I've always admired Alex's Schaefer bold and wonderful artwork. I tell him that if I had money and a house I would just buy his pieces and Jennifer McChristian's. I just love both these artists a lot and I am lucky to know them both personally. So I called him up to see if we could go downtown and paint for a bit. He knew of some new park with wonderful views of the downtown skyline so there we went. The weather was great and Alex made such a beautiful and LARGE painting .
The skyline is deceivingly complex and it requires either great simplification of shapes or -if taking a more detailed approach- a lot of attention to color nuance, edges and texture.
Alex is always generous and open about his methods. His style is very free flowing. I loved the answer he gave to one young admirer. Young Admirer :"How long did it take you to paint this?" Alex: "We got here at one, so ...three hour and twenty years." I am adopting that answer.
He alternates between acrylics and oils. he painted with oils and a mixture of galkyd and gamsol as medium which made the paint somewhat workable when using wet on wet. And that's it, the rest is his awesome sense of color, design and color, really.
As a cap to our afternoon, I drove Alex around to one of my favorite spots in hopes we will be able to paint there sometime soon.
2 comments:
Hi, Jose, where is your painting? I admire Alex and Jennifers Work too, but I love to see your paintings also and look at your blog every day to find something new, greetings from Berlin, Maike
Thanks Jose, what a blast! We'll do it again soon.
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