Category Archives: Nudes

The Joy of Completion

Posted by Aline on
Detail from Portrait of Grace

Detail from Portrait of Grace

The “Joy of Finishing” was my first thought for the title to this posting, but “Completion” is  better.  And not just because “completion” brings with it  fewer double entendres.   You could “finish” or come to an end of a project without being satisfied with it.  “Completion” connotes a goal achieved.  I could go further in this amusing wordplay by comparing “accomplished” as in “mission accomplished”, but that could get raw.

This week, therefore, I celebrate three completions.  Last week you saw the intermediate stages of two of them, so you have some idea of what to expect.  Above is the detail from the bigger one.  I said I wanted to make the background from the colors of the headscarf and whaddya know–I did!

Portrait of Grace

Portrait of Grace

Grace did not realize we wanted to repeat the pose from last week, so she arrived with a different scarf, wearing different earrings, and carrying a different drape.  Just as well–three elements were thus eliminated that I might have spent valuable time on.

This is a pretty good likeness of Grace, but of course, profiles are so much easier than 3/4 or full facial views.  Have I mentioned that before?  I hate to repeat myself, especially when the point is obvious when you think about it:  matching up eyes, eyebrows, lids, etc., etc., especially in the 3/4 view where the shadows make them look different, is really, really tricky.  Also, faces are not symmetrical, so too much matchy-matchy would be wrong.  Given all that, trying to figure out where the eye on the left should be higher or the one on the right should be lower can give me headache sometimes.  No, all the time.

The other just-short-of-finished figure from last week came out OK.  I think I messed around a little with the face, to no good purpose, but the main focus was the hand.  Now shorter, narrower, and with a hint of finger structure, this hand no longer detracts from the painting as a whole.

Figure Study (M on BLS)

Figure Study (M on BLS)

However, the face is not that of Margaret, so I moved in closer, metaphorically, on a second sheet of canvas:

Portrait of Margaret

Portrait of Margaret

Still not Margaret.  If I had had more time, I would have lengthened the nose perhaps.  Or shortened it.  But it’s hard to say what exactly is wrong.  Peter Clive said, “Margaret is elusive.”  I called her “sneaky”.  (Which I think she appreciated.)  Likeness or not, this painting came out well.  What do you think of the background?  I was thinking of light through thick green glass, but chose not to take that concept all the way–it was just my inspiration.

You might notice that the head is tilted differently in the second attempt.  It’s just impossible to keep a head from moving.  If I were alone, and were painting a portrait, I could keep telling the model how to adjust her attitude, but when painting the entire figure, there is so much to keep aligned that you tend not to trust  your opinion about where the head should be–especially if changing it might decimate a colleague who thought he had it right.  (I apologize for the long sentence but couldn’t find a spot to break it up.)  Still and all, frustrating as it is, I would not trade it for drawing from a plaster cast of a head, illuminated by a steady, never varying spotlight.  The harder it is, the more ways we learn.  I hope.  I sure hope so.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at Stella Blu , an American Tapas restaurant in Nashua; at her law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.  Beginning May 1 through May 30, nine of her Boston Arboretum paintings will be displayed at the Leach Library in Londonderry, NH.  On Saturday and Sunday May 4-5, she will be exhibiting and demonstrating at the Londonderry annual event “Art in Action”; the location of Art in Action will be the large farmstand operated by Mack’s Apples, 230 Mammoth Road in Londonderry.

Race up Mount Washington

Posted by Aline on

I’m sharing with you this week a magnum opus WIP (work in progress) that has been in progress for over a year now.  It’s not that I’m lazy, at least I don’t think so.  Or that I have too many other projects going.    I just stopped working on it for many months, waiting for my desire to finish it to return.  I explained this in my blog of a few weeks ago, here if you want to read it.

Usually, I am fast to paint and perhaps too fast to declare my painting done.  I don’t have time to get bored or the scope to get intimidated.  But I almost always have one big painting in the works, and it usually takes me a month or two to work out the problems and declare it finished.  This one has been a totally different experience.  It has intimidated me with its scope, size and complexity.  I now have barely got all the canvas covered, and am only beginning to try to pull it all together as a whole.

Mt. Washington Phase 4

Mt. Washington Phase 4

No smart aleck mountaineer (my son) has yet asked, but perhaps I should make it clear that I am not going for accuracy in the configuration of the mountain ranges depicted.  The people are, however, based on real people whom I observed at the 2011 Race to the top of Mount Washington.  From the hundreds of photos that I took while waiting for my son to finish (33d–that’s really good!), I picked out some vignettes to incorporate in this panoramic scene.  I have drawn and/or painted most of them before I started on the present mammoth.  (OK, it’s 30×40, not really mammoth, but quite big for me.)  Here are my studies, in no particular order:

Fans

Fans

Awaiting the Stragglers

Awaiting the Stragglers (3-legged dog)

View of race with vista

View of race with vista

Whew!

Whew! (a top female finisher)

Andy with bike

A Very Special Guy

Bike Race spectator on Mt. Washington

Bike Race spectator on Mt. Washington (Find him in the magnum opus)

These small paintings are more faithful portraits of the mountains and the infrastructure at the finish line.  The two portraits are of my favorite cyclists, the ones I was there to cheer on.

Mount Washington is often referred to, fondly and respectfully, as “the Rockpile”;  if nothing else, my painting does give the viewer a sense of why that is.   Despite all my practice paintings, I’m still not satisfied with my technique for depicting rock piles.   I also intend to enliven my landscape with many more spectators and cyclists.  If you examine the distant road, you will see, you might see–some indistinct blobs of color;  they are supposed to suggest more cyclists on their way up with spectators along the route.

I would not want to leave you without a nude this week. For the past month or so, I had been sticking to 8×10 and 9×12 canvases for the Tuesday and Friday sessions with live models.  Last Tuesday, counting on having my model in her pose for two straight weeks, I brought a larger canvas to work on–16×20.   I was using a piece of oil-primed linen from a Centurion pad.  If I don’t like all of it when I am finished, I can always cut it down.  So I started large.

Figure in Turban and red drape WIP

Figure in Turban and red drape WIP

So far, so good.  I have high hopes for this one, but am a bit perplexed by the color of the background.  I think I would prefer something that more closely echoed the colors in the turban.  Or perhaps a much darker background to set off the figure and the turban.  Stay tuned!

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at Stella Blu American Tapas restaurant in Nashua; at her law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

A Milestone Reached

Posted by Aline on

Last week, without really thinking about it yet fully conscious of it, I produced something, finally, that I have been aspiring to for many years now.  Here it is:

Jon, supine pose

Jon, supine pose

This aspiration started with a class that I took with Patrick McCay at the Institute–a course called Explore, Express, Exploit.  At that time, what I had in mind was achieving a style that was loose as opposed to tight.  Following Patrick’s course, I took Painting the Contemporary Portrait with Cameron Bennett.  Cameron gave us a list of portrait artists, “portrait” being loosely defined and the artists being avant garde, and suggested we look them all up to find one who could inspire our own modern and unique take on portraiture (again, loosely defined).  I glomed onto Carolyn Anderson, American artist living in Montana, somewhat obscurely.  She seems to be an artists’ artist–known to and collected by fellow artists but not yet collected by museums.

Since then, her work has always been in the back of my mind, even when I am producing the hard-edged, detailed works that seem to come out of me unbidden.

You’ve seen a few nudes from me.  Here is the only one I found on Anderson’s website:

Anderson nude

Anderson nude

And here is one of her portraits, lovely beyond words to describe:

Anderson portrait

Anderson portrait

By comparison, I know, my big breakthrough seems heavy-handed. But it occurred–bloomed– quite naturally that Tuesday morning, without a trace of the manipulation that I felt I was guilty of when painting loosely for effect.  “Loosely” implies something casual, effortless, airy–not something forced or faked.  Here is one of my earliest efforts, and it’s not horrible, but still you can feel the strain it put on me:

Translation into Oil

Translation of life drawing into Oil

I know from past experience that this reaching a new level, slightly closer to the high level occupied by my hero, does not mean I am permanently raised on that new level.  On Friday I tried not to slip back too far.  I worry about being too self conscious about it.  A Catch-22.  You can only succeed by not trying so damn hard.

So here is Margaret, the model with whose limbs I have recently struggled in vain to organize*.  I got a break when we posed her with her hair covering up one of her shoulders.

M on brown recliner, WIP

M on brown recliner, WIP

*”organize” is the word used by Robert Liberace to describe the first stages of a drawing or painting, which the parts are sized and fitted together–the jigsaw puzzle stage.  It’s so the right word that I am adopting it.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at Stella Blu American Tapas restaurant in Nashua; at her law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

Aging

Posted by Aline on

Well, it happened again.  I forgot to post Monday’s blog.  I was so pleased with myself Sunday for taking the photographs and uploading them to WordPress, that I must have subconsicously given myself credit for completing the job.  Or it’s age.  Twice in three weeks–not good!  Good thing I am wrapping up my law practice.

Yes, it’s official.  I will not be renewing my license to practice law in the state of New Hampshire at the end of our fiscal year.  As of July 1, my status will become “inactive”.  Of course it may take weeks after that to tend to my clients and sort through and dispose of the accumulations of 29 years.  Some of my clients I will continue to be able to serve (e.g., by preparing tax returns) but for those requiring the services of a member of the Bar, I will try to place them with new lawyers.  The tax clients will be the hardest to place–not many lawyers want to represent taxpayers in trouble with the IRS.  That’s because usually the trouble originated in some fault of the taxpayer–well, not “fault” exactly, but behavior.  When people get smacked down or just depressed, they can’t cope with taxes, and of course, to the IRS, it’s just another same old story.  Our system of income taxation confers upon the taxpayers great responsibility and great trust.  Alleviating that burden on the taxpayer is, in my opinion, the only decent argument in favor of a sales  or value added tax.  Thank God I won’t have to even think about this stuff in a few months (except, as I said before, a few tax return preparations).

So this week’s original topic was going to WIPs (works in progress),  WIP and RIP (rest in peace) are two possibilities existing simultaneously in a half-finished painting, like alternate universes.  RIP means I never return to finish the painting.  WIP is a hopeful designation.  Two unfinished paintings this week are, I hope, WIP and not RIP.

But let me show you first–three completed charcoal drawings from our Saturday Life Group.  I’m pretty psyched about them.  Our couple was back, and all of us were a little more at ease with each other and the whole concept of two entwined naked bodies.  For one 2-minute gesture pose, they even struck a kissing pose.  It dawned on me that I could not get more appropriate pieces for the McGowan Gallery‘s annual Valentine’s show,  “Love, Lust and Desire“, than these drawings.   And pieces in the show are limited in size to 8.5 by 11,  so when I decided to bring my 9×12 high-quality pastel paper to SLG that morning, Fate was with me.

I don’t quite remember (age again?) which poses were what length, but the range was 20 minutes to 50 minutes.

LL&D No. 1

LL&D No. 1

LL&D No. 2

LL&D No. 2

LL&D No. 3

LL&D No. 3

I started all three by smearing the paper with soft charcoal.  Then I deployed the kneaded eraser to bring out the lights.  The paper was not white, so I could have increased  the contrast by using white pastel, but for some reason, I felt that much contrast would be too intrusive.  Does that make any sense at all?

WIPs I have several, but the most important is my Mt. Washington Oeuvre.  I slapped some more paint on it, and it’s beginning to take shape.  I’m getting excited about it again,  as the background gets covered with paint.

Phase 3--Biking on Mt. Washington

Phase 3–Biking on Mt. Washington

I have to keep reminding myself that I conceptualized the mountains as semi-abstract.  I cannot allow myself to get hung up on painting realistic rocks.  For the figures, I need to resize them–the ones farther from the viewer need to shrink a bit.  I plan to refer to the original photo references for each figure, on my iPad if I can get it to stop  going to sleep.  Consistency in the direction of sunlight also needs some work.

The next work was a WIP yesterday, when I should have posted this entry, but when I got to Tuesday life group this morning, everyone else wanted to move on with a new pose.  So although I may need to tinker with shapes and values here and there, this is essentially a done deal.

Jon seated on stand wip

Jon seated on stand wip

By the way, I made up the background at home, thinking to get a head start on today’s session.  Head start, finish line, same thing almost.  One of my cohorts today commented that I had a nice touch with interiors, suggesting I should consider that as a specialty.  So watch out for that as a new theme, possibly.  I’m pretty opportunistic, like a leaf in a stream of water, just letting it carry me wherever.  So far, no interiors have presented themselves as likely candidates for painting subjects.  George Nick did some interiors that I admired greatly (many shown in his gallery of 2008-2010 paintings here), and Paul Ingbretson, just one floor below our studio, has an interior that would knock your socks off (see it here–called Warm and Cool).  And Van Gogh was very much into interiors.  Can you think of other examples?  Seems to me to be a pretty untapped seam.  Hope I’m not mixing metaphors there.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at Stella Blu American Tapas restaurant in Nashua; at her law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

Hello, Again

Posted by Aline on

To those of you who noticed and cared that I did not post anything last week, I apologize.  To those who never noticed or cared, I don’t know what to say.  Really?  Your lives did not seem emptier?  Mine seemed peculiar.  I am so used to the follow up discussion among my friends that it was as if we had lost a piece of our conversation template.  Perhaps I have gotten spoiled, so it was a good thing to experience a little deprivation for a short time.  I have no excuse for missing a week, if that’s what you are waiting to hear.  I suddenly realized on Tuesday that I had never posted the Monday blog, or indeed even taken the photographs with which to illustrate it.  Instead of bending myself into a pretzel getting a late entry out, I decided to lie back and wait for complaints, if any.  Too few complaints were received.  Oh, well.

The upside is all the extra material I have for this week.  The headline news is progress on the painting that I started a year ago of bikers racing to the top of Mount Washington.  Here is a link to what it looked like last  year.  I brought it out to work on March 23 because of Peter Granucci.  He invited us to his studio in Gilsum (where?–middle of nowhere but close to Vermont) for a workshop on stalled projects.  I had the perfect candidate in the Mt. Washington painting.  He forced me to do exercises of value studies for the painting, six of them, and claimed that each was better than the one before, and only then was I allowed to apply those principles to my big canvas.  So annoying to have to apply real rules when all you want to do is follow your instinct.  But my instinct had dried up, I guess, and that’s why the canvas had seen stashed away for a whole year.  So now Phase 2, which will I hope lead to 3 sooner than a year from now:

Phase 2 of Mt Painting

Phase 2 of Mt Painting

Another feature from Figure Fridays with Peter Clive is this 2-session study of Fletch reclining on the ubiquitous brown leather sofa.   I had two hours remaining when I finished the figure study, so I started a portrait too.

Reclining Male on Brown Sofa

Reclining Male on Brown Sofa

Portrait Fletch Mar 2013

Portrait Fletch Mar 2013

Compare the new portrait to this one from last month.  Am I getting better?

Fletch portrait on darker bkgrd

Fletch portrait on darker bkgrd

The Saturday group is back in business after two weeks off.  Here is the pick of that session.

Reading from back

Reading (Nook) from back

Finally perhaps my favorite of the group is this portrait of Grace.  I think I am finally getting the hang of something–the color of the skin, the modeling of the shoulder, and the light touch for the mouth.  I’m really fond of this one!

Portrait Grace Mar 2013

Portrait Grace Mar 2013

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at Stella Blu American Tapas restaurant in Nashua; at her law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

Portraits, by Zorn

Posted by Aline on

Just one painting to talk about this week.  It’s a portrait.  One of my colleagues opined that it was the best thing she had seen me do.  She has a fine critical eye, so I was happy to hear that.  But later in the week, I was able to take in the special exhibit (titled, A European Artist Seduces America) at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The European artist was the Swede, Anders Zorn.  The exhibit includes many of his portraits.  Seeing them reminded me of how far I am from achieving the quality that I admire in Zorn’s work.  Reminded?  No, that word is way too mild.  It whacked me over the head!

First, for context, the result of my effort this week:

Face and Hand

Face and Hand

One of Zorn’s:

Martha Dana

Martha Dana

Many artists avoid dealing with the open mouth because depicting the teeth can look ridiculous.  Not a problem for Zorn, of course.  Look at that bow!  I would have labored over the thing; he just swipes a loaded brush, right, left, right and done.

Many of my nonartist friends, when I told them about the Zorn exhibit, said they had never heard of Zorn, which is completely understandable since I hadn’t either until I started painting back in 2005.  At that time, I was working on landscapes only, and Zorn’s name came up in the context of the limited palette that he had espoused.  “Limited palette” means just a few colors (hues), and the limited palette for which he was known consisted of cadmium red, ivory black, white and  yellow ocher.  Using those hues, he could even make gray look blue.  But while he did some spectacular impressionist landscapes, mostly as backdrops for nudes, his principal claim to fame is his portraits.  He rivaled Sargent, literally.  One of the portraits in the Gardner exhibit, according to the story accompanying it, was created in response to a challenge by the sitter’s husband to make a portrait of her that was better than the one Sargent had done.  I think it was this one.  Mrs--Bacon-small  White gown, overhead view–both to mimic Sargent’s version.  I also think he probably met the challenge, but in the world of art, such comparisons are invidious.

So what is so great about Zorn?  In a word, his deftness.  He could describe a hand, a nose, a cheekbone with a few strokes, and when they was done, he let them be.  Or not–in one painting (the next one shown) large, rough strokes surround the figure, but the figure itself is soft and blended.  images

His nudes all tend to be smooth and soft, and are usually surrounded by an impressionistic landscape including water.  His water was much admired too.  Here’s a taste:

Opal

Opal

Here, in The Omnibus, is another example of his deft strokes–look at the hands:

1799

I think I may try to copy this painting.

The ability to convey much with very little definition is something I have admired in a contemporary artist, Carolyn Anderson (see descriptions of my struggles here and again here), and I wonder how much she has been influenced by Zorn.  His portrait of Gardner herself, in Venice, is considered a major tour de force, because of its liveliness, resulting in no small measure from the looseness and blurriness that also characterizes Anderson’s works:

DSC_0002 - Version 2

Her mouth is open, but you can hardly tell.  DSC_0002  This painting should be an inspiration for all figure artists who desire to capture movement and spirit in a gesture.  I wonder if there is anything written anywhere about how Zorn put this painting together.  Clearly Isabella did not pose for more than a minute or two.

If you want to see more, here are two links that I found useful.  The Gardner Museum website.  The Complete Works of Anders Zorn.  I also found a review of the Gardner exhibit here, and an exposition of the Zorn limited palette here.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at her law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

Through March 29, you can also view (and purchase–of course!) my 6×6’s at the Artstream Gallery in Rochester, NH.

Viewer Discretion Advised

Posted by Aline on

The weather has been crazy up here in New Hampshire.  One day last week everything had to stop for a snow storm, and the next day Spring seemed to arrive.  Because of the snow day, what was supposed to be three successive sessions with Becky as our model were interrupted, and as a result, many fine artworks have gone unfinished.  Quelle tragique!  (Obviously I am referring to the fine artworks in progress by my cohorts, as well as my own.)  Here are my almost-finished works from Friday and Tuesday.

Becky on the Green Chair

Becky on the Green Chair

This one may be finished.  I need a critique from Peter to be sure.  Since I was working on a 9×12 support, the face was quite small, which frustrated me because it was really beautiful.  I decided to quit the one above and start up a portrait, which was going to be finished the next Friday, weather permitting.  Which it didn’t.

Half-finished portrait of Becky

Half-finished portrait of Becky

And no Sunday sessions, possibly due to a mix up involving Daylight Savings Time.  But I still have extra material to show you this week, thanks to the Saturday Life Group.  Two Saturdays’ worth, in fact.  Not only two Saturdays, but two models on one day–a rare event!  But so hard for us as artists to pull off.

I’ll start with the earlier Saturday.  Pretty normal stuff, not shooting for the moon, just charcoal on the Mi Tientes pastel paper.  I don’t care for that exaggerated texture but I have a lot of it to use up, and it might be growing on me.

Becky, left side view

Becky, left side view

Becky, right side view--another imitation of Ingres' Grande Odalisque

Becky, right side view–another imitation of Ingres’ Grande Odalisque (see my prior discussion here)

Becky, front view

Becky, front view

For the second Saturday, we had two models, both new to us, a couple.  We found that posing them in a tableau where they seemed to be interacting with each other made for better results.  Here is our first longish (20 minutes) pose.

Duo Jamie and Catherine, No. 1, 20 minutes

Duo Jamie and Catherine, No. 1, 20 minutes

The second pose was our longest, about 45 minutes I believe, and as you will see, the models were side by side but not really interacting.

Duo Jamie and Catherine--No. 2, 45 minutes

Duo Jamie and Catherine–No. 2, 45 minutes

We had intended that second pose to last the rest of our session, but as a group, we were so disappointed by it, that we abandoned it for another intertwined pose.  However, I did enjoy my drawing, which was basically just of the guy, with the girl in the background.  The light was interesting.  (That studio at the Institute has an overhead skylight, which distinguishes our Saturday drawings from all others in the Langer Place studio.)

Duo Jamie and Catherine--No. 3, 25 minutes

Duo Jamie and Catherine–No. 3, 25 minutes

It was hard to account for all the limbs and still keep their positions believable.  When a body disappears behind something, it has to come out the other side looking as if it belonged there.  If you examine my drawings closely, you can find much fault, but overall, the effect is pleasing, I hope.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at her law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

Through March 29, you can also view (and purchase–of course!) my 6×6’s at the Artstream Gallery in Rochester, NH.

P.S. Heather’s from Tuesday

Posted by Aline on

20130217-093813.jpg
This is a kind of postscript to my blog entry from yesterday. After publishing yesterday, feeling pretty satisfied that I had used my time in Cleveland well, I continued on to Fort Myers. Then I got to wondering why Heather’s painting was not uploaded. Today, hooked back uo to the Internet, I discovered that the photo of her painting had never left my phone. Oh, boy! I had to learn a new thing–how to get photo from phone to WordPress with help from my computer. My iPad would have to rise to the occasion.

Well, some hours later, I give up on amending original blog and settle for this special edition. Heather deserves a page of her own anyway, because she got me thinking in terms of long-pose painting in the first place, and because she and I have been progressing together, taking the same classes for several years now.

Your Last Nudes for a While–A collection from the Circle

Posted by Aline on

Still a work in progress

Still a work in progress


That photo is a product of my cell phone. While in the throes of packing my gear for Florida last night (I’m writing this from Cleveland airport during a long layover), just for the sake of comparison, I snapped this image of the same painting with my Nikon.
DSC_0021
Yes, my hand shook a little ( couldn’t afford the time to set up properly with tripod), but the colors are truer. Bearing that in mind, here are the cell-phone-pix of my fellow artists:
The Front by Nancy H.

The Front by Nancy H.

The Back by Nancy C

The Back by Nancy C


 
Nita's Portrait

Nita’s Portrait


In the course of packing for Florida, I came across a forgotten painting, forgotten only a matter of weeks, perhaps. It’s interesting for the uncharacteristic brownish flesh tone. It reminds me of Rembrandt’s palette.
brownie

brownie

I recognize that beach chair, but can’t remember the last time I’ve seen it. So this painting may be months older than I originally thought. I found it in the framing studio so it seems likely that it predates that great framing effort for the Londonderry show in September.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at her law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

In February, you can also view (and purchase–of course!) my 6×6’s at the Artstream Gallery in Rochester, NH.

If you happen to be near Tampa, Florida on March 7, 8, and 9, you could (and should) catch Nude Nite, happening with music and other entertainment at 3606 E. 4th Ave., in Tampa.  Hours are 6 pm to midnight.  (Nude NITE, after all)

 

Potpourri–Nudes, Landscapes, Almost Abstract

Posted by Aline on
Sideways

Sideways (12×9)

Once again I lead off with a nude.  I love my nudes.  This was today’s.  You probably recognize the model.  Our Saturday group got cancelled by the snowstorm and my painting from Tuesday is not finished, so it’s the only nude I have for you today.  (We have Tuesday’s model again this week, so I will finish that one up and post it before I leave for Florida for two weeks.)  I am not sure that I will be able to keep to my Monday blogging schedule while I am down in Florida, but I should be able to post photos of the paintings from time to time.

Today I finally noticed why I sometimes see shadows as orange.  When it’s cold in the studio, we used a space heater to keep our model comfortable.  The heater glows orange.  Her breast looked as if it were on fire yesterday.  That was the clue.  But it doesn’t explain other orange shadows, the ones on the other side from the heater.  Maybe it’s simply what I see, after having one cataract removed.  Can’t wait for the other one to go.

I also loves me some landscapes.  Without a Saturday Life Group session, I was unleashed to paint a landscape.  Ever since the Eric Aho exhibit, I’ve had this notion that I too could paint an abstract landscape if I simply gave myself permission .  Turns out, it’s not that easy.  I have, in the past, made paintings that look abstract–well, only two, to be exact.   One happened in a magical state of unconscious creativity (as seen in hindsight, of course), and the other’s subject matter was inherently abstract.  “Spirit Lake” is the former; the name I gave it may be a subconscious bow to the process that created it.  Click here to go to my web page showing Spirit Lake.

The inherently abstract one was a close up view of the mangrove swamp in the Ding Darling National Wildlife Preserve.

Mangroves, Ding Darling

Mangroves, Ding Darling

So Saturday I taped up a 16×20 piece of oil primed linen on a drawing board, and got out a volume of spectacular photographs by Tim Palmer, of some of the most spectacular scenery in existence.  I met Tim some years ago at a Sierra Club meeting, and told him I wanted to use his photographs as inspiration for paintings, and he gladly gave me permission to do so.  His book, titled “Luminous Mountains: The Sierra Nevada of California”, had been waiting patiently in my studio all these  years to be put into service.  I opened the book and did not get further than the frontispiece, a magical scene titled “Volunteer Mountain, Yosemite, at Sunset.”  I tried valiantly not to paint the photograph, but I’m sorry to report, my product is not very abstract.  Not abstract at all.

California Landscape

California Landscape

It’s also earthier, less magical, than the photograph.  Isn’t that strange?  I may try again, next time limiting my palette–no blues or greens allowed.

I also took the Saturday opportunity to modify, perhaps improve,  the frigid plein air paintings of a few weeks ago.  I actually made something of that first effort in the windy, subzero meadow off Route 302.

Mt. Washington from 302, No. 4

Mt. Washington from 302, No. 4

The scene of the Jackson church needed some cleaning up, and fresh whites (actually not pure white, but white with a tiny bit of yellow).  Compare:

Jackson Community Church, looking west, BEFORE

Jackson Community Church, looking west, BEFORE

Jackson, AFTER

Jackson, AFTER

The differences are perhaps too subtle to show up in this medium, same as a photograph can never do justice to a painting, unless it is printed as a giclee and there is nothing between you and the giclee print.  (No digital interface, e.g.)

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at her law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

In February, you can also view (and purchase–of course!) some of my paintings and drawings at the McGowan Gallery in Concord, NH, (“Love, Lust and Desire” is the theme) and my 6×6’s at the Artstream Gallery in Rochester, NH.

If you happen to be near Orlando, Florida on February 14, 15 or 16, or Tampa, Florida on March 7, 8, and 9, you could (and should) catch Nude Nite, happening with music and other entertainment at these locations, respectively: 639 W. Church St. (blue freestanding warehouse just East of I-4) in Orlando; and 3606 E. 4th Ave., in Tampa.  Hours are 6 pm to midnight.  (Nude NITE, after all)

Welcome, Groundhogs*

Posted by Aline on
Skin Colors

Skin Colors

Yesterday’s quasi portrait is my pick of this week.  It could be improved, for sure.  But overall I am pleased–with the gesture, the drawing, the colors, the modeling.  I wanted to leave the background unpainted,  to show off the fact that I made no changes in the outside contour of the figure.  But now I do need to make some changes, so I will try to match the color of the paper I was painting on to eliminate that dark edge atop her left arm, and to carve away at the neck and jaw on her left side.  I would also like to point that I snuck in a tiny glimmer of teeth showing between her open lips.  Even more so than hands and feet, teeth are the painter’s nemesis.

This brown card stock, which I have been using a lot lately, is called “carton board” and is made by Judson’s (Guerrilla Painter).  It looks like stiffened brown Kraft paper but is  sized to accept oil paints without absorbing them.  It does kind of absorb the Gamsol, but dries out quickly.  It leaves a spot.  You can see a spot near her left jaw, where I was trying to carve away at it without deploying paint.

Other things I want to change about this piece: the eyes–too heavy with the dark line, I think; the transitions between colors in skin tones–too abrupt in certain places;  the hair:  too restrained–she has quite a mop, and showing that would add interest to the painting.

In my stories about the Circle of Six (or Seven), I showed you several examples of what my colleagues were doing with the same poses, but somehow I missed capturing this one by Steve:

Steve's Best

Steve’s Best

Steven thinks this is his best drawing of Becky.  For the blog that showed more takes on this pose, go here.

I have heart-warming news in abundance today.  One of my little 6×6 paintings was selected by one of the sponsors for the Notecard project of the Women’s Caucus for Art.  OK, that requires an awful lot of explanation.  The WCA pulls together an annual exhibit to showcase members’ 6×6 pieces, which are sold for $66.  Artists purchase the 6×6 blank panels  from WCA and the money we raise from these sales of blank panels to artists goes into the scholarship fund.  (We award a $1,000 each year to a NH woman attending art school in NH.)  The sale of the finished panels generates revenue for the artists and the gallery, not the WCA.  So this year, for the first time, our beloved leader (Suzanne Whittaker) developed the Notecard Project:  ten sponsors donate a largish sum of money in exchange for the credit that goes with the publication of sets of ten note cards, each set containing reproductions of all  ten 6x6s chosen by  sponsors for such honor, to be sold throughout the year in various retail locations.  The money raised from the sales of the notecards goes to the scholarship fund.  The money raised from the sponsorships pays for the printing of the notecards, and a little bit goes back to the artists chosen to be in the notecard pack.

That takes so long to explain because there are so many interlocking elements.  I was intending to show you my oown 6×6’s eventually, but had so much content on other subjects that I never got around to it.  Here they are:

A Walk in the Woods, 1

A Walk in the Woods, 1

A Walk in the Woods, 2

A Walk in the Woods, 2

A View of the Bay

A View of the Bay

A View of the Forest

A View of the Forest

Barrington Editions, a business that creates giclee reproductions of artists’ paintings, is the sponsor who chose one of mine for the notecards.  They chose the one I call A Walk in the Woods 1.  To create these pieces, I cut up old watercolors to the correct size and mounted them onto the 6×6 panels.  I enhanced them with black and brown ink,  then I covered them with an acrylic gel, which protects the watercolor paper and adds a nice shine.  Inspired by the shine, I decided to construct wires simulating windows.  This turned out to be much more difficult than I had imagined, and I became worried that the wires were too fussy, especially for the first two, which seemed to stand well on their own.  So in the end, I added the window wires only to the last two above, then forgot to photograph them in their little cages.

Other big news, which cannot wait:  Nude Nite Tampa invited BOTH of my pieces.  These two.

DSC_0006

Artists and Model

Artists and Model

I’m not quite ready to part with Artists and Models, but now I have to.  Am wondering if it will be any cheaper to ship two smaller pieces than the one large one that went down to Orlando last week, at a cost of $122.  (I do hope it sells, but in case it doesn’t, the trip back home is already paid for.)

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at her law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

In February, you can also view (and purchase–of course!) some of my paintings and drawings at the McGowan Gallery in Concord, NH, (“Love, Lust and Desire” is the theme) and my 6×6’s at the Artstream Gallery in Rochester, NH.

If you happen to be near Orlando, Florida on February 14, 15 or 16, or Tampa, Florida on March 7, 8, and 9, you could (and should) catch Nude Nite, happening with music and other entertainment at these locations, respectively: 639 W. Church St. (blue freestanding warehouse just East of I-4) in Orlando; and 3606 E. 4th Ave., in Tampa.  Hours are 6 pm to midnight.  (Nude NITE, after all)

*I really have nothing to say to groundhogs, but am so grateful that Phil has ordained an early spring for us that I just had to call out.

Breaking Bad

Posted by Aline on

My weekend was dominated by my iPad (Christmas gift) and my discovery of the HBO series “Breaking Bad”.  Apparently it’s been around since 2008, but only recently came to my notice.  Convergently, my iPad excels at downstreaming (if that the correct term) episodes of Breaking Bad from Netflix, 46 episodes starting in 2008, each about 48 minutes long.  I made only a small dent.  Needless to say, not much art got created.  So in a way, I acted out in my own very small way the title of the series, which refers to the conduct of a high school chemistry teacher who breaks bad and sets up a secret lab to manufacture crystal meth.

Thank goodness for Nita and Nancy, my fellow Circlers, who have provided images of their creations to flesh out this sorry specimen of a blog entry.  All three of us painted Tuesday morning, and Nita painted Friday as well, while Nancy and I were gallivanting to Boston for the Symphony and the MFA.  Let’s start with Friday and go backwards for a change (it’s good for your mental agility, they say):

Nita's Friday Project

Nita’s Friday Project

I’m so impressed with this portrait.  It is well drawn, and the lips in particular are so delicately painted (and accurate for the likeness, if that matters–it matters in the sense that you score more points for a likeness, but doesn’t matter in terms of quality of painting).  The modeling of the facial structures is also well done.  And the eyes are good.  Skin tone, really good, well I could go on, but you get the idea.

Because we were a smaller than usual group on Tuesday, we gathered around the brown leather sofa, on the sunlit side of Adrienne’s studio.

Nancy's pastel painting

Nancy’s pastel painting

Nita's Painting

Nita’s Oil Painting

My Painting

My Oil Painting

I took this painting to a collegial critique on Wednesday and got some really useful suggestions, which I promptly implemented, all except one which I forgot about until just now (add red reflection of the drape on his thigh).  My handling of the pillows and the sofa itself drew more admiration than the figure.  Here are some–perhaps all, at least all that I could locate–of my prior interpretations of that sofa:

The Feet Have It

The Feet Have It

Owning the Brown Leather Sofa

Owning the Brown Leather Sofa

On the Brown Leather Sofa

On the Brown Leather Sofa

Vote for your favorite brown leather sofa painting by commenting below.  If you want to.  Don’t feel obligated!

I will be participating again this year in the McGowan Gallery’s annual “Love, Lust and Desire” show–it’s a Valentine theme for the month of February.  The reception will be February 1, from 5-7. The show is unique, or at least pretty unusual, for the limitation on the size of the artworks:  2D, no larger than 8×11.  The prices are accordingly affordable.  McGowan is a superb, high-end gallery, worth regular visits any time you might be in the neighborhood.  10 Hills Avenue, Concord, NH.  My contributions to the exhibit are mostly small oil paintings on treated paper.  I included two copies of master’s portraits that I am particularly proud of.  One is a self-portrait by Pietro Annigoni , the other a detail from a painting by Jacob Collins.  I love this black and white closeup of his model’s head almost better than the original half-figure-in-color version.

After Jacob Collins (detail from Carolina)

After Jacob Collins (detail from Carolina)

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at her law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

This week’s nudes

Posted by Aline on

I’m risking a “same old, same old” reaction from my followers, but I really have no choice.  Nudes are what I did this week, so we are stuck with it.  I regret not getting photos of the others’ paintings as well, but that’s not what I’m thinking about at the close of a session when we are cleaning up, packing up, making arrangements for our next meeting.  On Friday, our model continued the pose that you have already seen two weeks of, from every possible perspective.  But  today you get one of those perspectives from me.

a different perspective

a different perspective

As chance would have it, I grabbed a sheet of 16×20 canvas simply because it was handy, and I had only one session to produce something on it, so I knew I could not finish anything.  But I should at least have got the proportions correct, and I see problems with that aspect.  Nothing prevents me from working more on this painting at home (=studio) and bringing it closer to a state of completion/satisfaction.  Whether I will feel like doing that is the question.

Our Sunday sessions are back.  I took in a smaller canvas this time–12×16, same size as the successful one from the last two weeks, “Artists and Model“.  12×16 is a good size to work with, because I don’t have to use it all.  I can carve an 11×14 painting out of a sheet that is 12×16.  This time, however, I wanted all of the sixteen inches of available length and less of the width.  So I carved away (not literally–I just drew a line) about 2 inches from one side.   My composition was improved, but maybe I was just too lazy to contemplate filling the space behind the model.  There were no artists on the other side for me to inspire me.

Leaning pose

Leaning pose

Because of my pruning, if this painting turns out to be a keeper, I will have to order a custom-sized frame for it.  Pondering that result as I was painting away Sunday, I suddenly understood why so many of the masters’ paintings were odd-sized–not just 22 x 31, say, but 22 and 3/8 by 31 and 1/2.  They must have cropped their paintings to achieve the optimum composition for each.   For the Old Old Masters, the frame sizes were not standardized anyway.

Upon further reflection today, I realize what a handicap we modern, thrifty painters  accept, those of us who strive to paint to a standard size frame.  My very best frames come from a company that sells only standard sizes, and you have to buy of lot of them at one time.  Their frames have “closed corners”, which means the frames are put together before the finish (gold leaf, e.g.) is applied.  You won’t see a seam in the corners.  The other kind of frame is “chop” or something like that, and on those frames  the seams are discernible.  When a painter reaches the level of selling for $50,000 a painting , he or she will order a custom, closed-corner frame and pay thousands of dollars per frame.  I’m not there yet.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at her law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

More from the Circle of Six

Posted by Aline on
Artists and Model

Artists and Model

I completed this painting last Friday, and there seems to be universal agreement that it is one of my best, knocking last June’s  “In the Artist’s Studio” out of the top spot.  What makes it best is, I believe, the additional interest contributed by the figures in the background, and I surely do hope I did not go overboard in depicting them.  I was acutely aware of the need to not compete with the central figure of the model, and I therefore had intended to be much sketchier with the artist figures.  But, as happens so often to me, the painting wrested control from me.  So far, no one admits to thinking the background figures are too prominent.

As I laid it out for you last week:  Tony is still the one on the far left, and Steve is the one across the room from me.  Both of them started over on new works this week. Here is Steve’s, and after it is Tony’s–in paint this week (hurrah!):

Steve's drawing

Steve’s drawing

Tony's painting

Tony’s painting

Continuing around the room counterclockwise, next is Fletcher’s painting, then Nita’s.

Fletcher's painting

Fletcher’s painting (awesome knee!)

Nita's painting

Nita’s painting

Heather was not with us this week; she was a casualty of the snowstorm we had the day before.  Elizabeth couldn’t make it either, a worrisome thing; I hope you will eventually get to see some of her work.

I’ll keep it short and (hope-you-agree) sweet this last day of the year 2012.  Happy New Year!

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at the Soo Rye Art Gallery in Rye NH; at her law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

Circle of Six, Sometimes Seven

Posted by Aline on

Gentle readers, particularly the artists among you, are  you wondering at the many opportunities I get to paint from live models?  How does that happen when there is no way could I afford it on my own?  It happens because I am  lucky enough to have friends who are just as obsessed as I am, and another friend slightly less possessed but able to offer us the hospitality of her studio.  With the advantage of so much practice since last Spring, we have been progressing as artists. One by one, each of us has turned from drawing to painting.   Suddenly, two weeks ago, I looked around the studio and discovered sights amazing and inspiring.   Since then I have been collecting as many images from the stalwarts as I could, to share them with you.

So this week I  celebrate the team, the Circle of Six (sometimes seven) who  show up week after week, sometimes twice a week, each week producing better and better art, and now producing it better with paint.

Heather Lord was the original painting fool among us.  I remember her years ago, bringing her paints to the Saturday Life Group, trying desperately to capture those short poses with oil paint.  Daft, but the results were vibrant.  It was her desire for longer, painting-possible poses that last April, led to our Tuesday morning experiment with 3-hours-as-default programming.

This Fall, with the consent of Peter Clive, our Friday workshop instructor, we continued with 3-hour program.  Lately, for both Tuesday and Friday sessions, we have enjoyed double sessions on the same pose. We have just come off two straight weeks with  Becky in one pose, and started on another pose that will continue next week.)  I was lucky enough to get photos of Heather’s paintings of both poses, the second one still a work in progress.

From Heather, week 1

From Heather, pose 1

Heather's painting of Rebecca [Work in Progress} week 2

Heather’s painting of Rebecca [Work in Progress} pose 2

My own portrait of Becky in week 1 of pose 1 was in last week’s blog, “Painting Faces“.  Week 2 of pose 1 is toward the end of this blog.

After noticing what fun the two painters (that’s Heather and I) were having, the others decided to give painting a try too.  Nita Van Zandt was one of the first to brave the new frontier of painting, and right away–way too quickly we first adopters carped–she began creating  bold, vivid images, experimenting, of  course, because painting is  all about experimentation.

Nita's, week 2

Nita’s, pose 1

Elizabeth Peck–no one works harder than Elizabeth to perfect her art.  She takes countless workshops and can quote some famous artist on almost any point.  However, she was too busy to furnish a photo this time.  I hope we can catch her later.

For years perhaps, Fletcher Taft had been drawing with pencil or Conte crayon.  He produced small, delicate images, quite lovely, but not “bold” or “adventurous”.  Look at him now!

Fletch's, week 1

Fletch’s, pose 1

Fletcher's week 2

Fletcher’s pose 2

Nancy Healy has  been at this longer than any of the rest of us.   Her artistry was and is already mature, so “progress” is less striking and unnecessary for her.  She favors painting with pastels,  despite its drawbacks.  (Pastel paintings are very fragile.)   Like the rest of us, Nancy doesn’t worry about selling, and she is a master with her pastels.

Nancy's pastel

Nancy’s pose 1

The sometimes-seventh member of our circle is Tony Fiore.   Tony is a man  “who knows a lot”.  About everything.  But not in an obnoxious way.  He entertains us with random knowledge on those days when his sailing does not interfere with his art-making.  Like most of us (except Nancy), he is a frequent student at the Institute of Art (the “Tute”, he likes to call it).  He was the last of us to try painting, possibly because he refuses to paint in oils, but eventually he could not resist, and for week 1 of pose 1, he brought his acrylics to give it a go.  Unfortunately I did not get a picture of his painting from that week, and he reverted to charcoal this week.  For the time being, we’ll have to settle for  his drawing.

Tony's drawing of Becky

Tony’s drawing pose 1

I had a particularly good week myself.  I completed one on Tuesday that may be my best yet, and started one on Friday that I will be finishing up next week.  Here they are:

Seated on Red Drape (Tuesday)

Seated on Red Drape (Tuesday)

Seated on platform, WIP, Pose 2

Seated on platform, WIP, Pose 2

I accidentally smudged the first one in the course of getting it home, but decided not to repair.   I took a photograph at an angle to the second one so as to avoid glare, so that’s why it off kilter to the camera.  But no glare!  When finished, there will be a suggestion of the two artists painting in the background, and one of them is Tony.  The other is Steve, who comes so rarely that despite his role as model for this painting, is getting no glory.  Yet.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at the Soo Rye Art Gallery in Rye NH; at her law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

Painting Faces

Posted by Aline on

Lately, in a change-up from the nudes, I have been trying to paint faces.  I suppose in the back of my mind I had been harboring some hope of getting good enough at painting faces to paint portraits.  The master of portraits is John Singer Sargent.  I’m beginning to realize that I will never ever be good enough to paint a portrait that I could even show to JSS for a critique.  No, of course I’m not aspiring to paint as expertly as JSS, but there is a continuum, let’s say of 100 points.  JSS is 100.  I had hoped to reach 80.  And for a while, it had seemed doable, as I gradually captured more and more of the likenesses of my subjects.  But OMG, it dawned on me between this and that stray thought, almost casually, that capturing a likeness is simply putting the correct shape in the correct spot, sort of like the police artist who renders the likeness of a suspect from the selections of a witness.   A likeness is only the beginning of a portrait, a toe in the water of portraiture.  I did two likenesses this week.

Close up of Becky's Face

Close up of Becky’s Face

Close up

Close up

Neither of them qualify as portraits.  Let us compare JSS’s portraits.

First, his portraits are full length.  I can’t think of a single JSS painting of a face.  (He did do many smaller charcoal or pencil drawings of facial likenesses, which I love to copy.)  “Portrait” signifies so much more than facial features.  “Portrait” suggests that attributes of the subject’s disposition are revealed.   The posture of the subject, the objects held by the subject, all contribute toward conveying what the subject holds dear and what attitude the subject takes toward life.

Second, consider the monumentality of effort that JSS put into his portraits.  Despite the fact that he was superbly accomplished and experienced, he would not complete a portrait with fewer than eight sittings (according to Wikipedia) and rumor has it that in at least one instance, the unfortunate subject had to submit to something like 80 hours of sitting.  And by the way, again according to Wikipedia’s source, he usually got the likeness right away, in the first sitting.  The rest of the sitting time, the bulk of his efforts, had to do with everything other than the likeness.

So in conclusion, I have not yet completed a real portrait, or even come close.  And if I were good enough to get so far as to complete one in my lifetime, which is alas limited to another 30 years at best, I should have by now received some inkling of the possibility.  I continue to make progress, but I will never arrive.

But hey!  I’m having a wonderful time.  Here is the lovely nude that escaped my camera last week, and a few more from this Saturday’s session:

Attitude in 20 minutes

Attitude for 20 minutes

10-minute pose

10-minute pose

5-minute pose

5-minute pose

35-minute pose in charcoal

35-minute pose in charcoal

You might like the 5- and 10-minute short poses better than the longer 35-minute pose.  That 5-minute pose is the best pose–wish I could have had an hour with it.  (The 50-minute pose was too horrible–I won’t even look at it, much less photograph it.)  The photos this week were, by the way, brought to you by my phone, pitch-hitting for the digital single lens reflex made by Nikon.  Not too shabby for a camera phone.

After our grueling session in the morning, a few of us SLG-ers got together for a party that night, and someone else’s camera phone caught this totally unposed candid shot of a few luminaries in attendance.  Not.

Members of Saturday Life Group at Xmas party

Members of Saturday Life Group at Xmas party

From left to right:  Marion Hazelton, Joey Pearson, Bea Bearden, Larry Christian (yes, THE Larry Christian), and me.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at the Soo Rye Art Gallery in Rye NH; at her law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

Slacker!

Posted by Aline on

I only painted thrice last week, and it’s  thanks to my Tuesday and Friday morning life drawing sessions and the Saturday Life Group that I accomplished that much.  It made me realize how little time I have been putting in on studio projects, and on painting in the great outdoors.  I used to be a pretty decent, very enthusiastic plein air painter.  Without actually counting, I would bet I produced over 50 plein air paintings in 2011, compared to 25 this year.   I miss it.  But so much of my artistic energy has been absorbed by the figurative and portrait sessions that I haven’t been carving out time for plein air outings.  Now the weather is getting nasty outside.  My New Year’s resolution, adopted early, is to find more opportunities to get outside to paint–starting with our first ever Bartlett Artists Winter Getaway in January, followed by a visit to Mary on Marco Island, probably in February.

Meanwhile, the story of this week:  Since our Tuesday model and our Friday model and our next Friday model is the same person, those of us who do both Tuesday and Friday decided to make it a repeating pose, enabling a total of 9 hours on one pose for those who wanted it.  I will probably the only one of us who will use all three sessions on a single painting, although I expect not to use the entire final session on this painting.

"Huis Clos" ("Inside closed doors" or "no exit"?) WIP after 2d of 3-session pose

“Huis Clos” (“Inside closed doors” or “no exit”?) WIP after 2d of 3-session pose

One of the more interesting aspects of this painting is the background architecture.  I had recently watched a video, part 1 of Dan Thompson painting a figure, in which he recommended painting in the background, at least temporarily, in order to use it as a roadmap.  It works.  Before I drew in the Exit door on the left of the painting, I had drawn the figure’s arm too close to his body.  By situating the frame of the door where it intersected the body, I uncovered the drafting error in the arm.  The cubicle on the right (it’s the bathroom) helped me with sizing the figure’s left leg (leg on the viewer’s right).

Because I knew about the extended pose, I started this painting on a 16×20 sheet of primed linen.  I intended it to be a whole body pose, but allowed my impulsive first blocking in to change my mind.  What you see is the product of two sessions, and it is almost finished.    Some tinkering with the facial features and decisions on the background are needed next week.  When it is finished, I will roll it up and stash it away with so many other paintings on which I have lavished hours of time and effort.  And love.  Paintings that, unlike landscapes, no one else is likely to savor.

At  SLG (Saturday Life Group) I continued the experimentation with compressed charcoal that I had started in Larry Christian’s class at the Institute.  Here is the final pose of the session:

40-minute pose, view of the back

40-minute pose, view of the back

Yes, I do like backs.

There is another  drawing, from a 20-minute pose, that I wanted to include today, but for some reason, the photo I thought I took of it did not turn out.  Too bad.  It was a good one, and different from the one above.  I will include it next week if I can work it into next week’s topic, whatever that might be.  I hope next week’s topic will include work in my studio, inspired by the successful completion of my reorganization exertions.  Yes, that’s my excuse for no studio painting:  I have been laboring on moving stuff, and removing stuff, to create more space in my bedroom/studio for the studio portion.  Books, heavy books, had to be carried downstairs to make room for just art books on the studio shelves.  Underbed storage units had to be emptied to make room for  clear bags, saved drawings and such art-related, seldom-accessed items.  Dust bunnies had to be captured and disposed of (sneeze!).  Furniture had to be rearranged and some of it relegated to the guest room.  Today, I ache all over.  Well, that’s nothing new.  Arthritis.  Really slowing me.  Down.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at the Soo Rye Art Gallery in Rye NH; at her law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

Lessons Less Enjoyed

Posted by Aline on

Sometimes I struggle and I’m not sure why.  Flailing is probably the more descriptive term.  Such was the case this week.  I was painting from life one of my favorite models, and I thought I was doing all the usual stuff, noting proportions, juxtapositions, etc.,  getting all the puzzle pieces in place.  But the result was not coming out right.  As Dan Thompson says in one of his videos, if the measurements are correct but it doesn’t look right, it’s not right.  The eye is the final judge. That is true of all painting from life–I have heard myself make that excuse (“hey, that’s the way it was for real”) and simultaneously cringe, because I do know that reality is not a justification for failing to satisfy the eye.  But in this case, I really, really want to understand why my usual tools were not working.  I still don’t have the answer, but I have perhaps a theory.  But first, to deal with the most glaring mistakes, I made some repairs back in my own studio.

Seated Nude, WIP

Seated Nude, WIP

Easy to fix was the arm in the back (her right arm), which was too large.  Because that arm was farther away, it must look smaller than the one in the foreground.   The bigger problem was the length of her torso.  While amending the right arm I also brought it down a smidge, thereby shrinking the torso the tiniest bit.

Seated Nude

Seated Nude

I think this helped, but it didn’t solve the puzzle.  Perhaps the figure is just too skinny?  My model is rather thin, but she is not particularly long limbed.  My guess now is that everything is too long (or not wide enough), but only in the torso does that exaggeration jar the senses.

As if to make up for that struggle, the gods of painting blessed my effort on Sunday to paint a portrait of Grace wearing her glasses.

Portrait of Grace

Portrait of Grace

Keeping the glasses on was Adrienne’s idea.  I painted around them until I could no longer avoid them.  I tackled them very delicately, framing them in with mere wisps of paint.  But one of my goals was to show the reflections as well, so I could not stay timid.  One thing about glasses:  you’ve got to get real accurate to matching one lens with the other–more so than with the eyes.  The eyes are often seen from different perspectives, one going round behind the face while the other is in full view.  But glasses are pretty much right there, perched on the nose, and aside from perspective, should match up exactly.  Well, almost exactly.

I am most pleased with the mouth.  Doesn’t she look alive enough to plant a kiss on you?  I worked and reworked the mouth, until it is almost where I want it to be.  Grace will be back in two weeks to enable Adrienne and me to finish our respective starts.  I want to perfect the philtrum (that groove between nose and upper lip), the nose, perhaps the eyes, and the hair.  And the background.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at the Soo Rye Art Gallery in Rye NH; at the law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

The Struggle (with compressed charcoal)

Posted by Aline on

I’m pleased to report that I did not chicken out.  Monday a week ago, I proclaimed my intent to deploy compressed charcoal in Larry Christian’s life drawing class, and on Tuesday I did just that.  I had prepared myself by acquiring a large bag of cots.  What is a cot, you ask?  They are little rubber caps for fingers.  They look like condoms.  Larry said they would fit his dog’s, well, you know.  I thought I would need only one cot, for the third finger, which I favor for smearing soft willow charcoal.   I soon discovered that compressed charcoal attaches itself to fingers that merely touch the stick.  By the end of the class, I had one cot on every finger of my right hand, because all of them were handling the stick.  My thumb is fatter than my other fingers, and all my cots were medium-sized to fit my other four fingers, so my poor thumb suffered mightily from the constriction of blood flow; after all that, my thumb still got covered in dust because of a pinhole leak in the tip of the cot.

Smearing, the technique that I love to use with ordinary, vine charcoal, is not a good technique for compressed charcoal.  You can’t soften a mark left by compressed charcoal–you can only make it look messy.  You’ll see.

I started with a test sheet of mark-making.

A test of handling

My sticks were square, but not precisely square.  One side of a square might produce a perfectly even application of charcoal, while the side next to it will produce streaks of darker lines at the edge.  Unless you were expecting and planning for those streaks, this would be quite upsetting.  Because THERE IS NO CORRECTING OF MARKS MADE BY COMPRESSED CHARCOAL.  You can start light and get darker, but you can’t reverse direction.   If you try to erase, you’ll probably sink the boat.

Gestures, no. 2

Upper left–that’s what happens when you try to smear or spread the mark left on the paper by compressed charcoal.  Yucky!

Gestures, no. 1

gestures, no. 3

Gestures, No. 4

Gestures, No. 5

Gestures, No. 6

You’ll notice that I am not drawing with lines.  Instead, I am trying to create form by darkening the space around it, or by filling in form with a darker value.  Given the size of the charcoal stick, details can’t make it into the picture.  You can probably deduce from a few stray boobs that our model was not a man.

The magic of the compressed charcoal comes from its revelation of the grain of the paper.  Almost anything you do can look cool.  To the extent that these gesture drawings are successful, it is probably because I didn’t have time to find ways of spoiling them.  The more time I got with a pose, the harder it became for me to adjust to the unique properties of the compressed charcoal, as these next three poses demonstrate.

Struggle no. 1  Where do you go when you can’t draw the face or fingers?

struggle no. 2 still trying to complicate things

Struggle no. 3 Falling back on lines

Too black, too soon, those last two.  I resolved thereafter to slow down, tread softly.  Restraint is key.

Stuggle no. 4

Finally, I feel I am getting somewhere.  Can you make out the smudges from my fingertips (actually from the cots on my fingertips)?  By this time, my finger cots were layered in thick, greasy, black soot.

Struggle no. 5–close, or there?

Because the back view is my favorite, or maybe because this was our last pose of the night, whatever, I finally produced something of which to be proud.  My light, early marks that were “wrong” (too wide buttocks) did not detract from the beauty of the final drawing.  The paper I was using was low-quality sketch paper.  I can’t wait to see how these marks will look on some decent “laid” charcoal paper.

Isn’t it ironic that a drawing that looks as though it were born of wild abandon is actually born of restraint?

P.S.  Larry was quite pleased with me.

Catching the Odd Perspective

Posted by Aline on

I haven’t mentioned it before, but I have been taking a figure drawing class at the Institute with Larry Christian.  Larry’s approach to drawing the figure is the opposite of academic drawing.  He pushes us to  draw quickly, intuitively, expressively.   The techniques are familiar ones, but to please Larry, we must apply those techniques more fluidly and expressively to create an image that is unique.

I took this course with Larry before, in the spring of 2006, when I was just getting started as an artist.  At that time, I was obsessing on landscapes, particularly plein air painting.   Now that I have done a 180 on that preference, and also come to admire Larry’s drawings, I was motivated to retake the course, hoping to find out how Larry achieves his dramatic effects.  For the only images of his work I could find online, click here.  By way of contrast, look at Anthony Ryder’s drawing, so meticulous, and also lovely, but definitely academic in style.

Most of our work product in Larry’s course is not fit for public view.  We bring nothing  to completion.  We produce pages and pages of gesture drawings, 30 or more of them each week, and then do our exercises on the technique du jour.  One week it was drawing shapes instead of lines.  The next week, drawing negative shapes.  The week after that, creating form with darker values for shadows.  Most recent week, creating form by wiping out darker values to create light.

Last week did produce a few showable drawings.  And one of them contributed to the title of this week’s blog.

Bent

We applied charcoal evenly over the paper in order to create a non-white ground, and then erased that charcoal to bring out the shape of the model.  I got lucky in my angle on the crouching pose–the simplicity of the shape and the shadow distinguish this drawing.  The one before it was a more traditional pose, more complicated, yet less interesting.

Seated

Now that the course is winding to a conclusion, I have a pretty good idea of what I will be practicing in order to emulate Larry Christian:  Use compressed charcoal;  draw negative spaces; and my shadow areas will be all in one value.  That last point was a revelation.

The other example of an odd perspective is my painting from yesterday, Sunday.  I brought a larger canvas (12×16) and had less time (we didn’t get started until 45 minutes into our 3-hour session with the model), so perhaps that inspired me to paint more with the larger, simpler shapes.  Or maybe I was influenced by the success of my crouching pose above.  In any event, here it is:

Pillowed

In evaluating this painting, I remembered one from a month or so ago, which, by consensus of my friends, I had ruined by smoothing out the shapes within shapes.  It’s very hard to restrain oneself.  Right now I’m looking at that light patch on her forehead, thinking it should be smoothed.  But I had a light patch like that on her breast at one point, and it disappeared and I don’t even remember doing it.  That’s how hard it is to restrain oneself.

Following up on the Soo Rye Gallery opening last Saturday, I’m hoping you are dying to see my photos taken at the reception.

Totem displayed in Soo Rye Art Gallery

High and Dry on exhibit at Soo Rye

Lotus Studies, on exhibit at Soo Rye

Bea’s drawing, displayed in Soo Rye Gallery

Bea’s portrait of Becky

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at the Soo Rye Art Gallery in Rye NH; at the law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

The Week of “Super Storm”

Posted by Aline on

Haven’t  you heard enough about Sandy already?  New Hampshire is one of the suffering states, but I got off pretty easy.  Looks like I’m going to have to pay for a new roof without help from the insurance company.  Being unscathed myself, I insisted on  holding the Tuesday life group.  It was, after all, a pretty nice day, weather-wise, a little rainy but hardly any wind to speak of.  But most of the other artists were dealing with one storm-related problem or another and couldn’t get here for the group.  So it was just the model, another unscathed artist, and me.

We set up in the window side of the studio and had our model lounge on the familiar old brown leather sofa.  We found ourselves looking down on him, which felt strange at first.  The model stand that we usually use puts the model at my eye level or above.  (I sit to paint.)  We also forewent any supplemental lighting inasmuch as the sun was streaming right in at our backs (yes, SUN).  No dramatic shadows to fall back on for creating interest.  But as it turned out, I didn’t need any drama from lighting.  I accepted a full-on frontal foreshortened pose with the model’s feet practically in my face.  (Of course that’s an exaggeration–I did say “practically”.)  I was super pleased with this development because it furnishes a response to a taunt from  one of my colleagues who, upon viewing last week’s blog, complained that I was not giving enough attention to feet.  Since he is also one of our models, I suspect it is HIS feet he want more attention paid to.  Nevertheless, feet are feet:

The Feet Have It

I have to point out that it is not often that you get to depict the wrinkles on the sole of a foot.  Having recently watched a documentary on Lucien Freud, I also felt as if I were channeling him every so slightly, as I tried to paint the effect of hairy legs.

On Friday, four of us  met with Peter Clive for a quasi-workshop session.  Peter had during the summer been attending our Tuesday group whenever he could, but currently his teaching schedule at the NH Institute of Art kept him there on Tuesdays.  So he offered to come instead on Fridays and critique work in progress, when corrections are possible.  In the course of the summer and now the fall, Peter has seen quite a few of my paintings.  He compliments me by saying something like “That’s a nice study,”  or even “That’s a great study.”  He said that about The Feet.  Noting his use of the word “study”, I had reconciled myself to the reality that a serious artist does not go around producing a finished painting in three hours (actually less when you consider setting up time and break times).  The fact that I consider these paintings as complete if not completely wonderful just shows how far I am from being a serious artist.  There is a whole level of professionalism up there that I can only imagine.

However, the work that I did Friday was, at the end of the three hours, pronouced a “painting” by Peter, “not just a good study”.  Yes, he actually said those words.

An Actual Painting

He liked the composition, which I admit, I  had worked out early in the process. before paying much attention to the figure.  So that was unusual.  Perhaps because of that, a certain painterly quality emerged for the whole painting.  But when I got home, I noticed that the right leg was too short, both as measured against her left leg and as measured against her torso.  So I “fixed” it.  I tried to duplicate  the original foot before I covered it up, but the new foot  (FEET again!) doesn’t look right.   I may have botched this painting by correcting one errant part of it that may not have mattered in the big scheme of things.    All is not lost, however–the same model is returning in two weeks for the same pose, and I will get another crack at that foot.  I am also hoping to paint a larger version from the same pose.

Totem, 11×14, $300

Lotus Studies 13×13 $265

High and Dry, 11×14, $300

A plug for the Soo Rye Art Gallery opening on November 10, reception from 5 to 8 p.m.  The address is 11 Sagamore Road, Rye, NH.  All the artworks being exhibited are priced no higher than $300.  I contributed “Totem”, “Lotus Studies”, and “High and Dry”, three of my all-time favorite paintings.  If you can’t get to the opening, the show  continues through the end of December, but I expect that a lot of the art will be sold at the opening.

Here is some history for these three paintings:

Totem was accepted in a regional show juried by Don Stone for the Rockport Art Association (Massachusetts, not Maine).  I painted Totem on the coast of Rhode Island, near Narragransett, with my artist friend, Mary Crawford Reining.  The totem, actually more accurately called a cairn, in the painting really did exist exactly as I painted it.  Other cairns had been built by person or persons unknown, but this one was the most adventurous.  It was more than a cairn–so I titled it Totem.  Earlier in that morning, I had painted another, more complex view of this rocky beach, and had an hour left over.  Only much later did I  realize until later what a successful painting Totem was.

Lotus Studies won Best in Show at a Manchester Artists Association exhibit, about a year ago when the MAA had a gallery of its own, but I created it at least a year before that for the Women’s Caucus for Art annual 6×6 show.    That had been my first year in the WCA, hence my first 6×6 show.  I had easy inspiration from photographs taken at the lotus pond in Wickford, Rhode Island, again visiting Mary.  The next year we tried plein air painting at the pond, but my output was worthless.

High and Dry has no  distinction to report, but it deserves an award, in my humble opinion, for oozing the most charm.  I have Mary Crawford Reining to thank again, for High and Dry:  this time I was a visiting her Marco Island home for perhaps the third year in a row.  None of my Florida paintings had amounted to much until this one, and I still consider it the Prize of my Florida collection.  Funny thing is, Mary had had her eye on this boat for a long time, wanting to paint it but never having got around to it.  So I swoop in and steal her subject as it were, and make it one of my best from Florida.

Only in the writing of these descriptions did I notice the huge debt I owe Mary Crawford Reining for guiding me to these three inspiring subjects.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  at the Soo Rye Art Gallery in Rye NH; at the law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.   Also, if you want to plan ahead, on December 1-2, a two-day show  of unframed works at Adrienne’s studio on the 4th floor of  Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH; the artwork will be priced no higher than $150!  At least six artists are participating in this sale.

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.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

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

Posted by Aline on

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.

Margaret

Posted by Aline on

Last week, Becky was my headliner.  This week, Margaret is the star.  Margaret is another of our regular models.  She met with a terrible mishap last Spring:  While modeling for another group–in a standing pose, she fainted, and crashed from  the model stand onto her jaw, breaking it in three places and damaging 11 teeth.  Young people don’t buy health insurance, and Margaret was just past the age when she could have been included under her parents’ policy.  But you’d never know from her cheerful attitude that the whole traumatic, painful and expensive mess was anything but an adventure.  She even celebrates the scar  under her chin.  So let’s celebrate her this week, and her youthful exuberance that refuses to be bottled up.

The paintings, all painted in the past month, are shown in chronological order.

Figure on the Green Tuffet

Margaret, portrait from the right side

Second portrait of M, left side

We were so happy to see her again, that we have cut her some slack with the talking.  She’s a talker, and even a jaw wired shut could not completely shut her up, according to her dad (as reported by Margaret).  That relatively silent period probably increases the happiness she feels now in being able to talk nonstop.   Stop her we did, eventually, because you just can’t paint a face that is talking.

AlineLotter 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.

Letting down

Posted by Aline on

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

Posted by Aline on

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

Posted by Aline on

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.

Painting outside in not so random back yard

Posted by Aline on

Some Back Yard!

Saturday I got out to paint with the New Hampshire Plein Air painters for only the fourth time this season.  There are two reasons for that rarity–first and primarily, Sharon, our leader, and my usual ride for these activities, was knocked low  for the season by precautionary chemo and radiation treatments; and second, I have been satisfying my painting urge with the twice-a-week life painting sessions.  (Last Saturday I got out, in my own car!, and painted two scenes in Portsmouth, part of the Art Festival paint out organized by the NH Art Association–but I left my paintings behind for a wet paint sale, without grabbing photos first.  No, they didn’t sell, and I will get them back eventually, and if they look as interesting as I remember, I will post photos of them then.)

So this Saturday we showed up at an Open House in Madison, NH (two and a half hour drive from Manchester) to decorate the grounds with our artistic activities.  The place would also make a great artist colony.  The realtor lured us with promises of food, drink, bathrooms, and good views.  She came through on all counts.  We’d like to buy the property, but it’s a little outside of our means.  So we are hoping it doesn’t sell quickly so she will have us back in the Fall.  There’s a view across the fields of a cluster of buildings, including a churchly steeple, that I have my eye on.  But the most compelling view was this one of the water and its reflections.

Back Yard photo

My position was dictated by the presence of a watercolorist working to my right, so the tree was smack in front of me.

I think it’s important to document all the discomfort a plein air artist has to put up with, after jostling for a decent view of the desired subject matter.  I had to peek around the sides of the tree to see what was going on in the margins.  I was on a hill– fortunately, facing downward.  Sideways would have been impossible.  Because I was on a hill, my sandals dug in between the toes.  So I did the sensible thing and went barefoot.  The flies of Madison apparently go gaga over bare feet.  Luckily I had my bug spray with me, and doused the feet.  (No more bug issues, which is amazing.  I suspect the realtor of debugging the property before we got there.)  I was standing to paint, so my back was hurting.  To give it respite and get a longer view of my painting, I had to get out from under the tree (see that branch in the foreground?), and climb uphill to my chair, whence I took the above photo.  Can you even see the painting from there?  Here is a better look at my work in progress.

Some Back Yard! WIP

The sight that attracted me to this painting was the dark and light reflections in the water.  You can see in this photo that I started by laying in the darks first.  By the way, to lay out  my composition, I was drawing with paint from my new tube of Michael Harding Red Umber.  Since I never heard of Red Umber before, I thought you too might be curious about it.  Then, after I got some beautiful reflections in, I allowed the leaves of the irises or lilies to obscure the water.  By that time, I had dragged my chair downhill and was dabbing away at the painting from a position below it.  Shocking?  There are no rules, damn it!  I regret not taking more WIP photos.  Could be that the painting was much better somewhere midway, before my back started to kill me.

Naturally, I still got in my two life painting sessions on Tuesday and Sunday.  Tuesday I experimented with more extreme colors mostly in one range–yellow to red.

Male Nude in Red and Yellow

Sunday’s painting is either unfinished or a study.  A lovely Sudanese refugee posed for us, her very first experience at modeling, in one of her native dresses.

We will have her again in the same pose next week, so I will have to decide whether to revisit what I started yesterday, or start over.

Yannette

One factor:  I did yesterday’s work on a 20×16  piece of canvas, taped to a board.   Seems a waste to paint a study on something that large.

They (good artists) say that worrying about waste is something a good artist gets over in time.  Not there yet.

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 Bedford Public Library, in Bedford; 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.

The color black

Posted by Aline on

It’s a paradox.  Scientifically, black is empty of color, and white, the color of light, contains all the colors. But an artist wishing to paint the color black selects all of the darkest colors on his/her palette and mixes them together.  It’s a  delicate balance to keep one of the original colors from dominating, but done right, it creates black.  So there are two kinds of black–the kind that is devoid of color, and the kind that contains all the colors.

Lately, I have been talking about painting all the colors I can find in Caucasian skin.  “White” skin.  More accurately, light skin.  Today I have two new paintings of a “black” model.  More accurately, a really dark-skinned model.  Not my first really dark skin, by any means, but my first while consciously searching for more color in skin tones.  I honestly don’t know, as I put this blog together, whether being color-conscious has made any difference.

My very first portrait class, a few years ago, utilized a black model, but I don’t have a photo of that and besides, we don’t need to go back that far, surely.  Here is one I painted last fall or spring from a life drawing (so I was imagining the color):

Proud (Nude Seated on Pedestal)

From the looks of it, I used a lot of burnt sienna and ochre.

Here is a portrait from life done last spring:

Sabrin in the Gold Chair

Looks like I started with burnt umber.  Sabrin’s arm photographed grayer than the actual painting, so the color here is not quite as awful as it looks.  I used a lot of purple here.

Here is a head shot of the same model:

Girl in the Red Turban

I was in such a hurry–the model was very late to arrive, that my choice of colors here must have been pure instinct, based on what I saw.  Let it be acknowledged, however, that the model’s  skin was quite a dark brown, not caramel brown.

Then, just a few weeks ago, I posted this painting of Grace in the yellow chair, which I believe is my first live painting of her.  Apparently, I found some red in her.

A Nude Study in Brown, Mustard Yellow and Lime Green

All of that was done without much thought.  Some thought, just not as much as I have been wallowing in lately.  Gosh, I hope that’s a sign I am becoming a better artist–more time to wallow in thought.

I’m skipping over the next two–one because of the hot pink drape that I hated, and the other because I hated the whole thing (although I have not  yet destroyed it).  If you feel compelled to check it out, the hot pink drape was two weeks ago, and all-bad one here.

Finally, drum roll please, here are the two from last week:

The red hairband (Nude Reclining on Blue Stand)

Nude, On the brown leather sofa

I hope you can tell which was the earlier, because I tackled the second one with even more resolve to find colors other than brown.  One problem I have with the darker, brown base is that the color tends to gray down if you just add white, like that arm in Sabrin.  Lighter colors seem easier to keep pure.  No, that’s just an excuse.  The truth is, I couldn’t see any colors that were not variations of brown.  Mostly warm browns.  My model said other people have claimed that they see blue in her skin.  Not me.  Maybe some navy blue in the shadows.  Maybe some hint of sky blue in the highlights (as I found on the Girl in the Red Headdress).  Maybe purple in the shadows.  But no aquas, no greens.

I am loving the brown sofa painting, regardless of color issue–the pose and composition are very pleasing.  Almost lost the foot, but managed to rescue it by foreshortening the lower limb.  Also, I discovered, with my new eye (cataract removed two weeks ago), that the blue drape reflected the brown of Grace’s skin, which was kind of startling.  Note that the brown leather sofa is a match to the brown leather recliner.  If we keep this up,  you are going to become familiar with every piece of furniture in Adrienne and Heather’s studio.

Grace is back on deck this Tuesday.  Maybe I should start by drawing her figure in green or aqua, instead of burnt sienna, just to see what effect it has.   Not kidding.

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.

Skin, Colors of

Posted by Aline on

Back in the Brown Recliner (Nude Seated in Recliner)

By now you should be aware, I have been caught up in an activity that could be headlined: Live! Nudes!  Good thing I am a little old lady with white hair, or regular people might suspect something irregular is going on.  This luxury of painting live nudes (as opposed to drawing) has come my way fairly  recently, thanks to the generosity of a fellow artist, Adrienne Silversmith, who lends her studio (nominal fee) for my Tuesday Group, and runs her own group on Sundays.  It was at Adrienne’s Sunday sessions last Spring that I first embarked on painting, rather than drawing, the models.  Why?  Because Adrienne had the model holding the same pose, not just for the 3-hour session, but for multiple successive sessions.  (I didn’t take advantage of the multiple sessions to continue a painting over more than one session–instead I made a series of  four paintings of “The Pose”.)

It was this simple formatting decision that opened the door for my fantastic voyage into live nude painting.  Most life drawing sessions are broken up into segments of quick poses, slightly less quick poses, and longer (1 hour) poses.  The quick poses get you warmed up, and challenge you with positions that a model could not physically hold for longer than 1 or 5 minutes.  Trying to paint short poses can be frustrating, although I did do it once when I had only painting supplies with me.

In the course of these few months of live nude painting, plus the portraits class that I took with Cameron Bennett, I have learned a few things about painting skin tones.  (Caucasian skin tones, that is.  I feel I am still in the experimental stage with darker skins.)

Before I had live nudes to paint, I painted them from drawings that I had made during our Saturday life group.  My very first one, a few years ago, came out all harsh in reds and blues, and I was disappointed in it. It went away to that special place reserved for things to do over, or paint over.  Then, after a long hiatus, I brought it out again, and painted over it with different colors.

From a Charcoal Drawing, a Painting of a Nude Woman

I may have tried a set of pre-mixed colors put together by Howard Sanden.  Sanden is one of the top portraitists of our time, and he had honed his skin-tone expertise to the point where he premixed his skin-tone colors.   Then he decided to sell those premixed colors, and I won a set on eBay.  I found them harder to use than mixing my own colors.  They interrupted my rhythm.  Figuring out how to use them added a layer of complication.  They limited my colors as well.   I wasn’t aware of that shortcoming at the time, but as you can see, I invented skin tones even here that were not to be found in Sanden’s palette.

When I was working from a black and white drawing, I had to invent my colors.  A lot of lavender shows up in my shadows there–probably because, as a plein air landscape painter, lavender shadows were what I was used to.  In a live model, lavender is not much there.  Maybe it depends on the model–most of my best paintings feature Rebecca, and her shadows can be red,  green, gray, red, and ochre, pink; and purple when I wanted it really dark.  For example:

(“In the Artist’s Studio”, my still favorite nude painting, which I keep finding excuses to show.)

So I have stopped worrying about skin tones per se. Instead, I try to evaluate my paintings on the basis of  value, and just enjoy the color.  Here and there I will throw in a few patches of traditional skin color, merely as a reference point for the viewer.  “Here’s what this skin looks like in the light.”

“Back in the Brown Recliner”, shown at the top of the blog, is my latest, from last Tuesday.  We started a about 20 minutes late, so I had to finish up the painting at home, which is kind of interesting in itself.  I seem to be on a clock of three hours, start to finish.  I don’t consciously pace myself to finish within three hours–it just happens.  Except last Tuesday, but that was because we spent a lot of extra time figuring out where and how we wanted our model to pose.

What we ended up with was a pose practically identical the “The Pose”–that Sunday pose held by the same model in the brown recliner for four weeks in succession.  But this time I had a different angle on it.   Here is the No. 4 painting in that original series.

The Pose, No4 (Nude Woman in Brown Recliner

I have 2 photos of this painting, taken a week apart.  Here is the other one.

The Pose, No. 4, v. 2 (Nude Woman in a Brown Recliner)

The colors are so different, it’s disturbing.   I believe the first one is more accurate.  Perhaps it goes to show how it’s not the color of skin, it’s the values and the heat that make or break a nude painting.  Well, any painting, really; it’s just more obvious with nudes.  It also goes to show that you can’t trust a photograph to convey the true beauty of a painting.

By the way, I’m posting larger versions of some of my paintings because I lately realized that you cannot click on an image to enlarge it.  That must have been something I remember from the iWeb days.  I hope you enjoy seeing the brush strokes up close.  I see you lose the title though.  I guess nothing’s perfect.

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; 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.

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

Breaking Through the Sticky Curtain–Not

Posted by Aline on

In an Artist’s Studio

Last week I mentioned the occasional magic of a painting that seems to complete itself,  all in one session (process known as “premier coup”  or first strike), and contrasted that happy event to my more common process of reworking and fussing over a painting.  Well, Tuesday morning, in the course of my regular Tuesday Life Group,  magic struck.  The result is above.

I long to be able to paint the way John Singer Sargent did.  I don’t mean I want to make paintings that resemble Sargent’s (although I would not turn down such a precious gift); rather I want to be able to place a brush stroke with confidence in just the exact right place for it, and not have to amend the color or value.  Sargent worked like a fiend for many years in order to attain such apparently confident perfection.  But even after he achieved the pinnacle of his brilliance, he continued to practice and try out options before putting paint to surface.   I have heard he sometimes restarted a portrait many (like, 20!) times before finding satisfaction.  So how can I , who have been painting for only six years, and painting people for maybe half that period, complain that about having to try this color, then try that value, and just generally operating in a constant state of experimentation?  Who do I think I am, anyway?  Not John Singer Sargent.

In “The Artist’s Studio”, however, I got a lot of strokes right, plus, perhaps most importantly, an interesting composition. Even the brashness of the spots where the canvas is showing through seems to bear witness to my energy, and pleasure.

In the past, I would have heralded such an accomplishment by proclaiming I had achieved a Breakthrough in my Painter’s Progress (the title of this blog, you know).  I would have expected every painting after the Breakthrough painting to follow in a trajectory of improvement because some kind of veil of ignorance had been lifted–I had seen the light, I knew where to go–finally.  But of course, the trajectory operates more like the stock market, up, up, and  . . . down.  I think of it now as a sticky curtain.  You can push through with great effort, glimpse the other side, once in a while even make some kind of a mark on the other side, but you never quite break contact with that sticky curtain on the other side.  You get sucked back.  Well, I get sucked back.

So I wasn’t surprised when the glow created by “In an Artist’s Studio,” only lasted until Sunday, when I sat down to paint, within three hours, another painting from life.   The Sunday painting is much more accomplished that what I was doing a year ago, even six months ago, and I consider it  a well done exercise.  I am proud of it, proud of my progress.  But glowing?  No.

Sunday Model June 2012

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

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

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

Drawing to Perfection

Posted by Aline on

. . . by which I mean, drawing TOWARD perfection.   It may be that technical skill in drawing is not so important in today’s art world, but I believe that it is something every true artist has to work at, at least until she gets inspired to do something so out of the box that drawing skill becomes irrelevant.  (I’m thinking Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, for example.  Jeff Katz?)   I figure that if I work at getting my drawings both beautiful and accurate for another, say, five years, I might then be in a position to move on.  That leaves me plenty of time to be great, provided I live as long as my mother did.  So that’s the Plan.  First:  perfection.  Second, greatness.

This week was a week without painting.  So I plan to unveil a bunch of new TV heads and two drawings from life, all with my stated goal of perfection in mind.  I’ll start with the TV heads.

David Cook, My Favorite American Idol

If you were not watching American Idol four years ago, or the 11th season program last week, you don’t even know who David Cook is, much less what he looks like.  He’s pretty.  But what inspired me to make these two drawing was the interesting attitudes and facial expressions.  (He was singing.  I hope that’s obvious.)

One of my favorite series is The Mentalist, and I think I’m not alone in that.  So you might recognize this portrait:

The Mentalist’s partner

Teresa Lisbon.  I’m sorry, I never learned the name of the actress who plays Lisbon.  This is her expression upon witnessing Patrick Jane’s declaration that he is quitting his job as a consultant for the California Bureau of Investigation.  She’s worried about his mental health.  Does it show?

Heroic Journalist

Heroic Journalist in “The Girl who. . . ” series (Swedish movies)

Character from “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”

These are two characters from the movie, “The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”, third in the trilogy that started with “The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo”.  One is the star (Swedish version) Michael Nyquist, and the other is a supporting role.  I had earlier drawn a portrait of our American version of Mikael Blomquist, Daniel Craig:

I think it is not as good as my more recent (by a few weeks) ones, which, if true, would be such an excellent indicator that I might reach my 5-year plan goal.

Last night I added  to my collection of heads–Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as currently depicted on PBS.

Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch)

Dr. Watson (Martin Freeman)

Holmes is played by a guy whose name is Benedict Cumberbatch.  I have been noticing him for some time now, bemused at how the Brits can allow a  comedic name like that out there, attached a guy looking so incredibly nerdy, and make a hero out of him.  So refreshing!

So those were practice.  The real test comes with the life drawing.  Last Tuesday I had three hours to create this drawing of a lovely nude back.  I could have used the same three hours to make an oil painting, and it might have come out well and been quite charming, but I’ve done a lot of painting lately, and I felt the need to hunker down and strive for the pure perfection of form and value as expressed with the lowly pencil.

The Perfect Back

The Perfect Back

To bring you up to date, hot off the press, as it were–just a few hours ago, I parted company with Dee.  Dee is a fellow artist whom I got to know from the Saturday Life group, before he moved to the Midwest.  Back in New Hampshire for a few days, he give me the gift of posing for me today.  I chose do a  portrait in pencil.  Before he left, I grabbed this photo to use later in perfecting my drawing:

Dee, for real

And here what I accomplished after two hours–a good start on the trickiest parts.

Portrait of Dee

The other news of the week is very disappointing.  The Sage Gallery, which I have been touting since it opened last September, suddenly called it quits.  As far as I know, not a single painting was sold (other items did attract buyers–stained glass, sculpture, photographs, etc.).   She (Janice Donnelly) got lots of media exposure, but somehow could not connect with the  serious art collectors.  Are there any serious art collectors in the area?  Maybe not.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

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

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

On My Own . . . Sort of

Posted by Aline on

No more class on painting the contemporary portrait.  No more Saturday life group.   Both are victim to the school calendar and to the need of the graduating Bachelor of Arts students at the NH Institute of Art for space to exhibit their senior projects.  (This is a wonderful exhibit, by the way; if you can get there during the run, you really should go.)  Even my Sunday morning ad hoc group was cancelled.  I had no organized artist activities for a whole week, and I had two whole weekend days with no workshops.  In short, I was on my own.

First I chose to clean up some paintings in waiting.  I went all the way back to my Florida trip in March for this one:

Marco Island Medical Center

The main focus of this plein air painting was the reflections in the big picture windows, and I was happy enough with how I portrayed them.  But the painting was unremarkable, dull, boring.  I thought I could jazz it up with new treatments for the tree and the grass.  Better now, right?

Next I turned to last week’s painting of our model in the brown recliner–painting No. 4 of her in that thing.  I did a little bit of this, a little bit of that, refining some areas, blurring others.

The Pose, Take No. 4

This might be Stage 2 in a multi-stage painting.  I’m thinking I would like the arm on the left more in the shadow, and perhaps all of her shadows should be darker.  I don’t care for the Barbie doll look of her features, but I’m not quite sure what to do about that.  What I do like is the new treatment of the aqua drape and  the background.

Another past painting touch up victim was last week’s “Iris Interpreted”.  I hope you like what I did to her face and the lower right corner.

Iris Interpreted

Finally, I struck out for new territory.  But it was territory based on last week’s drawing of the black and white couple.   Here is a glimpse of my set up as I copied the drawing into paint:

High Contrast in the making

Try as I might, I could not make his skin less white and her skin more black. That happens sometimes–the painting refuses to be what I want it to be.

I discovered the magic of a brayer on this painting.  The brayer is a roller of soft rubbery material.  It picks up and removes paint.   If you don’t clean it constantly, it also lays that paint down again somewhere else.  (I think it was actually meant to be a printing tool–and not one that comes in direct contact with the ink.)  You can see the effect in the background.  As I become bolder, I might even obliterate my carefully drawn figures in this way.

High Contrast

For the figures, I tried to keep the paint thick.  I was working on a slippery panel, so that was difficult.  Maybe that’s why I couldn’t get the effect I wanted.  Is this a good painting?  Good enough to forgive the flaws that I find so frustrating?

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Library Arts Center in Newport; at the NH Institute of Art in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

P.S.  Honey is recuperating from her surgery, and is getting back her spunk.

Speaking figuratively . . .

Posted by Aline on

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

A Splurge of Portraits

Posted by Aline on

“Splurge” seemed the right word, so I looked it up, and indeed, there is a secondary meaning that covers what I feel I have today:  an extravagant display.  Beginning with the figure workshop with Peter Granucci last Tuesday, through the class with Cameron Bennett, and and ending today with my last–no, my most recent–edits of the Sami and Noodles portrait, my week was full of figures and faces, most of them falling squarely under the category of portraiture.  Oddly enough, my favorite of the week is the most unlikely candidate.  I entered a contest to paint a portrait from a supplied photograph by Shan Peck–he is the photographer and the contest administrator and the juror.  It’s not a big deal, just a fun thing to do, and it became a project to do in my class with Cameron.  I can’t reproduce Shan’s photo here–he made a point of forbidding any use of it other than to paint the portrait–but you can link to it here.

Since we were encouraged to upload our works in progress, I snapped a few of those on my cell phone (had to figure that out first–what a banner week!).

WIP for contest

Contest Portrait, Final

Our Sunday model, Sabrin, was slated to keep the same post and dress as she had last week, so I went prepared to draw a charcoal portrait of her.  She was very late in arriving, however, so another artist volunteered to sit for us.  As a result, I came away with two charcoal portraits, one better than the other.  The first did not capture a good likeness.  If I had had the time, I hope I would have achieved a likeness.  As it stands, I believe I exaggerated the size of her nose.

HH Profile

The profile of Sabrin came out well, I think, likeness or not.  Her mouth was very interesting and challenging to capture.

Sabrin, in charcoal and profile

While we are on the subject of portraits, I took another crack at the portrait of Sami and Noodles.  It’s harder to capture children, I think, because you have to keep a light touch.   Their features are so delicate.   For that very reason, though, painting portraits of children makes for terrific practice in making marks at the precisely correct spot to provoke a translation in the viewer’s brain that matches reality.  Our eye/brain supplies so much of the information that an artist who tried to lay out all the information before you, especially in a child’s face, comes across as heavy-handed and awkward.  As a result of trying to avoid heavy-handedness, I spent most of my time today painting out the details that I had so carefully laid in earlier.  I may not be there yet, but at least I know where I want to be.

Sami and Noodles

I’m not done yet.  Remember, I promised a “splurge”.  Tuesday, Peter suggested that my last drawing was worthy of working up to a finished piece.  I had that drawing pad with me Saturday when my car broke down, so I was able to pass the time waiting for the tow truck by working on that drawing.  Never has such a usually tedious wait passed so delightfully.

G, in pencil

Nude woman in chair

Wait, there’s more.  Saturday morning (the regular Saturday life group) I completed two charcoal drawings with which I was happy.  One of my favorite models–it’s remarkable how much difference a good model can make to the drawing.  Last week’s was uninspiring.  This week’s–well, it’s what keeps me going back.

R, reclining

R, seated, in blue and yellow

I think that’s it.  Seven days, seven happy figure/portrait projects.

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

Skin Tone Struggles

Posted by Aline on

Sabrin, No. 1

My painting of Sabrin (pronounced Sabrine) is the result of one three-hour session with the model yesterday.  It was quite the exercise in skin tones, and I am still not happy with the arm closer to us–it’s too gray.  It’s so easy to tip over from a fresh color into mud, and I believe white is to blame most of the time.  I must have painted her chest a dozen times trying to get the value and the color just right.   While I labored over the skin color and her facial features, I succeeded in portraying the hands with my initial strokes.  So I am leaving them alone.  No finishing touches for them.   I wish I could produce an entire painting with that kind of verve and bravura.  Some day, perhaps.

Earlier in the week, I reported to Cameron Bennett at my contemporary portraits class with the two works I had done the previous Sunday (see previous blog).  Got good marks on one and failing marks on the other.  He didn’t like the quick head sketch one bit.  Not one tiny bit.  The other, the whole figure pose, was “charming”, but the head too small and the neck too long.  I received orders to fix that.  He gave me some really interesting suggestions on how to go about fixing a head that was already very good, just too small.  The best one:  take a photo of the original painting and use that to copy a larger version onto the original.  I never would have thought of that.  Here is that painting again, so you can see what we were talking about:

Adrienne in her tough guy outfit

He especially liked the feet, by the way, singling them out right away as a major contributor to the charm of the gesture.  Yea!  (I had started with the feet because they were my favorite feature of her pose.)

In other news from that class, I may have finished the reclining nude that I started last week.  Her head is looking too small to me now, but it is farther away so maybe I can argue perspective.  I labored over painting her face with just enough definition and would hate to have to start that over again.  You might recall that this is one of the heads that Cameron did not like in the original charcoal version of it.

With about a half hour left in the class, I started on another translation from charcoal to oils, this time looking for some new aspect to try out, to make my work “contemporary”.  I decided to paint the skin tones without white–or less white–and to isolate the red and yellow ochre ingredients.  Red for the shadows.  I ran out of time just at the point where I had wiped out the face in order to start it over, so what you will see below is truly a “work in progress”, not just an almost finished work needing a few tweaks here or there.

Study in Perylene Red and Yellow Ochre WIP

I also managed to put in a few hours this week tweaking older paintings.  One that is nearing a finished state is my original portrait of Sammi and Noodles.  I added yellow reflections in Noodles’ eyes, which gives away the origin of the image as a photograph.  But so what?–the image just cried out for that yellow in just that place.

Sammi and Noodles No. 1, almost 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; at the McGowan Fine Art Gallery in Concord; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

Two Steps Forward, One Back

Posted by Aline on

Adrienne in her tough guy outfit

It was a great week in terms of activity.  Wednesday the Granucci workshop group met for 4 hours of live nude drawing.  Thursday the Bennett class met for painting the contemporary portrait.  Saturday the Saturday Life Group met for its usual three hours of live nude drawing.  And Sunday I joined a new group that meets for three hours to paint or draw from a clothed model, who keeps one pose for the entire time.

Peter (Granucci) started us on shadows, and I am happy enough with my results to share with  you for the first time some of my drawings from that workshop.

Two quick poses from Granucci workshop

Exercise in Shadowing

Thursday night, I took in my drawings from Saturday and Wednesday in order to choose one to use as a basis for painting.  I narrowed it down to two:  the more developed one above, and one from last week, the reclining figure.  I was happy with both of the faces on these two, until I asked Cameron (Bennett) for advice on which to choose for my painting.  He didn’t like the faces.  I was so taken aback that I forgot to ask why.  Anyway, together we chose the reclining figure to paint:

Translation into Oil

Our model on Saturday was the same person who was modeling for SLG the first time I joined.  That was perhaps 4 years ago, and she hasn’t changed a bit.  I have mentioned before how I just accept a bad angle and try to make the best of it.   This week I tried, but I did not make the best of it.

Rear View

Extreme Foreshortening

In fact, I may have done better with the shorter poses, which were in pencil:

Series of poses from SLG:--5, 10, 20 minutes

Sunday morning I  joined up with my friend Bea to go paint at Adrienne’s studio, the same studio where we meet for the Granucci workshop.  Adrienne had arranged for a Sudanese model dressed in her native regalia, and Bea in particular was looking forward to painting the dark skin tones–she even prepared a special palette.  But the Sudanese model never showed up–signals got crossed or were not even received, apparently.  So Adrienne herself modeled for us, too upset to paint anyway, she said.  She held the same pose for the entire three hours, with generous breaks every 20 minutes or so.  I finished a small painting of her entire figure (the painting that leads off this post) and had a half hour to spare, so I started on a painting of her  head.  I was hoping that the limited time would push me to capture the essence with minimal strokes, a la Caroline Anderson (whom I have adopted as my muse, as recounted in earlier posts).

Alas, on my way home, the tape I had used to keep the full body portrait secured to its support came loose, and smeared the head portrait.  In the course of repairing the head, I lost the freshness and simplicity of the original.

How to Sport a Fedora

The full body one was easy to repair, and I don’t think I lost anything essential to it.

So I am kind of down in the dumps at the end of a relatively productive week, which is probably why I couldn’t bring myself around to getting this post out on time.

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; at the McGowan Fine Art Gallery in Concord; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

New Nudes

Posted by Aline on

Proud, in Color

I scored a few points in the contemporary portrait class Thursday, by painting from my own charcoal drawing titled “Proud”, which I featured in last week’s blog.  Keeping it loose, in the spirit of Caroline Anderson, was what I was after here.   I don’t know whether to call it a “work in progress” or an experiment.  I suppose if I go back to it to correct my mistakes, it was a WIP.  If I let it be and move on to another, it was an experiment.  Overall, I am not unhappy with my progress in losing my edges.  It takes a bit of acclimatizing.  I will get to a point that I think looks pretty good, but then I think I can make it a little better, and in the course of trying to make it better, I make it worse.  I’ll bet that sounds familiar to the artists reading this blog.  And that’s how I ended up ruining the head.  Sigh!

From Saturday Life Group, I could not decide which of two drawings I preferred to share with you, so I will share both.

Layabout

Layabout is a conventional, yet disturbing pose, which was hard to compose on the page.  My favorite part is her head.

Twist of Limbs

In Twist of Limbs, I got more aggressive with my charcoal, and I was enjoying the result.  However, you probably can’t see that her legs are crossed.  There must be a word for a section of an image that contains all the action compacted into one small area.  An area of concentrated complexity.  I took it on as a challenge, which is probably why I attacked the image more aggressively than usual.

You may or may not care to know that I finally attacked my big Mount Washington Bike Race painting.   I finished sketching in the major figures, leaving additional figures to the end where the composition may call for them, and I applied some paint, thinly.

Work in Progress

After finishing this sort of underpainting, my plan is to use this painting to experiment with some new techniques,  lost edges and palette knife.  Palette knife should be particularly useful in building the rocky surface of Mt. Washington.

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; at the McGowan Fine Art Gallery in Concord; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

Concentrating on Portraits: Faces with no Features?

Posted by Aline on

Of all the works I labored over this week, the above detail from a charcoal drawing comes the closest to being an actual “portrait”.  It looks like the model.  In fact, the entire drawing could be called a portrait in that it not only looks like the model, but it conveys the model’s attitude, which I have called “Proud”:

Proud

If you are a regular reader of this blog,  you already know that I am taking a course in contemporary portraiting at the NH Institute of Art, with Cameron Bennett.  One of the points that he made in our first class was that anything representing the subject can qualify as a “portrait”–if that is what the artist intends.  (One out-there example brought up by one of my smartypants classmates was Andy Warhol’s tomato soup cans.  She/he said he practically lived on tomato soup; therefore the soup-can paintings could be considered self-portraits.)

So suddenly I feel free to call my anonymous figure paintings “portraits” too.  I’m thinking of the studies I painted from the photos I took at the  Mount Washington Bike Race, discussed and reproduced in several of my posts from last fall.  As you will see below, I’m still working from those photographs, and I’m still trying to work more loosely.  To that end, I have stuck printouts of Carolyn Anderson paintings all over my easel to help me remember how little I need in order to convey eyes, nose, etc.  (Forget the mouth altogether.)  All this fits splendidly into another theme or goal, which was urged upon me by various art teachers to whom I have paid good money to criticize and guide me.  And that goal is to eliminate the detail.  I was never quite sure which details I should eliminate, so now I am on track to eliminate all of them, so that should produce something like progress, eh?

Last week I was struggling with a portrait of Sammi and Noodles, which got way too detailed.  (To see it, go back to last week’s post.)  Thursday night, I went to class bearing that sorry effort, along with my photograph of Sammi, and my drawing from the week before.  (All in last week’s blog.)  But I (wisely, I think) decided to make a fresh start on a new painting of the same subject.   Again I was seduced by the dog Noodles.  (Maybe I should just give up and do nothing but pet portraits.)   The depiction of Sammi was horrible.  I can’t show you how horrible because I smeared it out even while Cameron and I were shaking our heads over it.  He got into the spirit and started moving paint around with his fingers too, in random and varied directions, to show me how Carolyn Anderson would probably have attacked the painting.  (I use the word “attacked” to convey both possible meanings.)  Then at home yesterday I practiced on both versions of Sammi and Noodles, and here they are as they exist today, side by side:

No. 1, version 2

Sammi 2

xxxxxx

xxxxxxx

I’m not satisfied with either one, but don’t you agree that version 2 shows me moving in the desired direction?  I decided it was time to move on and apply whatever I learned to another project.  Here is the result:

Fans

I’m feeling good about this one.  The paint is very thick and still very wet, which is why I could not get a decent photograph of it . .  .  also why the colors may be a little too muddy, but I’m not going to worry about that right now.  The important thing is, I conveyed the gestures and attitudes of these three people without painting distinct features on them.  My previous Mt. Washington studies (yes, this too is from that race) had started to become that kind of thing, what with the loosely painted crowds.   Notice the crowd depictions above!    Maybe too abstract?  Hey, I’m feeling my way here.

But back to the portrait, the real thing, that I started you with today, the charcoal of “Proud”.   My favorite thing from this week.  I believe–I could be wrong, but I do believe–that there is no offending detail in that portrait.  I am going to take it in to class this Thursday and see what Cameron has to say.

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

Why is this man digging a hole, in the nude?

Posted by Aline on
J's back, three-quarter.

"This should have been easy"

Portrait of a young man resting on the handle of the shovel, contemplating the hole he has dug for himself.  Why is he digging a hole for himself?  Unimportant.  Why is he nude?  Hmmm.  He’s in a nudist colony?

I struggle with the titles of my nudes.  The models must adopt a pose that they can keep for 20 minute stretches (sometimes longer), so the figure is contemplative, dreaming, sleeping, reposing. . . well, you get the idea.   One could simply title this one “Nude Male”, but that would not distinguish it from all the other nude males in the portfolio.  One could number one’s nude males.  Or one could come up with some witty thought superimposed on the model, which is what I attempted to do today.  I was inspired by the captions attached to the animals photos that circulate the internet, which captions awe me with their inventiveness.  I think, however, that it works better for cats and dogs than it does for  a naked human being.  The caption needs to acknowledge the nudity somehow, to make it work better for the nudes.  Something like, “Only five more minutes and I can put on my pants.”

On this point Degas’s bathers had the advantage–their natural nudity, nakedness, did not have to be explained away.  (By the way, that exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts will be closing February 2.)

Today’s nude was the pick of last Saturday’s life drawing session.  Sunday I finished the reverse-painting-on-glass and delivered it to the owner, who was pleased.  I also finished the Covered Bridge.  In response to an excellent observation from one of my followers, I removed some offending slashes of white, which I guess I had intended to symbolize water laps.  When you paint loose, the results can be brilliant,  or when not so brilliant, just careless.  An artist needs another, more objective eye to catch those things, and it  doesn’t have to be another artist’s eye either.  I always listen to a criticism and act on it, unless I am very sure of my own contrary view.  (Many times, the stated objection does not actually identify the real problem–it could be something nearby that throws the viewer off.)  In addition to making that and other various improvements to the body of the Covered Bridge painting, I painted the sides of the canvas in colors approximating the action going on the main canvas.  The painting can now be hung without a frame, as a “gallery wrapped” painting.  That is important to me, as the artist, because otherwise I would have to invest in a frame in order to exhibit the painting.

The rest of Sunday was devoted to another project:  homework for my fifth (at least) course at the Institute with Cameron Bennett on portraits.  But this time, something different–for him and us.  We are trying to BE different, paint somehow “out of the box”, using as possible inspiration other contemporary portraitists who are painting in styles newly invented or at least newly applied.  The only artist on the list supplied by Cameron whose name I even recognized was Chuck Close.  I am not drawn to emulate his monumental portraits.  The artist I am drawn to is Carolyn Anderson.  Her portraits are so loose as to be almost not even there.

Detail from portrait by Carolyn Anderson

In class I tried to emulate Anderson in pencil, drawing a portrait from a photograph:

Drawing from photo of Sammi and Noodles

After drawing my careful image, I erased a lot of it so as to leave ghosts of the image.  This exercise was the starting point of my painting effort yesterday, but yesterday I tried to be looser right from the get go.  Nevertheless, when I reach the point where I thought everything was correctly placed, there was a lot of smudging and subtracting.  Not enough!  This is still a work in progress–don’t judge it too harshly, and remember what I am going for:

Sammi + Noodles portrait

This isn’t going to be easy!  Especially for me, who has been accused of getting too hung up on the details.  I love the details.  It’s a mystery then, why I am so beguiled by Carolyn Anderson’s way of painting.

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

Three Hours of Life Drawing

Posted by Aline on

I hesitated to expose an unedited display of everything I did in the course of a life drawing session–not all of it is worth going down in history–but I’ve got this blog to feed and I have done so little art this week that I am desperate.  First you have to agree not to sneer.  If you can’t promise that, you should refrain from going any further.

Our Saturday Life Group seldom varies from the following regimen:  five quick poses of one minute each, then a five-minute pose, then a ten-minute pose.  These total 20 minutes and earn a 5-minute break for the model.  Then a 20-minute pose.  In theory, at this point we have used up only 45 minutes of our three hours.  Over the next two hours and  15 minutes, we will typically ask for two different poses, broken up by breaks every twenty minutes.  The length of each “long” pose is usually between 40 and 50 minutes.  Once, maybe twice, since I have been a member, we got one longer pose over that two-hour period.  At that duration, I can start thinking about drapery and background, because I generally work  fast.   My Tuesday workshops with Peter Granucci are, more and more, informing my choices on Saturday morning, and one of things I am working on is speed.  Slowing down.  Getting it right in the beginning.

But one-minute poses don’t allow for getting much of anything right.  What you must do for a one-minute pose is quickly decide what you want to capture–the gesture, for example, is a good choice.  I had been using newsprint paper, both purchased and saved from packaging (one of my art suppliers uses crushed paper as packing material).  Peter frowns on using inferior paper for even the quick sketches–you should be practicing on the same quality of paper that you intend to use for your masterpiece.

So (coincidentally) this week, I decided to obey Peter, and left the newsprint at home.  Here are my five one-minute poses:

The first one, the one on the left, is my favorite.  I went for the delightful posture, and attacked it by first marking a few key points, then connecting them.  You can pretty much see those marks, which are slightly darker than the other marks.  After that pose, I pretty much fell apart and struggled to find my way.  But it doesn’t really matter–whatever comes of these exercises, they do warm you up, get you moving your arm and thinking in the  right mode.

Here is how far I got on the five-minute pose:

Getting it right entails measuring and lining up.  I do a  lot of that by eye, but sometimes I need to do some actual measuring and lining up using a straightedge.  For this one, I don’t remember using a tool.  I think I placed the forward foot in relation to the calf of the closer leg, but it doesn’t look correct now.  Instead of making sure that I got that relationship absolutely correct, I was busying myself with the more interesting light and shadows.  Aside from the mistake in foot placement, this drawing is not bad for five minutes, but it illustrates how haste makes waste, and why I must slow myself down even when I have only five minutes to complete the drawing.

Next up is a ten-minute pose, which seems wonderfully luxurious at this point in our sessions.  Usually I switch to charcoal at this point, but Saturday I decided to stick with the pencil because I must use it in Peter’s workshop.  Using a pencil forces me to slow down.  Because the pencil is so confining, I also chose to draw smaller, which led to two drawings on the same page–the ten and the twenty-minute poses:

With both of these, I tried really hard to slow down and get all the parts in the absolutely correct places.  These are OK, I think.

For the last two “long” poses, I gave myself permission to do my drawings in charcoal.  It seems weird to me now, but I used to be afraid of charcoal.  I can remember asking permission to start my first charcoals drawings with a pencil sketch.  Probably I was worried about being unable to erase, which is really silly because nothing could be easier than to obliterate a charcoal mark with a swipe of a finger.  But the best thing about charcoal is your ability to create shadows with a smear of a finger.  So much quicker than hatching with a pencil.

I like this one best.  We got two 20-minute poses and I was finished with the pose then, but some people wanted more, so she went back into it for another 7 minutes, and I used that time to create another version of her head.  She has a wonderful face to draw.

The final long pose was one I struggled with, which is a little strange because you would think this pose is easy:

I got hung up on her hand, and redrew it multiple times, and am still not happy with it.  But the bigger problem lies most likely in my beginning — too fast perhaps.  Looking at the pose now, I think she looks too uncomfortable.  Yes, she was leaning on her far-side arm, but her legs should look more relaxed.  I’m pretty sure I did the requisite measuring and checking, but something is not quite right.

After our session concluded, we went over to Joey’s house for the most wonderful party, to celebrate a great season of drawing.  We will start up again in January.

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 if you happen to eat at the Bedford Village Inn, check out the painting in the foyer.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

“I See Naked People”

Posted by Aline on

“I see naked people” was adopted last year by my life drawing group (SLG, or Saturday Life Group) as its motto on the occasion of its 20th anniversary.  I didn’t get it at first.  It’s supposed to evoke the little boy’s shocking statement in the movie ” The Sixth Sense “:  “I see dead people”.   We had t-shirts made up with the slogan on the front and an outline of a nude figure on the back.  I wore mine fearlessly to Home Depot and the like, oblivious to the curious stares until someone would ask me about it.

Recently, as a result of several visits to an exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, I came to realize that what we see in SLG isn’t naked people at all–we see nudes.  The MFA exhibit was the Nudes of Edgar Degas.  The best of his nudes are pastels of  nude women engaged in some kind of bathing activity with their backs turned to the viewer/artist.   One of the many innovations credited to Degas was this rendering of a person unclothed on purpose, that is, for a purpose of her own, rather than a person unclothed and posing for the benefit of an artist who wishes to draw or paint a nude figure.  The naked women by Degas were disturbing, therefore, stripped as they are of an artistic rationale.  Nakedness is shocking, nudity is art.  (If you think this is odd and hard to grasp in this day and age, consider the outrage that greeted Manet’s “Olympia”–she was depicted as a prostitute awaiting her customer, in a pose that had not shocked anybody when it was assumed by Venus, the goddess of love.  See the Wikipedia article here.)

Anyway, this week I am treating you to some nudes.  And what connects my nudes (albeit tenuously) to the foregoing two paragraphs is the word “people” in the SLG slogan.  Usually I don’t see naked or nude “people” because usually I only see one person/model at a time.   Models charge for modeling (clothed or not, but they get a little more for taking off the clothes), so it is  a luxury to have more than one model posing at  a time.  Especially since you can look at only one at a time, really.  I have trouble understanding why simultaneous multiple models would even be desirable– getting one figure right is challenge enough.  Be that as it may, I guess we had some extra money accumulated in the kitty, so one morning  a few weeks ago I went into SLG to find not one, not two, but THREE models undressing for our benefit!  Fortunately, I could not see all three of them well enough to incorporate all three into a single drawing.  Two was hard enough, thank you.

Double the Pleasure

We had two hours (less break time) to work this double pose.  Our third model took his pose on the other side, forming a kind of triangle.  Yes, he was a male.  Radical!

This past Saturday, we were back to the normal single model, suddenly seemingly so easy!

sketch, standing figure

seated figure

I remember complaining in the past about getting more than my fair share of back views, and although I still do seem to get a lot of backs, I’m not complaining anymore.  I have been humbled.  Backs are hard enough to do.  The challenge is to keep it simple even while suggesting the complexity of the bone and muscle structure beneath the skin.  I am still working all that out and thus may be faulted for overdoing the complexity thing.

While rooting around in my stacks of older drawings looking for something suitable to submit for an exhibit, I came across this one:

His Dreaming

Funny how a drawing I don’t even remember making could magically appear and rise to the top of my favorites.   I am fascinated to see how I used a light brown chalk to highlight his hair and applied those white strokes of light just as if I were as expert as, say, John Singer Sargent.  Yet I recall nothing of the process.  Probably it went fast, and was followed by something else that loomed larger in my mind.  I usually make a note of the length of pose and the date on my drawings, so I am able to confirm that it was a 40-minute pose, and it turns out I had to accompany my granddaughter to a court hearing right after the drawing session.  Yes, a court hearing could obliterate whatever came before it.

After patting myself on the back for the discovery of “His Dreaming”, I tore up many, many others that embarrass me now.  God forbid I should be subjected to the fate of Degas with  my inferior projects unearthed after my death and exhibited in a museum (I should be so lucky, but this is “My Dreaming”) alongside the good stuff, where pompously overinflated amateurs (like myself) can sniff and proclaim them to be worse than unremarkable.

That I am getting better is proved by the callousness with which I tossed my inferior stuff, and I think my progress can be attributed to the work I have been doing with Peter Granucci.  What we do in his figure workshop is all practice, practice, practice, so there’s not much to show off–yet.  He has promised that exhibit-worthy projects lie in our future.  (As if a venue could be found for an exhibit of nudes.  Naked people.  Oh, the horror.)

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

Posted by Aline on

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.