Nopalito (New Acrylic Sketch)

Riding a burst of enthusiasm, I made an acrylic sketch of the nopal in my courtyard.

This is a 12" x 16" acrylic sketch on unstretched canvas. Available for $200 US, includes shipping/insurance via DHL.

Cheers,
Steve
(click my name to send an email)

Succulent on Roof

This is a booming succulent that lives on my roof. It was both a pleasure and a struggle to paint. Capturing this on a canvas is like opening a Chinese box, the more you look the more complex it becomes.

Acrylic on canvas, 9" x 12", $175 includes DHL two day shipping and insurance.

Steve Lafler

Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

One of my favorite things about living in Oaxaca is the oversupply of ancient beat-up slag heaps that were cars in a former life. Let's just say they have a lot of character.
I saw this '74 Dodge Dart today, at rest a couple blocks from my house, and had to paint it. I sat on the sidewalk and struggled to capture it as an earnest young man stopped and amiably chatted with me, destroying my already fragile focus.
Still, a bit of this old heap's character shines through.

The painting above is titled Classic Ruins. It's a 12" x 9" acrylic on canvas. $175 includes shipping & insurance via DHL. Takes two days.

Interested parties can email me.

Steve Lafler

Valentine's Day Painting

My wife Serena loves paintings so I made her this acrylic sketch today for Valentine's Day.

Today I went to Parque Llano, Oaxaca's singular, well loved & humming urban park, to look for something to paint with my student Judy. We sat in the shade on a bench and painted this interesting door in an alcove of the building across the street.
This is a bit of a static subject but we found ways to make it interesting. I used a lively pastel pallet that bore only a slight resemblance to what I saw there, I used color more to distinguish parts of the composition than to report the truth.
Much of old Oaxaca was build with cantera stone, a locally quarried light green stone that is luminous with a near magical presence, both light and dead serious at once. So I at least wanted to mix a color that gave a clue to the cantera stone.
Of particular interest was the horizontal line at the top of the building, crossed with the line of the phone pole. It sets up a super basic, very dynamic composition that brings the sublime simplicity of Mondrian to mind.
I was really happy to leave the cars in the foreground as simple contours -- they were the coldest things in the view, so I let them linger as cold white shapes in a warm world.
We gave ourselves just enough time to set up the composition and block in color, without getting obsessive over the details of the scene.