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Displaying: 1 - 12 of 12
August 15th, 2014
During the last year I have been experimenting with creating a series of abstract paintings. These images are a fusion of accident and intention (chance and choice). With a 24-48 inch squeegee I spread layer upon layer of oil paint across the canvas sometimes letting a layer dry before applying another sometimes not. "Chance decides” how the paint will spread itself. My choices include format and size of the canvas, color and viscosity of the paint, and the angle and pressure of manipulating the squeegee. Other tools are sometimes used to deconstruct what I see. Painting becomes a metaphor for living - a continuum of choices and chances. Excitement is in risks taken!
August 9th, 2014
"Celebration City"
There's something exciting going on in this city. It's a celebration! You can feel it in the air. You can see it in the hustle and bustle. This print celebrates the city and the thrill and pleasure of being in the midst of it all.
This artwork is a bold and wild departure from my normal style of painting city scenes. In the original I used gobs of glorious color to add texture to the surface in order to create a dynamic impression of the Chicago skyline.
I had the most fun painting the sky with it's almost confetti-like feel. I was most concerned about the reflection of the skyline in Lake Michigan because I wasn't exactly sure how to represent it given how loose the painting of buildings are, but I'm excited by how it turned out. When I look at it I can almost feel the energy of the painting jumping off the canvas!
What is your experience of looking at it? What does it do to you?
Order a print of this painting at JLorenReedy.com
Let's connect on Facebook @ www.facebook.com/JLorenReedy
October 25th, 2011
GIVE THE GIFT OF FINE ART PRINTS!Looking for a unique, affordable gift this coming Holiday season? Give the gift of fine art to the special people on your holiday list.
The Stretched Canvas Prints
• You have options on the style of the side wrap:
Framed Prints • Choose from 9 different, quality frame styles and 15 frame colors.
Standard Prints
• Choose a top mat for your print if you wish.
About The Greeting Cards
• The greeting cards are 5" x 7" in size and are produced on digital offset printers using 110 lb. paper stock.
The original paintings, for many of the images, are also available at a Special Holiday Discount of 15% on any order placed by December 1, 2011. Check out J. Loren Reedy's website (www.JLorenReedy.com) to learn more about this Holiday special!
Chicago artist J. Loren Reedy is offering high quality prints of some of his most popular paintings from "The City at Night" series, starting as low as $29! These fine art reproductions are gorgeous! They are printed on high quality paper or canvas.
You get a 30-day, no hassle, money back guarantee on each print. Shipping of your fine art gift occurs within 2-3 business days.
[NOTE: Prints of other scenes are available at JLorenReedy.com]
• The gallery wrapped stretched canvas is a high quality giclée print.
• It is mounted on 1.5" back stretcher bars and is back stapled.
• You can choose either a glossy or matte finish.
CLICK HERE to view the prints.
• Choose from 7 different papers for your print; for only pennies more upgrade on paper for whiter whites, blacker blacks and more vibrant colors!
• Choose the size and color of the top mat border (There are over 18 colors to choose from!)
• The finish is an 1/8" clear acrylic glazing, and it's mounted on foam core.
CLICK HERE to view the prints.
• Choose from 7 different papers for your print; again, upgrade for pennies and get maximum quality.
• Each is printed with a 1" white border to allow for framing.
• The print ships in a durable 1/4" thick cardboard shipping tube.
CLICK HERE to view the prints.
• The inside of each card has a matte white finish and can be customized with a text message up to 500 characters in length.
• Cards can be ordered in a horizontal or vertical configuration.
• Each card comes with a white envelope for mailing and gift giving.
• Each card is coated with a UV protectant on the outside surface which produces a semi-gloss finish.
• Cards can be ordered with a white or black background.
CLICK HERE to view the prints (and card option).
October 14th, 2011
"CHICAGO SKYLINE – EVENING APPROACHES"
I’ve been wanting to paint this view of the city for a number of years. To my knowledge, It’s the most breath-taking skyline view of any city in the world. Lucky me, I happen to live in that city.
However, be that as it may, the painting is really more about the light than it is about the city.
Capturing the light of a certain time of the day is always a delightful challenge for any painter, whether it be morning, mid day or twilight. Things seem to change so fast, especially in the evening. One moment the sun is setting. You blink your eyes and suddenly it's gone and the city lights are on!
Part of the fun (and challenge!) is capturing the glow of the light that appears various parts of the scene. Here I was particularly drawn to trying to capture the glow the lights of Michigan Avenue cast on the buildings, the subtle reflections of light in the water, and the twinkling lights in the magnificent buildings along the Lake Michigan shoreline as evening turns into night.
I'm especially pleased with the fading light in the sky and the clouds which give depth to the painting.
What are your thoughts and reflections on this image? What could I have improved?
Order this painting (or a print of it) at JLorenReedy.com
Let's connect on Facebook @ www.facebook.com/JLorenReedy
October 1st, 2011
"CHICAGO WATER TOWER AT NIGHT"
One of the most famous landmarks in Chicago is the old water tower which stands proudly on Michigan Avenue, sometimes referred to as The Magnicent Mile. The Water Tower is one of just five public buildings to survive the Chicago fire in 1871, and the only public building in the burned zone to survive.
In the years since the fire, the tower has become a symbol of old Chicago and of the city's recovery from the fire. It remains today as an unofficial memorial to the fire's destructive power and Chicago's "Yes, I can" spirit.
The structure has not been universally admired. Oscar Wilde said it looked like "a castellated monstrosity with pepper boxes stuck all over it," although he did admire the arrangement and movement of the pumping machinery inside. The Water Tower's castle-like style inspired the design of many White Castle restaurant buildings. The Tower was named an American Water Landmark in 1969.
This painting captures the beauty of Michigan Avenue at night with the Water Tower standing proud watch over it all. In 1918 the street was widened to give the Water Tower it's current featured position. This painting shows the tower in all its glory with the twinkling lights of the traffic and the city around it.
The original painting has been sold but you can order a superb print at JLorenReedy.
Let's connect on Facebook @ www.facebook.com/JLorenReedy
September 26th, 2011
"THE CITY AT NIGHT" PRINTS
I'm very excited to announce that prints of the images in my popular YouTube® video are now available for the first time! If you've not seen the video yet Click Here to watch it.
These are ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS, high quality prints which are available in a variety of styles. You can get a canvas print mounted on stretcher bars, a frame print with your choice of 9 different frame styles and 18 colors to choose from, a standard paper print with 7 different paper types to choose from, or you can order the images as greeting cards.
These fine art prints will definitely make a statement in your home or office. They give you the opportunity to own fine art reproductions at a fraction of the cost of the originals. Of course the originals, for many of the images, are also available.
These prints also make for great gifts any time – birthdays, anniversaries, graduation, weddings – but especially bear this in mind as the upcoming Holiday Season approaches . GIVE THE GIFT OF FINE ART! It's guaranteed to get a great response.
I've put together a special webpage giving you all the details. Just go to City At Night Prints to learn more about this great offer!
Be sure and contact me at JLorenReedy.com if you you have any questions.
September 15th, 2011
This spectacular view of Chicago at night is a quintessential image of the city reflected in Lake Michigan. "Big John" (the John Hancock Building ) stands tall on the city's north side and is one of Chicago's most famous landmarks.
This painting was an experiment for me. I knew I wanted to try a new "loose" way of painting but I wasn't at all certain how it would turn out.
I started out giving the entire canvas a pinkish undercoat which I later allowed to show through, especially in the sky. I was very concerned about the darkness of the buildings and the water, but when I started to add the lights in the buildings and the lights from the cars along Lakeshore Drive, suddenly the painting came alive. The reflections of the buildings in the lake completed the scene. I'm very pleased with the results.
At an art fair this past summer, I received a commission to paint a larger, vertical version of this work by a past customer, so I guess others agree with me on the successful results of my "experiment"!
Order this painting (or a print) of it at JLorenReedy.com
Let's connect on Facebook @ www.facebook.com/JLorenReedy
September 15th, 2011
Welcome to my new blog! I am Chicago artist J. Loren Reedy. As the title of this post says I create paintings for people who love color. First of all, let me thank you for taking time visit my blog. I hope you'll return often and tell others about it as well.
Here I'll be sharing lots of information for people who are interested in art:
• I'll share many of the paintings I have created along with short stories about them and how they came to be.
[CLICK HERE to learn about the painting to the left.]
• I'll share articles I've found helpful from fellow artists and articles about the whole creative "art process".
• I'll recommend websites which I've found exciting – in addition to my own :-)
• Occasionally I find books that shape my thinking as an artist. I'll write short reviews of these and tell you why I think they're important.
• I'll talk about my own journey as an artist – new things I'm trying, new things I'm learning about painting, and places I'm exhibiting my art.
AND much more.
In this first post, I thought I'd just share a little about myself so you can get to know me a bit better and how I got interested in art.
Many people recall childhood interests in drawing or painting accompanied by dreams of some day becoming an artist. A few lucky ones develop skills under the mentorship of a close artist relative or family acquaintance.
As a youth, growing up in a small farming community in south-central Illinois, I showed no particular artistic inclination. The community offered no sources of artistic inspiration – no art museums, galleries, not even an art class in school.
In the early elementary grades I dutifully colored within the lines of my coloring books, as instructed, and in high school doodled sketches of "cool" sports cars of tomorrow. No real evidence of an artistic bent there.
In college, following the footsteps of my most inspiring teacher, I majored in English and minored in journalism and history. One term I took the only formal art course I've ever had. The class worked in watercolor and we painted nothing but seedpods for twelve weeks!
However, I learned an important lesson from this class that I have never forgotten. I discovered that there is art in the seemingly mundane and taken for granted. The possibilities are literally limitless. I came to realize that it is not so much the subject that makes a good painting – it is how the artist interprets the subject. A small painting of a tree in misty morning light can be as arresting as a giant, detailed painting of the Grand Canyon.
For several years I taught English and journalism at the secondary school level, then became a bureaucrat for the Illinois Department of Human Services. During my years with that agency I married and raised a family.
My interest in the visual arts found its first expression in photography. For a dozen years or so I pursued photography as a serious hobby. I was especially interested in creative and casual portraiture. Even today I am most comfortable composing prospective paintings through the viewfinder of a camera.
I do not know where I got the notion that I wanted to paint. Whatever the motivating source, within weeks of retiring, I purchased my first how-to-paint book ("The Big Book of Painting Nature in Oil" by S. Allyn Schaeffer), which continues to get me out of some problematic situations. And within three months of retiring I was on a plane bound for Maui to decide if the island would become my new home. I lived there for eleven and a half years.
Today I make my home in Chicago. I absolutely love the city and it has become the new focus and subject of most of my paintings. I am also painting mostly with acrylics these days rather than with oils, where I began.
I suppose one would say I am self-taught, if there really is such a process. We unconsciously learn so much from images and impressions all around us and nothing in the vacuum of isolation.
I pour over art magazines and books and have learned a lot from them. I visit galleries whenever possible. I participated in three formal workshops during my time living in Maui. I was privileged to learn from such notables as mainland artist Hope Stevenson, internationally renown plein aire artist Kevin McPherson, and premiere Maui painter Ronaldo Macedo.
Photographs are often the initial reference point for my paintings. However, when I paint I move away from the photographs and try to capture the many moods of the city and its people on the canvas. This blog will frequently demonstrate this process.
Again I thank you for taking time to visit my blog and please come back often.
I'd also love to connect with you on Facebook @ www.facebook.com/JLorenReedy
September 15th, 2011
"A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT!"
I love the city at night paintings and especially city reflections in water. Chicago provides many opportunities to paint reflections of the city, from Lake Michigan and its many harbors, to the ponds and canals in Lincoln Park, to scenes along the Chicago River. In this city at night painting, entitled "A River Runs Through It", I was trying to capture all the magic and sparkle of Chicago at night along the River. I had an especially good time (and some problems as well!) creating the reflection in the river from the bridge above.
One of the main issues in painting reflections is to make the water look reflective as opposed to just a "mirror image" of the scene above. While in a photograph you'll often get a perfect mirror reflection, I feel that this rarely looks right in a painting. So I'll often have to work and rework a reflection in a painting so it really looks like it's water. I think it was really pretty successful in this one. Whether you're from Chicago or not, big city lovers everywhere will delight in the romance of city life captured in this large city at night painting.
CLICK HERE to order a print of this painting.
Let's connect on Facebook @ www.facebook.com/JLorenReedy
September 14th, 2011
As you know, I'm a Chicago artist. Let me introduce you to Mr. Daryle Lambert who I met at an art fair over a year ago. I was doing an art fair in a shopping mall (not something I recommend, but I'll leave that discussion for another post). Mr. Lambert visited my booth and we must have talked for close to an hour. A day or so later I was surprised and delighted to receive the following post which he put on his blog. I though you might find it interesting.
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I know today I was supposed to share some pearls of wisdom with you but that will have to stew for a day. The reason for changing my mind is because I met an exceptional artist and wanted to share him with you while my memory is fresh, you know how that is.
My love of art is growing everyday and when I think back just a few years I barely knew who Picasso was. But it was during those early days that I began appreciating Western Art as my family returned to a ranch in Wyoming over and over and I visited the art galleries around that area. To my surprise I encountered the work of Leonard Howard Reedy, a Chicago artist, and over the years I have bought and sold many of his paintings, mainly water colors. His best pieces are of Indians, Cowboys and Stage Coaches. However this isn’t the Reedy that I would like to discuss with you today. This artist name is J. Loren Reedy and he is also from Chicago.
Let me tell you how Mr. Reedy and I got to know one another. I had just completed having work done on one of our bathrooms and we needed accessories for it so off to the “Bed Bath and Beyond” we went. As we entered the parking lot of the mall, I noticed that there was an art fair going on and this gave me the excuse that I needed to not go shopping which is my least favorite thing to do. Pretending that I really had interest in the show, I asked Vickie if it would be okay for me to browse around. Her answer was “sure” but I could see in her eyes that she was saying to herself “He has done it again”, and she would have been right. I really had very little interest in the booths but it was better than shopping.
This is when things began to change because the first booth that I approached stopped me in my tracks. Usually I have very little interest in contemporary art, but when my eyes landed on several paintings by Mr. J. Loren Reedy, I knew that I had to talk with him. That didn’t take long because I thought that the gentleman with the badge must be him. My instincts were right and we immediately struck up a conversation like we had know each other for years.
One of his first questions was “What do you think?” Since I have complemented few contemporary artists and usually sidestep this question, I surprised myself by telling Mr. Reedy how much I liked his work. The colors and composition of several of his pieces really caught my eye. Even though there was an impressionist look to his canvasses, there was also a quality of realism.
I wasn’t as impressed with his figures as I was with his landscapes and still lifes because the landscapes and still lifes seemed to really flow, while some of his figures seemed to me as if they were painted while he was looking through some else’s eyes. That is what makes art so wonderful. Everyone has a different opinion but in my case I try to be truthful to my opinion.
I believe that in the future you will be hearing great things about J. Loren Reedy and if you have the chance to purchase his work now you may be well rewarded in the future. In fact Mr. Reedy’s work should be among your artists to watch and he would love to talk to you about selling his paintings.
I would encourage you to go to his website JLorenReedy.com and if you like what you see, give him a ring at 773-404-0584. I can promise you that some of my clients will have their walls adorned with select pieces of this gentleman’s art.
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Daryle Lambert is the founder of Daryle Lambert’s Antique and Collectibles Club, Inc. He has been around antiques, fine art and collectibles for most of his life. He made his fortune early in the Kentucky oil fields and later owned a very successful brokerage firm in Kentucky. He left the business world when he realized his passion for both antiques and helping people was not being fulfilled in an office.
September 3rd, 2011
"NIGHT BRIDGE"
This painting is part of my "City At Night Paintings" series. It represents the bright lights of Chicago's historic Michigan Avenue Bridge reflected in the Chicago River as one views the scene looking west towards the Trump Tower. It's an awesome sight!
As I've mentioned in other posts, I love painting the city at night! This particular painting has taken me a long time to get it to where I was satisfied with it. First it was too literal, almost photographic. Then I "messed it up" with the thought of making it more impressionistic. It was too much for what I want to paint.
The image you see here is a compromise between wild impressionism and expressionism. I'm pretty excited by what I've come up with here.There's the vibrancy and excitement of the city at night coupled with the reflection of the bridge and its lights in the river below – one of my favorite things to paint.
Reflections are always challenging for me because they can become "too perfect" (i.e. mirror like) which looks great in a photograph but not in a painting, or "too messy" so you're not certain what you're looking at. (That's fine for some artists, but it's really not my style!)
So after many "re-works" I've finally come up with something which I find exciting and I hope you do too. The painting is a 24 X 30 inch acrylic painting on a gallery-wrapped canvas. The vibrancy of its colors and the excitement of the scene provides a stunning conversation piece.
CLICK HERE to order this painting (or a print).
Let's connect on Facebook @ www.facebook.com/JLorenReedy
September 2nd, 2011
"DOWNTOWN FRIDAY NIGHT"
1. The end result of this process reinforced a concept I learned from an article by Indiana artist CW Mundy that "The power of suggestion is greater than a statement of reality"..
2. I learned that "loose is more". What this means is that fewer, more dramatic, and less precise brushstrokes create what is often called a "painterly effect". It's definitely not a photographic representation. It's very clearly a painting. I've discovered that I like this in a piece of art as do many other people.
3. From exhibiting this piece at various art fairs I discovered how much people are drawn to bright colors. Even if they don't buy a painting I'll get lots of comments about how people love my colors. In fact, I've even subtitled this blog ". . .painting for people who love color."
4. I learned that it's best not to analyze a painting too much, especially while I'm in the midst of painting itself. This doesn't mean don't think. It's just that "over thinking" can get in the way of the creative process.
5. This also taught me to trust my instincts, intuitions, and feelings, and to allow them to contribute their fair share to the process.
This painting was a real breakthrough for me as an artist. Previously I had painted in a "semi-realistic" or "representational" style with a twinge of impressionism thrown in. Here's the story about how this painting (which is anything but realistic or representational!) came to be.
I was working on a painting of a downtown Chicago night scene. The more I worked on it the more dissatisfied I was with the results I was getting. I basically gave up on what I was trying to do and just started playing around with my brush doing all kinds of wild things with color and brushstrokes and texture. I felt like a crazy man just slopping paint here and there. In reality, instinct was taking over over-thinking and the need to be realistic. Was the right brain beginning to dominate the left brain? YES! The end result is what you see here. People love it so much I won't sell it!
At first I must confess that I wasn't sure what had happened and not sure I liked it. But the more I lived with it the more excited I became. For years I've been trying to "loosen up" my painting and get away from the more realistic or representational style. I just couldn't do it. I'd get protective of my image and was afraid that I'd mess it up if started getting too loose. This painting has become one of those "turning points" or "watersheds" you often hear artists talking about in their careers.
There are several important things I learned from this experience:
Anyway, ever since this painting "happened" my style is notably different and I'm having the time of my life with this new direction!
Order a print of this painting at "Downtown Friday Night" Print
Let's connect on Facebook @ www.facebook.com/JLorenReedy
