Progress on a Diptych

I finally put paint on canvas for a pair of figurative paintings for my client on Kaua'i. The male and female figures are supposed to evoke the mythic nature of the place where the house is being built, on the far end of the North Shore. Limahuli Valley is a beautiful park now, filled with ancient Hawaiian walls and functional taro patches, and a wide variety of native plant species. To achieve this the workers had to clear out a profusion of non-native invasive species that have congested most areas of all the islands.

The palette of the diptych will be very subdued, like several earlier commissions which I'm showing here as well. I'm getting to that in a circuitous manner, doing the initial blocking in with a relatively unrestrained color range which I'll dampen down as I progress.

Paintings of O'ahu

This posting is especially for the noted Honolulu interior designer Fran Obayashi. She used a big painting of mine at Queen's Medical Center, showing a bunch of pink flowering shower trees at Kapi'olani Park. Now we are looking for something similar but different. That loop of shower trees with the glimpses of Le'ahi during the flowering season is pretty hard to beat, but O'ahu as a whole is a painter's paradise with one spectacular vista after another. Of course one has to maneuver around and between all the buildings and highway interchanges! I'm biased in a way because I grew up on O'ahu and still think it is the most beautiful of the Hawaiian islands.

New Paintings by AJ

Cosette, Tuko and I drove into Hilo yesterday to catch the one day sale at Ben Franklin store, where we spent lots of money on canvases and other art supplies. Too bad that's the only place now in town to buy art things, as they have a small variety of mostly not such great stuff. But we had fun, going to the East Hawai'i Cultural Center to see the Spring Art Show, which we were all too busy and important to enter (actually the entry date is Saturday, which is when I have life drawing at my studio, which is my excuse). It was a surprisingly sophisticated show with very sparse hanging and many nice pieces. Then we went to check out the new "One" Gallery, which is a revamping of the old Ka Huina Gallery. It is cluttered but nicely done with some good artists, in a charming old Hilo building.

I brought some new paintings into our gallery last week. One of them is a portrait of a mother and her baby, a commission from a nice young surgeon. I thought the baby looked interestingly serious. The other two were actually in my summer show at the Wailoa Center but I reworked them quite a bit: Keokea beach, in Kohala, and Kaluahine Falls, the intermittently running waterfall south of Waipi'o Valley.