Category Archives: still life

The Appeal of Sunflowers

Posted by Aline on
Sunflower Bouquet

Sunflower Bouquet

This bouquet of Sunflowers and small blue companions was a gift from another artist (thanks, again, Flo) for whom I was doing a small favor. I started the painting the same day that I received them, when the flowers were fresh, but it took me a few weeks to finish i; the flowers had all died in the meantime. So this painting is from both life and from memory. My tea mug just happened to be there when I started, and it filled a compositional need, so it got to stay.  The blue of the companion flowers is picked up in the cat’s eyes  on the mug.  No, I sure don’t know the name of the companion blue flowers.

What is it about sunflowers that makes an artist want to paint them?   Their sunny color, their sunny symbolism, their over-the-top size are all hard to resist, but I was also drawn to the complexity and variety of the brownish, greenish centers of the flowers.  Until I had a bunch of them in my hands and could examine them close up,  I never realized that the centers were variable in color and have quite a lot going on, design-wise.

My sunflowers were mostly dark brown in the center, but on the periphery of the center, little green and yellow shoots were pushing through the brown matrix.  Gosh, I really need to find out what all that stuff is, and what it is called.  Excuse me, I’m off to Wikipedia to learn.

OK, I’m back, more confused than ever.  But I gleaned that the yellow petals are called the ray florets and are not really the flower of the thing.  The flowers are the tiny rosettes that grow from the brown matrix.  Wikipedia kindly provided this picture isolating the flowers from the (dead) ray florets.

Sunflower_disk

An even more intriguing statement is this one: “Sunflowers are especially well known for their symmetry based on Fibonacci numbers and the Golden angle.”  If ever there was a secret formula for attracting artists, that has to be it.  Thank god I finished the painting before I was made aware of this aspect, or I would have got hung up on the idea of depicting the Fibonacci sequence and Golden angle, which are present in the way the rosettes swirl from the center outward, in a closely knit spiral.  Here it is, simplified:

spiralsBlack I don’t really understand how those two math concepts produce the sunflower design, and I’m so glad I don’t have to understand it as it was beginning to make my head hurt.    Here’s a website on the subject that you might enjoy.  Or not.

My Sunflower Bouquet is for sale.  It is painted on a 20×16 stretched canvas and I am asking $925 for it, unframed.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

At the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett;  at the Bernerhof Inn in Glen; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway;  and at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester.   For the month of October I have two paintings in the Womens Club of Concord, part of a three-part 20th anniversary exhibit by the Womens Caucus for Art.  However, the hours during which the WCC is accessible to the public are unpredictable.  You can visit another of the 20th Anniversary exhibits at the Kimball Jenkins carriage house through the month of November.

Opening this week, with a reception Friday night, 5-7, is the 2015 Regional Juried Show of the Center for the Arts in the New London Inn.  Also on Friday night, 7-9, is the reception for the Womens Caucus for Art annual 6×6 exhibit at Apotheca, in Goffstown, NH.  Opening this week as part of NH Open Doors is another popup from East Colony Fine Art:  at Salzburg Square in Amherst, NH, Thursdays through Sundays, 11-5, from now until the day before Christmas.  This Sunday, as part of the NH Open Doors, I will be painting a demo at the store.

As usual, you may view paintings with prices and order prints, iPhone cases and the like at my Fine Art America page. If the painting you are interested in is not there, or if you prefer to bypass that experience, you may contact me by email to alotter@mac.com.

If you want to add a public comment to this blog, go to the bottom of this page where it says “Leave a Reply”, and enter your comment in that box. I love to get public comments, so don’t be shy!

Ups and Downs

Posted by Aline on

Yes, it has been a few weeks since I last posted.  No, I have not got sick again.  But I have been floundering a wee bit.  It almost seems that as I practiced my landscapes and learned my florals, I forgot how to paint a portrait.  That disappointment cast a pall over all my work.  But I’m following my own advice, the second major rule of art-making:  Don’t Give Up.  (I guess the first rule would have to be:  So Try Already.)

It helps that I have a second successful floral painting to show off–what a high it is, to create something that surprises you with its beauty:

Floral Painting No. 2--Roses

Floral Painting No. 2–Roses

This floral is the second of three projects that will eventually emanate from the Floral Painting course I am taking at the NH Institute of Art with Deirdre Riley.  I missed three classes because of the Florida sojourn, but I needed only the two weeks remaining to me for this painting.  Two weeks equals six hours of painting.  I could actually paint a living floral arrangement and get it done before the flowers started to wilt.  But I’m not that energized anymore.  My batteries only last three hours.

Coincidentally, the annual Petals to Paint event comes this week–TOMORROW actually, to East Colony Fine Art.  About 20 floral designers are designing and putting together a (live) flower-based sculpture inspired by the painting that each chose a month ago.  One of the designers chose my “Nap, Interrupted” (the very large cat portrait) as her inspiration.  If I had a six-hour battery, I’d be able to go in after hours at the Gallery and make a painting of her creation.

The reception for Petals to Paint is Thursday from 5 to 8 p.m., but the exhibit will remain up for the next two days.  The address is 55 South Commercial Street in Manchester, NH.   I’m very sorry to report that this will be the last P2P at this location, and one of the last receptions for East Colony at this location.  We decided not to renew our lease because not enough of our artists were willing to commit to the continuance of the Gallery.  On May 14, we will host our last reception, a kind of farewell party. Our last day will be May 30.

The portraits that I have been wrestling with are mostly of Margaret, although I have to confess my last portrait of Aubrey was no keeper either.  I was trying so very hard to get a likeness of Margaret in two 3-hour sessions, that I lost my perspective over the works as entire pieces.  I was going to post pictures of these failures but I lost my nerve.  Just trust me–you don’t need to see them.

Of course, my response has been to try harder.  At SLG (Saturday Life Group) we had a new model, a very young tall lanky guy named Andrew.  I had wanted to concentrate on portraiture, but all I got was the back of his head for the first long pose (“long” in this group means 45-50 minutes).

The Back of Andrew

The Back of Andrew

The last pose gave me the opportunity I sought.

Generic Head

Generic Head

The problem with this “portrait” is that it is largely invented.  He held his head in this position for perhaps five minutes, then it started dropping, dropping, until finally his chin was on his chest.  I continued with my original version, filling in what I already knew about faces, treating it as some kind of memory exercise.

This Monday, in order to conquer the whole problem of Margaret, I announced she was in it for a two-week pose.  All I needed was more time, was my reasoning.  But when I saw the pose, I could not resist included her gesture and the yellow dress.  This is my Work in Progress:

Girl in Yellow (WIP)

Girl in Yellow (WIP)

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the East Colony Fine Art Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett;  at the Bernerhof Inn in Glen; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; and at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester.

As usual, you may view paintings with prices and order prints, iPhone cases and the like at my Fine Art America page. If the painting you are interested in is not there, or if you prefer to bypass that experience, you may contact me by email to alotter@mac.com.

If you want to add a public comment to this blog, go to the bottom of this page where it says “Leave a Reply”, and enter your comment in that box. I love to get public comments, so don’t be shy!

New Subject Matter

Posted by Aline on

Drum roll, please!  I hereby present my first floral painting*:

Floral Painting No. 1

Floral Painting No. 1

It represents nine hours of development under the tutelage of Deirdre Riley, whose own floral paintings are simply spectacular.  I went very slowly (for me) in order to grasp the all the points she wanted to get across to us, her “community education” students at the New Hampshire Institute of Art.

I am flying to Florida this Wednesday, there to paint daily en plein air, so I will miss the next setup in the floral class, but maybe they will still be working on it when I get back.

*Actually when I was much, much younger–between 18 and 20–I painted a still life with flower arrangement as a gift to my brother and sister-in-law.  I think most of it came out of my head.  At that time of my life, I had had zero experience at painting from life.  Everything was from imagination.  Then in my last year of college I signed up for a course in oil painting,  Painting from “life” yes, but all very still life–not even dried flowers, every object was dead.  Paper, wood, ceramic, and so on.  Then, in a later year, taking a night class at the Museum School in Boston,  for one session we had a live model.  I painted a very crude portrait on a very large panel, which panel had followed me around for the decades from Boston to Florida, back to Boston then Michigan, ending up in NH.  I finally reused that panel a few years ago to paint the abstract landscape that I call “Darkly“.  I like to suppose that the portrait underneath influenced the new layer of paint and the title, in that the portrait and the meaning of the new layer are hidden from casual view.

About this Floral Painting No. 1, I want you to be aware that the background and table top were covered with brown wrapping paper, Kraft paper I think it is called?, then the paper was draped with gauze to affect its hue.  The background gauze was lavender.  The table top gauze was lime green.  I chose to ignore the background lavender but did paint in the lime green gauze.

I enjoyed working on this painting.  It is actually a still life, one of my first in the last nine years.  The flowers were not alive, of course.  How could they be, and last for three weeks?  I believe they were silk.  I have never  been drawn to paint still lifes, but I have always enjoyed painting stuff into my figurative paintings.  Flowers may be the lure to suck me into the world of the still life.