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.

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”.   

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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.

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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. 

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