the room giving the sense of more openness. Below are a series of other examples from the last couple of decades.

 

 

 

I’m not a huge fan of cherubs but I do get asked to do them from time to time. I usually recommend not adding them as the result can seem somewhat tacky, plus having had a baby of my own and knowing what comes out of them I’d rather not have them flying over my head!

Has Spring Sprung at the Big Show?

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Seven days in at the Seattle Home Show and I’m getting a good feeling. It’s a sensation which I haven’t felt in a couple of years at a Home Show.

Optimism…..

It feels just a little bit like old times. The frowns are disappearing from both the visitors and the vendors and people have plans. The next couple of weeks will tell if there is substance to the speculation but I for one choose to believe that this is a good sign, and a sign of things to come. 

I put my money to work this year and expanded to a twenty-foot booth. It allows more room for examples and also for my 42″ flat screen tv with a looping video of the painting of a five-day mural. It’s been quite a hit! Although, as the video was taken a number of years ago I seem to be asked quite a lot who the young man doing the painting is…….. Huh, is it possible to be jealous of oneself? I guess it must be the beard (or the extra 15 pounds).

You can see the video for yourself on the website, www.muralworks.com. Just click on the “movie” tab

The Home Show is a great place to answer basic questions about the process. The top three questions are:

1. How much does it cost?

Answer: The murals are based on a day rate of $850 per day. I work out how long the project will take and give a fixed price based on that. As an example, the mural in the video took 5 days to produce.

2.Do I have to know what I want?

Answer: No. The design process is part of the fun. If you have a specific image in mind that’s great, alternatively we’ll design it together and come up with the perfect fit for you and your home.

3. Do they last?

Answer: Yes. On completion the mural is clear coated for protection, is washable and the clearcoat has a UV filter which helps protect against fading.

The fourth most popular question used to be “Is it wallpaper?”, hence the video.

The top six favorite murals at the show are:

Trompe L’oeil Wine Cellar. (The room ends just beyond the light fixture on the left)

Sepia Toned Stairwell Mural

Northwest Landscape with Bear

Turtle

Trompe L’oeil French Door Mural (everything above the baseboard is a mural).

Tonasket Community Center

You can always see the whole portfolio at www.muralworks.com

If you’re in town over the weekend drop by the Home Show and say hi. We’re in booth 1432. As always, if you can, BRING COFFEE. It’s a long day!

 

TRINITY

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This evening I delivered my large cloud triptych to Cole Gallery in Edmonds. I started this piece seven months ago. The initial “sketching in” stage took just twenty minutes. And then it sat for a very long time. I liked the unfinished piece so much I didn’t have the courage to complete it. Then, after Christmas, I was suddenly able to see my way forward with the piece and have worked over the last seven weeks to complete it. It remained nameless until this evening when my son named it “Trinity”. The three panels span about fourteen feet when hung. The center panel is 4×5, the outer panels are 3×4. The painting is done in oil on canvas. Click on the image below to see a larger version.

I have been fascinated by cloud formations for years. This is the latest and by far the largest of the recent paintings.

The painting will be on display at Cole Gallery for Third Thursday Artwalk. The gallery also has “Uplift” shown below and “Calm Before”, together with the Glacier Park series.

“Uplift”

“Calm Before”

As always you can see all the latest work at www.andyeccleshall.com and at www.colegallery.net

Have a great week everyone!

An early taste of spring…a false sense of security!!

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In my last post I hinted at the mild panic that a week of snow caused here in the Puget Sound. We are now being tortured in a most cruel and deceptive way, by beautiful, sunny, mild and spirit lifting springlike weather. Cruel and tortuous because we all know what’ll happen as soon as we let our guards and our Gor-tex down. We don’t have a ground-hog here in the Northwest but we know from experience that winter’s not done with us before the end of June. Well, who cares, let’s thoroughly enjoy it while we’ve got it!

It’s been a glorious couple of days with more to follow. Fishing with my wife and son down on Edmonds pier today we were pretty happy not to catch anything and instead just bask in the warmth of the sun, albeit wrapped in fleece and windbreakers. The mountains were out in all their glory and Mt. Baker was absolutely radiant to the north.

On Wednesday last week, as I drove my son to school we were greeted by the sight of the sunrise on the Olympic Mountains. The sky on the horizon was clear and the sunlight was shining almost horizontally across the landscape. It was quite a sight, full of contrasts and brilliance. In the studio later that morning I started in a canvas and didn’t stop until I felt I was close to capturing the scene.

“Olympic sunrise”

I never get tired of this view. It changes all day and every day. We are so lucky to be surrounded by this landscape on a daily basis.

With the Olympics to the west, Baker to the north and Rainier to the south we are pretty spoiled for scenery and are supplied with a constant source of artistic inspiration. From sunrise to sunset, here’s a little painting I did last year of Mount Baker as seen from west of Everett.

“Mt. Baker Sunset”

I have had several opportunities to paint Rainier in murals over the years. Last week I painted a monochromatic version for a client in Lakewood.

And this view of the mountain from Tipsoo Lake (shown below) was embellished from the treeline down to create a more rugged scene. This was an 8′x12′ mural and took about a week to produce. Go to www.muralworks.com to see more.

Getting a little closer, a more natural view from Tipsoo Lake is reflected in a painting entitled “Rainier Meadow”, showing the mountain with a springtime blanket of wild flowers.

You can see this painting and the rest of my current portfolio at www.andyeccleshall.com and at Cole Gallery in Edmonds or www.colegallery.net .

We were delighted to hear last week that another local scene, “Edmonds Sunset” was purchased through Cole Gallery. This is an oil painting measuring 48″x36″ depicting the sunset over the Olympic Mountains, as viewed from the beach. Thanks to Denise, Gill and Shannon and all at Cole Gallery for their constant support and efforts on their artists’ behalf.

“Edmonds Sunset”

Enjoy the weather everyone!

Three paintings, three stories

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What a crazy week it was last week. Those of you who live anywhere but the west coast think we’re snow wimps in Seattle. Somebody recently sent me this photo entitled “Seattle’s reaction to the snow”

Well, having spent five years in Connecticut before heading west I can somewhat understand it. But it’s so rare that we have significant white stuff at sea level out here that we forget how to deal with it.

I must admit that for the first day or so of the snowfall I was thoroughly frustrated with not being able to get anything done. But then when I realized my two-wheel drive Astro Van wasn’t going anywhere, I relaxed into it and enjoyed the snowball fights, the snow football games and the sledding with my family and tried to forget about work for the week.

The one thing I was able to do was re-arrange the studio a little. I have ten canvases in the Rocky Mountain series started and they were scattered all around the studio drying out. In order to get some functionality back in the space I moved some of the finished work back into the house and rediscovered some old friends in the process.

Here are three paintings which hold some particularly fond memories for me, and the stories behind them.

“Swarm”

When I was a kid growing up in the midlands of England, a trip to London was a big deal. The train ride, the tube, the taxis. The grandeur of the buildings, the squares…………………the pigeons.

Trafalgar Square was one of my favorite places. The National Gallery is there, Nelson’s Column, the Lions and thousands and thousands of pigeons. I haven’t been back for quite a while so I don’t know if the pigeon population is still the size it was but I remember someone saying once, “Don’t enter Trafalgar Square with a sandwich, you won’t get out alive.”

The painting above shows the innocence of a young child who has been told by her parents of the simple delights of feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. With a bag of breadcrumbs, which have been carefully saved, stored and carried to the site, she has no idea of the Hitchcock like scene she is about to create. This painting was based on a photo I took seconds before she opened her bag and completely disappeared into a cloud of grey, flapping madness. I wonder if the green coat she was wearing ever looked the same again.

“High Force”

The River Tees carves an astonishingly beautiful path through the landscape of northeast England. Rising in the Penine Hills it meanders its way to the North Sea, skirting the North Yorkshire Moors.

The painting above shows my favorite location along the Tees. The waterfall is called “High Force” and is a magical spot. The river flows across open moorland before cascading down through the basalt landscape into this small and secluded canyon. The geology is very similar to that of Palouse Falls in Eastern Washington (Just north of Lyons Ferry on the Snake River) but High Force is much more intimate. I sat at this spot for over an hour watching the sun light fade from the sky and there was nothing but the sound of the water. Quite a place.

“Pac Beach”

We used to have a hard sided trailer until gas prices got too high to justify the truck we used to pull it. One our favorite places to camp is Pacific Beach State Park, near Moclips on the Washington Coast. We try to get out there early in the school summer holidays to “blow the cobwebs out”. It’s notoriously windy and a fabulous place to get unintentionally exfoliated. We have great memories of walking (at a 45 degree angle) along the beach, building sand castles in full winter regalia and imagining what the view would be like if we could only get the hood of our rain coats out of our faces.

These days we have a pop-up tent trailer and can add the sound of clattering canvas to the many delights of the trip.

Having said all of this, there are those times when mother nature cuts us a little slack and allows the wind to drop long enough to feel the warmth of the summer sun. This painting shows the end of a wonderful day at Pacific Beach. The day was warm, the castle was huge and the dinner is almost done. As the sun sinks beneath the horizon the breeze starts to pick up again and the warmth of the day is gone in an instant. I love this place!

If you’d like to see more work please visit my websites, www.andyeccleshall.com and www.muralworks.com or www.colegallery.net

When is a wine cellar not a wine cellar?

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I’ve always enjoyed creating trompe l’oeil spaces. Trompe l’oeil is a French term which means “to fool the eye” and refers to a technique of painting which creates a three-dimensional illusion.

Over the years I have used this technique to create niches that aren’t niches, objects that aren’t objects and rooms that aren’t rooms. One of my favorites however have been wine cellars…..that aren’t wine cellars!

It’s often a fun idea on the part of a client to turn that unused corner of the basement into their own tasting room or cigar lounge. Often these spaces are very small indeed and were previously used to store the Christmas tree, the bikes, or the stylish 1980′s over stuffed pullout couch for those unexpected long-term visiting relatives.

Once cleared out however, the room begins to pop with possibilities. But even with the wine racks, the tables and the mood lighting the room is often still a cramped corner in the basement. So here’s an idea to open things up a little.

Below are a few murals from the past which have proved effective at increasing the sense of space where once was the unused, carpeted cat tree and the 8 boxes of tax receipts from the 1970′s.

From just beyond the lamp on the left this room is an illusion. With a ceiling height of only 7’6″ this room felt very confined before the mural was painted.

Once a shooting gallery in the basement of this client’s home, this room was about 4 feet wide and 50 feet long. With a perspective like that why not add another 150!

The faux brick wall on the left marks the start of the mural.

Another nice addition to the same space.

On a much larger scale, this mural in a restaurant in CT is about 12′ high. Everything you see, including all of the brick and the light fixtures is painted. Below is a close up detail of the area on the right of the cavern.

If you’d like to see more applications of Trompe L’oeil, please take a look at my website www.muralworks.com There you can see what other mischief we can get up to!

 

Happy New Year!! New start! New ideas! New energy!

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What a beautiful day it was to start off 2012. Walking along Edmonds beach with Ingrid and Jack, skimming stones, feeling the sun, it felt more like spring than winter. I hope everyone had a great New Year’s Eve. For many of us 2011 was full of challenges and we were happy to turn the page. I have to say that I have a wholly different feeling about 2012.

We start the year with a myriad of ideas and plans. It feels like a truly fresh start. Though from a business perspective things are still very uncertain, there’s more potential than I’ve seen in a long time.

I took a trip to Aaron Brothers this week to take advantage of their one cent canvas sale and came back with more than twenty canvases. There have been times when a stockpile such as this would sit idle for the majority of the year but not this year. For the first time in a long time I am absolutely buzzing with the excitement of painting.

After a trip to the Rocky Mountains last summer I have at least twenty compositions prepared and ready to go. I can see the finished results in my head and can not wait to get into my chilly studio and start painting. I’ll post progress shots as I go but feel free to stop by and check out the work.

I have been given a date for a show at Cole Gallery in August and will be well prepared with new work. And Cole Gallery’s Anniversary Show is January 14th, be sure to stop by and see new works from all of Cole’s artists. It’s always a great night.

For the Anniversary Show I’m entering two paintings from a series of three, which were inspired by a trip to Glacier National Park. Cole Gallery has been showing “Twilight at Lake McDonald” for some time. This is the larger of the three and was my first oil painting in nearly eighteen years. The other two, “Glacier Park Sunset 1″ and “Glacier Park Sunset 2″ are views of the mountains surrounding the lake. All three pieces depict the stillness and tranquility of the place. As the sun sets across Lake McDonald the mountains glow while the coolness of the mountain air fills the valleys. It’s a magical place and we hope to return in 2013.

 ”Twilight at Lake McDonald”
 
 
 
 ”Glacier Park Sunset 1″
 
 
“Glacier Park Sunset 2″
 
On a different tac, I was delighted to have the opportunity to create an architectural portrait for a friend just before Christmas. The subject of the portrait is a their cabin on Whidbey Island. A fairly new structure, it replace an older one originally built by a family member and affectionately known as “Fred’s Place”. While the new construction was necessary, the old cabin carried  a lot of memories for the whole family and when a portrait was discussed the request was made to somehow incorporate the old structure into the image of the new one. Our friend suggested that perhaps the old cabin could be reflected in the water below the new one. A great idea! Below is the finished result, created in watercolor.
 
Over the years it’s been a pleasure to create numerous portraits of some wonderful old homes and structures. Here’s just a few.

 
 
 Historic log home in Bellevue WA
 
 
Limited edition print of Edmonds Main St. in the 1930s
 
 
New Bunswick Home
 
 
McKim Meade and White Historic Long Island Home.
 
We wish you all a fantastic 2012. Good health, happiness and peace. Now let’s get to work!!
 
 
 
 

Tonasket War Memorial Completed

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The final four panels of the Tonasket War Memorial are now finished…..more or less. They still need a coat of varnish and will probably be tweaked over the next few weeks before they get their clear coat. It seamed somewhat apt this morning  to be finishing the Iraq/Afghanistan panel the day after the last of our troops crossed out of Iraq into Kuwait.

Thank you to all of our service men and woman for their service to our country and Merry Christmas to all those who are coming home, and to all those who still find themselves in another world, far from family and friends. 

 

The panels will be stored in the studio until the spring when they will be driven out to Tonasket and installed. The United States Armed Forces Legacy is working hard to complete the project. You can find out more about them at http://www.veteranlegacyproject.org/

I look forward to heading back to the Okanogan when the warmer weather returns. There will be more work done on the west wall of the Community Center at the same time.  The Okanogan Highlands Alliance has funded the Community Center mural project and continues to be engaged in environmental work in the Okanogan Highlands. Again, you can find out more information about the organization at http://okanoganhighlands.org/ If you happen to take the scenic trip across the North Cascades Highway next year be sure to visit Tonasket, the hospitality is fabulous! Drop in to the Community Center Cafe and see Sarah for great conversation and an outstanding breakfast!

Merry Christmas everyone! Congratulations to Brian and Louise on the opening of Jack Murphys in downtown Edmonds. Hope to see you down there over the festive season!