Category Archives: Exhibits

Waiting for the Roof to Blow Off

Posted by Aline on

Hurricane Sandy is on her (his?) way and I need a new roof.  Fingers crossed.

But so far, the wind is not even moderately scary.  People have lost power though.  Peculiar.  I am sitting pretty with my permanent generator, installed last year after the surprise October snowstorm.  After I finish my blog, I get to clean my palette in readiness for the Tuesday life group tomorrow, instead of my usual Monday bridge game.  Bridge is cancelled because of the storm.  Many have advised me to cancel this meeting of the Tuesday life group, but I am waiting to see if it’s going to that bad in the morning.  I’m almost hoping it will be bad–I could use an unplanned for day off.  Almost.  Falling behind doesn’t help in the long run.

Since last week I didn’t post any of my new nudes or portraits, I have twice as much inventory this week.  The choices aren’t easy.  None are perfect, but each has something I am proud of.  So that will be my theme this week:  proud parts.  No, that doesn’t sound right.  Part of which I am Proud.

Sitting Tall

I struggled most with the arms, and finally got one down but ran out of time.  The part I like is the head.  There is a resemblance.  I think the hands could have been better articulated, but I got a good start on them.

Occupier

In this charcoal drawing, I like the different textures I tried out on the chair and the background.  Also, the big toe.  And the resemblence isn’t bad either.

Sitting Solid

The hands are my favorite part of this portrait.  His hands have always been excellent models for me.  I also like the face.

Finding Flight

For a change, I am not pleased with the face because it looks too old for this model.  But I like most of the rest of this painting–I like the quality of the paint, the values, the colors.  This little green chair is showing up more often–it’s a good choice for us because it has no arms to block one’s view of the model from the side.

Cheeky

This is my favorite of the two weeks.  I like to draw profiles.  Her face was so shadowed that after getting the profile itself in,  I had to imagine the rest.  I started it as a charcoal drawing on a dull orange paper, but added a few pastels (yellow, pink and rust) to bring this drawing closer to being a painting.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  for a few more days only at the Pantano Gallery in the Shapiro Library at Southern NH University and at the Derry Public Library; at the law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.  And coming soon:  at the Soo Rye Art Gallery in Rye NH; the opening reception is Saturday, November 10, 5-8.  Also, if you want to plan ahead, a 2-day show  of unframed works at Adrienne’s studio in Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial Ave., Manchester, NH; the artwork will be priced no higher than $150.

The Wall of Nudes

Posted by Aline on

I received a request, in response to last week’s blog, for a picture of my Wall of Nudes before I dismantled it all.  I agreed to comply, but before I could photograph it for posterity, I felt obliged to try for some semblance of order.  Not perfect order, as you will see, but a little bit more coherent than the crazy-quilt effect suffered by my bridge players.  I filled all the gaps at least, which produces a display of nudity even more overwhelming than the original.  You are fortunate not to have to experience this in the flesh.  (forgive me, pun intended)

I kept out of photo range all of my paintings by Others.  The effect is chaotic enough without introducing totally dissimilar artworks.  Plus, I would have felt obliged to identify all of them, which would make for a cumbersome blog entry.  However, having decided to devote this blog to the Wall of Nudes, I thought I might as well include other nooks and crannies of that room and an adjoining one, the Yellow Room.  We tend to name rooms by their predominant color, rather than by their purpose.  Purposes of rooms in my house tend to change over time.  The Wall of Nudes is in a room formerly known as the Pink Room, for its carpet.  The carpet is gone, but I still refer to it as the Pink Room.  Others call it the Striped Room (for the stripes painted on the wall).  As far as purpose, the Pink Room currently serves as Gallery, Entertainment Room (TV, etc), Pet Dwelling (one dog and a bunny).   I suppose it is, in modern parlance, a Family Room.  This family, however,  consists of me, the dog and the bunny.  (My granddaughter, who loves upstairs, has her own fancier TV and does not join us in the Pink Room for any purpose other than a meet up with the dog.  (Her dog.)

The Yellow Room is where I do stuff like stretch canvas, mount canvas onto panels, gesso panels, and frame paintings.  Framing oil paintings is a pretty simple affair, and if you stick to certain standard sizes, you can pop a painting in and out of a frame quick as a . . . well, bunny.  When I began this journey, I would search for and order a specific frame for a specific painting.  Somewhere along the line, the possibility of switching frames dawned upon me.  I began to stock up on standard sizes at sales, and fit them to paintings as needed for exhibits.   At one particularly prolific point of time, I managed to frame and display 81 paintings at one time, finding something appropriate for each one of them in my supply.  Nowadays, my paintings are predominantly 11×14, while I have more 10×12 frames than I can use.  Turns out 10×12 is not a standard size, but I didn’t know that when I ordered a supply of 10×12 panels from RayMar back in 2006.  So for a while there, I was glomming onto 10×12 frames wherever I could find them.  Then, of course, wiser, I stopped painting on 10×12 panels.  Ergo, excess 10×12 frames.  Which led to a wall of 10×12 frames right where I can lay my hands on them, if I ever need them.  Why didn’t someone explain the Facts of Frames to me in the beginning?

I explain all of this ahead of time  in part to whet your appetite, but mostly because I have little confidence that you would read it after the slide show.

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Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at the Pantano Gallery in the Shapiro Library at Southern NH University; at the Derry Public Library; at the law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

Weary of nudes?

Posted by Aline on

When Londonderry Arts Council decided to take the plunge and allow nude images to be exhibited at their annual “Art on the Common”, an outdoor art show to be visited by regular folk and their innocent, sheltered children, I threw caution to the winds and signed up.  In order to show my nudes, I had to mount and frame them.  Big effort, but more significantly, big expense.  After the one-day show, I had about 25 paintings of nudes, many of them in new frames purchased for the occasion.  What to do with all those riches?  Hang them up, of course.  I have one room in my house pretty much covered from ceiling to floor by artwork, most of it my artwork.  I took down all of my artwork, and replaced those pieces with my nudes.  When you walk into that room now, you are pretty much overwhelmed by the beauty of the naked body.  It’s a bit too much, even for me.  That room is where I host the weekly bridge game, and this week was the first time my bridge players had seen the room in its reborn splendor.  I allowed as how the display was too much, and was rewarded with this telling remark:  “I’d say you got that down — you don’t need to do any more.”

Need vs. want.  I am an addict.  I spend so much time in a week working on my little studies of nudes that I have not made a lot effort to get outside and paint landscapes, or put in some time on my large studio project.  Between my Saturday group, my Tuesday group, my Tuesday night class, my Friday morning workshop, and my Sunday group, I currently probably have more opportunities for life drawing and painting than practically anyone else has ever had since the beginning of modern times (by which I mean the 20th and 21st centuries).  The ability to admit this may be my first step back on the pathway to normalcy.  Or not.

I think I will take down most of the nudes gracing my walls, but I can’t stop myself when it comes to the drawing and painting part.

Sometimes I get distracted by the face.  The ability to paint or draw portraits is important to me.  I keep thinking that if I just keep trying, I will eventually learn how to capture the elusive likeness, and when that happens, only after that happens, I can start to apply some Art to the likeness.  And that thought has led me to another breakthrough insight into modern art, at least the kind of modern art which represents a depiction of something.  The depiction of something with paint or whatever other medium can range from photographic to practically abstract.  The purely photographic requires a great deal of skill and patience.  But it’s doable, given time, talent and determination.  The other end of the spectrum is largely inspirational.  The amazement it engenders in the beholder is something more rarefied than mere appreciation of skill.  That is not to say that both appreciations cannot be embodied in a single work of art.  Sargent, say.  Or my latest hero, Eric Aho, an abstract landscape artist.  Also, see  Antonio Lopez  Garcia , a realist of inspired genius.  Here is one of my favorite works by Garcia:

Sink and Mirror, by Antonio Lopez Garcia

An artist who creates amazing, inspired art is gifted with more than mere talent for drawing and painting.  He (or she) is gifted with genius.  I suppose it is my hope that somewhere hidden inside me is a spark of genius, if only I can find it.  And that’s why I can’t stop drawing and painting nudes.  It’s my pathway.  To destinations unknown.

So, speaking of which, here are SOME of the nudes of the past week, one of which is a portrait:

Figure in Charcoal

This young gentleman is a new, inexperienced model.  I hope we see him again.  In addition to the full figure above, I also drew a pretty accurate portrait, but forgot to photograph it.

Full figure in charcoal

I am starting to misremember when and where I painted what, but I’m pretty sure this charcoal drawing happened in the past week in Adrienne’s studio.  I just can’t figure out how I must have drawn this as well as the portrait below within the same three hours.  I would have skipped over this one but for the breast resting on the ottoman–does it perfectly evoke the soft tissue or could I have done it better?  Doubt is such a demon.

Becky portrait in charcoal

You all know Becky by now.  I thought this was an excellent likeness when I drew it, but now I think I have made her look just a little bit older than she is.

Relaxed

This is a colleague who models for us occasionally so as to defray his cost of participating as an artist.  Artists make the best models.

Long-stemmed rose

Our new long-limbed model.  Drove me crazy as I kept revisiting the question, is her leg (arm, foot, hand) really that long or have I exaggerated it?

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at the Pantano Gallery in the Shapiro Library at Southern NH University; at the Derry Public Library; at the law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

Roaa

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Pretty in Pink

Roaa is a young (14 or 15) Sudanese girl now living in Manchester.  She is a Muslim, I am told, but lucky for us, not opposed to being painted or photographed.  We have painted two other Sudanese women, but they were not Muslims.  So we felt very honored that Roaa was allowed to pose for us on the last two Sundays.  On the right is my piece as completed that first Sunday, in about two hours.  I had marked off a 9×12 section of canvas from a pad to use as my surface.   Subsequently, I took it to an informal critique, and made a few improvements.  Here is the new, improved version.

Roaa No. 1, finished

The changes were so subtle that they may get lost in the translation to digital photographs.

Covering 9×12 in two hours is a lot easier than covering 16×12, as I was remindedyesterday at our second Sunday with Roaa.  I decided to paint bigger, intending to go for more of a head portrait.  But when she got situated in the light with her hands again cupping each other, I could not resist another half-figure portrait.  Naturally, with the enlargement came complications, and I could not achieve the likeness that I had captured the week before.  I am going to have to find a way to stand (as opposed to sit, as I usually do) for the painting of larger portraits.  When I stand, I can more readily back away to get a better perspective.  Or I must at least remember to use my reducing glass.  The catch is, while I am working, I’m not thinking about whether I need to check my work.  During the process of painting, I may not be “thinking” at all.  So every now and then, I should stop painting and tell myself to think.  So annoying.

Roaa No. 2, in Peach

The wrap that she wore for this sitting was a peach, almost pink, but at the end I decided to lay over some cadmium yellow, from the tube I got from Michael Harding.  It’s so vivid, I love it.  Why do I still call it “peach”?  It’s the color of the insider of a real peach, isn’t it?  Anyway, this is an unfinished portrait, but I’m not going to develop it any further.  Roaa thought it looked more like her mother than herself, and that may be because I got the nose too long.  Again.

In a parallel theme, I am taking a course with Larry Christian at the NH Institute of Art.  It’s the same course that I took  back in 2006 when I first started on this art track, but today  I’m jumping in at an advanced level.  As luck would have it (good luck), nobody in the class is a beginner.  Larry encourages–no, demands— his students to loosen up.  I like to work fast, so it’s kind of liberating for me.  I dug out my compressed charcoal, ready for anything.  Saturday, at SLG, I tried to apply the new thinking, with three pretty different results.  Bet you can’t tell which one took 20 minutes, which took 40 minutes, and which took 50 minutes.

Getting the Angles Right

Out of the Fog and Mist

Blackest Black

But I know you can tell where I used the compressed charcoal!  It’s a bit like finger painting, and it took two days of scrubbing to get the stuff completely off my fingers.  Badge of honor.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at the Pantano Gallery in the Shapiro Library at Southern NH University; at the Derry Public Library; at the law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

The Wolfeboro Paintout

Posted by Aline on

I’m getting a little spacey, a little forgetful;  I forgot that I have this self-imposed obligation to post something beautiful and interesting to my blog every week on Monday.  My excuse is that I was just too busy yesterday picking apples.  Well, I mostly observed the actual apple-picking part, but the whole afternoon was a visit, with my apple-picking family, to old friends from law school, who own a house  in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, plunked in the middle of — you guessed it!–an apple orchard.  We started with a repast set outside in the orchard–so heavenly!  (Heavenly, thanks to the glorious weather we have been enjoying.  I entertain a horribly selfish thought: “If this is climate change, bring it on!”  Then I remind myself that with warmth comes insects, and invasive plants.)

Anyway, all that information is in aid of explaining why I forgot to photograph paintings for the blog today.  There is another, possibly truer, explanation:  I am a older person.  Older people tend toward absent-mindedness.  This is actually because they have lived a long time, long enough to figure out not to sweat the small stuff.  Not to imply that you are small stuff.  No, you are big stuff, but the self-imposed blog regime is small stuff.

However, I have a few shots taken on Saturday with my smart-ish phone.  They are not great photos.  I think my previous phone, which wasn’t at all smart, took much better photos.  But in phones, as in everything, you can’t have everything.  (My smart-ish phone is a Samsung Conquer and it came free with my new Credo cell service provider.  I am half-expecting Apple to swoop down and confiscate it after its big court win.  Then maybe Credo will offer me the new  iPhone.  I’m sure the photo quality would improve because I have complete faith in all things Apple, having forgiven Apple for dropping iWeb.

Now that I have got used to  WordPress, I would not want to return to iWeb for this blog.  With WordPress, I can start the blog at one location (home or office) and finish it at another.  That means I can write stuff now, and delay publishing until I get home tonight, take better photos, and post them then–still Monday, just later on Monday.  However, another regular Monday thing that I do is play bridge, in the evening.  I could work on the blog after bridge, before I go to bed, but, you know, older person?  So I’m thinking I had better give you what I have today, and catch up on the good photos next week.

Unfortunately, there will never be a good photo of one subject.  Saturday, with a few other painters in the New Hampshire Plein Air group, I participated in the Wolfeboro “Paint the Town” fundraising event.  My first painting was sold (YEA!), so I have only that camera phone shot to show for it.  Here is the scene I was painting:

Three Boats and a Wetsuit (photo)

It was the wetsuit that caught my eye, but it is such a small detail in the painting as a whole, that I felt I had to draw attention to it in the title to the painting.  Also, I worried that the dark splotch might not immediately read as “wetsuit” unless I provided a clue.

Three Boats and a Wetsuit (painting)

The wetsuit painting is, trust me on this,  much livelier that it appears to be in this poorly exposed, horribly framed photo.  I let the carrier go with the painting.  Sometimes I can retrieve the carrier from the buyer, which is to be desired since the carriers (“Art Cocoons”) cost each about $10.

For my second painting, I looked around for a spot overlooked, an interesting corner with good composition and contrasts of light and shade, where I could be myself in the shade.   I found one that excited a lot of comments and curiosity from passersby (why would I chose to turn my back on the docks, etc. to paint this dark corner–what could I possibly find interesting enough to paint in this dark corner?), but it was not purchased.  Good.  I see a few things that I can improve.  And I will be able to get a better photograph of it.

Wolfeboro painting no. 2 (Cate Park)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cate Park Painting–better photo!

 

P.S.  P.S.  P.S.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the Gallery at Red Gate Farm in Plymouth; at the Yoga Balance Studio in Manchester; at the Pantano Gallery in the Shapiro Library at Southern NH University; at the law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

Letting down

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Thank goodness, it’s all over. The one-day show on Saturday that I was furiously prepping for–it ended without disaster. Sure, two rods holding the tent up broke, but I had whimsically thrown in some duct tape at the last minute, which rescued that situation. And my little crew of two useless females and one strong clever one were assisted by the men on either side of us in getting that “EZ Up” up. E-Z, bah humbug! It is not anything I could have accomplished alone, that’s for sure. My granddaughter (the strong clever member of the crew) was there at beginning and end for the heavy lifting part, and my daughter kept me company during the day with her mini Pomeranian dog. The sun came in and out, a little breeze snaked in every now and then, and the rain didn’t start until we were packing up. Here is what my 10 ft by 10 ft space looked like.

Left corner

—

Right Corner

—

I was the only artist there whose entire exhibit (almost) featured paintings of nudes. (28 works framed, of which all but one were paintings; of the paintings, all but three were paintings of nudes) Apparently there was some controversy generated by the decision to show nudes. Two artists (artists!) boycotted the event in protest. But the organizer promised me, when it was all over and we were packing everything up, that they would continue to allow artistic nudes to be exhibited. It grieves me to report that there were at least three other artists present whose nudes were more award-worthy than the one I picked out as my award candidate. I wish I could show you what these winning works looked like, but the Londonderry Art on the Common PR machine has not got as far as issuing press releases or creating a blog.

On a cheerier note, I was a winner in another show. It opened in Plymouth at the Gallery at Red Gate Farm, last Friday. I couldn’t get there because I couldn’t find a ride (granddaughter needed the car more than I did), but I heard it was the best reception ever, and one of my two paintings was honored. Not sure for what, exactly–just a really nice painting. The theme of the show is “Reinventing the Farm. My painting was “Apples Ready to Pick”, and indeed, I painted them at Mack’s Apples, which allows people to come in and pick their own. I guess you could say that is one way of reinventing the farm.

Apples Ready to Pick

Lest you think I was too preoccupied by the above activities to paint, let me reassure you, by no means! I have two new nudes:

Standing Nude

I had to cheat a bit on the length of his legs in order to fit the feet in the picture. I deliberately left the feet kind of unfinished-looking, but notice how well they are planted. I really love this painting just the way it is, dribbles of diluted paint and all. Cameron, if you are reading this, I would love to hear from you whether you think I can “get away” with leaving this painting in this unfinished state.

It was not dry enough for me to mount it for the show, but I stuck it in a frame anyway and displayed it. You can probably pick it out in the photograph of the Right Corner; it is in the middle, on the ground but leaning against the wall. Many of my portly visitors, when they saw it, started considering a new career in modeling.

My second nude of the week is from a 3-hour workshop with Peter Clive, an instructor at the NH Institute of Art. I spent half the time watching him do a demo, and the other half trying to emulate (in small degree) his tighter approach, starting from highlights, then filling in dark accents, and last, working in the midtones. I think I usually start with the midtones. Everybody has their own “attack”, one that works best for them.

Seated Nude (M)

You’ve probably remarked on how restrained this painting is, compared to my usually more bravura approach. The skin tone is totally realistic. I do like it. Although the skin is quite light, the highly lit parts not look chalky. The highlights on my other nudes tend to bleach out. Must have something to do with values, with contrast. One of these days, I will get to the bottom of that.

One last thing of note–only because I have photographs. I will only subject you to one as I know you must be tiring. This is one section of an exhibit of plein air paintings from five or six members of the NH Plein Air group.

NH Plein Air exhibit at Pantano Gallery

One of mine is on the top left. Flo Parlangeli has two–top right and bottom left. Barbara Carr did the one on the bottom right. To see the entire exhibit, go to the Southern NH University in Hooksett, NH, find the library (Shapiro Library, if there are more than one) and then locate the Pantano Gallery within the Library.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the Gallery at Red Gate Farm in Plymouth; at the Yoga Balance Studio in Manchester; at the Pantano Gallery in the Shapiro Library at Southern NH University; at the law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

Prepping for A Show of Nudes

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You can’t wait until the last minute to prepare for a show. I started by ordering a modest number of new frames intended to accommodate my recent paintings of nudes on unstretched canvas, with the mixed results that I described in last week’s blog. This week, while waiting for the second order of frames to come in, I framed up what I could, and worked on those 12×16 canvases that needed paint to the edges. So far, I have nine “studies” from this spring and summer all framed and ready to pack, and five 20×16 more fully realized nudes framed and boxed. Three more 12×16 edge-painted studies and the five waiting on the new frames brings the total to 22. There is at least one portrait of a clothed model included in the collection, and I may bring along other recent figure or portrait paintings. I have to keep in mind that I may be doing this on my own.

Since of the nine studies I have framed there are two that you have not yet seen, I decided to photograph all nine in their frames. But first, the painting from yesterday, which cannot be framed yet:

Owning the Brown Leather Sofa


Now for the nine, in chronological order to the best of my memory:

Week One, Brown Leather Recliner Pose No. 1


This was one of my experiments with the palette knife, and the first of four paintings from the same pose. The second is waiting to be framed as a 12×16 after being painted to the edge. The third, a head portrait and another knife painting, may be left home. The fourth is one of the 20×16 framed and already boxed.

In the Artist’s Studio


This would have been my pride and joy, but I ruined it with a sloppy mount. Lesson learned. It will be on display but not for sale.

In the Artist’s Studio, No. 2


In this photograph you can judge the new frames that I ordered specially for my nude studies. They have a subtle scrolling that harks back to olden times, as befits paintings of nudes, ironically in our liberated age not often displayed. This painting is one of my resizing victims (from 11×16 down to 11×14).

In the Artist’s Studio, Green Drape


I wanted to crop this one, but could not sacrifice either the elbow or the foot, so I had to extend the green drape to the bottom edge. Note to future generations of art lovers: it would OK with me if you were to reframe this one with the bottom one inch cut off.

African Queen


This is the only one of the 22 that looks better in a black frame than in silver or gold.

New Angle on the Brown Leather Recliner

New Angle on the Brown Leather Recliner

Modern Odalisque


Another resizing victim.

untitled

In the Artist’s Studio, Green Hassock


Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the Gallery at Red Gate Farm in Plymouth; at the Yoga Balance Studio in Manchester; at the law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

And don’t forget: Saturday, June 8, Londonderry Art in the Common. (Rain date is June 9)

No Nudes Week

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I mislaid my Tuesday painting of a lovely male nude. That’s the primary reason for depriving you of any paintings or drawing of nude people this week. However, it creates the opportunity to publish the plein air paintings that I left behind in Portsmouth a few weeks ago.

Bridge to Pierce/Peirce Island


This first painting, “The Bridge to Pierce/Peirce Island,” I worked on for about three hours, and brought it pretty much to a point where I felt it was finished. Notice the American flags. They were present, of course, but I could have ignored them. As the result of spending so much time on the bridge painting, I did not have as much time as I needed to finish the second one.

NHAA’s Sheafe Warehouse


I had expected the Warehouse to make for a simpler painting, but I had difficulty with perspective and texture, which took time to work out and so I ran out of time. One day, when I am more experienced, I will know to ignore the deadline and just withhold an unfinished painting from the wet paint sale. I don’t plan to finish this painting. It goes on the discard pile, to be sanded and painted over.

I’ve been wondering why I tend to go in close to buildings instead of situating them in a landscape. I’m beginning to realize that it’s harder to paint a successful landscape painting with so little actual land. Buildings can be beautiful, but they need to be placed in context. In the next painting, I stepped back a little bit–but still I chose to lose the top of the barn.

Swallow Barn


I produced this painting in the course of collecting the above two Portsmouth paintings from my artist friend, Bruce Jones, who had kept them safe. This barn is across the street from his home in Exeter. [Exeter is the home of Don Stone. Bruce paints with Don Stone and has a lovely loose style that you sometimes see in a Don Stone painting. Who influenced whom?] I titled the painting “Swallow Barn” because Bruce’s wife Tracy told me about barn swallows who have made this barn their home. I wish I could have caught them in my painting but I guess they were snoozing. Instead, I put in the shovel, as my quirky substitute for life. Don’t you wonder what use that shovel was being put to, in the middle of August?

Report on exhibits: Two of my plein air paintings were accepted into an exhibit titled “Reinventing the Farm”, opening this Friday in Plymouth NH–the Gallery at Red Gate Farm, 188 Highland Street. The reception is Friday from 6 to 9. I never got around to mailing out the post card invitations to attend the reception. I feel really bad about that, and hope a few of my blog readers will make the effort although I know Plymouth seems a bit out of the way.

Another painting, not plein air but rather a combination of still life and photographic references, that I developed specifically for an exhibit titled “Add Women and Stir”, was rejected. To check out the rejectee, click here. Perhaps not edgy enough, perhaps just not good enough. I look for excuses but “just not good enough” seems most likely reason.

I round out this week of painting-from-life-but-not-nudes with my two paintings of our new Sudanese model, Yannette. These are from our Sunday life group. The first is the one I started last week. I “finished” it this week, which only means I came to a point where the painting seemed uniformly complete and I didn’t feel like taking it any further.

Yanette


Sorry about the glare. The painting is 20×16, which is a very large surface to light without incurring any shine anywhere. I’m going to be doing more paintings of that size now that I possess a 16×20 canvas pad, so I promise to figure out how to photograph paintings of size more competently. Surely there is something on the Web, if only I can find it.

I may have rushed the full length portrait of Yannette to conclusion because my secret desire was to paint a closeup portrait of her.

Yanette Profile

Finally, a fuller explanation of why I mislaid my lovely Tuesday nude. I have been readying my nudes for display at the Londonderry Art in the Park on September 8 (Saturday). As I mentioned in an earlier post, Londonderry is not only permitting the display of pre-approved nudes, it is encouraging it by making the theme of the show “Bare Essentials” and awarding a prize for the best nude in the show.

I probably have twenty or so nudes painted in oils, and hundreds of nude drawings that I could mat and frame. To keep effort and costs down, I have decided to concentrate on the oil paintings. I ordered six new, distinctive frames, which arrived Thursday, two days early. I selected my ten favorite nudes–almost all of them had been painted on 12×16 unmounted, unstretched canvas. I had to choose whether to crop to 11×14 or to add paint to the edges where my support had covered up the surface. This choice resulted in a lot of agony. Even the painting to the edge distorts the composition of the original painting. If only I could wave a wand and produce odd-sized panels to mount them on, and odd-sized frames to put them in. Then, picture this: I go to insert my cropped-down treasures in the new 11×14 frames and they won’t fit! Five of my hardboard supports had been cut slightly too large. Price being no object when it comes to presenting my paintings, I got on the phone today and ordered five more frames cut slightly larger than 11×14. Meanwhile, I had put aside my last nude because it was not quite dry enough for the mounting thing, and it disappeared in the midst of the chaos. I’m not worried. It will turn up, and it will be on display in my tent at the Londonderry Art in the Park on September 8. Be There!

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the Gallery at Red Gate Farm in Plymouth; at the Yoga Balance Studio in Manchester; at the law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

Deception

Posted by Aline on

Yesterday’s painting, part still life, part breathing life, represents a bit of a change of pace.  I requested a view of the model’s back because I wanted to concentrate on larger shapes, more subtle changes in value.  I didn’t really intend to get hung up on the decorative pillows and drapes, but I can’t help myself.  To my eye, those pillows now look exactly like the real thing, even though I suggested only their basic characteristics.  It doesn’t take much information from the eye to translate a form into something the brain recognizes.  That ability of the brain to glom onto something and make sense of it is what enables a certain colleague of mine to see elves and monkeys in just about any painting of shrubbery or clouds.  That ability might also be the thing that gets in the way of accuracy when you really need it, as when you are painting a portrait.  “That’s it, you got that!”  the brain exclaims, but it’s just not trustworthy.

The comparison  of my reclining nude to the Ingres “Odalisque” is inevitable–well, I like to think it’s inevitable.  Comparing my work to Ingres’ is a little bit of . . . is “hubris” the correct word?  What the hell, let’s do it anyway:

La Grande Odalisque by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Much has been made of the anatomical distortions in Ingres’ figure.  Ingres is one of the foremost figure artists of all time, so he didn’t make anatomical mistakes.  He exaggerated, on purpose, the length of her torso and right arm.   And it works, if  you don’t think about it too hard.

My model’s back was almost as smooth as Odalisque’s, but I took pains to include as much nuance as was available.  I’m now thinking some of it is overstated.  I have to keep reminding myself, it doesn’t take much of a change in value or color to get the point across, not with the brain of my viewer zeroing in on the point with great efficiency.

In my Tuesday Life Group, the pose was a carryover from the week before. (One of our artists needed two sessions to work on her painting.)  So I moved to a different part of the room, one I usually avoid.  As a result I suffered from glare from  the sunlit windows  combined with insufficient light on my canvas.  Add to that the fact that my new lens in my right eye does not focus as well as the old one, cloudy though the old one was.  With so many visual handicaps, you’d expect me to strike out on this one altogether.

African Queen

Apart from one yellow breast and one red one, there’s not much I want to change.  Is good vision overrated?  No.  I worked hard to compensate for the poor conditions:  I wore a hat with a brim that I could pull down to shield my eyes from the glare from the windows, and I would bring the painting in close to my eye when I needed to be able to see what I was doing (putting the lights in her eyes, for example. or the highlights on the earrings).  [Footnote: My left is the distance eye, which I use to see the model, whereas the right eye, is the near eye, which I use to see what I am painting.  It was the right eye that got a new lens.]

Seeing what you are doing in fine detail is not important most of the time, unless you are a classical artist.  (Like Ingres).  By the way, this is a pretty good likeness, my untrustworthy brain thinks.  And how about those earrings!  I so loved painting the earrings, which required a bit of skill, and the headband, which required no skill at all.   I love being able to put a stroke of paint on a spot and having it pop right in place and speak its nature.  Obedient.

I want to record herewith an “improvement” made to another painting.  I was bothered by the highlights on her eyelids, and when a friend confessed that the highlights bothered her too, I fixed them.  Here is the before and after.

On the brown leather sofa (BEFORE)

AFTER

Less is more when it comes to values.  I tend to overdo the highlights, because that’s what I see–the highlight on dark skin is almost blindingly white, like light bouncing off a glass.  In a painting, however, such bright highlights look strange.  Or, perhaps, this exemplifies another deception, eye-brain-wise:  those highlights were never as bright as I think I see them, they just looked bright by contrast with the surrounding color.  And it illustrates another truth–sometimes you need to separate the painting from the live subject of a painting in order to see and correct the values.

So to sum up this week’s theme:  Beware of  deceiving yourself, but take advantage of your viewers’ willingness to see what you want them to see.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the Epsom Public Library in Epsom; at the Bedford Public Library, in Bedford; at the law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

Jewel Tones

Posted by Aline on

Reclining Nude, Green Drape

I didn’t have to think too long before coming up with this week’s caption, “Jewel Tones”.  Any buyer of women’s clothing knows what “jewel tones” means.  It means, for the rest of you, saturated color.  At least, it means that to me.  I didn’t look it up.  It’s one of those intuitive things, primarily enjoyed by women, which as it turns out is singularly appropriate this week.  You’ll see.

My first example has the turquoise green, with which I drew my image so as to force some green into the skin tones.  My second image depicts some actual jewels.  And my third goes all the way out there in jewel-tone-land, and I love it best.

Girl on Green Drape is another study in my quest to find the colors of black (so-called) skin.  My favorite part of this painting is her head, with perhaps the jewelry in close second place.  One of my mates (in the Brit sense of chum) declared the cheek color “authentic” and the earring and necklace “unbelievable”, by which I think he meant, totally believable.  I have been doing a pretty good job with heads lately, even as I focus all my discussion on skin tones.  I have figured out that, when it comes to heads, less is more.  The secret is placement.  All you have to do is get a stroke of the right paint in the right place and voila, it looks like something!  Leave it for a bit, then go back and analyze what will make it better, and apply that stroke.  And so on.  Until you can’t think of any way to make it better.  So now everyone can go out and do it!

I finished the painting that I dreamed up for another WCA themed exhibit.  I really racked the old bean for this one.  Googled the theme, for starters.  “Add Women and Stir.”  It means, I gather, that getting women involved in politics and business and such will lead to world peace and a healthy environment.  Good idea.  However, you must have noticed that I am not disposed to paint ideas.  Conceptual art, and what I call message art, just does not appeal to me.  But I am a member of the WCA (Women’s Caucus for Art), actually on the Board of Directors, and I also like to participate in exhibits.  It’s a stretch for me, so it’s a good thing.  All stretching is good.

This will be the third concept piece I have done for the sake of a WCA exhibit.  (For most other exhibits, I have been able to shoehorn existing paintings into the themes.)  I painted the nude brown fairy in the Iris for “Flowers, Interpreted”  (see it here) in order to sneak a nude into an exhibit–hard to do around here.  I did “Starry, Starry Night” for “On Target” (which by the way was selected for a newspaper article on the show).

So here’s my entry into “Add Women and Stir”:

Grandma’s Jewels

Do you get it?  Old woman sighing over the hope represented by the button for the Equal Rights Amendment, which never did garner the requisite number of states to ratify it and make it part of the U.S. Constitution.   She is going through her jewelry box (costume jewelry–but still in line with today’s jewelry theme),  selecting pieces to give to her grandchild (probably a girl, but maybe not), and comes across that old ERA button.

Last month I was despairing over this piece, and thought I might have to start over.  Revisit my wailing here, where I argue that regardless of outcome, no painting is a waste of time.  But instead I painted out the parts I didn’t like and found some photographic references online to guide me in the repainting of those parts.  Does the old woman look like Queen Elizabeth to you?   I devoutly hope not.

The “Add Women and Stir” exhibit is going to be juried by Sarah Chafee of the McGowan Gallery in Concord, even though the exhibit itself is headed to the Newport Public Library.   (Usually somebody affiliated with the exhibit site juries the entries.)  Notwithstanding all the agony of producing this painting for this exhibit, it might not be accepted.   Will I feel stupid?   A little, but it’s a risk I took on willingly, for the sake of a project that stretched me.  As I said before, nothing is a waste of time.

My final jewel today is from yesterday, still so wet that the camera caught glints of light all over the place.   I started removing them one by one with my iPhoto blemish removal tool, but it was too tedious.  You will be able to respond to the jewel tones anyway.

The Color Purple (Standing Nude against Purple Background)

With this painting I felt for the first time as if I had got beyond the fretting over black skin tones and had just painted.   I stopped being literal.  It’s probably a truism, but you start this artistic journey by being literal, by trying to replicate exactly what you see.  Somewhere along the way,  you let reality go and paint what you feel, smell, taste as well.  Maybe even hearing comes into it, since we play music during our sessions with the model.  Amy Winehouse yesterday– I’m catching up with the current music scene, thanks to my fellow artists.  Followed by Eric Satie.  I couldn’t say which one wrought the bigger influence on this painting.  It must be the combination:  Winehouse-Satie.  Not quite as impressive as a Joplin-Satie combo would have been, but right up there.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the Epsom Public Library in Epsom; at the Bedford Public Library, in Bedford; at the law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

Painting Luscious, or Painting with your Tastebuds

Posted by Aline on

There’s nothing like oil paint to please the senses.  My senses, at least.  Not that one wants to smear it all over one’s body, although that sometimes happens when one least expects it, but it just looks sensuous.  I concede that a good pastel painting can look as if it had been created by oil paints .  After all, the same pigments form the bases of oils, pastels, and watercolors.  But for sheer yummy lusciousness, however, there’s nothing like oils.   I love the look of wet oil paint in particular.  The glossiness of it.  You never get that with pastels or watercolor.  Or, dare I say, with acrylic?

To keep that glossy look of wet paint, I have been using a medium that includes Liquin.  It works so well that recently when I took a painting in to be scanned for reproductions, there was a concern that the shine would interfere with the scan.  It didn’t, thank goodness.

I bring this up today because the painting I was working on Sunday sings to me like a ripe peach.  I don’t know how else to describe it.

Study in Reds (Nude seated on pillows)

Although it might not come through on the computer screen, every area of this painting is permeated with red.  I was in a red mood, I guess.

I might have been teetering on the edge of another breakthrough (yes, yet another breakthrough):  this one, out of realism and into something different–a realm where seeing is only one of the engaged senses.  Feeling, smelling, hearing, even tasting seem to figure in the experience.   Notice  the words I chose above–singing peaches, luscious paint.  “Peaches” evokes tasting and smelling.  “Singing” evokes hearing and feeling. Touching– through the brush–that IS painting.   I think maybe, just maybe, this ability of a work of art to evoke more than a visual response is what makes art  important to our civilization.

Lest you think I am going all weird and mystical on you, let me reassure you that I have not gone off the deep end or found religion.  But I like my new hypothesis:  only when you are able to let go of the visual rules for creating art (I mean, not break the rules, but LET GO) and allow your  nonvisual senses to manifest themselves in a painting, only then are you making good art.  Let me be clear–it’s not about breaking any rules; you may, or you may not.  However many rules may underpin a great work of art, they don’t control a great work of art.  Think Van Gogh.

Now that I’ve got some rules down pat, I will try to let them slide in favor of putting my other senses in charge.  I will at least be thinking about doing that.

My last two Tuesday paintings are more down to earth:

The Last of the Hot Pink Drape (Nude Woman Lying on pink-draped stand)

The title means:  no way am I allowing that drape in a future session!  You’d think that I’d like hot pink, given my fondness for reds.   But  this shade of hot pink was too intimidating, too overpowering.  I couldn’t see color anywhere else.  This painting could have been pretty good if I had only solved the problem of color and background.  The lines of the figure should be the story here, not all that distracting pink and bilious background.  Might be worth fixing.  In my studio where no hot pink is allowed.

Fletch, Thinking? (Nude Man seated on blue-draped block)

I could have called this a “Study in Complementary Colors.”  (blue and orange)  Reading or sharing my distress over the hot pink drape of the week before, Fletch, who most of the time is one of us artists, arrived with his own blue drape.  He’s also good at moving the model stand and getting the overhead fans to work.  Full service model!  For most of the session, his left foot was not visible–it  had sunk deep into the three pillows that he was resting it on.   It didn’t look right, having his leg end at the ankle, so at the end we substituted a trash can for the pillows just so that I could get a view of the leg terminating in a proper foot.  (One of the pillows got obliterated as well–who needs that detail when you have a lovely foot to admire?)

Mark the date:  September 8.  On this day the Town of Londonderry NH is doing a very courageous thing:  it is allowing depictions of the nude figure in its annual Art on the Common show.  The special theme of the show is “Bare Essentials”.  Every nude must be juried into the show in order to screen out anything deemed too . . . pornographic?  I am so hoping that some of my nudes will be acceptable to the censors.  But whatever, even if my nudes don’t make it, this is monumental! — this welcoming of nudes in a venue to be frequented by innocent young children whose eyes have never beheld such a thing before, presumably.  PLEASE support Londonderry’s Art in the Common 2012 with your enthusiastic attendance.
Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Epsom Public Library in Epsom; at the Bedford Public Library, in Bedford; and at her studio by appointment.

Not a Waste of Time

Posted by Aline on

I got so immersed in what I was doing last weekend that I totally forgot about documenting something for my blog.  That’s a good thing, right?  I was watching TV (of course) last night, on BBC America, a new show called “2012”.  The characters are responsible for putting on the London Olympics.  One of them was keeping a video blog, following her progress in getting in shape to run the marathon at the Olympics.   Her blog and the training was intended to demonstrate support and enthusiasm, etc. for the Olympics, but she inadvertently divulged some inside information, which promised to land her in hot water, so she ordered the whole blog removed from the web.  (Hope you were able to follow all those clauses–we sometimes can’t resist a good long compound sentence!)  Then she explained her action to the omnipresent interviewer something like this (I didn’t take notes so please just take this as the message my brain received, not necessarily the message that was directed to my brain):  “Well I was only keeping the blog up to talk about my training for the marathon, and I was only training for the marathon to have something to put in the blog.”  Loved that.  The rest of the show is pretty good, too.  I so admire the way the Brits serve up humor–gently.  But to get back to the point–I am glad that I am not (yet) painting merely in order to have something for the blog.

Such a build up.  Now for the letdown.  My big project of the weekend is not fit for public eyes.  It may never be publishable, but I don’t feel my time was wasted.  I am working toward a concept piece in order to qualify for another WCA show, this one called “Add Women and Stir”.  I searched among all my available artworks for something to shoehorn into that theme–that is how I usually match painting to show–but nothing even remotely qualified.  So I researched the phrase ( meaning, I “googled” it), free-associated words, tried out some ideas, and finally came up with a concept that I like.  It’s the kind of concept that, if it does not make it into this show, will just sit around gathering dust for the next hundred years.  Actually, that will happen even if it does make it into the show.  But nevertheless, I firmly believe it is NOT A WASTE OF TIME.

Why not?  Because it forces me to stretch, probably beyond my ability; because it exercises my imagination; and because it gives me a goal to work toward in this summer where for one reason or another I am not painting much outside.  So what if the result of all this imagining and stretching is amateurish!  Let’s regard it as a preparatory study.  Some parts of it are OK–the parts where I had something real to look at:

Jewelry Box

My old satin and velvet jewelry box, which I have owned since I was a teenager, looks an awful lot like that.

ERA YES

The parts that I had to conceive of in my imagination?  Not so good.  Even with all my practicing with TV heads, I cannot paint a believable head out of pure imagination.  Today, therefore, I  searched the web for models to inform my ultimate vision.  I have latched onto an image of Queen Elizabeth that I look forward to trying out.  Already, though, I have learned a lot by doing what I only knew in theory before.  I now understand why somebody as accomplished as John Singer Sargent was making sketches of the murals in the Boston Public Library, trying out different positions of the figures, different gestures of the fingers on the reins, before he attempted to paint on the walls.  So should I feel like an idiot for failing to produce a masterpiece at this point in my endeavor?  No, but I should feel like an idiot for thinking I could just pop out a decent representation of my concept in one weekend’s time.

Meanwhile, I have been saving up some nudes to share with you.  Now seems like a good time to do that.

Study in Brown, Mustard Yellow and Lime Green (Seated Nude Woman)

“Study in Brown, etc.” goes back to before our Tuesday sessions got to be so popular that we could not afford to hide the back of the model in either this arm chair or the brown leather recliner that I got so good at painting.

Palm Study (Nude seated on pink draped block)

Feeling a little desperate for something different in a pose, we came up with “Palm Study”.  This model’s posture is always so perfect that just to get her to look down was something.

Last is the best since “In the Artist’s Studio”:

Back in the Artist’s Studio (Nude Leaning on block)

Same model, same studio, same pillow–different pose, different background.  Hence the title.  I hope you enjoy it!

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Epsom Public Library in Epsom; at the Bedford Public Library, in Bedford; and at her studio by appointment.

What I Learned This Week

Posted by Aline on

Don’t bite off more than you can chew.  That was Lesson No. 1 this week.  To rephrase in artist’s terms, don’t try to paint/draw larger than you can take in at a glance, unless you are able to move away from the easel frequently to judge what you are doing.  Another way of  not biting off more than you can chew  is to “sight-size” your drawing.  I learned this at least once before, I’m sure, but perhaps it just doesn’t sink in until all the other obstacles to good drawing have fallen away.  I prefer to think of my recidivism that way, so that it appears I am making progress, not just the same mistakes time after time.   I will explain, elaborate, and, to quote the Car Guys, obfuscate:

At Tuesday life group, we are starting to attract more artists that I originally would have thought we could fit into our studio.  Last Tuesday, I decided to forgo the paint and try to complete a charcoal portrait of our model.  I got up real close to the model.  That is supposed to be a good idea for doing portraits.  I work sitting down because my legs and back start to hurt if I stand for very long.  Because I was low and close to the model, I had artists working on either side of me and behind me.  I was pretty much trapped in place.

From my perspective, the portrait was looking pretty good.  It was larger than what I could see, so not “sight size”.  “Sight-size” means drawing the image exactly the same size as the image being read by your brain.  You can hold your drawing up next to the model to check how your are doing.  If you are not doing “sight-size”, the smaller your drawing, compared to what you see, the easier it is to judge the accuracy of your drawing.  Think of it as a built in “back up”.  Obviously for someone like me, who has to sit close to her drawing most of the time, drawing sight-size or smaller is the way to go.   Going big is tricky–the more you enlarge on the image that is hitting your brain, the more scope for error.  Proportions become especially hard to judge.

Portrait in Charcoal

Only when I got my Tuesday portrait home did I realize how far off the mark I was.  You may not be able to judge how disappointing this was as a portrait, because you don’t know the model.  This is not the first portrait I have done of her, however, and all of the others were more faithful to her likeness, so if you have been following along for a while now, you know this model too.  Examples here.  The hair looks good though.

Lesson No. 2.  Maybe not so much a lesson as an insight:  I’m getting hooked on paint.  I usually love working in vine charcoal, but Tuesday, as I smeared my charcoal around,  I wanted to mix color, not shades of gray.  It didn’t help either that I was drawing on relatively slick Bristol board instead of my usual Strathmore Charcoal paper, which has a texture that is characterized as “laid”.

Lesson/Insight No. 3.  Laid paper is laid (textured weave) for a reason.  Exactly what it is that makes “laid” so appealing is hard to articulate.  I should probably look it up to see what other artists have said but I really want to try to come up with something intelligible myself.  The weave definitely contributes  to the look and feel of the drawing . . .  the charcoal settles into the nooks and crannies–or not, depending on how much smearing the artist does. Does this satisfy some kind of primal artist hunger for the unexpected result?   When the unexpected happens and not in a good way, fixing  is easy.  When unexpected happens but in a happy way, artist takes credit.  Note to self:  do not use vine charcoal on Bristol board again.  I used charcoal pencil on Bristol board once, to good effect with a no-smear technique (getting it right from the first mark).  See here.

Lesson No. 4.  Worrying about why your painting does not sell in the wet paint sale after a paintout is a waste of time and psychic energy.  You can’t change  what you do, so don’t try to analyze why two terrific paintings got left on the table.  Hmmm.  The table.  Maybe it would have made a difference if the paintings were upright, as on an easel!  Darn, I forgot to bring the pieces of cardboard that would make an easel out of my Art Cocoons.  What a dummy I am!  Here are the paintings:

South Corner, Forbes House

View of Boston from the Forbes House Driveway

The location of our paintout was the Forbes House and Museum in Milton, Massachusetts.  My first painting took some liberty with the color of the Greek Revival house, in that I added orange to the tan because there was a pinkish cast bouncing off the house when the sunlight hit it.  The pink glow under the soffit was really there, so the house had to have pink in it, right?  (In the interest of full disclosure–I am going in for cataract surgery next week, and I’ve heard that colors will look different after I get my new eyes.)

The second painting is the view across the road from the Forbes House.  I liked how the two fruit trees framed the distant city skyline.  I finished this painting so fast, that I filled my remaining time until the wet paint sale by cleaning my palette.  It was good to have a clean palette.  It was good to have two plein air paintings that I am happy with.  So it was a good day even if my offerings were shunned.

UPDATE:  The Women’s Caucus for Art has two exhibits going on:  “Flowers, Interpreted” at the Epsom Public Library; and “On Target,” at the Bedford Public Library (going up at the end of this month).  In earlier blogs, I discussed each of my contributions:  Starry, Starry Night for On Target, and for Flower, the brown fairy called  Iris, Interpreted.  Even if you don’t remember those discussions, you might enjoy these exhibits.  Many different media will be represented, with special emphasis on photography in the Flowers exhibit.  Given the parameters of  “On Target,” I’m expecting some crazy stuff.  Certainly my contribution is nothing like anything else I have ever done.  Also at the Bedford library is my “Enchanted” painting on view for the summer, per “Artist of the Month” vote by the Manchester Artists Association.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Epsom Public Library in Epsom; at the Bedford Public Library, in Bedford; and at her studio by appointment.

Imagination

Posted by Aline on

Last Thursday I attended the opening reception for an exhibit of the landscapes of Eric Aho at the Currier Museum.  Really interesting abstracted landscapes.  Eric and the curators presented a slide show during the reception that was SRO.  I was lucky enough to get a choice seat next to Mary McGowan.  Mary founded the McGowan Gallery in Concord, and proudly reported (sounds better than “bragged”, doesn’t it?) that she had exhibited some of Eric’s paintings back in the day.  (Mary has recently retired from the Gallery, passing on the job of discovering new talent in the New England region to Sarah Chafee.)    We, Mary and I, being of similar age, conferred over the idea of taking up painting at an advanced age.  A sensitive subject for me.

Mary said she had always liked to paint, but would not take it up in retirement.  Her eye was too good.   “My eye is better than my hand.”  She meant she would be so hypercritical of her own work that she would not be able to enjoy the results.

That got me thinking.  Do mediocre painters paint mediocre pictures because they don’t see what’s mediocre about them?  Is the reason I am not churning out masterpiece after masterpiece that my eye is deficient?  No, I think I know what’s good and what’s bad.

So is the problem technical–a lack of skill–the hand, as Mary would put it?  Skill is not something that comes and goes.  It grows, or it declines, and yes, you can have a bad day, but once you learn how to apply  paint to a surface, to achieve a certain effect, you have the “hand”.

The critical element is something I used to call “inspiration”, but earlier that day I had watched a lecture online, broadcast from the Cornell University alumni reunion that was I skipping, on the subject of imagination–the importance of imagination to the advancement of the human race.  Who first realized the value of fire?  Who first thought of using a wheel to move heavy objects?  The realization of fire, the concept of a wheel, each required the thinker to form an image in his mind of the usefulness of such a thing–to imagine something not yet in existence.

Between that lecture and Mary’s casual remark, I came to the conclusion that what makes a great painter is imagination.  Mary’s eye knows a good painting when she sees one.  Her hand could be taught how to achieve what the eye wants to see.  But in order to know what the eye wants to see, imagination is required.

Let’s take Eric Aho, for example.  Landscapes are the most familiar of painting subjects, and the most popular.  A well done landscape takes a fair amount of skill.  Not the greatest amount of skill, but a landscape done by a skilled artist is going to be much better than one done by an unskilled artist.  But this required imagination:

(This reproduction of his webpage constitutes “fair use” under the copyright law.  I hope.)  Art in the 20th and 21st centuries has become all about the idea underlying the work.  Skill is assumed, or even discounted.  Think  Jackson Pollock.  He was not particularly skilled at the painterly underpinnings such as drawing.  But he was fiercely determined to be an artist, and he had imagination.

All this deep thought made me realize that what I have been doing, mostly, in my making of paintings is developing skills.  Every once in a while, an idea trinkles into my head and produces something special, like last week’s “In an Artist’s Studio.”  Repeated here for your convenience and also because I just love to show it off:

In an Artist’s Studio (Nude Woman Reclining)

Acquiring skills is important.  If, last week in the artist’s studio, I had been struggling harder to get the proportions correct and the skin tones plausible, my mind would not have had the luxury of considering the composition, which made all the difference between an exercise and a showable painting.

My regression from that pinnacle continued downhill this week.  I won’t even show you the entire painting.  It will be consigned to the “dust bin,” an antiquated term which seems  more fitting somehow than the trash can.  It contained a few OK parts, which I have cut out for you here.

Head of Nude Woman

Hands of Nude Woman

That was Tuesday.  Sunday I decided to paint a portrait in my three hours with the model–another “exercise”, I guess.

Head of Nude Man

It looks better in person.

Remember my “Iris Interpreted”?  Little brown fairy (Grace again) ensconced in a giant iris.  From  June 16 to  July 21, it will be exhibited as part of the Women’s Caucus for Art “Flowers Interpreted” annual show.  The site of the exhibit is the Epsom Public Library.  There will be an artists’ reception on Friday, June 22, 5 pm to 7 pm.  Come if you can.

A continuing exhibit without reception features seven of my landscapes in the Bedford public library, on the bottom floor, through the month of June. After June 30, one of my paintings, a rather long and tall one called “Enchanted,” will remain hanging there for the summer because it won that privilege by a vote at the annual meeting of the Manchester Artists Association.  Look for the tiny frog near the bottom.  It’s hanging near the children’s book section, so I’m hoping the children pause long enough to delight in the frog.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Library Arts Center in Newport; Bedford Public Library, in Bedford; Epsom Public Library in Epsom; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

Speaking figuratively . . .

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is a lot easier than drawing figuratively.  And painting figuratively, especially without the coverup advantage that clothing provides, is hardest of all.  I admit that I am torturing that adverb “figuratively” –pretending that it can be substituted for the phrase “about the figure” in one sense and for the phrase “of the figure” in the other two examples.  I don’t make a lot of use of puns,so I figure (there’s that word again0–definitely no pun intended), I’m entitled to a little wordplay.  In face, half the fun of blogging is finding ways to make plays on works.

But figurativity is relevant.  This week, the subject is figures.  Beautiful figures in reality.  And paintings and drawings  that aspire to be beautiful in their own right.

My experimental palette knife work carried over into this palette-knifed figure study:

Girl in Brown Recliner

This painting is the output from one of our Sunday morning sessions.  Don’t you love the chair?  I do, but have to admit it looks better in person (in the painting itself).  I will get another crack at this model and pose, but instead of trying to correct errors in this one, I will start over with a new painting or drawing.  Paint that has been ladled onto the canvas with a palette knife just is not conducive to being overpainted.  Case in point: last week’s portrait, which I declared cooked after that session ended.  I would never try to add another layer of paint to that.  My first palette knifed portrait was not as heavily impasto’d, so I was able to rework  most areas.  (Both of those portraits can be seen in last week’s blog.)

Here’s another palette knifed portrait, but it’s also a little riské, so it fits in my theme for this week:

How Demure is She?

“Demure” is another one of my contest entries on Fine Art America, wherein I am given a photo of which to make a painting.  Because of the restrictions placed upon my use of the photo, I can’t reproduce it for you.  You will just have to trust me when I say that you would recognize this woman as the same one in the photograph, despite the radical colors and rough knife strokes I have adopted.  Or you can go online to Fine Art America and check out the current contest for “painting from photographs”.

I am kind of pleased with the ways I am finding to depart from the literalness of the subject matter without sacrificing the rigor of getting the essential elements right.

Not that I always get them right.  Au contraire.  Last Saturday I came away from our Saturday life drawing sessions with a couple of drawings that I felt good about.  This one, however, no longer looks good to me:

Reclining Woman

Through the fresh eye of the camera, I can now see that her head is way too big for her body.  I think of some deKoonings, Picassos etc. and ponder, so what?  They drew people with diminished bodies, and no one claims that they didn’t know how to draw.  Hmm.  Well, let’s move on:

Crouching

The arms on this figure got crumpled up somehow, but I still like the overall look of the thing.  It’s so . . . Degas.  Mind you, I am not all that admiring of Degas’ drawings, so this is not necessarily a self pat on my back.

Faring a lot better is this multi-colored drawing, which some of my fellow artists begged me not to touch after the first model break (20 minutes into the pose).  I continued working on it anyway, but not in any significant way.  I worked on the drape, clarified some values, things like that:

Seated Woman in Color

With an extra five minutes left for the pose, I sketched this head of the model:

Five-Minute Head

As you might have deduced, had you thought about it, our Saturday models come top-lit.  The light streams down from an overhead skylight, at least when the sun is shining.

OK, here are some guy drawings that I saved up from last month:

Seated Man

Contemplative

The composition of this one is interesting, and if his hand is a little too big, that’s better than being too small.  Our guy models use those poles a lot–not only do they give the model something to handle but they also give the model a place to rest his/her hand/arm, so as to provide more variety in the pose.  I also use the pole as a check of my  placement of limbs; if the angle of the pole is correct, the body parts have to come together with the pole in the correct way or I have got something wrong.  (Same model, same pole were featured in my mid-January blog titled “Why is this Man Digging a Hole in the Nude?”  Still a good question but now you know the answer.)

I suspect that I have written way too much tonight, but can’t trust my judgment.  It is  late, and I am  tired.  My usually upbeat Monday was discombobulated by the discovery that we had been burglarized; my desk, in particular, had been “tossed”.  My losses were not catastrophic, but still, it put me off my stride.   And Monday being Bridge Night, contains no slack.  (The cards were kind to me, which certainly helped put me in a better frame of mind.)

One last item of interest:

POP UP!

A pop up art exhibit will appear at the White Birch Brewing Company in  Hooksett NH Friday (5 to 7 p.m.) and Saturday (noon to 5 p.m.) this week.  April 13-14.  Food for the Friday night reception will be provided by cooking students from nearby Southern NH University.  Don’t sit this Friday the Thirteenth out, huddled in  your closet.  I believe a tour of the brewery with beer tastings can also be expected.  Whoo’ee!

Oh, yes,  I am participating.   I haven’t picked all the pieces that I will be exhibiting (and selling) yet, so if you have one you’d like to see there, let me know.  The theme is “New Hampshire Proud” but only one piece is required to represent that theme.  If you Google the theme, you will find elegantly composed publicity for this event. Support your local artist and your local brewery at the same time as enjoying food from your local  univeraity.  Doesn’t get much better, right?

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; and at her studio by appointment.  AND, for two days only, April 13-14, at the White Birch Brewery in Hooksett, NH.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

Out of the Comfort Zone

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People are always urging artists to get out of their comfort zone.  What exactly is wrong with a comfort zone, anyway?  I wish I knew — I wish there was something  that I could nail every time out.   But there are certainly ways of making art that I am more comfortable with than others, and I’m not talking about the difference between painting in my studio or getting outside in zero degree weather.  I am most comfortable painting and drawing in a representational way, in a traditional way, in oils, on a stretched canvas, panel, or in the case of the drawings, a pad of paper.

This week I have decided to go public with three new things that are out of my comfort zone.  Two of the three are combined:  (1) Painting on glass.  (2) Painting with acrylic paint instead of oil, on said glass.  The third:  Painting symbolically, as opposed to realistically.

First, the reverse-painting-on-glass project.  A client bought an old clock at auction that boasted a glass panel reverse-painted with a once-lovely bucolic landscape.  The paint was peeling and  flaking off the glass.  Here is what it looks like :

original reverse-painted scene

He asked me to replicate, roughly, this scene freshly painted on a new pane of glass.  I did some research, and discovered that you can use either oil or acrylic for reverse-glass painting, but acrylics are preferred because of the faster drying time.  I already had some acrylic paint, which I use to tone canvases before painting with oils.  (You can paint with oil over an acrylic base, but should not paint with acrylic over an oil base–for fear of the oil not having dried completely underneath–maybe that is what caused the above painting to start to crumble.)  Except for the gold, which I have only in oil paint, I used my acrylics to make this loose reproduction:

painted side of reproduction

My client did not mind if I reversed the image, so I traced the image with black pen right onto the surface I intended to paint.  I wanted the black markings to show up  in the first layer.

Viewing side of reproduction

I need to work on the gold “frame” and plug up some holes, but basically this is it.  The only way to change anything is to scrape off and start over.

My other uncomfortable project takes a bit more explanation.  I belong to an organization called “Women’s Caucus for Art“.  I am on the Board of Directions for the NH chapter, and also serve as Treasurer for the NH chapter.   Every year the WCA organizes a number of funky exhibits.  I have mentioned the 6×6 here, and I have participated in the annual “Flowers, Interpreted”, and my “Farmers Market” painting was juried into an exhibit on a theme of locally grown food.  My offering for one called “Old Wives Tales” up at Plymouth State College did not make it, nor did my very first submission a few years ago to an exhibit of female nudes called “Go Figure”.   When I saw the art selected, I better understood the meaning of the title.

Point is, they do some weird stuff that my rather sober, traditional take on on images does not fit into, comfortably.  But good sport that I am, I keep trying.  So here is this new one, called “On Target”.  For this exhibit, one must use this as one’s inspiration:

The "On Target" inspiration piece

My first reaction was, “Huh?”  That was my second and third reaction too.  How on earth do I fit that thing into my way of being artistic?  Coincidentally, I had recently watched a movie called “Vincent” by Paul Cox.  Van Gogh is one of my favorite artists.  The movie consists of Van Gogh’s words, written in letters to his brother, recited against images of his paintings and the countryside that he painted, and a few reenactments of his painting process.  I was particularly affected by the reenactment of his painting of “Starry Night”.   Suddenly, it came to me that the targets were very similar in shape (you know, round!) to stars, and that the circles around them were analogous to the  auras that surrounded the stars in Starry Night.  All I had to do was reverse the colors.  I was inspired!  So inspired that I jumped on it right away and spent all of  yesterday on it:

Starry, Starry Night, under its inspiration

I am titling it “Starry, Starry Night” after the Don Maclean song, because that opening theme keeps running through my mind.   As always, it may not be finished yet.   Actually, it may be just my first stab at bringing this idea to fruition.  Does it have enough merit to make it into the “On Target” exhibition?  Stay tuned for word on that.  But if satisfying the theme counts heavily, I think it should.  What think you?  Here is the large, in your face, version:

Starry, Starry Night

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

A Best Week

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Some weeks are so full of reportable stuff that I have trouble choosing my topic.  Other weeks, I have trouble scaring up a single decent topic.  I could save up half of the good-week stuff for a dull week, but who wants to plan for dull weeks?  Not me.  On the other hand, I don’t want to bore you either, and really now, wouldn’t  you rather hear about struggles?  This week I can report on a bit of a struggle and its accompanying triumph so that’s what I lead with.

Part I.  Alpaca Love.  You remember the alpaca farm/ranch from last month?

Alpaca Farm v.1

Alpaca Farm in North Conway

This was the plein air painting from the Bartlett weekend, to which, I announced, I would be adding an alpaca closeup.  I had one good alpaca closeup, so I went with that, even though I’d have preferred the animal to be facing more towards the viewer.  My closeup did not include the legs either, so I was winging it with regard to the posture and thickness and general shape of the legs.

Alpaca Farm v.2

Alpaca Farm v.2

Pretty awful, right?.  I wouldn’t even show it to you before–I couldn’t let it sit out there as if finished when I was going to have to repaint the red alpaca closeup.  First, I had to find a better reference photograph.

As it turned out, when I got around to searching my own photographs, I had plenty of good alpaca poses.   Thanks to my powerful Nikon SLR camera, alpacas photographed in the way distance still gave me enough enlarged detail to paint a loveable blond alpaca in just the right pose, in just the right spot.

Alpaca Farm, v.3 (Final)

Part II:  Supercyclists. Earlier this evening, I delivered two paintings to my son in celebration of his birthday.  One of them  you have seen already.

Andy as Supercyclist

It depicts him right after finishing the race up to the top of the Rockpile (Mt. Washington).  Paint still wet on the second one delivered, is my painting of his friend Kori, from the same time, same place.

Whew!

I love the foreground in Kori’s painting.  Strange that where the focus of the painting is the figure of the cyclist, what I love most is how I painted the ground.  I would have liked to paint the face more expressively, but I didn’t really have room for that.  The two paintings are each 12×9, so the faces are quite small.  I wanted to get the likenesses as close as possible, so I had to be careful.  Andy’s worked out better because I had only light and shadow anyway, but Kori’s nose, mouth, eyebrows had to fall in the exact correct places, and no smearing please.

My major painting plan, for which these two 12x9s have served as studies, is still on, but the faces in the big one are not going to get any bigger since the plan is to encompass the entire rockpile.  I think I need to reuse this scene in a longer painting so as to include more of the shadow, and larger overall, so as to allow more of a slapdash face.

Part II:  Lovely Nudes.  Finally, for a change of pace, how about a collection of lovely nudes from Saturday Life Group?  My best from two weeks ago, and all three from this week:

Arrangement of elbow and knee   

Leg on Blue Draped Pillow

Right Side with bent elbow

The back from a left angle

I am wondering if I am getting too heavy-handed with the charcoal.  The “Leg on Blue Draped Pillow” has more charm to it, I think, because I had the pose for only 20 minutes and had to keep a light touch.  I would like to know if you agree.  Or disagree.  Either way, it was a good week.  Here’s hoping for another one coming up!

Tomorrow (Monday) I pick up my painting from The Rockport (Mass.) Art Association.  Unsold.  They invited me to apply for membership, and I thought I would if my painting sold, but it didn’t, so I didn’t.  A bit far to go for the sheer joy of exhibiting.  Although I do hope to get in a plein air painting day tomorrow, which makes a trip worthwhile.  Also tomorrow, paintings are being changed out at the Sage Gallery in Manchester, 70 Lowell Street.   Please visit this new gallery.

My old website, with multiple painting galleries yet to be transferred to this WordPress location, can be accessed at this address:  www.paintingsbyaline.com.  Also there are  all the images attached to earlier blog entries.  Eventually I will move everything here, but it takes a lot of time.

Never Try to Predict the Market

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Last weekend was Open Doors New Hampshire as well as something called “ArtWalk” in Nashua and “Art in Action” in Londonderry.   If you had the energy (I didn’t), you could have spent all weekend touring artists’ studios and watching demonstrations by artists and crafts people.  As part of this pretty big deal, the NH Women’s Caucus for Art held its annual, tenth anniversary, 6×6 exhibit and sale as part of Nashua’s ArtWalk.  It was great timing for the WCA (of which I serve as Treasurer) because the visibility brought in lots of new membership applications.  Sales of our 6×6’s were brisk too– on Saturday.  I suspect, although I haven’t got proof positive, that the higher Saturday sales reflect the fact that our artists were buying each other’s works.  (No one appreciates your work as much as your own people do.)  See the incriminating photograph on the blog of Kathryn Antyr  of our president possibly red-dotting the panels that she wanted to take home.

Two weeks ago I made a prediction regarding  which of my panels would be the first to sell, and I got many, many responses (by email and by blog comment) from my readers who agreed with me.   I predicted that my first sale would be this image of the lounging alley cat, titled “At Home”.

At home

Au contraire.  My first sale was the “Snaggle-Toothed Cat”, Grace, the one I painted many months ago to amuse myself while gallery-sitting.

Snaggle-Toothed Cat

The Snaggle-Toothed Cat

Apparently one of the artists from a neighboring studio fell head over heels in love with the snaggle-toothed kitty.  I know from my own experience that when love happens, it happens.   There’s no explaining it.

The next to go was the portrait of my friend’s deceased akita, Nora.

Akita

I heard, in fact, that more than one person wanted to buy the Akita, but then they both thought the Akita was a polar bear.  I guess polar bears are popular. Coca-Cola knows what it is doing.

I had to get much of the above information on Sunday, after the fact, because on Saturday I was busy learning how to get luminosity in my paintings.  It was one of the series of single-topic landscape workshops, offered by Peter Granucci through the New Hampshire Plein Air group.  We began Saturday by studying paintings by masters such as Kensett, trying to figure out how they achieved luminosity, then we tried to achieve it in our own painting. Our first exercise was a new painting from a projected photograph:

Early morning

This exercise illustrates many of the attributes of a luminous painting–high key (meaning mostly very light); complementary colors (purples and yellows are the preferred set of complements); small areas of dark contrast; one lightest spot that seems to pour luminosity all over the scene.

Our second exercise was to  work on  one of our already “finished” paintings, trying to add more luminosity to it.  I chose to work on “Spectator, Mt. Washington Bike Race”:

Bike Race spectator on Mt. Washington

I had already been pretty happy with my Spectator, but Peter saw potential for more luminosity.  I lightened the background mountains, added the light source, and changed my white highlights to pale yellow.  The result:

Spectator

Is this better?  It looks darker rather than lighter.  Must be the lighting when I photographed it.,

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the Rockport Art Association Gallery in Rockport, Massachusetts.

[The Manchester Artists Association Gallery is now officially closed.  But the MAA itself is as active and vibrant as ever.]

Link to website:  www.paintingsbyaline.com

Progress on the 6×6 paintings

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At home

I just laid down my brushes and photographed the 6×6 plaques that I am painting for the upcoming Women’s Caucus for Art exhibit.  I “previewed” this project back in September and that was the last blog entry I was able to upload using my old iWeb program, so I’m feeling a little nervous about approaching the 6×6 subject matter again.  But I’m not superstitious, am I?  No.  Not at all.  So here goes:

WHERE AND WHEN:  The exhibit is to take place in the Chimera Gallery in the Picker Building at 99 Factory Street, Nashua.  It opens Saturday, November 5, at noon.  Saturday hours are noon to 5 o’clock.  It closes the next day, Sunday, at 4 o’clock.  The Sunday hours are noon to 4 o’clock.  The reception will take place Sunday, between 2 and 5.

These are unusual hours.  In years past, we have left the exhibit up for about a month, thinking to accommodate Christmas shoppers.  But almost all sales occurred during the reception, and people seem to be shopping for Christmas earlier and earlier each year.  (Pavlov’s dog experiment comes to mind as an explanation of this phenomenon.)

The exhibit is unusual in another respect:  Not only 2011 plaques will be exhibited and offered for sale ($66 each), but also plaques from years past–a retrospective of sorts.   This being my third year as a member of the organization, I will be exhibiting 12 plaques.  My 2009 four consisted of Lotus Studies, which has become a stand-alone piece, as I discussed in the September blog.  You can revisit the earlier blog here.   You can also inspect the condition of the new pieces as works in progress.  Today they may still be works in progress, but progress has been made, and only a few tinkering details remain.  I hope!  But first, I will show you the three brand new images, then follow up with three from before, as improved.

Noodles, a Cockapoo-Poodle

I met Noodles last week in Bartlett.  He belongs to Sami, the innkeepers’ daughter.  Noodles is still a puppy.  A sweeter dog cannot be imagined.

Alpaca Love

Why this title?  Impulse, inspired by the expressive face, which seems to be regarding a beloved.   I painted this portrait from the same photograph that I am using to insert an alpaca close-up in my Alpaca Ranch painting.  (See last week’s blog.)  I painted this on a plaque from 2010, on top of the original painting.  You can see a ghost of the 2010 image in the shadows.   Obviously, I didn’t like the 2010 painting and am very glad of the opportunity to obliterate it.

At Home

This is our Great Dane, Honey,  getting comfy on the sofa.  The strong desire of Great Danes to seek comfort is well-known.  The white spots in the photo are light reflecting off globs of wet paint.  This image also conceals an old one that I will not miss.  (Two more of the 2010 reborn plaques are shown in the September blog.)

Red-Breasted Plover

The Plover was featured in the previous blog. I made refinements, not changes:  The canopy on which he stands sinks a little more under his weight, which I hope explains what kind of a surface it is.  The red reflection on his breast is a little more intense.  The feathers have been touched up.  A light reflection has been added to his eye.

Poser

Another one from the previous post, with no changes to the Snowy Egret’s persona, but I did insert the words taken from a Wallace Stevens poem “. . . the feathers flare And bluster in the wind. . .” because they describe what is happening.  I wouldn’t want anyone to think the bird looks like this all the time.  I’m thinking I should add to the blustering plumage on the right side of the image.

At home

This is Sundance, a former resident of my household.  Despire his appropriation of my bed in this picture, he now prefers to be on his own.  Of the works in progress, this painting received the most of my attention.  His posture was unexplained before.  Now that  you can see he is slumbering away, sunken in pillows, I think this image is very appealing.  I am betting that if any of my plaques sell, this will be the first one to go.  (Going by my own weakness for cat images.)

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Manchester Artists Association Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Rockport Art Association Gallery in Rockport, Massachusetts.

Link to website:  www.paintingsbyaline.com

Bartlett, October 2011

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Bike Race spectator on Mt. Washington

In my EEE class last week, I painted one of my studies for the Mt. Washington Bike Race painting, and since it is my favorite painting for the week, I start with it.  The official title is “On the Top of the Rockpile”.  Mt. Washington is, for those of you not from New Hampshire, referred to affectionately as the Rockpile because above treeline, it seems to be nothing more than pile of rocks–quite a few of them loose rocks, which makes the going tough for hikers.  Here at the tip top, the boulders are more civilized.  I painted this painting on a 9×12 art panel that had been first painted with an acrylic cadmium yellow.  You can see some yellow peeking through a thumb print and some smears in the upper right corner.  I had dropped the painting, face-down, on a cat-and-dog-fur loaded carpet when I got home after class.  The figure escaped undamaged, and the rocks conceal any hairy texture (is the painting now “mixed media”?), but I tried to wipe the sky clean of fur and dirt.

The biannual trip to Bartlett for the artists’ getaway fell on last weekend.  “Fell” seems appropriate because the weather was pretty darn awful.  We could not visit the Rockpile, or any other tempting peak.  In fact, another guest at the Bartlett Inn reported that the Cog Railroad on Saturday started up Mt. Washington but had to back down because of the high winds.  Most of us painters sat out Thursday altogether; painted under a roof Friday (pavillion at Swift River Lower Falls), managed to get a few windy hours in before rain started on Saturday, and finally got a rain-free, partially sunny day on the appropriately named Sunday.  I usually come home with 5 or  6 paintings from a Bartlett weekend.  This time, only three:

Lower Falls

Mt. Washington Valley with Moat Mt. and cornfield

The view above is from the lawn of the Red Jacket Inn.  The painting will be exhibited at the Red Jacket once it is finished and framed.

Alpaca Farm in North Conway

I got out my big Beauport easel and a 16×20 panel for the alpaca farm.  I intend to add a close up of an alpaca, using one of my photographs.  Here is one of my models:

Head Shot

I had to minimize the shadows with my photo editing program (iPhoto) in order to see her amazing face.  She came up fairly close to me several times, but each time I could not get my camera in focus quickly enough to get the straight on gaze that I would love to have in the painting.

Not all of the alpacas were this lovely chestnut color.  I love that red shade because the edges generate such a warm glow.

Gray Alpaca

White Alpaca

Here are two others, who were not disposed to come so close to me.  They are shown galloping toward their owner at the back of the barn, who called them in by shouting “Ladies!”  At all other times, their muzzles are buried in the delicious grass.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Manchester Artists Association Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Rockport Art Association Gallery in Rockport, Massachusetts.

Link to website:  www.paintingsbyaline.com

IPAP weekend

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IPAP stands for International Plein Air Painters, and every year in September, IPAP, the organization, calls on the painters to get outside on a particular weekend and paint. Our local organization, the NH Plein Air group, or guys, or whatever, responded to the call. It is our tradition to select three different locations over the weekend (weekend for painters generally includes Friday). So while in other parts of the world, I imagine painters piling up at their glamorous locations, we spread it around New Hampshire.

I participated on the first two days of our event. Friday we painted at Twin Bridge Park in Merrimack. It’s one of those places that you would never notice unless you got out of the car and explored. From the parking lot, you take a trail down toward a baseball field and playground, but then veer off into the woods, and descend farther, following the sound of rushing water, to a trail alongside Baboosic Brook. Due to the recent storms, the Brook was a torrent.

My chosen scene, featuring Sharon Allen behind the tree.

Because of last week’s workshop on layering water, for my second painting I chose this scene:

The water was moving very slowly over the flat rock in the foreground, which just happened to be catching beams of sunlight. The light enables you to see the shapes and shadows formed by the rock’s submerged surface, the ripples catch the blue of the sky, there’s foam, there’s vegetation, there’s unsubmerged rock. There’s not enough time! I had only an hour to work on this painting, so I kept my rendition of this scene abstract:

I like this painting for what it is, but I would like to paint another version from my photograph, to see if I can better capture the effect of the light and seeing-throughness, to coin a phrase. (Probably “transparency” is the synonym, but that word has secondary meanings and who needs that?)

Saturday morning I could not give up the new year’s first meeting of the Saturday Life Group, so I was not at the appointed IPAP location until the afternoon. We painted in the most northerly end of the Amoskeag Millyards in Manchester. Old mills, because of their locations on waterways, near falls, offer a large range of subject matter. It was my idea to paint there, but turnout was disappointing. I guess most plein air painters prefer natural landscapes over the man-made ones. I, on the other hand, even welcome the odd vehicle into my paintings from time to time:

The building in the foreground is occupied by a restaurant (Fratello’s–good Italian fare). All of the buildings in the Millyard have been repurposed of course–there is no milling going on there. In another one of them, at the southern end of the city, is the artist’s studio where we have our figure drawing on Tuesdays.

NEWS FLASH! A new fine art gallery is opening in the arts and cultural neighborhood of Manchester, 70 Lowell Street, just down Lowell Street from the new building of the NH Institute of Art. Called the “Sage Gallery . . . . a Fine Art and Metaphysical Meeting Place” (how quixotic is that!), it is owned and operated by the former director of the Manchester Artists Association Gallery, Janice Donnelly. I have seen the space and it is terrific, and of course the location is also terrific, not to mention the director–yes, also terrific. Yes, I will be exhibiting there. I think the hours are generally 11 to 4. If you can, please stop by and encourage Janice’s courageous venture.

Snow Painting

Posted by Aline on

Next August, I plan to participate in a special exhibit at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, of paintings painted au plein air by members of the New Hampshire Plein Air group at the Arboretum. We are trying to cover all four seasons of the year. So we had to do winter. On January 7, the first group of us (about six in number) descended upon the Arboretum with our usual gear, plus all those things designed to keep us from freezing to death. I staked out a spot on the Willow Path, which is just inside the main gate, not far from the bathrooms in the visitor center. At least I had a bit of a hike to get to this spot. Others who shall remain nameless set up their work stations in the parking lot.

 

Willow Path in Winter

Willow Path in Winter

After finishing the painting above, I had a little extra time, so I produced a 6 by 12 panorama of a nearby culvert, which may seem a little weird to you. I chose it to seize the opportunity to include a richly dark area in my composition. Contrast creates drama.

Culvert in the Arboretum

Culvert in the Arboretum