These paintings were finished in April, 2017. All are done in acrylic, and they measure about 20X24, canvas.
Sometimes I like to divert to something really light and fun and what better character to do than Sponge Bob! Next, I had this face in mind for some time. I kept envisioning it connected to a German U-boat around 1939. Finally I had to put the face down on canvas and this is what I kept seeing…maybe somebody will recognize him, perhaps, your long lost relative? lol
The next painting below was a lot of fun and took several days. It followed the U-boat character by several weeks and it’s meant to depict an American WW2 submarine. I had to go searching on the internet for a sub picture because there was too much detail for me to paint from memory and i tried to stay faithful to accuracy.
At this point I have given up on getting a gallery to hang to my stuff. Unless you are a known artist they won’t talk to you. Not sure how you get known if you can’t get your displayed in a gallery? I’ve tried for 2 years to Upper Crust in Chico to hang my stuff, but every time I go back seems they never heard of me and the wait list is a mile long. Well, to heck with all of them, I’ve got the internet! So, that’s I’m happy to just put my stuff out here for everyone to enjoy. Who knows, maybe some day I can sell one to cover the costs of my paint and canvas? lol
And last, is another sea picture, deep sea, jelly fish!
Thanks for looking, and as always all comments are welcome.
I like #1 and #2
Sponge Bob adds diversity to you work.
The portrait is really good, Jack.
The submarine is well done…reminds me of my father-in-law who served on the Bonefish. The crew that was lost were his mates…he was ordered to take a prisoner ashore before its last fatal patrol as fate would have it.
My favorite is the jellyfish. You captured their luminescent quality and seeming weightlessness. Beautiful.
Well thank you Tina, I’m glad you liked the jellyfish, my daughter told me I should paint over them! lol Wow, that’s some story about your father in law. He had somebody upstairs looking out for him that day. I bet he had some amazing experiences as a submariner. Our sub crews operated at a disadvantage in the first year or so of the war. The head of the Navy Dept. rejected the concept of using subs to hunt in coordinated groups and preferred to assign one sub to one sector of the ocean. That’s far more dangerous and arguably it was less productive too. But, they were also hampered by faulty torpedoes that often failed to detonate on impact.
Another problem was the guidance system, that would occasionally flip the rudder full over causing the torpedo to do a 360, returning armed to sub that fired it. We lost several subs with all hands thanks to these homing torpedoes. But, back to the guy running the Navy in 1941, he also rejected Britain’s advice on using convoys. When we fired this dopey guy we started running convoys and cut losses by 60-70%. The torpedoes were quickly fixed too. Sadly neither the German’s nor the Japanese experienced the faulty torpedo designs we did. In fact the Japanese torpedo was extremely accurate and deadly.
“Developed in the late 1920s, the Long Lance, as Americans nicknamed it (the Japanese designation was the “Type 93″), was a remarkable device. In modern parlance, it would be an asymmetric weapon, designed to compensate for Japanese inferiority to more economically powerful Western nations. In some ways, it was the equivalent of hypersonic ship-killing missiles that China and Russia would use to counter the superior U.S. Navy.”
Learned the other day it was Hedi Lemar
The ‘Most Beautiful Girl in the World’ Was A Brilliant Inventor Who Changed Our Lives:
“Any girl can look glamorous, all she has to do is stand still and look stupid.”
So begins the new bio pic Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story.
Lamarr, the author of that damning opening quote, is the 1940s Hollywood movie star who was once branded “the most beautiful girl in the world.”
But Lamarr wasn’t just a pretty face at Metro Goldwyn Mayer studios: she also developed the groundbreaking idea that undergirds much of our 21st century communication systems.
From GPS and Wi-Fi technology to the billion dollar U.S. military satellites that are used to send secret messages to the President, Lamarr’s ‘frequency hopping’ technique makes our everyday movements possible.
“Our most cutting edge technology was invented by a movie star when she was at the peak of her career, starring against Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, with the help of Howard Hughes,” Bombshell director Alexandra Dean says.
Lamarr’s idea for ‘frequency hopping’ is essentially the mother of modern encryption. The idea, born during the era of World War II radio-controlled torpedoes, was a way Lamarr hoped the U.S. Navy might better evade Nazi radio jammers. By quickly changing the frequency of a radio transmission and ‘hopping’ around on different radio waves, communicators can create a unique pattern for their messages that only they are privy to. That way, if someone does try to intercept and jam that signal – they will only have access to the communication for a matter of seconds, before the message ‘hops’ frequencies again. Many were skeptical that Lamarr might’ve stolen the idea from her first husband, Friedrich Mandl, who manufactured munitions for Hitler – a claim that Lamarr denied until her death.
“I think it took a while for the world to catch up with Hedy Lamarr. I can say with confidence that she was 100 years ahead of her time” Dean says.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hilarybrueck/2017/04/30/the-most-beautiful-girl-in-the-world-was-a-brilliant-inventor-who-changed-our-lives/#373e480772ee
How Hedy Lamarr Invented Early Wireless Technology:
https://iq.intel.com/how-hedy-lamarr-invented-early-wireless-technology/
Great paintings Jack. You need to open a art gallery to show and sell them. The sub looks soooo real. The lighting is perfect. Thanks for sharing.
Oops posted before I completed my sentence, which should have said – Hedy Lemarr invented the remote control for the torpedoes and she did it based on the 88 keys on a piano.
Amazing brilliance and blunders.
Blunder: putting emphasis on our submarines hunting capital war ships instead of oil tankers. There is not a single oil well anywhere in Japan, which is part of the reason the whole thing started in the first place.
Brilliance: the proximity fuse for anti-aircraft shells. The Germans never could make them work. I believe it was a Brit who came up with the simple idea of using the shell casing as the receiving antennae for the returning radio waves. This ammo was considered so vital that none was allowed on the European continent for fear the Germans might recover a dud round and reverse engineer it.
Radar not only works to detect aircraft, it works on ships too. It also gives a return from shell splashes from large caliber guns like those on battleships, giving real time targeting info. This was especially devastating during a night engagement
More radar: some who are old enough may recognize the name of Chico resident (the late) Fred Rabo—
http://482nd.org/h2x-mickey
LOL, if it were me, I’d paint over Sponge Bob (smile)…to each his own.
Sorry to hear you haven’t had any luck with the local galleries. Not being able to sell poses several problems. The cost, of course. Also what to do with all those paintings…I think the masters painted over a lot of canvases, especially their early work. That’s not always easy…we do get attached. But, we’re also fortunate to have the ability to make a digital record. That’s something the masters couldn’t do.
I think having a digital record that people can access will eventually pay off. The Sponge Bob painting received several more positives on Facebook. Well if Campbell’s soup cans launch Andy Warhol, maybe Sponge Bob will get me noticed? lol
Jack,
Maybe that guy is someone you met when you were in the Merchant Marine???
Or…you ever see that WWII German sub movie from the early 1980’s? I think there’s a character in that movie that looks like that guy. Maybe the sub commander???
Have you sold your paintings? If you did you would prolly become rich and famous but then you’d have no time for us little people in the peanut gallery of your blog.
Just curious if you wear one of those painter berets when you paint??? Like the one this guy is wearing…
http://watermarked.cutcaster.com/cutcaster-photo-100876710-Senior-artist-with-beret-and-brushes.jpg
Mr. Jack,
If you have not sold a painting since you posted this you might want to consider the suggestions below.
If I were you I’d try galleries outside Chico, maybe even outside Northern California. I knew someone once who was able to get their paintings in galleries in Oregon.
You could also get a domain name (like JackLeeArt.com) and set up a Web site then try some Internet marketing techniques like SEO, etc. (But you prolly already know that with this blog and working with David Little.)
If you don’t want to do that you could just try selling your paintings on eBay, craigslist, etc. That would be the easiest and quickest to try.