Abstracted

Here's some more recent artwork, this produced with a brush rather than a mouse and pixels.  It's after one of my heroes of abstraction, Hans Hofmann, and entitled "Here Comes the Sun":

One of my students in How to Look at Art this semester protested that abstract art seemed to him to be "without intention," which I take to mean that there doesn't seem to be much thought put into it in its distance from recognizable figures.  My painting above actually took a great deal of thought and time in execution, and it is based upon landscape--the sun rising over a green hill.  There is cloud, rain, and grass.  But sometimes I've produced abstraction that isn't based on anything but its own gestural form, as in Scherzo, a piece I did a couple of years ago which I still like, a Pollockian swirl and spatter of paint:

But I've also had some time for realism lately, such as in the piece below that I did in early summer, based loosely on a photograph taken near Loveland Pass in Colorado in early June of 2011 when the snow was still deep on the higher elevations.  The guy on the horse is a long-time friend of mine who loves the mountains:

The work of painting and drawing goes on--abstract or realist--and it's always a labor of love.

Photoshop Art

Lately I've been playing around with a trial version of Photoshop Essentials 10, the pared-down version of Adobe's Photoshop.  I'm using it to create modified images for my course this semester on How to Look at Art.  Yesterday I started doing some compositions from scratch with the range of imaging tools the program has to offer, especially the different "brushes."  Here's what I came up with:

It's an abstract composition, obviously, that has the distinct feel of an impressionistic watercolor, or a "water-acrylic."  I like what I came up with and will do more of these, I'm sure (and probably post them into this blog), but for all their power and versatility, a computer mouse and Photoshop are not a brush and paint.
One of the primary reasons I love doing art is the physical, visceral connection between me and the canvas/paper/board through the brush, pencil, pastel stick, or whatever tool or medium I'm holding in my hand.  Perhaps I should try this sort of thing on an iPad--if I had one; it might be analogous to "real" drawing and painting.  I do use a sketch application on my smartphone, which is nice for capturing visual ideas where I happen to be at the time.  But it's never as good as those old-fashioned tools for creating art down in my studio.