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A couple of weeks ago, I took a painting workshop with Buffalo-born artist Chris Liberti. At one time he lived a few blocks from me, but we never knew each other. Now his home is in Charlotte, NC. The workshop topic was painting the urban landscape. We spent half the time painting outdoors and the rest, painting at a gallery which served as our base. According to art writer John Seed, "Chris Liberti brings together abstraction and representation in a way that allows beautiful tensions and artistic paradoxes to co-exist. He plays the organic off of the geometric, sets transparency next to opacity, and contrasts depth with flatness. His finished works are balancing acts that demonstrate just how thoughtfully and methodically he has struggled to maintain those tensions."

We painted at south Buffalo site where we had a view of the water and the once very busy grain elevators.

Chris did a little demonstration before we started painting and then we set to work.

Here I am working on my third painting, just about to take a photo of it to check progress.

This is the second painting I worked on.

We went back to the gallery that served as our base and created collage versions of our paintings by painting strips of paper with similar colors as in our painting. I added a little bits of paint on the collage here and there.

The first image in this blog post is my first painting, and instead of making a collage version of it, I added collage to the original painting.

We had an "art circle" at our outdoor painting site where we would discuss our work from time to time.

The workshop was a very worth while experience for me. I painted outdoors for only the second time ever, and the subject matter was landscapes, which, is you know, is not my usual subject. I also worked on wood panels, which I hadn't done since college days! I also worked with collage, which I never had done, and used some new tools, such as plasterer's smoothing tools to push paint around. It was also great to meet and work with the other artists in workshop, who came from Maryland, California, and, not as far, Ithaca, NY.

This painting of Punk Steve is one of the first paintings I did after the workshop. Here I did some pushing and pulling of paint with the plasterer's tools, in addition to usually just using brushes.