Naples Museum of Art Exhibition of Steve Childs dance paintings

Today was the opening of the exhibition of my dance paintings at the Naples Museum of Art. The paintings will be on exhibit until April 28, 2013. If you live near or have travel plans to Southern Florida please take some time to go by the museum. Below is a description of the exhibit as described on the museum's website. I am very pleased to be showing my paintings along with these other three artists listed here. 
VISUAL CONNECTION

PAINTING, SCULPTURE & PHOTOGRAPHY INSPIRED BY DANCE

Uniting the visual and performing arts, this exhibition features the work of four leading artists dedicated to dance: Rose Eichenbaum, photojournalist and contributor to Dance Magazine; Richard MacDonald, figurative sculptor known for the 1996 Olympics’ The Flair; Steve Childs, painter and documentary film director for And We Will Dance; and Marc Haegeman, Belgian photographer of the Bolshoi Ballet.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012 – Sunday, April 28, 2013

Organized by the Patty & Jay Baker Naples Museum of Art

                                        http://www.thephil.org/museum/museum_exhibitions/museum_exhibits.html

                                          Sometimes It's Not So Easy   30x24    oil on linen

Time-lapse painting of Gracie

A couple of weeks ago I was in the middle of painting this portrait of Gracie and I realized how much I was growing to love this painting. Gracie is at that age where she is changing from a young girl to a young woman. So I decided to put my Nikon on a tripod and set it to shoot a still photo every six minutes while I painted. I thought since I am painting this young woman who herself is changing, I wanted to share this with you as it changes. This time-lapse takes place over about four days. It is painted in oil, on linen, as I normally do. You will notice the light change on the overall color which is the light changing in my studio during these four days from cloudy to sunny and back to cloudy. You will also notice changes happening even while my hand and brush are not in the image since the camera took those photos while I was mixing paint and I had already made many changes during that period. Watch for changes in the position of her left shoulder (the right side of the screen) and the chair. You will probably have to watch a couple of times to see all of these things happening at once. I decide along the way that these are not working and I kept moving them around over these several days. I recommend you click the YouTube icon at the bottom right of the video and watch from there so that you can set your viewing to the highest resolution possible. This way you can see the very subtle changes I make to this painting. One final thing about the portrait, since I had to set the camera at an angle from the side (so that I didn't block the view) you will notice that the image appears slightly "squashed".  Maybe some day I can figure out how to shoot it from straight on while I paint. Also enjoy the music. It's a little piece I composed and recorded. Thanks for coming to see my blog and I'd love to hear back from you. I hope you will share this with others. 
Steve

Steve Childs to speak and show his work Tuesday April 10

I will be speaking and showing "slides" of my work tomorrow night, Tuesday April 10 at the Muddy River Art Association meeting. Doors open at 6pm and after a brief meeting at 6:30 I will give my presentation. This event is free and open to the public. It has been almost 10 years since I've done this type of event near my home town and I encourage you to come. I will be talking about my 40 years of painting and what drives me to plug away at this every day. There will be lots of time for Q&A as well. This will be held at the Clemmons Branch Library at 3554 Clemmons Rd. For more information see the link below.
http://www.muddyriverart.org/Calendar%20trial%202.html

Steve Childs Portrait Demonstration at Salmagundi Club NYC

While cleaning my studio recently I came across this 10 year old taping of me painting a demonstration portrait at the Salmagundi Club in New York City. In Fall of 2001 my good friend and renowned painter/teacher John Howard Sanden graciously invited me to come to NYC and speak about my work and do a portrait demo the next morning.  My other good friend and great artist Bart Lindstrom brought his video camera along and asked if it would be okay to record my demo. He filmed it handheld and sat next to the music I had playing so the music appears a bit louder than it was. Regardless, I am forever thankful to him for recording this and giving me a copy. My demo probably lasted about an hour and a half but I've condensed it down to 25 minutes. I would also like to thank the model, a beautiful young woman who I simple selected from the audience. I'm sorry that I have forgotten her name but she was kind to agree to miss the demo from one side of the canvas in order to sit still on the other side. Hopefully someday someone will see this video and recognize her and let me know. You may follow other videos about my work at the YouTube channel "FilmingVision".  Thank you again John Sanden for your years of encouragement and friendship and for allowing me the opportunity to share my work with others. 

Steve Childs

Painting my oil head studies

Here in my third blog once again I bring you into my studio through this video. I talk about a painting I just finished two days ago and also show several of my oil head studies. I briefly touch on my palette and paints and show a bit of the way I apply paint to canvas. Also below are two paintings I did in 1993 when I lived in Utah. The boy is my oldest son Daniel. I painted this from life. The fellow with the beard was an artist friend, Mark, who I met in Utah. The one of Mark is cropped in on the head. It is a much larger painting which I plan to show the whole thing soon. Thanks again for checking out my blog. If you like it please join/subscribe. Steve

Still Opening Up To This Whole Idea

On this second post I'm focusing on this painting you see here of these dancers rehearsing. So I've created a short video/film about this painting (you can watch the video on this page) and I share a bit about using a palette knife to paint this. Typically I would have my wife, Nilla, edit most of the things I write since she is a writer/author and writing is one of my greatest weaknesses. But for my blog I've decided to do this unedited "uncensored" so you will get the real me. So from here on out please keep that in mind. 
Currently I'm feeling torn between painting, filming/editing, and music and many days find that I constantly am jumping back and forth from one to the other. And more often than not these days I'm combining all three. And in between all of this I feel a bit crazy trying to create and keep up with putting out a blog that I think people might actually be interested in seeing. But when I consider that people seem to really enjoy my life drawing classes and workshops and they keep filling up with students, I suppose I do have something to share. So this is how we will proceed from here. I'll assume that I will be posting paintings, video/films and comments that some viewers will enjoy and hopefully learn from. And now that I've got that out of the way we won't have to deal with that from this point on. 

Here is a close-up of my painting "Preparing for Spring
Dance".  This will give you an idea for what my paintings often look like in detail. This painting is oil on linen16x20. On this type of painting, where I use mostly palette knife, I build up countless layers of paint but tried to allow parts of every layer to show through. So with the palette knife I use the canvas as my palette really more than my actual palette. Then I let my eye, and yours, blend the color as we look at it. 

This painting (left) is the full image of the close-up only image I showed in the last post. I don't recall the size but I think it was around 22x14 perhaps. I didn't use palette knife for this but instead used fingers and a brush. 

Since this is my very first post, I feel compelled to share this painting (close up) that I did in the mid '90s. This dancer was with the Atlanta Ballet at the time I painted her and I have painted her countless times. She still remains the one subject who I've painted more than anyone else, but it has been a number of years since the last painting of her. I share this specific painting because I feel that it expresses and conveys my painting style as well as any I've done. Perhaps I will show you the rest of the painting soon. This is oil on linen painted mostly with one brush (as I tend to do) and many fingers and both thumbs. This is the only way I know to arrive at this texture and atmosphere. I think that by painting with my fingers I have a much closer involvement with the canvas and and feel my way around the layers of paint, which is not possible with a brush alone. Thanks, Steve.
stevechilds.com