Stirred, Not Shaken – The Fire Down Below

Oil on canvas, 24 X 36 inches, April 2, 2015

Stirred, Not Shaken – The Fire Down Below, is a 24 X 36 inch oil on canvas painting I completed April 2, 2015.  I spent about 35 hours total on it, making it one of the quickest I have produced in many years.  It is based on the stylistic ideas I developed ten years ago in the 2005 painting titled Fireworks, which was a further development on the style of the large 1999 painting titled Satyr’s Dance.  The model for the figure is a young dancer friend of mine that modeled for me in my studio last autumn.  The male companion composition of the same size is Shaken, Not Stirred.  The twelve color limited palette used on this piece is based on that of William-Adolf Bouguereau.  I chose this palette to see just how abstract and psychedelic a work could come from such a limited but perfectly balanced  set of colors.  It is amazing to me to see how far from his particular style one could go using the same set of paints, but using Liquin (alkyd based) as the medium, laying in numerous layers and thinking about other, more relativistic aspects, of reality.