Each mural is the same size, measuring approximately 26 panels wide and the height of the building.  This in some sense feels like the end of an era but I don’t necessarily want to say that because I love painting walls and never want to feel like that chapter of expression is closed.  Each design I painted was a design I was very excited about painting at the time I started each portion.  With the first two murals I wanted to somehow reconcile both flatness and depth in the design.  I like the idea of the decorative Matisse background in the first one as being an integral component of the still life in the foreground.  With the second mural, the middle one, I again wanted to create an interesting play between flatness in depth.  The picture of a big bend that composes the background of the picture should have immense depth, however it was my goal to flatten that depth of the landscape with the goldfish scattered across the “foreground” and casting shadows on the image, thus flattening it.

The last design was too made in the studio via collage however it possesses more of a graphic, immediate quality that when I saw I didn’t hesitate to execute.  I like the simplicity and narrative impact of the last design very much.  It was also the simplest in design and the easiest to paint.  I suppose these three murals represent a process of simplification that occurred throughout the year and a half of my progression as a designer and a painter.

I think more insights worth sharing will present themselves with time but I just want to share this picture in the immediate.  I have a lot on my mind as I am traveling tomorrow for personal reasons and I feel like my painting career is at a small impasse, perhaps less an impasse and more of a pivot.  A reframing. No one in Houston paints like this, expressively and with rigorous consideration given to design and the problems presented (and to be solved) via the application of paint on a flat surface.  I don’t, and will not stop for anything, but a short breather is in order during this season and the culmination of this massive wall feels like an appropriate place to turn the page and start a new chapter.  I know my recognition here will come but I don’t know how much longer I can wait for it either, hence the pivot.  I will not stop painting murals regardless, this period may just be a necessary reframing of my mural practice. 

The post Paint Diary 9/12/2025 appeared first on Max Lowtide.

I will endeavor to briefly share a few insights as it pertains to some of the art history reading I’ve been doing these last few days.

It has been said that the only class liberated by the french revolution was the bourgeoisie. Fifty years later in 1848 two rounds of violent protests occurred, one in February and one, more impactfully, in June.  The bourgeoisie sponsored the state in the squashing of these rebellions resulting in a few thousand protestors being slaughtered. This is the political backdrop from which Courbet is and will be exhibiting paintings in the years ‘48, ‘49, ‘50.

In 1849 he won a prize at the salon for his painting “After Dinner at Ornanes”, the state purchased this painting.  Napoleon III, the nephew of The Napoleon, has recently ascended to the throne.  This was not a controversial subtext per se, although the underlying current of the rural peasantry and the oppressed urban classes could be perhaps read into this painting.  These groups, despite sharing class identity, had not unified in any substantive way.

The next year 1850 is when Courbet profoundly displays 3 paintings which are to be the beginning of the Avant-Garde.

• The Stonebreakers – Man as machine, man as tool
• Burian at Ornanes – intensely simple painting (tonally), awkward composition of figures
• Peasants of Flagy – peasants presented ambiguously (perhaps like the social classes of paris)

These pictures are profound in a few simple ways.  Their formal simplicity in lack of gradating values, their deliberate ugliness, their almost black and white tonal simplicity, their awkwardness and emotional flatness evoke the popular mass images accessible to the lower classes of the time.  To reference Greenberg, Courbet evoked the imagery of Kitsch.  Kitsch would be considered the culture of those who are too busy working to have a culture, culture.  This is any sort of cheap, easily produced and distributed form of entertainment.  What Courbet did that was so revolutionary is he evoked these formal qualities mentioned above in these massive historical paintings. 

This could all be summed up by Courbet’s use of a naive style. He makes his work relatable to the oppressed masses in a way that was unprecedented – this is the definition of Avant-Garde.

This is powerful because he makes his salon work more relatable to the lower classes thus empowering them and alienating its typical bourgeoisie public.  In short he turns the spectators into interlocutors (a person who takes part in a dialogue).  Mind you the political backdrop occurring at this time. 

Modernism versus the Avant-Garde

It seems to me that the Zizek writing is about our innate desire for the sacred. In the absence of anything to fill this void, we essentially fill it with trash, but the point is it needs to be filled and even more so we need to assert that this void exists to begin with.  For many centuries art filled this void (the sacred) with many “traditionally” understood beautiful art objects, including many naked and partially naked women.  The great illusion that representational painting implied was not of rendering space but that these beautiful women could be had.  Courbet comes along and with this painting “The origin of the world” gives you, front and center, that.  This is desublimation according to Zizek, in that he takes what has been elevated to the sacred (sublimation) and undermines it, demotes it, to the ordinary, but not just that the abject and the disgusting.  This is what happens Zizek argues when the void is filled with the object such that no space is able to exist and thus the plane is broken.  Zizek asserts that the sublime occurs in the space between the object and the void.  In our contemporary age we elevate all sorts of “stuff” to fill the void thus christening it as sacred.  But the point for me is that something needs to be sacred.  He uses coke, or even Coke Lite as an example. 

The last point to work through here is that the equal and opposite painting made by Malevich was the Black Square.  This is the inversion of Courbet’s painting.  The Black Square reasserts the void, which is what modern art does (or did).  Modern art was able to shock and thus challenge the system. Postmodern art only shocks, that is the system.

For me I can’t help but approach all this and not think about, given all this obtuseness (which actually is quite manageable and concrete), what paintings can (and should) be made in order to perpetuate the inertia of progress.  What paintings can be made that will shock via anti-shock. I have been spending more time reading than painting these last two weeks.  That is okay, but in the meantime I am using the break to assess and assert what it is (deep down under) that I want to paint.  What is the true me expressed via the materiality of paint? 

The post Paint Diary 9/10/2025 appeared first on Max Lowtide.

The world is immensely complex, abstraction is a form of simplification, we see this in math, in language and in art.  Abstraction is a process of selection, a process of what to emphasize and what not to emphasize.  I write this more to instantiate it within myself than share it with my nonexistent reader. 

This does bring me to a later point that emerged in my Realism reading this week as it pertains specifically to the challenges the realism “movement” faced in the beginning of the 20th century, under immense state and ideological pressures. A portion of the quote reads: “art forfeited the right to report the world.” – the comment was made in specific relation to the camera and the follow up is something to the extent of: “the romantic longing of the masses are satisfied on social media (movies).” I editorialized there at the end.

The jarring types of pictures one would need to paint today in order to be considered a realist are “I don’t even know what.” Perhaps Banksy would be considered a realist, there does seem to me to be a realist sensibility in bringing art into the public space, even in an illegal capacity. Actually that is a nice point I will hold on to for the subject of a paper later in the semester.

Realism formally emerged with Courbet, in his insistence of painting the present in its immediacy and social reality. Sure painters like Hogarth (is mentioned specifically) had painted peasants and laborers in the past but did so in a moralizing and even comic way.  Genre paintings like these were essentially a way for an increasingly growing merchant (bourgeoisie) class to perhaps “virtue signal” while keeping a comfortable distance from their social realities.  All of this, and perhaps most important, is contextualized within an increasingly secular and rational society influenced by scientific phenomena like mathematical perspective. A new dogma for interpreting the universe outside of a religious one.

This is perhaps the largest and most key factor for what made this 19th century movement take on the most momentum in comparison to other attempts within art to document their social realities.  The worldview was becoming dominated by a scientific rationale in which the observable phenomena of the universe could be documented with a higher degree of fidelity (thank photography) and even more importantly (and I can quite make this intellectual jump yet, perhaps because I have only ever known the world through this lens too) a material rationalism was emerging that tainted their perceptions of reality as distinct from say Velasquez. 

To Courbet, and shortly after Manet, painting was a vehicle for social truths.  They preferred to state things in quite a matter of fact way in a way that imposed new forms and elucidated new truths to the public in a way that was quite jarring.  In essence they removed any amount of poetry from painting, but this in and of itself possessed its own type of poetry.  It would be hard to look at a Manet painting and say there is no poetry, but perhaps for the observers back then this is maybe how it felt. 

One of the art historians I read made the important point of not taking these artists and their fellow Realist literary champions at face value and instead scrutinizing them from the convenient distance of retrospect.

There is another detail here which is they began painting in a very matter of fact way. In that the flatness of the picture plane was beginning to come through, Manet famously used black as a color and didnt render mid tones etc.

Some notes:

The realists valued philosophical elements over stylistic ones. 

History painting is today.

The artist can only paint what the artist has on hand, making pictures venerating the tales of antiquity is so yesterday!

The realists are steeped in the history of the present. 

This is the big point I was trying to make, which I think is the most important. Prior to realism artists were steeped in a belief that meaning existed outside of the material world. This group of 19th century artists were “free” from the ideological limitations of societies united by myth/religion.  Belief in facts was belief itself.

This movement was unique specifically for the above reason but also because of how self-conscious, aware and singularly fixated these artists were on this social endeavor through their picture making.

Ultimately the goals of Realism are fairly concrete. They wanted to depict the social realities of the time with as much fidelity as their minds and technology would allow.  I say their minds in that they themselves needed to step outside of preconceived ideas in order to document the social realities of their era. What is less concrete are the social, political and technological factors that informed this happening.  I will endeavor to list a few things I understand.  Rational thought was increasingly becoming the dominant form of thought. Innovations and discoveries in science and technology informed this shift.  Meanwhile the middle class is growing and the economic disparity is growing as a result of it.  Some bourgeoisie were comfortable documenting this reality and others were not.  It is important to keep in mind that Courbet and Manet were “rich kids” essentially.  But then again it’s always like that. Prior to this time the dominant belief was that meaning existed outside of the material world.  This was increasingly no longer the case and these artists endeavored to document meaning in the material reality they saw before them and endeavored to do so with the utmost fidelity even at the sacrifice of “style”.   

The post Paint Diary 9/1/2025 appeared first on Max Lowtide.

Designing and applying is a good muscle to build.  It’s worth applying for things just for the sheer sport of it, regardless of the fact that all these things are both hyper competitive and political. Plus I’m not a resident of Florida so I feel like that doesn’t help. One interesting things is that on the submission form there was no place to put your Instagram or your pronouns (etc) so perhaps those social deficiencies will not be held against me and I will instead be judged on the raw merit of my mural painting experience, my capacity with the written word and the design I created and defended in the application.  Anyway, these are good muscles to build and this is of course “the hustle”. Even though I have decided to transcend this hustle for another hustle (academia).

The next creative endeavor that has been well underway in the meantime is the execution of the Rosemary master copy painting (I don’t know what to call it). I am putting the final marks on it this weekend and will take it to the gallery next week.  I want it out of here, in the best possible way. Nothing I ever give to the gallery I need or expect to sell but if I’m being very pragmatic I need this thing to move. I will say I was pleasantly surprised by how effortless and without major conundrum the painting process was.  I maintain that this would have not been the case 12 months ago when I was initially tasked with this “commission”.  In that sense I am glad I put it off for as long as I did.

I think one of the main landmines I tried to avoid in the production of this painting was not overworking the picture. The reference painting that I worked from was really about 50% abstracted with intensely loose and thin brushwork.  The brushwork is so loose that it is impossible to even know what it is even trying to suggest.  I see all different forms in these abstract passages that may or may not be what the artist intended.  The point is I tried to keep as much of that around the periphery of the picture as possible.  The only places where I worked into the painting with a super small brush was on the central figures portrait.  All the other portraits were increasingly less rendered as they moved away from the focal point.  This is my favorite type of contrast to create within the picture – to render the heck out of the focal point and be more and more low resolution as you expand out from that intended place.  One would also do this with saturation and contrast.

Just like with the Orlando this, whether this thing sells or not it will now live for infamy in my portfolio.  This is certainly portfolio level execution despite the inconvenient but immensely important fact that this is essentially a glorified master copy.  I wonder how the gallery will handle this.  I am actually just now making a funny connection in regards to this and another “artist rights” occurrence happening in my life that I am unable to reference at the moment.  I will be eager to see how this painting is received at the gallery, where it will live, how long it will take to be framed and most importantly (because I am unemployed and needing to think practically) how long will this thing take to be sold (if at all).

So there was that too. In the meanwhile since I last wrote on this website, I made a fairly successful painting which can be seen here and I am also in the middle (60ish%) through a mural on the east side of Houston. The painting I made on this website was fun and another good reminder of how important it is to work from a combination of imagination and intuition. It was much like the painting I made after Gauguin that featured my painting of Jesus as the Man of Infinite Sorrow.  I am motivated to make another few pictures with this same working procedure, something tells me developing this muscle will be key for my next era of paintings.  Given the fact that, as I have made mention here, I am uninterested in rendering photos in oil painting with the expressed intent of only tricking the eye and flexing technique. As I have mentioned before this is the job of a technician and not of an artist.  I actually articulated the intention quite nicely in my Orlando application for my artist statement: 

“The expressive qualities unique to paint are too powerful to relegate to the narrow realm of rendering photographs with small brushes and stencil caps.  In my humble opinion it is the job of the artist to achieve more than just technical proficiency with their medium. I hold myself to this high standard despite often falling short.”

It is in these types of pictures, many of which are combinations of drawing and painting in both oil and acrylic, that I will find my voice with the materiality of paint and use the medium as the means in and of itself. That right there is the product of all the Robert Motherwell I have been reading.

There is much more to write on but I will turn this into a two parter.

The post Paint Diary 8/30/2025 appeared first on Max Lowtide.

Making a master copy of an abstract painting would be quite a strange endeavor, especially when it is more of a lyrical, gestural abstraction and less of a hard-edged one. I am generally quite pleased with how the painting is progressing, I just happen to be hitting a wall at this exact moment.  But that’s okay.  I have after all probably spent about 12-15 hours on this thing just in the last 4-5 days.  My body aches from standing at the easel. Between running and standing at the easel my lower body is perpetually sore and uncomfortable.  It is a shame that my two primary expenditures of time work against each other in that regard.  I couldn’t imagine sitting to paint however. I am a student of Robert Henri in this regard.

Tomorrow and the next day I will push through the remainder of the block-in and then let the paint simmer (and dry!) for probably about a week.  I am using a foolish amount of linseed oil to give my pigments flow to replicate some of the loose brushwork of Rosemary however that means my first pass will need many days and many nights to dry before receiving more paint. It will be a productive break, I will want to step away and really revisit this thing with fresh eyes for the final passes.

If this was me a few years ago I would have high hopes and expectations for this painting.  It is very good, and will be a very strong piece in my portfolio, but I must enjoy the journey of the painting and not get attached to any hypothetical outcomes that come as a result of it.  The gallery (whom I will never mention by name here) tasked me with this painting almost a year ago.  I would like to think that I wasnt tasked with this painting arbitrarily.  I would like to think that this person has some sort of plan or vision for where this painting will live and with whom.  At this point it is besides the point, what matters is I have been given a challenge I would not have been given otherwise and it will push me as a painter.  And I will leave with another interesting and strong piece for my portfolio. And that is enough to fuel the trip.

It’s extremely important to me that my motivation, my north star, be something outside of competing in this game of freelance easel painting and mural painting. I will fucking hate myself, my painting and become resentful of everyone and it all if my conception of myself as an artist is that of another one of these goof balls competing in this world of freelance painting.  That is not to say that I will not apply for things and apply myself as a painter. But it is not productive to see my peers and these walls as competitors and spaces of competition.  I must paint first and foremost for myself and must keep my expression true. Otherwise nothing will ever happen and I will never make a great painting, the way many of these people whom I loosely refer to will never make a great painting nor ever even conceive of the goal of making a great painting. 

The Rosemary painting aside, I have a lot of design work to do.  I see a new arrangement of figures on my wall that necessitate a composition.  However I don’t suspect they are good candidates for some of these more whitebread mural applications I need to make designs for. I am financially such that if I get one of these whitebread things I won’t need to work for the rest of the year and I can solely focus on my academic and esoteric studies as well as paint my butt off.  Regardless, that’s more or less all I will do anyway. 

To refer to the above point I made a special painting this year based off of relationships of paintings on my studio wall.  I like the idea of these self-referential compositions that organically occur peppering my walls with whatever inspires me each month.  The painting I am speaking of was a Gauguin “The Vision after the Sermon” and my painting of Jesus after a James Ensor “Man of Infinite Sorrows” painting.  I believe that all the inspiration I need to make great works can be sufficiently sourced from right in my immediate surroundings (unless its plein air paintings in which case get me out of Houston asap!).

On my wall I currently have a tin or copper plate which I bought in Palestine that has an Egyptian female figure in profile on it.  This currently hangs right below a framed picture I took in Mexico City of a very naively painted mural of the Virgin Mary.  I have adored this image for many many years.  Right now both these powerful female icons hang within the same ocular gulp. 

I will paint them.  I will find a way to compose them and present them for a mural and an easel work. This will be one of many paintings that happen in the coming months.  I also want to paint the portrait of my Italian friend V. I currently have a prop I brought from my mom’s house that I think would A. be fun to paint and B. would suit him quite well. I say this here to keep the idea manifesting to ensure its execution. 

The post Paint Diary 8/18/2025 appeared first on Max Lowtide.

The main problem is that the painting is immensely spontaneous – abstract, and much of the painting is composed with extremely thin passages of oil paint.  In fact it seems like this is how she painted in general, extremely self-assured, confident and with thin oil paint.  Paint with lots of turpentine in it.  Her paintings (I’ve never seen any before) probably have very little impasto or texture to them.

I am working from a print of a 30 x 48 in a painting that she made many years ago.  I have had the framed print hanging in my studio for a long time and it was only today that I took it down to photograph it and begin doing all the preproduction schlep necessary to essentially execute a master copy of this Rosemary Mahoney painting.  It’s a bit strange but I feel close to her while I study the painting as I make my drawing on my gridded panel.  I was recently listening to a Wayne Thiebaud lecture about the importance of doing master copies and how it gives you a chance to make a real connection with the artist (get in their head) and I very much already feel that effect with this Mahoney painting.  It’s really quite special. 

Six or 12 months ago this painting might have been a nightmare for me to copy (or rather interpret) because so much of it is spontaneous and low resolution, i.e. not a lot of visual certainties for me to grab a hold of.  But I am at a point where I trust myself.  Maybe I will even make a very strong painting after Mahoney in my own right.  I will bring the portraits, there are maybe 5, to a certain degree of resolve and then loosen up as I expand out accordingly so that essentially the contours of the painting are completely abstracted.

I see how she composed this picture.  It is very solid, it is in the form of a triangle, with a very sturdy base all building up to the central figure’s portrait.  It is Ninfa, as in the popular restaurant chain here in Houston, Ninfas.  I have been to the one on Navigation a few times, it was actually one of the first places to eat Magdalene took me to when I came here to Houston.

So this project has begun, the timing is good.  Something tells me once I get entangled into this painting I won’t be able to do anything but resolve it.  What I’m saying is I don’t anticipate this painting will drag a lot of ass the way certain recent commissions have this year.  I could already feel myself getting quite swept up in it just putting the initial drawing down earlier.  Tomorrow I will resolve the drawing to a further extent then immediately start loosening up.  With a pen I will block in all the light and shadow patterns before I layer transparent passes of gesso down (cheap gesso = transparent) and then I will immediately start putting down some very thin washes of acrylic.  All before I start blocking in with oil.  Success here will be keeping a freshness that she had, and even though it won’t be as truly fresh as the original artist’s freshness I trust I will be able to fudge it enough to make the picture work. 

So that’s that.  There are so many other projects to sink my teeth into right now including an 80’s night live mural painting event I will do this Friday, as well as a person mural project I need to do and then the WAG art Jones award submission I still very much plan to do (although I haven’t found the visual component to compliment my rather robust conceptual layer of my proposal) and then lastly really sinking my teeth into the feasibility of a MA in Art History which much be prepared and applied for in the next 3 – 4 months.  

Quick note on that: I got a decent dose of reality today when I learned that the VCU MA Art History program only accepts about six applicants A YEAR.  So there’s that… 

I will need to write a Hail Mary paper to make this happen, at least that’s my current feeling, although the extent to which that is grounded in reality is big time TBD as well.  I guess that’s why I characterize that move as a Hail Mary, because technically it could happen.

In keeping with the above theme I was just rereading a section from Lawrence Weschler’s book on David Hockney and in the middle of the book – the book spans about 30+ years in conversation with Hockney- he spends some time with David while he is in the throes of being a controversial art historian unearthing the likely fact that many of the great masters used optical devices.  It was 1999 that Hockney was pursuing this hypothesis.  I am extremely curious as to how mainstream this has now become in the last 25 years or is this still a testy little bit of art history snooping?  

I bring this up because this topic feels potentially ripe for me to expand out on my application paper.  The problem is I am in such a vacuum, both in the world of painting but even more so in the world of art history inquiry, that I don’t know to what extent a thesis of this caliber is even “worthy”.  I will certainly be throwing way more than one Hail Mary to make this new undertaking happen, because I will be reaching out to all sorts of people asking for help and referrals in order to write this paper but also get academic and art world references for this application.

Hockney’s thesis is essentially that starting in maybe the late 1500’s, right around the time Caravaggio was active, lens technologies were beginning to be employed in the practice of painting.  For hundreds of years prior the quality of drawing and likenesses was “Awkward” and clumsy as David puts it.  It’s quite plain and easy to see.  And then beginning in Northern Europe with the Dutch painters (whom I know zero about, I’m assuming there is an Eyck here and an Arnolfini wedding here too) and then the Northern Italian painters you begin to have this amazing quality in their pictures (especially the portraits) that had not been seen prior.

The paintings leave tons of clues, lots of awkward distortions that indicate the use of lenses – in technical ways I cannot speak on – but places where the foreshortened hand in the foreground is smaller than the hand way back in the background, this was frequent in some Caravaggio’s.

Anyway Hockney presents an entire thesis that spans almost 500 years of western painting that I do find extremely fascinating.  I spent a lot of time reading art history and art theory anyway but now I’m doing so on a mission to find a compelling thesis to write a graduate level paper on that will serve as my entry point on what will be an overall very midgrade graduate application.

The post Paint Diary 8/12/2025 appeared first on Max Lowtide.

The last thing I’ll say on this is that it’s quite a strange experience writing these paint diary entries (there are about 10 on www.shopoilpaintings.com).  It’s strange because I am writing publicly but I know no one will ever read them.  I need to both be cautious and mindful about people’s names and business but I can be open, vulnerable and transparent (to a large extent) because few humans, if any, will ever read this.

If anything I will perhaps revisit these entries years from now the same way one would revisit a private diary.  At the risk of sounding arrogant I think I am quite innovative with this paint diary idea because they take relatively little time to write while simultaneously satiating my need to document and express my creative practice all the while pleasing the search engine gods at google.  Anyway I am quite proud of this innovation and moving forward I will be dividing entries between this site www.maxlowtide.com and www.shopoilpaintings.com. 

Today was spent mostly doing boring and tedious work to finalize some aspects of the other site.  Magdalene thought it a good idea to frame the paintings which I am selling, which was really a great idea because many of them look so much better, and I am selling them after all so it’s nice to include a frame with them.  But all to say that meant that every single painting needed to be reshot and reprepared for presentation on the website. I have been very meticulous about this process but it will prove to be worthwhile in that this site is a sort of “set it and forget it” kind of project. 

If I never had to photograph another oil painting in my life I would be quite content with that.  Oil paintings are notoriously challenging to photograph because oftentimes some of the painting dries matte while some dries glossy and semi-glossy.  Specifically, blacks and darker values are extremely frustrating because they reflect so much light and blow out your values when trying to photograph.  After all these years I am still trying to figure out how to do it.  Sometimes natural light is the key, other times not. 

It doesn’t really matter, what I’m mostly saying is that I had an administrative day and did not spend it painting.  However as it turns out this is the reality of working artists: equal parts painting and doing marketing type things and applying for opportunities.  I will say I am very proud of the collection of paintings of shopoilpaintings.com.  All the works with the exception of one have been painted from life and many of the compositions and paint handling is extremely technical and well achieved.  This portfolio currently indicates the high water mark of my painting career to date – for the most part at least.  They are not tediously rendered portraits from photographs but rather more sensitive intuitive works that indicate a certain degree of proficiency I have achieved between my eye and my wrist. 

Enough of that, most of these types of themes can be read about on the other website.  I am currently pondering a way larger and more substantial theme which is getting my masters in art history aka going back to school.  I’m not going to get into the nuance here as much of this decision is extremely personal.

One aspect that isn’t is that in order to get into school I will need to write a very strong and technical academic paper on an art history theme.  I am giving myself approximately one month to figure out what this theme will be.  I have had some ideas but many I fear are low hanging fruits. A few obvious topics that much art history ink has been spilled over may include: who was the first “modern” painter?  How did the invention of the camera facilitate new modern ways of painting? One that comes to mind is something David Hockney spent lots of work on which was about the use of optical devices like camera obscuras and camera lucidias by old masters – Caravaggio, Ingres etc.  One idea I’m thinking of that certainly aligns with my painting interests is the impact and influence the Mexican mural painters – Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco, had on the abstract expressionists like Pollock.  My sense is that this too has been written about a lot however many there is a new angle to unlock here.  Whatever the case may be I am going to need to knock this essay out of the park if I am to have a chance to get into an MA program.  Needless to say I don’t look that amazing on paper, with the exception of my painting portfolio. 

There are of course other components I need to get together in order to achieve this new goal and this will now occupy much of my time and attention for the remainder of the year.  Fortunately I have about four months to get my house in order so there is time.

I will continue to read a lot in hopes that the topic of my thesis paper will jump off the page.  I am reading the collection of written works by Robert Motherwell right now and it’s dense but fascinating.  Less dense and more accessible for a dummy like me than reading Greenberg.

On the topic of painting I finished a painting / drawing today that is quite dark and powerful.  I will attach a portion of it here on this paint diary entry. The painting began as a drawing with Sakura marker on a large piece of panel.  It began as a fully abstract, intuitive entity.  I was listening to Paradise Lost by Milton when I made the drawing because I wanted to source energy and vocabulary from that work and include it in the picture.  The drawing was very reminiscent of my paintings and graffitis from a decade ago.  I wanted to pull from that very raw creative spirit that I possess.  I want to experiment with elevating that raw energy into something that would be appropriate for a gallery space.  Key word: try.  Perhaps it will never happen.  The work I made really is quite powerful in my estimation however it also feels a bit juvenile.  I want to pull from this deep creative reservoir I have in order to make my own abstract works.  Reading Motherwell one gets the sense that when visual art, painting, is pontificated over enough, and given the sense of our own art history that we cannot escape, all roads lead towards abstraction. Perhaps that is naive and is a sense that will come and go with the seasons but whatever the case may be, rendering photographs in oil paint is not art, and more or less that is a part of my practice that I will leave behind moving forward.  Except of course if someone wants to pay me for that.  And also once or twice a year I will create an intensely resolved, high resolution work to remind people of my technical prowess. That aside, those books are closed and should be forever.  I have very little respect for the mural painters around me who render portraits from photograph with that ugly all spray can style. 

The post Paint Dairy 8/11/2025 appeared first on Max Lowtide.

The states of primordial ease cultivated by the four highly curated environments are ephemeral in design, inviting us, as experiencers, to absorb each precious moment of the show, knowing they will never be repeated.  

Are you in?

Wielding ephemeral tech, the creative duo, Alexander Groves and Azusa Murakami, reimagine the floating worlds of Ukiyo-e for a 21st-century audience.  Ukiyo-e prints, or “pictures of a floating world,” were popularized in Japan’s 17th-19th centuries as a means of pictorial escapism for a growing merchant class.  Historically, to visit the floating world is to leave all your earthly concerns behind, temporarily, in exchange for pursuits of desire and repose.  

An ambitious bar to set, no doubt, for a contemporary art-going audience with singed retinas and chihuahua-sized attention spans (present company included).

Upon entering the show..

Your eyes descend on two large moonrocks presented as sculpture.  Despite their out-of-this-world porous sheen, the exhibit encourages us to meditate on these synthetic objects as representations of Earth in the Zen garden of life.  The consensual game of technology disguised as nature and attendance masquerading as attention begins.

On the other side of the asteroid belt hang two suns, Neon Sun and Beyond the Horizon, two illuminated squares composed of alternating bands of colored light.  Within each square sits the circle that our collective existence is forever indebted to.  As with the asteroids, these art objects are not what they seem. AA. Murakami has employed neither neon nor electricity to bring these shuttered gradients to their muted brilliance.  The effect of these pieces is achieved by plasma (the fourth state of matter we are told) contained within an electromagnetic field, making one wonder what Robert Irwin might have achieved had he gotten his hands on plasma in the 70’s.

More than one aspect of this show makes me think of the late, , but we’ll revisit him at the end. It’s time to plunge into the…

Floating World.

Walk through the black curtain, and you’re underwater, the depth of which is up to you as the experiencer to decide.  Bloated jellyfish with glittering contours undulate weightlessly across the void as you enter the space. 

Did you see that one? And there goes another –

Each one more captivating than the last, as the artistic duo reminds us how to see.

But wait, those aren’t jellyfish at all. Those are soap bubbles filled with dense fog. You are reminded of the magic of bubbles from childhood, and how they collapse into nonexistence, leaving behind nothing but a sticky residue that slowly coats the ocean floor.  

These moments are here for the experiencing.

If you are savvy enough to find the entrance to the next room, welcome, a powerfully dim blue light greets you.  The bumbling jellyfish have now calcified into beanbag chairs, inviting our bodies to emulate their weightlessness.  Lay back and enjoy Passage, where circular rings of fog are launched towards you only to disperse before making contact.  

Am I in the green room after a rap show?  Or have I burrowed deeper down into the depths where geothermal geysers expel hot air?  Whatever the case may be, each gust of fog, according to the artists, is:

“random, uncontrollable and unpredictable — a parallel to our own lives in our ever expanding universe.”

Wait, is it all just ephemeral?

By the fourth and final room, you, alongside other travelers, have penetrated so deep that you now occupy the center of the earth. This cavernous red room buzzes with an ordered chaos that sets the mind at ease.  A seemingly infinite number of plasma-filled tubes hang perfectly at 45-degree angles from the low, imposing ceiling.  The collective buzz of the tubes punctuated by a profound stillness, followed by a buzz here and a buzz there (everywhere a buzz buzz), makes one feel as if they’ve peeked behind the Creator’s curtain to discover that there is a method to the madness.

Hold that thought.  Hold that feeling.

Because once thrust back into the MFAH, it’s over.  Welcome back to the surface earthlings, where the only guarantees in life are death and taxes.  Now you see why I am left with a primordial nostalgia for the ooze from which I came.

I took the ride that AA. Murakami constructed, and I was rewarded with brief states of psychological repose and existential reflection. I did my part, I upheld my end of the bargain.

Had I not, I may have instead left the show with a collection of photos to document the journey.  Photos signaling that I came, I saw, but did I experience? The anti-ephemeral journey, the impulse to cheapen every special moment with a photo.

I’m left wondering how much more potent the descent into the Floating World could have been had the public not been permitted to contradict Murakami’s ephemeral tech with their own anti-ephemeral tech.  Robert Irwin famously did not let anyone photograph his work for decades, citing that photography could not sufficiently convey the experience of his art.  

Why permit the production of false substitutes, Irwin claimed.  Why indeed.  But that was then, and this is now, and there is no sense in investing too much energy in idealizing the past because if Floating World by AA. Murakami teaches us anything it’s that this moment, too, is ephemeral. 

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Many people will say yes, I am here as a contrarian to say…

Not necessarily, it depends. 

You may be surprised to learn that painting from life can be easier and more fun, all while yielding a more interesting painting.

Today, I will attempt to make that case.

Painting Tips, Tricks, Tools, and Hacks

I’m no stranger, nor am I opposed to using all the great painting tricks and tools that modern technology affords us.  Employing the use of grids, projectors, doodle grids, and transparent overlays in Photoshop all have their utility when it comes to painting murals and easel paintings.

I was surprised to learn that even the old masters employed technology to actualize their masterpieces centuries ago.  Devices such as the camera obscura (pictured above) and other types of cutting-edge lens technologies were used to assist artists put their initial sketches down quickly and proportionally. 

We’re not here to debate the legitimacy of using such devices to assist in the painting process (at least not today).  But i did want give these methodologies their moment before diving into the truly age-old technique of painting from observation, also known as painting from life.

Photographic Reference

Our entire modern existence, in large part, is mediated by the camera.  We all have these devices in our pockets, we just call them phones – but really, they’re cameras that are able to make and receive calls.  We should call them cameras and if you’re like me, you probably shoot more photos than you take calls anyway.

That said it’s easier than ever to snap great photos all day long. And it can be very tempting (albeit quite lazy) to think that a great photo will yield a great painting.  I’m not making the case that it can’t or that it won’t, just beware.

This is just one brief consideration when working from a photograph versus working from life: You may end up with an epic cache of paintings that ultimately read as photos rendered in paint.

The case for Painting from a Photograph – 

-because, of course, there is a very strong case to be made.  We are so lucky to have this technology, when I look at portraits from way back when, I sometimes think – “How did they do that (without using a photo)?” A painting that always makes me think of that is The Tiger Hunt by Peter Paul Rubens which I briefly discuss in this Episode 4 of Painting of the Week.

Here’s an example where working from a photo is essential: you’re painting a portrait and you don’t have someone willing to sit for you over the course of 10+ sessions, totaling 50 hours.  

Lucien Freud, the great contemporary English figurative painter (grandson of Sigmund Freud), famously painted all his figures from life, often having them pose for him over the course of many, many sittings.  No doubt his strict adherence to painting from life allowed his paintings to achieve a certain quality, but we’re not Lucien… 

So we work from photographs, and nevertheless, we are still able to achieve great results.

The Unlikely Problems of Painting from Photographs Creates

When working from a photo, the benefits are numerous.  Here are four I can think of:

1. The subject (person, landscape) is unaltered, the person doesn’t move, the sun doesn’t change
2. You are able to summon this reference image at your convenience – for example, painting a photo of a bright sunny landscape in the middle of the night in your studio
3. You can splice and compose many photos into one composition, haters will call this photobashing (it can work, it can also not work, you better be a good composer)
4. You have endless detail and information to reference for your painting, for example, you can 10x zoom in on your landscape and render each blade of grass (boring!)

It’s this last point that can be both your greatest weapon or the largest hindrance to having fun and making a great painting.

If you’re painting a portrait for a client…

..chances are they want some photorealistic thing with minimal artistic interpretation.  Really, they want you to download their photo in oil paint, which is cool; that’s a very real hustle, and in this case, having a photo to work from is crucial for success.

Pro Tip: Make sure the photo is flattering to the sitter(s) and every element of the photo makes sense, because if it doesn’t, then neither will your painting!

Enter: Painting From Life

We’ve established there is a time for rendering immense loads of detail, like when you’re contracted to be a paint download machine.

There is also a time to not get overloaded with detail and paint from a more intuitive place, painting the impression of the object and not the symphony of pixels that compose the photo.

The bouquet of flowers or the crystal skull photographed here are great examples.  Painting either of these from a photograph would have the potential to devolve into a lost-in-the-sauce-slog of a paint, which wouldn’t be very fun (because that matters too, right?)

However, when I paint these subjects from life, I am unable to get too lost in the weeds. This means that I need to use my brain and my creative faculties to find functional, convenient, and interesting solutions to the problems of needing to suggest lots of information, whilst not spending 100 hours rendering it.

Painting The Crystal Skull

In the case of the crystal skull, the number of planes of light dancing across the surface of this object would literally be insane to paint.  Of course, I could work from a photo and still try to maintain an impressionistic touch; however, I am way more likely to get stuck in the mud 2x-ing, 10x-ing, and 50x-ing the zoom on certain spots while proceeding to pick up smaller and smaller brushes.  Before I know it, I’m on my third sitting of this 8×10 inch panel, and maybe I have even achieved a photographic effect, but who cares.  That doesn’t mean it’s an interesting painting, or even a good painting. 

Flexing technique doesn’t make you an artist; it makes you a paint technician.

It’s About Having Fun  

If painting from a photo is fun, then who am I to say otherwise?  Painting is meant to be enjoyable, otherwise why do it?

I only want to dispel the conception that painting from life is inordinately challenging.  And while it can be a challenge it also forces you to adapt as an artist, making you a stronger painter when it is time to retreat to the studio and be the oil paint download machine that clients pay you to be.

If you have never painted from life, I encourage you to give it a shot. 

You may be surprised at what you see when you start looking.

The post Painting from Life versus Painting from a Photograph appeared first on Max Lowtide.

It was for me.

This fall will mark my six year anniversary of learning how to paint with oil.  In 2019, I bought my first set of oil paints from Plaza Art in Richmond, Virginia, a month before my birthday, at the great encouragement of my girlfriend.

Earlier that same year, I had been studying portrait anatomy online at New Masters Academy, and as soon as I got into oil, I immediately set to work on large and small portrait painting.  I remember telling myself that each year, around that same time, I would commemorate my oil painting anniversary by producing a self-portrait.

Well, that was a nice, romantic goal to set for myself, but I never followed through with it.  Not in those first years at least. 

My First Self Portrait – 2021- 

If you may even call it that – was a bag of goldfish, I very ironically titled “Self Portrait”.  This was me invoking that quintessential millennial ironic detachment we briefly discussed last week in the posting your art on Reddit blog.

I did that a lot back in the day – it’s called being too cool for school, and it doesn’t typically age well.

So my first self portrait was a bag of goldfish (In my defense, I have always loved the snack that smiles back).

My Second Self Portrait – 2023

My first true attempt at a self-portrait.  This painting was executed in an ambitious fashion and with great expectation despite its small size.  Looking at the painting now (after not having done so in a year), I effectively stole all the compositional devices from Rembrandt and the tonalist painters.

A strong direct light dramatically illuminates one side of the face, creating a high contrast portrait with distinct shadow shapes being cast over the opposite side of the face.  This effect results in a very dramatically lit portrait illuminated against a dark background.  If you look at Rembrandt’s paintings, they are almost all composed in this fashion.  I believe this lighting effect was used to communicate the light of God shining down on the sitter.

Knowing me, I was probably pursuing this device to achieve a more Jungian effect with the intent of establishing a tension between the light side and the shadow side.  In effect, rendering a self-portrait that would work on multiple levels.

The Importance of Likeness

I liked this painting initially, but was soon convinced otherwise by those around me.  People didn’t feel like it possessed a strong resemblance to me, myself nor I.  At the time, I was a bit too close and too attached to the painting to really step back and assess its quality with any sort of objectivity (to the extent that that’s even possible).  If I remember correctly, I was even going to give this painting to my mom (as one would), but I felt too insecure given this whole likeness debacle. 

A question worth asking is: 

In order for a portrait to be successful, does it need to possess a strong likeness?  

What do you think? Certainly a discussion for another day.

I unearthed this painting from my scrap panel drawer in order to document it for this blog, and despite the fact that the likeness is lacking (even cartoonish!) I like this painting and am not likely to bring myself to gesso over it anytime soon.

My Third Self Portrait – 2025

Finally, a self-portrait to call home about – or in this case, to write to the internet about.  This was painted from a photographic reference taken at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.  Some weeks prior to staging the photo, I had been wandering around the Nancy & Rich Kinder Building of the MFAH when this painting by Jasper Johns caught my eye.

The work by Johns is titled Ventriloquist, and upon doing some research for this blog, I was surprised to learn a very relevant detail:

“When Abstract Expressionism was at its height in the 1950s, Jasper Johns returned to concrete imagery. He painted simple icons: flags, numbers, and targets. In Ventriloquist, Johns arranges such imagery to create a symbolic self-portrait.” (1)

Ventriloquist, by Johns, is a self-portrait

Very relevant. I did not know that until right now, and I certainly did not possess that information when I staged the photo and painted the portrait (I should probably read the wall labels more to sound more smart and stuff).

What drew me to stage my self-portrait in front of this piece specifically was the two green and black striped American flags stacked on top of each other.  These bastardized flags (at least that’s how I interpret them), in conjunction with the Burger King crown atop my head, felt like appropriate symbols to articulate an American identity in distress.

I’ll leave it at that and let you interpret the rest.

I don’t like it when people hold me hostage and unsolicitedly tell me about all the “profoundly” hidden symbols and layered meanings baked into their art. Someone held me hostage once and after that, I vowed never to do that to anyone.

The Art of Looking

It’s one thing to look at something, one thing to see an object and register it as a “thing”.  It’s a completely different exercise in looking to represent that “thing” in paint.  This act forces the observer (the painter) to study the object, the scene, or the sitter in an entirely new type of way.

When painting a self-portrait, be prepared to look at yourself in this same way.  Be prepared to spend 5, 10, 20 hours staring at a picture of yourself while you render every detail, every turn of form in paint (if you’re into that sort of thing).  It’s really neither a good nor a bad experience; it’s just an interesting one.

Since the advent of painting, artists have been representing themselves and those around them as a means to communicate the human experience.  No amount of generative AI, Photoshop, and selfie sticks thrust onto popular culture will render this tradition obsolete.

If you are a painter who has yet to embark on the introspective journey of painting a self-portrait, I highly encourage it.

It’s never too late to thrust yourself into the long, unbroken chain of artists who throughout time have represented themselves in art.

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