Paint My Words

2.5 feet by 2 feet
Pen and Ink on cotton rag paper

2 feet by 1.5 feet
cotton rag paper
pen and ink

Two Paintings.

Ink on Cotton Rag Paper.

2.5 by 2 feet.

Roald Dahl.
The BFG, The Enormous crocodile, The Everlasting Gobstopper
3.5 feet by 2 feet
Oil, pen and ink, on cotton rag paper.

Cotton Rag Paper.
Pen on Ink
3 feet by 2 feet.

18 by 24 inches
cotton rag paper
Gonna be on a beer label someday
Pen and Ink

Pen and Ink on Cotton Rag Paper
16 inches by 30 inches

Pen and Ink on cotton rag paper.
3 feet by 2 feet.
Oil wash and Ink.

History Class
2 feet by 3 feet.
100% cotton rag paper
About a week in primary.

Two works 3 feet by 2 feet. The Pen and Ink piece I have titled as “Dahl” it’s built from images from Roald Dahl and his work. I grew up on Dahl. I’m still growing up on Dahl.

The other piece is of a cat hunting a lizard. Pretty fun work. Lindsey gave me the idea. Let’s call it Meave.

2 feet by 1.5 feet on canvas rag paper. Oil paint with a white/red background over painted quickly with 3 colors. From tube to canvas in less than four hours. Happy with the results.

I’ve spent the last month working on the two painting below. They are both oil on white cotton rag paper – about 3.5 feet by 2 feet each, so larger which I love. Gives me a bit more canvas space to work with. I’m 99% done with these – I may add a dab o color here or there as the mood strikes but I’m at the point where I worry about messing them up more than I care to possible make them more complete. I’m happy with the results. It’s been fun to experiment with color layers and plot a bit more. Softer colors than usual which is also challenging.

100% Cotton Rag Paper.
Roughly 20 inches by 16 inches.
Oil and Oil wash.

A construction of 5 masterpieces compiled from Neo Rauch and a recent visit to the NC Museum of Modern art. I collaged my favorite pieces from the visit – primarily the flowers, the fore figure and background figure, the abstract geometric lines on the flower vase and lastly the Rauch scene in the background of the patio figures, the golfer and the swordsman. Happy with the result. Busy colorful piece, but there is a lot going on to keep one’s attention.

Still working on the title.

100% pen and ink on 100% cotton rag paper.
Size is 30 by 20ish.
I built this up over the last week. Happy with the results and inspired to work more in the people forms on a broader scale.

I moved to Baton Rouge about two weeks ago. One of the art items that I’ve had dangling in the back of my head for probably two years was to produce a sculpture of an apple in the resemblance of a human female. Not sure why I had this motivation, but that’s not really the point – the point being to move from concept to production. Starting with a less ambitious approach I produced my idea on paper first. The results are below – produced in oil roughly 30 inches by 20 inches on 100% cotton rag paper. I painted this in about 3-4 layers over the course of a day. Only time will tell if I’ll have the desire to make one out of stone.

About Cima:

Cima Rahmankhah was born and raised in Iran. In 2000 she moved to the United States. She is currently working towards an MFA at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles.

Rahmankhah works in various media, including painting, installation, video. Her work deals with stigmas, explores the aesthetics of power, and finally compares the ways in which power structures differ from culture to culture.

Her work has been shown in the United States and abroad, and was featured in the latest issue of New American Paintings.

Pen and ink work by D.B. Williams
Cotton Rag Paper
30 by 24 inches

I have been working on a new short story. It’s raw, awkward, reflective, allegorical – a summary of characters from the last few years mingled with the thoughts that kept me up laughing awake at night. I like to think ”Fantastic Mr. Fox” or ”The Twits” goes adult bed time story. There is a free pdf version below and a link to hulu publishing as it won’t show up on Amazon for a few more weeks.

The Wondrous Adventures of the Sergeant Peppers Noggins Platoon.

The Wondrous Adventures of the Sergeant Peppers Noggins Platoon Download

2 feet by 3 feet. Watercolor pen and ink wash. Titled – Addiction Trifecta

24 inches by 16 inches
Pen and Ink
Brown ink on Brown Rag Paper

This one took awhile to complete. There are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of tiny hash marks used to compose this picture all of one color ink. Two days or so of work. I had the time – surgery and hence a week in bed off of running.

These oil paintings on cotton rag paper are 3 feet by 2 feet. The computer study work for their preparation can be seen a few posts down. I drew the images in pen and ink and filled in color blobs with oil/turpentine and pigment. Each took around 5 hours of prep time and 10 hours of painting/drawing. I’ll make more like these. I like the negative space style.

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Bird paintings by me.

“Breached Umbrella” 2011 by D.B. Williams

“Flock of Paper Cranes” February 2011 D.B. Williams

2 hours or so apiece of work and a reminder of photoshop.  I built up layers to be used as inspiration during the painting process.

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I have been working on a series of mythology edition prints for roughly the last month.  The process chosen involved reduction linocut where by a single block was reduced through four layers to produce the below images.  Daphne’s father transforms her into a tree as Apollo attempts to take her for his lover.  The images are 8 by 10 inches and were produced using watercolor inks and block printing paper.  I made four editions each  of a separate color ranging from edition sizes of 30 to 76.

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18 by 20 Inches

Reduction print series of Twelve

Arches 190 lb Acid Free Printmaking Paper

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I have been working over the last few weeks on creating a few more of my treescape series on stainless steel.  The process started with a trip to the metal recyclers in Durham J&R recyclers off of Cheek Road.  I purchased about 50 dollars worth of 18 and 24 guage steel.  I sanded the steel scraps which varied in size most being around 1/2 to 1 square foot in size using a rotary sander with a 120 grit sandpaper to wear through the thin chromium protection layer.  I then placed tape over where i wanted the tree forms to remain, and painted the sheets with acid concrete color – in other words metalic salts which eat away at and react with the iron in the metal.  After a few hours, I pulled up the tape and begin to paint on the layers of leaves using oil and enamel paint.  I let all of this dry and followed it up with numerous coats of spar varnum and damar varnish to hold it all in.  I’ve made a few of these before and always been happy with the random results of the acid staining.  These works are no exception.  I’ll make more.

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18 by 24 inches

Edition of 18

Hand Pulled Reduction Linocuts by D.B. Williams on Arches 190lb Watercolor Paper

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Edition of Nine Wavy sunflowers

16 inches by 18 inches

Arches Watercolor 190 lb paper.

Each is unique cut from linoleum using reduction print processes.  I made these using the below image as  reference point.

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New York Skyline

I have been working on these for the last 2 months.  Lots of evenings carving linoleum and stamping ink on 300lb paper.  I’m happy with the result and intend to produce more in a similar manner.  This is a limited edition release with only 10 stampings.  Doug, my brother wanted 1 of the 10 so there are only nine left at this point.  If you are interested, they’ll be on etsy for sale.

18 inches by 48 inches

9 by 11 inch prints “Who is John Galt” and “The Violets are Blooming and We” Prints were my first attempt at carving words in reverse in Linoleum blocks.  The process takes some time, hence the two week lagtime or so in posting anything of my own work.  I like the prints.  Good food for thought on future works.

I spent the weekend writing and working on these pints of beer prints.  Vibrant Warhol like colors erupt from the pages. I’m happy with the results.  Oil, mixed with block printing ink and charcoal. Each print is 9 by 12 inches or so.

Any blogger worth his or her salt has Google analytic software or some equivalent service established so that they can monitor, analyze and respond to their readership.

I for instance have most of my readership located in either the California or North Carolina area which makes sense.  I won’t go into all of the reasons why that is the case, but simply wanted to point it out.

What i find interesting is that the three artist below are the artist which direct the most users to my pages:

Sylvia Grantis

Norman Rockwell

Sam the Dot Man

What i find interesting is the reasons why these artist have the highest hit per page ratio when compared to my other blog pages.  Norman Rockwell for instance makes perfect sense.  He is a well known artist whose works many Americans have seen; He is so well known in fact that his pictures often show up in history text books.  The other two artist, Sam the Dot Man and Sylvia Grantis, I speculate are high achievers in regards to hit per post I speculate because they do not have respective pages that are easy to find on google.  Sure, there are a few articles on the net for each artist, however my page appears close to first or second in the search results when you type in either of their names.  I’m just capitalizing on the fact that they are not represented online.   Mental note, I should search for more artist like these who are well known, but do not have pages online, in order to increase my own page count hits.

I have had the good fortune to have a few days off of work.  As neither Lindsey or I are traveling, I have been dedicating a lot of the time to producing new art and writing.  “A Weekend in the Saddle” is now much closer to being finished and I’ve started a short novella about a deranged Sergeant who manages to trap five miniature people in an aquarium.  I’m hoping to have an audio version available shortly of “A Weekend in the Saddle”.  I recorded it yesterday, however haven’t had a chance to clean it up and convert it to MP3 format.

I created a series of three prints with each production run only 8-10 images using various colors so each one is truly unique.  There is a seated man, a magnolia flower and another flower of unknown origin.  These were produced using linoleum block printing techniques.  The rubbers were destroyed in the process.

I printed off labels and bottled some bees wax and tea tree oil based skin balm for Christmas presents.  A picture of these can be seen below.  The lotion is smooth, good smelling and does not leave the skin feeling greasy.  I love bees!

Over the last three weeks I have worked on a series of butterfly prints. There are 18 of these in total, all of which are different. Most use the colors above, however some also have touches of orange/red.  They are 9 by 12 inches and would look best framed in grey/black mattes.

I’ve spent the last two months working to recreate a previous composition. I began two canvases dedicated to this task. The works began with a layer of tar and sand, painted over again and again.  I pealed off the layers, like strips of peel from an orange.  I painted, repainted and painted again, using layers of polyurethane as the glue.  I created a suitable background for a composition, using my normal layered style, and after completion, I found that I liked the simplicity of the backgrounds more than the thought of disturbing the silence with additional painted forms. I am done.  Welcome to “Red Paintaholic” and “Purple Paintaholic”

I have been working on a manuscript over the last year or so which documents in principle my experience of cycling. The manuscript is well on its way to being completed.  These prints will be used as chapter dividers.  It’s not entirely fiction or non fiction, but rather a blending of the two – A Mark Twain if you will.  I spent the day today, carving a rubber block, cutting my hand, and producing these colorful cycling prints.  There are twenty in total. The rubber has been destroyed.

Over the last two weeks I have been experimenting with rubber block printing and color combination. I worked away at the background and vase first, followed by a bit more detail on the flower pedals and the vase bottom. The results look stunning when compared as a series. Tulips redefined.  I made thirty of these, most of them completed over the course of the last 24 hours. More flower prints to come, perhaps a daisy or a pansy next.

This painting is 3 feet tall by 4 feet wide. Figures matched by their shadows face off. The base of the painting is composed of a white layer painted over a previous work that I was never fully happy with. Tar is underneath that. I dug out the forms, through layers of paint, exposing the tar and then sealing it back in with polyurethane. The figures and background are painted on that matrix. It can be hung with either side  upwards. I prefer it with red on top.

This is work from the last week. It’s composed of tar, layers of oil paint, acrylic and clear coat polyurethane. It’s 4 feet long by 13 inches tall. Clouds a bridge and numerous layers until I found what I liked.

Paintings created during the first few months of 2010. Lindsey created the smaller aced etched metal tree scene. I created the larger 4 by 2 foot works using oil, concrete, enamel and found objects. Not sure if these are fully done yet, however they are close.

Artist: D.B. Williams

This painting was constructed on a 4 by 4 foot sheet of particle board. It is rare that I leave a piece as complete without adding a bit more detail or complexity. This piece stands on its own weight. The colors and negative space are well balanced. I’m not sure yet where this lovely lady will end up, but I do know that she will find a good home.

In this piece I have mounted woven plywood strips onto a 4 by 4 foot piece of particle board. The work is thus, quite heavy given that in some places three layers of wood and paint have been built up.  The colors chosen are secondary and primary in design. These are accented with vertical and horizontal lines surrounded by spherical shapes.  Additionally, off hues by blending white have been created to add an additional layer of complexity.

Artist: D.B. Williams

On the right a sunflower print can be seen. It measures 18 inches by 12 inches.  I cut this print from linoleum.  4 layers of paint have been applied to produce a flower image which fills up the canvas.  I created 17 of these prints over the weekend mostly the same color. These have been signed and those still available can be found in my etsy shop.

Below is a 4 foot by 2 foot painting on wooden panel.  Spent grains from home brewing, a birch panel, enamel and oil paint have all been mixed to create another one of my treescape series.

Artist: D.B. Williams

A rubber cut stamping of either the great white whale from Moby Dick or a teacup.  I prefer the idea of a whale.  This print was created in a Limited Edition of four. One of the stamping was accidentally stamped upside down.  Water color paint was rolled onto a rubber cut stamp.  Each color represents a subsequent pressing after cutting out the block.  The print is 18 inches by 12 inches in size on white heavyweight watercolor paper.

This work measures 12 inches by 18 inches. A tree scene is painted atop an acid stained steel plate.  This is #5 in a series of acid stained works.

I have created a few of the paintings over the last half a year. I discovered the creation process while experimenting with metal and concrete acid stain. Apparently, metallic salts react with more than simply the lime in concrete. I like these paintings. They are simple, approachable, reproducible within reason and unique. They have my usual improptu style, yet they maintain a bit of dignified elegance. The copper hues don’t hurt!  More of these paintings will come. You can find the ones that I have available for sale through my etsy shop.