I lead off today with my last red chalk drawing done in the course of last week’s workshop with Rob Liberace, “Drawing the Figure in Red Chalk”. He thought this drawing was my best from the three days, and who am I to argue with the Master. The workshop was a fabulous experience. The “students” included Sean Beavers, who was my instructor just a few weeks ago, and Larry Christian, who was my first figure drawing instructor at the Institute in 2006. I suspect that many of the faces who were unknown to me belonged to other long-established professionals as well.

The red chalk is not actually red chalk, but rather any soft red drawing material that simulates the red chalk used by the old masters. We deployed pencils and pastels of various properties, but the principal difference was softness. The harder pencil drawings work better on a smaller scale; detail is easier with a pencil while covering a large sheet with pencil is not fun. So conversely the larger the sheet you want to use, the softer is the material you choose. Obvious that should have been, yet a revelation to me.

I started with the harder stuff:

Young Woman in Red Chalk, about 18×18

With a few leftover minutes on that pose, I drew her whole figure in miniature, showing her slump so much better:

18×9

My output for Day 1 was perhaps suppressed due to my confusion about the paper. Based on information received with our materials list, I had pretreated sheets of paper with dilute amber shellac–on the wrong side. Drawing paper comes with two different surfaces–one side is rough, the other is smooth. I should have used the smooth side, not the rough side. No way to know. Then it turned out that when using the softer materials, you don’t need to treat the surface of the paper after all. Fortunately, I had some extra paper at home, and I came back on Day 2 armed with every possible configuration of treated and untreated sides.

For both Day 2 and Day 3 we had the same model, an 80-year-old guy whose body was so lean that he was practically a textbook on anatomy.

This was my best likeness of our model. Here I was using the softer pencils and little bit of the pastel stick. The duration of this pose was only an hour.

The next one was for the entire afternoon of Day 2:

When I was only halfway through,m Rob Liberace sat down and made almost imperceptible improvements to the face. Far be it from me to cover up Rob’s marks with my own improvements, hence the slightly kooky face.

Day 3 we had the same pose all day, but I was finished with my particular angle by lunchtime:

In the afternoon, I was able to move to a spot on the other side of the room. I went back to using the harder pencils:

Why was this one the favorite of Rob Liberace? He advocates using what I can only call “squirrely” lines, and in this drawing, I tried extra hard to make sure I had no straight lines. He also particularly loved the foot.

Here is a copy of one of his drawings, which shows pretty clearly what he was looking for.

The link I gave you at the top of this page should lead you to this image, and from there you can find others of his figure drawings.

It’s pretty humbling for me to see his and mine next to each other.

Surprise! Monday blog is a day early because tomorrow I am over my head with exciting engagements that leave me no time to blog: First, workshop with Robert Liberace learning how to draw figures in red chalk as was done by the Old Masters, and we’re talking OLD old masters–Da Vinci, for example. Then Monday afternoon and evening my bridge group–our three Manchester members anyway–is heading out to Baboosic Lake for an unusually festive visit with Jackie, our Merrimack player–she’s making chili for us and taking us for a boat ride on the Lake in addition to our usually austere bridge playing.

The theme today is “profiles” because yesterday Peter Granucci had us anatomizing waves, which I am stretching to mean profiling waves, while earlier in the week, and the week before, in my Portraits class with Cameron Bennett, we started out with profiles. Cameron seems to think profiles are easier than other angles of the head. For him, maybe.

Profile #1 is a grisaille (black and white) copy of a Jacob Collins head, which we started in class and are supposed to be finishing up as homework over a two-week period.

I trust that by combining the photo original with my copy, I will meet the “fair use” exception to the copyright rules. Sorry about the glare on the wet paint. I had to blast the light from the front in order to keep the sunlit background from shining through and obliterating what I am trying to show you. Both this project and the next one are taped high up in my window where I can stare at them from time to time and where neither cat can rub up against them. Fur on a painting is not, I have found, a desirable quality.

As additional homework over the same two weeks, we had to find ourselves a profile by a master to paint, again in grisaille. I made the immediately obvious choice of Madame X, by John Singer Sargent, which in the original is pretty darn close to black and white anyway.

I can see that neither copy is perfect yet, but pinpointing the reason becomes harder and harder as I eliminate the more obvious defects. Every day, I notice something to fix. Madame X’s nose has been a nightmare. Such a unique nose but so very subtly unique that it cannot be captured casually. I knew it would be hard when I chose it.

Last Thursday, we painted, still in grisaille, from a live model:

I believe I caught a likeness, albeit not a perfect one. It is a challenge when you have only two hours minus breaks to work with the model. Mine was one of the more complete-looking efforts in the class, but a likeness must come before completeness.

At least I’m fast, which gives me more time to capture the likeness–more time to make mistakes and correct them. I am thinking that all the mistakes are necessary markers, milestones to progression. I SHALL get that nose on Madame X right by the end of the week!

Meanwhile, waves. Waves are not easy by any means, but let’s face it–you get a lot of latitude on the details as long as you get the elements right. So practicing how to paint waves Saturday with Peter Granucci and my plein air painter friends was a joyful experience. I learned the terms to apply to a wave: “base” “ridge” “eye” and, most interesting, the “dump”. The dump is the part of the wave that is crashing over. The eye is the thinnest part, illuminated by light, which I find the most magical element. The rock doesn’t really fit the theme, but Peter gave us a rock to work on at the end–dessert.

I taped all of my Saturday paintings to a hardboard to see how I might be able to fit all four into one frame. All of these were painted on canvas pads; to get three of them home, I simply closed the cover on them, which is why the thickest paint has that funny texture. (The fourth one fit into one of my “Art Cocoons”.)

I don’t quite know what to do with these four paintings of nonuniform sizes and needing mounting on something harder than air. The hardboard is one possibility. Maybe I shouldn’t try to get all four into one frame. I’m open to ideas–and offers.

“Portaits” might be slightly aggrandizing. Painting likenesses of animals is a lot of fun and not nearly as demanding as painting a portrait of a human being. That scruffy little pup above is “Justice”, with whom I share living quarters and who is my best TV-viewing buddy. He actually belongs to my granddaughter, but I feed him, let him out in the yard morning and night, and take him to the Gallery when I am sitting there. He barks at the visitors but so far, no one seems to mind. Art lovers are, for the most part, animal lovers too.

So last Saturday a week ago, when I was gallery-sitting, I painted three new animal portraits; the Justice above, on 11×14 panel, and two small ones on 6×6 blocks.

First was Grace, my crooked-jawed sweetheart who likes to squint at me. Her life apparently started out pretty hard, but I swooped into the Manchester Animal Shelter the very day she arrived there–back in August of 2010, and she has finally come to believe that my home is her home. When I paint, she comes up to me, reaches up on her hind legs, pats at my leg and speaks in her inimitable cat language, asking what am I doing and why.

So despite her tomboy appearance, she is the sweetest cat in the household. (Her only competition is the white goddess cat Isis, of whom I have spoken and painted before.)

My second 6×6 features Nora, an akita that belonged to an artist friend but who died a few months ago. I only met her once. She was unbelievably plush.

While these are paintings inspired by the animals, a few months ago I finished a true portrait. I never met this fellow but had a selection of photographs to use as a reference. I spent many hours on him:

Maximillian, from the point of view of the mouse.

After putting my animals aside, I worked on a few problem paintings, one of which is the Wells Harbor tarp painting from only a few weeks ago. I am now totally happy with it:

The big fixes were to the doors of the red shed and to the background edifices, but I spruced up the little things too, “finishing” in the best sense of that word. For the sake of comparison, here is the previous version:

With all the fixin’s and trimmings applied to make this painting more presentable, I never messed with the tarp except to increase the contrast between light and shadow. The tarp was pretty much “premier coup” or done at the first stroke. It works like that sometimes. Other times, I can do over five times before I get it right.

Five solid days of intense concentration on the drawing and painting of the human figure left me dazed throughout the following weekend. Only today do I begin to feel that I have returned to earth. The image above is the last piece that I worked on, and , I believe, represents my best work for the week, which is a Good Thing as it means I profited from the processes that preceded it.

The workshop was superbly taught by Sean Beavers at the NH Institute of Art. Sean was a terrific resource, imparting a prodigious amount of information about methodology, tools, techniques. The workshop was structured around two models, Levy and Margaret. Dark-skinned Levy took a standing pose, under a spotlight, and held that pose, with breaks of course, for the three hours of each morning. Ivory-skinned Margaret held her seated pose for the three afternoon hours, lit only by the light from the north-facing windows. Those of us on the south side of the room had trouble seeing what we were working on, so Sean arranged small spotlights to hit the wall behind us, which cast reflected light onto our easels.

Fifteen hours for one pose was an unheard-of luxury for most of us, I’m sure. Some members of the class moved around the room during the week in order to get a different perspective on a pose, while others worked a single piece for the entire fifteen hours of a pose. I produced two final pieces for each pose, but chose to work from a single spot for all four images.

Our process was something totally new to me: first we had to produce a drawing on cheap paper that was perfect enough to warrant transfer, then transfer by tracing through graphite paper onto the final paper or canvas. This process allows the artist to crop the image and alter its placement on the canvas. Here are my first two drawings:

I used a magenta pencil to trace each drawing onto the graphite paper so that I could see where I had already traced and where I still needed to trace. That treatment kind of ruins the drawing as a completed work on its own–it becomes only a way station to the final masterpiece.

I ran into trouble with the size of my drawing of Levy. When drawing, I like to fill the sheet with my subject. But my drawing pad was 24 inches high, while all of my canvas panels were 20×16. I could not accept the idea of cropping off his head or his feet, so I managed to squeeze him onto the panel with millimeters to spare. He’s about to step right out of the frame. Here are 2 images of the painting, one intermediate and one final:

The principal, perhaps only, difference between the two is the warmth in the shadow areas. For the final version, I “blued” the shadows on his body and the cast shadow behind him. Note that I placed him well to the right of the panel, giving plenty of room for his shadow, and plenty of space for him to be gazing into. I’m really pleased about that, and his toeing the edge of the picture is kind of growing on me too.

After declaring that painting finished, I decided to do a portrait of Levy. Originally, I hoped to turn it into a painting. Then I thought perhaps a charcoal drawing would be fun. In the end, I simply worked the drawing to death on my pad. Here is my start and my finish:

My first work featuring Margaret took me three days. The second one took only two days. Here is the first:

From drawing to canvas panel did not require much repositioning. I had plenty of room to keep all her toes and fingers intact.

The second pose started out with thoughts of portrait, but somehow grew beyond portrait to a half figure (I think that’s what it’s called). Here is the drawing, then my first blocking in of the painting:

And here, for your convenience and, I hope, enjoyment, is an image of the final painting again:

I love how her skin shimmers against the antique background light and shadow. Funny thing–now for the first time I notice the tan lines running up her shoulders, which somehow got automatically transferred from my eyes to the canvas without passing through my brain.

Calling up a phrase from the sixties (fifties?), that was the week that was. I wish I could live all my days being exhausted and used up like that. If you are interesting in examining these images a little closer up, you can do so on the Newest Additions page.

Today’s blog follows up on the story of last week’s plein air adventures in Wells Harbor, Maine.  Nobody spoke up for my first start, which I had abandoned after the evil umbrella attacks.  Silly of me to expect anyone to dispute that the first painting was a “wipe out” (meaning, the paint should be wiped off so that the panel may be reused for a better painting).  If the artist who had been originally inspired to paint a scene can’t defend it, who could?  

Just to remind you, here is the original half-baked painting:

I felt a little tug on my heart from this sad little guy.  Wasn’t its fault that I couldn’t cope with the evil umbrella.  The composition was good, and that’s the most important element.  To try an salvage the painting, I had to invest only my time and a little paint, and even if the effort were to fail, I would learn something.   

I redrew the structural elements and played with the colors of the water in the foreground and the foliage in the background.  I added interesting details, such as the lettering on the banner on the ramp.  The salvaged version may need more work, but I am pleased enough with the progress. 

I also worked on the second painting, the one I hoped would be salvageable.  Here is how it looks today:

Here is the half-baked version:

(The tarp color was not changed–the light in which I photographed the painting changed.)  

The improvement to the second painting is not as dramatic because the painting did not start out as hopeless as the first one.  Some remaining rough spots should be simple to fix–I don’t like the doors much, and I think I might be able to improve on the way I suggest distant buildings in the background.

Meanwhile, for this whole week, I am taking a figure workshop with Sean Beaver at the NH Institute of Art–from 9 to 4:30 Monday through Friday, it leaves me little time to do anything else.  I am in heaven!  Next week you will be hearing about that in great detail.

In the past week, I twice took off from work in order to go on a plein air painting expedition. Last Wednesday, Flo (Florence Parlangeli) and I went lupine hunting out West (Peterborough, Jaffrey). In northern NH (Sugar Hill) the natives plant lupines in every field and roadside shoulder and fence post in order to lure visitors to their Lupine Festival. But western NH natives apparently have no use for the mostly blue flower. Fortunately, we had a tip that there was a fabulous field of lupines behind an artist-friendly private home in Troy. Our hosts welcomed two complete strangers onto their beautifully landscaped property. The only hardship we endured was the annoying flies. Not the little black flies, known for their propensity for invading bodily cavities, but some large flesh-eating ones. One hardship is not enough to discourage a plein air painter.

I am pleased with the picture above. I could have chosen another angle on that field, one with Mount Monadnack in the background, but I was struck by the drama of the foreground shadows acting as a threshold to the scene beyond.

I have never been satisfied with the color of my lupines in paint, but got a clue from Michael Chesley Johnson in his recent blog on painting lupines in New Brunswick: when the blue of the flowers is applied to a surface of wet paint, the blue sinks into the paint underneath, muddying the blue; so the painter must go back after the oil paint has set up a little bit, with fresh blues to represent the glorious blue of the real life flowers. This I did, and I also blended in a tiny portion of a rose color that I don’t take outdoors with me, to achieve the purply blue lupines.

OK, so that was Wednesday. Yesterday, Monday, (sorry about being a day late with the blog if you were waiting for it with bated breath but now you know why, and it is a good excuse, right?) we took advantage of a beautiful day and an invitation from the newly organized southern Maine plein air artists to paint at Wells Harbor in Maine. I set up my big Gloucester-type easel and my big umbrella in a sandy area that was also very rocky. The wind was stiff. The umbrella would not stay put in the sandy soil, so eventually I lashed it to the easel with a bungie cord. I proceeded to work on the following painting, which is a view of Wells Harbor from across a considerable expanse of water.

My point of view was dead on straight at the buildings, which simplified the composition of a complicated collection of objects. Here is a photograph of the scene:

The panorama format as in the photo would have suited me much better, but all I had with me were squarish panels, so I limited my subject to what would fit. But composition was the least of my problems. As I mentioned before, it was windy. My umbrella had blown away twice before I lashed it to the easel.

Why all this concern over an umbrella? If I paint in the sun, the paint colors look much more vivid than they will indoors. I learned the hard way that I have to shade my palette and my painting in order to see how my work will look when it is exhibited indoors. Other painters may learn to compensate, but I just use an umbrella if I can, or turn my easel and palette away from the sun if I can’t get them in shade any other way–which means me facing into the sun. But when the sun is overhead, as it was yesterday, it is hard to find any spot where it is not shining on the painting or the palette.

“Shade Buddy” is the name given to my umbrella by its manufacturer. “Evil” is the name conferred by me after the second assault. In its first assault, it leapt over the easel striking me in the shoulder as I devoted all my attention to protecting the painting, easel and palette. I forgave, and reattached it to the easel, tightening the bungie cord so that the assemblage could not travel up the easel leg again, and got back to work. Evil umbrella was still Shade Buddy, innocent victim of windy gust. The painting required a few repairs, but no big deal. (The ultimate disaster would be a painting falling face down in the sand.)

The second assault almost had the ultimate result. I can’t even remember how it happened, it happened so fast, but the umbrella attacked me again and everything, including the painting, went flying. Not the palette–it was clamped down to the easel, which met its hype for stability by not budging. (This is a snapshot of my easel the first time I used it.) Even the open jar of turpentine was unspilled. I cursed the umbrella and gave it its new name, Evil. I closed it up and managed to maneuver the painting’s position so that no sunlight fell on it, but my heart was heavy and I gave up shortly after repairing the smears and scratches inflicted by the brutal bumbershoot. (To the painting, not to me–although I expected to suffer some aftereffects, bruising, etc., but so far, I’m okay.)

But the day was not yet over. Our whole crew (Sharon Allen, Barbara Busenback and Catherine Weeks) found our way with some difficulty to that spot across the bay or whatever I was painting, and there we all started over. I found some serious shade and plunked myself and my gear down where the sun could not get to me, and prepared to paint the only scene that presented itself:

You can make a good painting out of anything. Given half a chance, that is. It was cold in that shady spot, and it afford zero shelter from the wind that blew through there like a freight train. I have painted in adverse conditions before, once in conditions very like these, and in a similar marine environment. That time I had to cope with a fierce wind, the cold, plus some sunlight issues that had virtually forced the scene I was to paint, and that painting turned out really well. Here is that successful one:

“Working Boats at Rest” 8×10 2009 (Rhode Island)

But the wind in Wells Harbor was something else again. I had switched to using my pochade box as an easel–it takes up less of a foot print and just seemed easier to deal with overall. The box sits on a tripod that I anchor with a stone bag and my SLR camera. The painting is secured to the lid of the box, and the lid is stabilized against the wind with pins, one on each side, that fit into holes drilled into the lid and box. (This is Steve Sauter’s “All in One” easel.) The wind shook the box so much that each of the pins worked their way out of the holes and fell to the deck. I, of course, was aware that the painting was shaking. Every time I tried to apply some paint, the paint would end up not exactly where I had planned for it to end up. However, I did not notice my first pin go missing, and happened to see the second go flying just in time to catch the lid and keep it from slamming down into the palette. Well, I was cold and miserable anyway, so I was ready to write off the day as just one of those days when the painting does not make my heart sing.

Here is that second effort:

I’m thinking this one is salvageable if only for the blowing tarp, but that the first one may be a candidate for wiping out or painting over. I’d like to hear from you if you think I should salvage the first one.

Think of my story if, the next time you see a plein air artist, you are tempted to coo, “Oh, this must be SOooo relaxing!”

P.S. Barbara just emailed me a photo of me at early stages, just getting set up, before any umbrella shenanigans.

Looks so peaceful, doesn’t it? Soooo relaxing!

I have not painted one bit this week. I had two full days of painting on my schedule. Saturday I had gallery-sitting duty at the Manchester Artists Association Gallery in Manchester, and I usually produce at least two paintings during an all-day stint like that. Sunday was to be plein air painting on the coast of Maine. But Thursday morning one of my eyes decided this would be a good time to act up. Itching, swelling, streaming with tears–I assumed the cause was the pollen in the air, especially when air conditioning seemed to provide some relief. At first. This morning, I was desperate enough to seek medical attention, and my doctor said the cause was neither my allergies nor an infection but my immune system reacting to the normal bacteria that inhabit my eye. I am now on steroids. That sounds so au courant. I’m peeking at the computer screen through one bleary eye.

Anyway, instead of painting Saturday and Sunday, I busied myself Saturday doing figure exercises and Sunday visiting the Currier Museum for the last day of the Jon Brooks exhibit. The weather was not so great anyway for painting outside on Sunday. The Currier has a couple of paintings by Martin Johnson Heade, the artist whose storm we copied last week. Also on display are examples of Cropsey, Bierstadt, Cole and Church, all prominent landscape painters of the 19th century, being featured on a PBS series called “Landscapes in Time”. That was my landscape “fix” for the week.

An artist’s blog without pictures is like a burger without the meat. A photo of the offending eye would be too horrific and hardly artistic. So this morning I snapped some photos of the figure drawing exercises that I produced during the workshop last Tuesday morning (eye still healthy then) and the ones extracted from my Saturday at the Gallery (with only one good eye).

At Workshop, from live model, 2 of the better ones.

What Peter is teaching is a kind of a universality. He starts us out with bean-shaped torsos and pelvises and we must observe how they connect as the body twists and turns. The process for me has become a kind of fumbling around, looking for universal truths, almost a formula for depicting movement. The fundamental idea is this: If the artist can acquire a broad knowledge base of anatomy and figure dynamics, and then apply that knowledge automatically, he/she has more time/room to figure out and portray the idiosyncracies of a particular human.

So in copying the figures from the anatomy book (Bridgman), I would apply the bean shapes first, and build from there.

As I worked through the examples, I think I started to feel the energy of the poses.

Speaking of the Gallery–I had NO visitors all day, from 10 until 4. It was raining all day, so nobody was gardening or boating or washing the car. Nope, everyone was inside watching TV or something when they could have been out and about enjoying some great artwork and supporting their local artists who only want a little bit of encouragement to keep on painting. Or sculpting. I’m really sad that the Gallery does not get more support from the community, and worried that its days are numbered. Without the traffic, artists won’t care to exhibit there, and without the artists to exhibit there, the Gallery will have to close.

So wherever you live, get out and visit your local galleries. “Starving” artists everywhere are starving for attention.

Stormy or sunny, weather is always interesting. It represents that potential for the unexpected. A tornado threatened southern NH last week, but got hung up in western Massachusetts instead. Then we had days IN A ROW of perfect June weather. Well, maybe a little breezy, but I’ll take it. The painting above–still wet– was painted indoors on one of those lovely June days, at a workshop with Peter Granucci on the subject of painting stormy weather.

I have seeing a lot of Peter these days: I organized a figure drawing workshop for a small group of us to take from Peter. Organizing a workshop means getting a certain number of interested people to come together at a specific time on a specific day. Organizing is not a favorite thing to do, but it has been SO worth it. We got started last week, and will continue on a week-to-week basis as long as we can get five or six people committed to attending. So far, it is happening Tuesday mornings.

Then Saturdays, once a month, I take a full-day workshop with Peter on a single aspect or theme of painting landscapes. June’s theme was stormy weather. First, we copied from an old master, then we painted from a photograph, adding the drama in emulation of the master’s painting. Here is my copy of the Master’s (Martin Johnson Heade) version of a coming storm:

From Heade and other examples, we learned to hype the contrast and include some bright spots. In a few hours I tossed off the sketch just above, imitating a huge painting that took Heade weeks, perhaps months, to complete.

Thunderstorm on Narragansett Bay by M.J. Heade

Then I applied those lessons to my painting with the telephone poles. If you have been following me, you might remember that I love telephones poles and wires. I’m pretty happy with my telephone poles as substitutes for sailboats.

In other news, it cost me an arm and a leg to ship Cat Contemplating Winter to California for that “Tell me a Story” exhibit. Now I am hoping it does sell so that I don’t have to pay to have it shipped back. My train engine “501” is now gracing the home page of the fan page to which I tried to refer my readers, but I garbled the address. Here is the right link: http://www.newenglandrailfan.com/ After distributing that image of my 501 painting, I made a few changes to the tender. You will probably not notice them, but for the sake of posterity, here is what that painting looks like today:

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I also touched up a few paintings from the Bartlett weekend and from the George Nick workshop. You can find them on the page titled “Newest Additions”, if you have time to inspect.

“Tell me a story” is the theme of an exhibit to be presented by a gallery in southern California. The idea is for the artist to write a 100-word (or fewer) story to go with the submitted painting. I was intrigued, and immediately thought of the painting above, which I titled “Totem”. You may or may not remember that I painted it last summer, on the coast of Rhode Island. (Visit that blog here.) In that rocky cove, there were many cairns arranged, but none so artfully as the one in the painting. No one knew who made the cairns, or what their purpose was. The cove was private property and practically inaccessible. However, on more than one occasion, a kayaker had been observed paddling past the cove, and I conceived the theory that when the cove was deserted, he paddled in and built cairns just for the mystery of it. For the story competition, though, I wanted more pathos. I imagined a lonely child distracting himself with building cairns as high as possible, but failing. The kayaker observes, empathizes. The child stops coming. The kayaker learns that the child has died. The kayaker builds the perfect, elegant cairn in memoriam.

I considered my chances of being selected for the California exhibit to be next to nil, but on the other hand, I could bring some writing skills to the project, which might give me an edge over right-brain specialists. I spent weeks working on my “story”–it had to be poignant, mysterious, poetic, and 100 words or less. Do you know how few words 100 is? I despaired. I let the normal deadline pass. But at the very last minute of the extended deadline (you pay higher entry fee), I reconsidered, and pulled together something with exactly 100 words, but lacking in content. The child’s death, and the kayaker’s involvement, is barely implied:

Rocky beach, isolated surf-scoured cove — nearly impossible to access by land. By sea, a kayaker paddles past.

One summer, a child is seen there every day, working, playing in the rocks. Day after day, he piles stones into elegant towers that tumble before the overpowering winds and waves.

Then he stopped coming.

Yet one day there arose a stack of three stones on a boulder, so perfectly fitted that they settled into their base as if grown there, oblivious of wind and waves, an anonymous tribute to fugacious striving, a totem to the beauty of a child and nature.

My use of the word “fugacious” probably sealed its doom, but I couldn’t resist.

But here’s the really funny part of THIS story. I submitted another painting at that last minute because a friend had recently admired it, and I could submit two paintings for the same entry fee. Here is the second painting:

Cat Contemplating Winter, 12×36. (“Casey” for short)

And Remember how poetic I wanted to be? Here is the cat story that I whipped out in two minutes:

Casey the cat was an outdoor cat. He liked to play in the grass and the flowers. He liked to play in the leaves. He does not like to play in the snow, or the wet, recently plowed streets. What to do?

Of course you already have guessed the end of THIS story. Casey got in the exhibit and Totem did not. Now I have to pack him up and ship him to Monrovia California (Segil Fine Art Gallery, if you are going to be in the neighborhood), and OMG, what if he sells? I am going to get a professional photograph taken of him for the purpose of making giclee prints, just in case.

This is the third honor for this particular painting: it won second best in one of the Manchester Artist Association Gallery shows, and it was reproduced in the Winter issue of NH Bar Journal in January. (They requested a snow painting for the cover (chose one of Franconia Notch), but couldn’t resist adding Casey at the bottom of the Contents page.)

Casey himself has abandoned us and adopted another home in the neighborhood with more cats and no dogs. He visits, but does not come inside anymore. Our feelings are hurt, which is why I put a price on his painting.

Anyway, the moral of this whole experience: keep it simple, stupid!

Above you see completed, the painting that got rained out last week. Clearly, I cannot call this a plein air painting anymore! While gallery sitting on Friday, I spent five hours on the engine itself, and Saturday after my granddaughter opined that the background was too loose by comparison to the engine, another couple of (annoyed) hours on the trees in the background.

Because the tracks converge on the roundhouse, I’m wondering if I need to offer an explanation of that by putting a reference to the roundhouse in my title.

This engine–the 501–by the way, has a fan website of its own, I discovered, where I found this photo:

I was looking for photographs of any steam engine clad in its insulating “jacket” because I met the young man who acts as the 501’s caretaker, and he had talked as if the 501’s jacket was out for repairs, and would be back on the engine soon. Perhaps I misunderstood him–in the photo above, the 501 is not wearing a jacket, but perhaps it was posing without jacket for the sake of the photograph.

In my web search, I did stumble on one explanation of why old engines are always pictured without their jackets. The jackets were made of materials (asbestos?) that deteriorated much more quickly than the metal that forms the boiler.

Saturday and Sunday I worked on my other large Bartlett painting. Not sure whether to call it a studio painting too–I did work on it en plein air for two consecutive evenings. Moreover, although I had a photo to refer to, few of the decisions I made in the studio were based on that photo. The painting is a view of the Bartlett Inn from the side, with one of its cabins intruding from the right.

My granddaughter did not have any helpful criticisms for this painting, which is kind of nervous-making. I use her to spot the glaring anomalies, jarring errors, etc.

In other news, I finally completed my portrait of Maximillian, who lives with Jane. I held off declaring it finished for many weeks because I was concerned about the eyes, but now I am happy, and here he is in all his glory:

Yes, his paw IS that large.

Twice a year, a few plein air artists answer the call to “get away” from their humdrum winter lives and congregate at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett, NH. The Spring Getaway occurs just when the outdoor temperature has risen to a point where standing outside for long hours of painting becomes more or less bearable, if you don’t mind the black flies and ticks. The spring weather is undependable though. We started this year on Thursday, which was a beautiful day, as was Friday. But Saturday threatened rain all day, and Sunday delivered on the threat.

I did some good things, which I will show you, but my Saturday disappointment is overshadowing all else right now. You see, I had looked forward to spending the whole day in one spot, working on a 16 x 20 panel, because the forecast was cloudy all day but no rain until later in the day. Clouds meant no shifting light and shadows, which created the possibility of painting one scene for more than two hours. Here is what my spot looked like when I reconnoitered the North Conway Scenic Train Station:

This photo shows the Round House pit exposed in the foreground and various cars and engines strewn about behind the train station. You can see the roof of the train station above the car on the left. Concealed behind the car on the right is a black steam locomotive that I fell in love with as soon as I laid eyes on it. Also note the clouds in the sky. Solid, but not threatening.

Happy as a clam, I set up my big Beauport easel in a spot smack in the middle of the upper photograph of the train yard and station, and got to work sketching this lovely machine with thinned out paint.

That sketch is the cover shot above, because that is as far as I got. After about a half hour, just as I got to mapping out the darkest darks, drops of water started falling. I packed away the painting and the easel and sat down to wait it out, but one of the train engineers came out to commiserate with me, and said his GPS showed the rain clouds blanketing us without any break. So I checked in with my two companions, Sharon and Sandy, who had set up to paint the front of the North Conway station. They were giving up too. We went back to the Inn, where we puttered around touching up the previous days’ paintings. The real rain did hold off until later that evening, however. We should have stood our ground at the station.

Sharon and I were staying on either sides of a duplex cabin with a roomy porch, big enough for three of us to set up easels–not my big Beauport easel, but my smaller pochade box-on-a-tripod. A piece of our cabin is in the foreground of my other 20 x 16 adventure, a view of the Inn from a point in front of our cabin:

I worked on this painting Thursday and Friday evenings, while my companions went out for dinner. The Inn serves wonderful full breakfasts, but no other meals. I played the role of Starving Artist, dedicated to my craft.

Three smaller paintings have come home in more complete condition:

Mount Chocorua. 11×14. We stopped there on our way up North. It was a boring landscape until I got to it Saturday on the porch with my dioxanine purple. Maybe I went too far? This is one that will stay in my studio until I decide whether or not to tame that purple with blue.

Fourth Iron. 14×11 Friday morning. The title refers to the identification used for this railroad bridge, located off Route 302 between Bartlett and Crawford Notch. To keep the sun off my panel and palette, I had to face into the sun with my back turned to the bridge. (I learned years ago that when you allow the sun to light your workspace, you end up with a too dark painting.)

Silver Cascade. 12×6. Friday afternoon. This waterfall is close to the Crawford Notch depot train station, but a little south on Route 302. We set up our easels in a large parking lot across the highway; the ground was anything but level. Because of the angle of the sun, I ended up facing out to the right of the scene, with my easel to my right, one leg uphill and the other downhill. After an hour of that, my body was screaming for mercy. I worked on this one again Saturday afternoon. The water cascades needed more nuance, but that dioxanine purple seems to have taken over again. The photo is blurry because I did not use a tripod to take the picture. Sorry about that. When these paintings are closer to perfect, I will retake the photos and post them on my website.

Friday through Sunday I participated in a Master Class with George Nick at the Currier Museum of Art, allegedly the first 3-day Master Class produced by the Currier. Given that the subject of the class was plein air painting, a one-day class would be hard to conduct–plein air painters spread out all over the allowed territory, which means that the instructor spends a fair amount of time just walking between locations. (I don’t know why an instructor couldn’t ask all the painters to paint the same subject, but suspect it is because part of the whole mystique of painting en plein air is the selection of subject matter, responding to the inspiration afforded by being outdoors.)

Indeed, I saw Mr. Nick at my easel only once for the first painting, twice for the second painting, once for the third painting, not at all for the fourth, and once for the fifth and last. But, in addition to being a terrific artist, he is a professional teacher, marvelously deft at giving encouragement while spotlighting the most important thing that the student needs to work on. For me, that thing seems to be detail. Less of. That is, I need to focus less on detail and more on the big shapes. Simplify? That sounds easy enough.

The “cover” photo above is George Nick holding the painting that he completed Sunday morning, not as a demo (“I don’t do demos”, he said) but as a contribution to our experience. His painting may sell for $10,000. Why on earth would he want to spend any of his time teaching?

In chronological order, here is my production, before the corrections I now see are desirable: Friday we only had a half day of painting, in Webster Park near the Currier, and I found a tree that inspired me:

It has been simplified.

Saturday morning I headed straight for the front of the museum, prepared to jostle for a good angle on the sculpture, but it turned out that all weekend, no one else chose to paint the sculpture:

At home that night, I reduced the literalness of the reflections in the windows, and found some orange paint to rectify a problem I had trying to mix a hot orange from cadmium red and azo yellow. The azo (M. Graham) was semi-transparent, the white was opaque, and I just could not get a brilliant orange using them. (But I left the detail in the roofing, which he had criticized.)

Saturday afternoon, it rained, so we deployed to the covered porches on the back of the Art Center building, one to each floor. I chose the highest and looked down on the original art center building that now serves as administrative offices:

The detail in this painting that drew Mr. Nick’s complaint was the variation in color on the clapboards of the building. He assumed I was trying to suggest the clapboards, but I wasn’t; I was just trying to make that flat expanse of color more interesting. He didn’t sound that definite about it, so I left the variations in for now. He said nothing about the purple sidewalks, or the carefully plumbed perspective. If you check out Mr. Nick’s paintings at the website link I gave you above, you may notice that he deliberately skews perspective, or so it seemed to me. But now I can also see, comparing my photo to my painting, that perspective here required more than vanishing points on a straight horizontal line. By studying George Nick’s own works and this photograph taken from above the horizon, I may have learned more than I did from my direct contact with him.

Sunday morning I returned to that porch even though the sun was out, in order to capture these roofs (Archbishop’s residence, St. Hedwig’s Church, and the Currier admin building, in order of distance:

This painting received no criticism, but I think I should straighten the lower edge of the red roof.

Finally, Sunday afternoon, with rain threatening again, I set up on the sidewalk next to the museum to paint this lovely peach-yellow and lavender Victorian house:

At the critique of my last two paintings, the word “detail” was not mentioned, so I may have improved. What I do have to fix are the trees in the background of the Victorian house. I had tried to employ a new technique taught by Peter Granucci involving the cutting in of sky holes in order to reveal the structure of the tree. I still suck at that, and Mr. Nick zeroed right in on their deficiencies. But he said my handling of the white blossoming trees in the foreground was “masterful.” Wow! I shall dine on that for a month. He also commented on the purple roofs, but not necessarily in a negative way.

Before leaving us, Mr. Nick gave us a tour of the customized vehicle that he uses to paint in comfort (and in private) through nasty weather conditions:

The roof was raised and an extra tall window installed to allow more light; the walls and ceilings were insulated to keep warmth in. Inside he can paint on a canvas as large as 40” by 40”. Pretty nice setup. I will definitely emulate him as soon as I get $10,000 for one of my paintings. I will furnish it with a step stool to help in the getting up and down.

Above is a smallish self-portrait in pencil. I don’t know how accurate a true representation it is. I drew in each feature as I would draw a collection of objects for a still life. Peter says the eyes are too high. Sheryl says the lower jaw is too narrow. Others have in effect agreed with both, saying the face is too long. So I hit upon the cheat of uploading it into the space above, then squeezing the vertical just a little to shorten and fatten the face. Now it may look exactly like me. Below is the drawing before being manipulated:

This being my fourth attempt at a self-portrait, I wanted to blunt the usual criticism that I make myself look too stern, so I tucked in a small smile at the corner of the lips. It was hard not to feel absurd, smiling the tiny smile into a mirror at yourself. But I think it worked. . . maybe. Fewer severity complaints have been received.

The size of this drawing is smaller than my other drawings–it measures at most 9 x 12. Although many of my oil-painted landscapes are that small, I normally draw on sheets that are 11×17 or larger. Thursday was my last Drawing with Color class, and I was feeling lazy and so chose to draw with pencil only, in black and white, in the same sketchbook that I used for the portrait. Small. Our model held the same pose for almost two hours (with breaks, of course). The combination of smaller size with longer pose resulted in a pretty accurate drawing:

All of this resulted in my newest insight: if the artist can’t be stepping back from her easel before making each mark on it, she might be better off working on smaller images so that she can better see what she is doing. “Duh!” I can hear you saying, “Why isn’t that obvious?” Perhaps I can explain it better, by analogy to a computer solitaire card game (“Eight Off”) that I became addicted to decades ago. When I later got a Palm Pilot, I moved heaven and earth to get the same game loaded onto the Palm, which has, as you probably know, a much smaller screen than any computer monitor. Suddenly it seemed as if I got smarter. But it was the game getting easier for me because the smaller screen enabled me to evaluate my possible moves in one scan. On the big computer monitor, my eye would take in a section of the screen, then have to move to another, which meant that I had to retain the first scan in my memory in order to meld the two pieces of information.

So if the artist must get far enough away to see her painting or drawing in a single scan, the larger the work, the farther the artist must back off. This is one reason for the long brush handles, but you can’t paint with handles that would be long enough to allow you to sit throughout painting a large portrait or landscape. John Singer Sargent, it has been reported, would step back after every brushstroke to examine its effect on the whole. He was a genius and every brushstroke of his probably had an effect on the whole.

Fortunately, my brushstrokes carry less freight. I say fortunately, because I prefer to sit while drawing and painting. My back hurts when I stand for long periods. If I am sitting, however, stepping back to view my painting involves getting up and moving around the thing I was sitting on (except at home where I can push off with my chair on wheels). This is not something I am inclined to do after very brushstroke! Frankly, I don’t know how I have been able to do as well as I have with the big drawings. Luck, I guess.

You would think that after this discussion, the answer for me would be to stick to drawing and painting small. An added bonus: small is easier and cheaper to frame. But no. I am glad to have this perspective on the advantages of going small, but I cannot give up going big, because big has its rewards too.

If smaller works better for getting the big picture down accurately, larger works better for small distinctions and intricate details. Sometimes you just don’t have room to make your point because everything is so darn small.

Fingernails, for example. Not that I care particularly about fingernails, but you can see their potential in the drawing on the right, which was the bigger one, whereas in the smaller one (a detail from the pose above), fingernails would have been ridiculous.

Truth be told, I’m not yet aware of all the reasons why I need to continue drawing and painting larger. Those insights are in my future, I hope. But in the meantime, I am resolved to sit less and move more, which is better for me anyway, back be damned!

Our Saturday Life Group met for the last time until September. Everyone seems to greet this reality with regret, but few of us try to continue the drawing through the summer. Summer weekends are for getting out of town, I guess, and summer weekdays for a lot of folks are disrupted by work schedules and kids at home. Since we ended with a male model, and one of my favorites, I am able to even the gender imbalance created by posting two weeks in a row of female nudes.

The one above is yet another back, and by now I should be getting good at backs. Backs are easier, even when they are unexpectedly populated by rib cages. Fronts always present the critical placement problem of exactly where the belly button goes. It is never where I first want to place it. Placement of the belly button just might rank up there in difficulty with placement of the nose on a face.

Luckily, our second long pose (about 50 minutes) also spared me the belly button problem:

In this pose I discovered a tiny light effect that I wanted to play up. Can you see it before I tell you?

During this pose, I noticed (for the first time) that light was reflecting off the white stripes of the material under the model. This reflected light shows up in only one area–that of his upper arm. Now that I have seen this effect once, I will be looking for it everywhere.

Friday I was gallery sitting, and I passed the time by drawing a self-portrait in colored pencil, then painting from a photo of a white birches in an autumnal forest. I forgot to photograph the self-portrait, so I will save that one for next week. And I am feeling insecure about the birches because I cannot detect a uniform light source and I am worried that they look too flat as a result:

The birches being white, they are bouncing light off each other, and there is no sunlight to clarify matters. So we have shadows here and there, but no form-shaping shadow side. Do the birches look pasted on?

I was delighted, however, by another discovery. My reference photograph shows the bright red leaves in the background as almost a red cut-out. I was struggling to get some sense of depth and form by adding shadows, adding white and yellow to the red. Then I looked at this huge pile of lavender on my palette, which I had been using for the birches, and decided to dab a little lavender into the red:

OMG! This is what the impressionists were all about, this is what Stan Moeller pointed out to me five years ago, this is what Lois Griffel was talking about two years ago. I finally got it! Intellectually I knew about juxtaposing two colors to get them to vibrate (see also “The Color of Snow” blog wherein Stapleton Kearns instructed that method to get a vibrating white), but until I came upon it independently, it was just theory. Now I think I have made it mine. Well, not really “mine”, but something I might remember to try the next time I need to break up a flat area.

Why? You may ask. Enough with the nudes! Hey, I have not been outside to paint landscapes since early March, when I was painting in Florida, so my non-nude output is pretty much limited to my retouchings of those Florida plein air paintings.

My class with Peter Clive at the Institute on “drawing with color”, on the other hand, has become “drawing [model’s name omitted for sake of her privacy] in color”, and last Saturday I joined the Saturday Life Group after a month’s hiatus (partly because of my conflicts and partly because the Institute shut us down twice because it was hosting Open Houses for prospective students)–yes, we have been doing the SLG at the Institute for two years now–much nicer space that what we had been used to.

Plus, I got to rummaging among my recent drawings and I uncovered some overlooked ones that deserved more respect. Let no halfway decent drawing go unsung, I say! I therefore give you a trio of drawing-with-color nudes, in what I believe is their chronological order:

Colored Pencil; the disembodied foot at the bottom is the continuation of the leg that disappears off stage right. The Masters would do stuff like that, Peter advised, so I should too. So I did–just to prove, like the Masters, I can draw a foot, and the fact that the foot didn’t make it into the drawing proper had nothing to do with any reluctance to draw it. (To fully appreciate this, you need to know that figure artists are always joking about wanting to avoid hands, feet, even faces in their drawings.)

Cretacolor colored charcoal (chalk); this one is influenced by a neo-classicist Picasso drawing that I think I remember. Wish I could show you, but when I tried to find it on the internet, the closest I could get was his “Woman in White”, a mixed media painting. The one I picture is a profile outlined in dark red with blue somewhere in the drawing–either in background or on clothing.

Cretacolor chalk: The new thing here is the layering. Previously I would apply blue in the shadows, pink as a midtone, and white or yellow as the highlights, more or less, give or take. Here, every color is a little bit combined, although in different degrees. The layering makes for a richer looking image, which I like a lot.

This is a portrait of me done by Peter Clive in the Drawing with Color class. Our model had failed to show up, and Peter likes to start out with a demo, so I volunteered to act as model until we got a real one delivered. Is this what I look like? For more examples of Peter’s artwork, go to this NH Institute of Art web page.

One more from Saturday, a quickie pose (20 minutes) — I just love the attitude (this model is the same one I called energetic in last week’s blog):

This model also posed for the lead off or cover image above. The cover image represents a one-hour pose.

I think that the reason figure drawing, especially nude figure drawing, is so highly prized as a regime to improve drawing skills is the need to see and apply subtle value shifts. I can see areas where I should have been more subtle, even in the one-hour pose, but that’s OK. Perfection is not expected. It is to be sought, but not expected.

In my admittedly inexpert opinion, female nudes are more challenging to draw than are male nudes. Men display more muscles, which provides a good road map. Women are softly curved, giving importance to their outlines. The slightest variation of tone within those outlines is meaningful, and can be beautiful. Perhaps it is for this reason that the female nude has been a favored painting subject throughout history. Feminists of today may take the view that female nudes were popular merely because the artists were males and the males just like to look at female nudes. I can’t dispute that, but I don’t really see anything wrong with it either. (What was and perhaps still is wrong was the squelching of artistic endeavors by women.)

I have led off with one of my last year’s nudes because it is a sweet one. Not much else to say about it, really. I don’t often get the gift of such a straightforward pose. Below is a more adventurous variation, with the same model.

Here I was enjoying the shadows cast on and by the body, which provide desirable drama. I’ll bet the sweet one would beat out the dramatic one in an auction though.

Playfulness is something you don’t often get, but here is a model that excels in that quality:

That pose lasted for only ten minutes, about as long as you can hope to get a pose with some energy in it. Even the next one below, which didn’t require any extreme twists, was probably hard on the fingers that had to grip her side so tightly.

Although I made an effort to portray her gripping deep into the fat, I did a better job portraying the back and buttocks–this is what I meant above when I suggested that the subtle tonal variations within the feminine shape were what made the female nude so beautiful. Scroll up until the hand is just out of sight and you will see what I mean. I should take scissors to this one.

Last week I mentioned losing a drawing right out of my portfolio. When I went back into that portfolio again this week, minus the urgency that had gripped me before, I found it right away. It is from my Drawing with Color class:

I do not like it as much as I remembered, so I added the black outlines where you see them. Some of the shading and coloring is nice, but I prefer it with the black outlines. My problem may be with the color of the paper–not enough contrast with the colors chosen for the figure.

During this week’s class I added a few more passable nudes, but I still believe that my SLG nudes are, on the whole, more interesting. (This has nothing to do with any input from the drawing class teacher, who pretty much leaves me alone until the end.) Here’s an exception, which sadly goes unfinished because I thought we were going to have 20 minutes for the pose and we got only ten:

I do like backs. What I particularly like about this one is how it emerges from the paper as a collection of light and shadow. The outline still reigns supreme.

Last one–my most recent nude, from the drawing class– but I left out the color. The color was becoming a distraction, I feared, so I returned to basics in an effort to produce a better example for you.

I loved the paper, contributed by the teacher–98 pounds in weight instead of the 60 I was used to. (Weight of paper is measured in pounds per 500 sheets sized 20 by 26 inches–I just had to look that up.) The charcoal seems to lie more lightly upon its laid (textured) surface, making adjustments easy, yet the paper allows intensely deep applications of blackest black as well. Who knew? I am now shopping for more of it, and not feeling at all bad about having already invested in 1,000 sheets of the 60 lb. paper since I can now use up the 60 lb. as if it were newsprint. I’ll bet the newsprint pads don’t even bother with stating weights.

I hope you enjoyed the lovely nudes, and got enough of them for a while.

This Thursday (April 14) night from 5 until 8 is Open Doors Manchester, aka Trolley Night, one of only three this year, so don’t miss it. Make two of your stops the Manchester Artists Association (MAA) Gallery 1528 Elm St (on the corner of Elm and Brook Streets) and the Framers Market at 1301 Elm Street, and look for my paintings: The Totem and Sunburst over Cathedral Ledge at MAA, and the Farmers Market at the Framers Market. For my previous discussion the Farmers Market painting, go here. (Unless you get there early, you won’t see me because Thursday is the night I have that drawing class.)

One of my blog followers admitted that he just skims through most of my blogs because he doesn’t care much for landscapes. Nudes, on the other hand, are more interesting. Me too. And I do have a backlog of photos taken of my drawings from the Saturday Life Group and its offshoot, the smaller Tuesday group. I have not taken any photos of the ones from the Thursday night drawing class yet. (You may remember that we started out with still lifes in this “Drawing with Color” class, but several weeks ago, switched to drawing a nude model.)

Not many of the Thursday nudes are worthy, but I thought I finally had a good one at the end of last Thursday’s class, and guess what! I lost it! I remember stuffing it in my portfolio, thinking this kind of treatment can’t be good for it. But when I looked in the portfolio for it Friday, it was gone. I am baffled. Fortunately, I’ve got enough other material to put together a blog entry.

I need a theme. Can’t think of one. Let’s go with gender: this week male nudes; next week, female, with fingers crossed and a prayer to St. Anthony that the missing female from last week will miraculously show up in the meantime. Not that I believe in miracles.

Above, the “cover” shot, is one of my Tuesday group products–basically a portrait of our organizer/model, who took this one home with him. It was a pretty decent likeness, although he doesn’t really look that old. The photo is grainy because he had to send it to me by email. (I don’t take a camera to life drawing sessions.) I like it not just for the likeness, which pleased me enormously, but also for the hands. I am always trying to improve my hands, so to speak. See my blog in October on A Show of Hands.

This one is from February, a straight-at-you pose that is a challenge to make interesting. I prefer more foreshortening. Maybe that’s my cop-out. I’ll explain: accuracy in drawing a nude is so very, very challenging that translating the pose into Art becomes almost an afterthought. That’s true with or without foreshortening. But with extreme or unusual foreshortening, I may be hoping for a substitute for artistry. Like this one:

I can tell by its roughness that this was a short pose–ten or twenty minutes. I only had time to get in what I thought was most important. You can see I assigned no importance to the far arm and hand, but I liked the toes a lot. (That’s just not normal!)

This one is from last May and is an example of foreshortening the body out of the picture altogether. I was trying out some new pencils, I think. The foreshortening of the right upper arm doesn’t read as foreshortened, and I don’t know why.

As you might be able to see, this one goes back to October 2009. Ordinarily I don’t like the use of the staff, but this time it improves the composition by creating a verticality to offset the horizontality. I have this one taped to my closet door, a place of honor.

A little funky, don’t you think? Maybe I have departed from accuracy here in order to express some creativity? Obviously, I chose to use my time differently–instead of depicting the muscles more expertly, I diverted to putting in some color and background tones. What was up with that? I can only speculate. It is a fact that great nude art does not necessarily include elaborate muscle modeling. Not that I’m saying this is great art. Maybe a start, though. The hand is particularly good.

Such a simple pose–how to make it interesting? I concentrated on the elbow. That’s maybe my best elbow yet. See how simply it is expressed. Almost Sargent-like.

Last one: Another pole made riveting by the shadow it casts. Cast shadows can be the best part of a nude drawing–shadows cast on the body or by the body. This drawing is also another example of leaving the body relatively undefined while concentrating of the development of the accessories. Artist in charge.

I think I have learned a lot about myself in the course of writing this entry. Thank you for reading it, which gives me the incentive to do this kind of retro-intro-spection.

I feel as if this past week were a week of breath-catching, art-wise. I did nothing significant. I got no rush from completing a drawing or painting the makes my heart sing, or at least hum a little. Even so I do have some new stuff to show you. Many blog-weeks, you will not get to see everything I might have going on, because I try to stay on topic. But today is another “odds and ends” kind of day, wherein I pull in all those loose off-topic strands .

First and foremost, congrats to all of you who thought my painting “Farmers Market” was worthy–it has been accepted into a small exhibit sponsored by the Women’s Caucus for Art, juried by the gallery owner where the exhibit will be shown. “Dig It” is the name of the exhibit, and locally grown (art or food) is the theme. (I also submitted my Marco Island “Banana Tree” of which I am so fond, but it was rejected!!) Here is the where and when of this exhibit in case you are moved to visit it: Framers Market, 1301 Elm St., Manchester; hours Tues-Fri, 9:30 a.m.-6:00 p.m and Saturday 9:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. Framers Market participates in Manchester’s Trolley Nights, so the artists’ reception for Dig It will coincide with Trolley Night: April 14 (Thursday) from 5 p.m. through 8 p.m.

I also have two plein air pieces (“Totem” from Narragansett, Rhode Island and “Sunburst over Cathedral Ledge,” from North Conway) showing at the Manchester Artists Gallery, right up Elm Street (1528 Elm) from the Framers Gallery. MAA Gallery is also on the Trolley map, as is Art 3, conveniently tucked away behind the MAA Gallery on W. Brook Street. Art 3 is always generous with the wine. At the other end of the Trolley route are East Colony and Hatfield’s, both in the Langer building. In the middle of the Trolley route is the City Hall exhibit and many others. If you haven’t tried a Trolley Night in Manchester, you really should. You will need the whole three hours. The official name for Trolley Night is “Open Doors Manchester”. Unfortunately, my own enjoyment of this Trolley Night will be cut short at six p.m. by that drawing class that I am taking at the Institute.

I mentioned before that I had M. Graham paints shipped to me in Florida and that I had liked them. So much did I like them that last week I wrote to the manufacturer to find out why their paint dries glossy, as if varnished. The oil used to bind the pigment is walnut oil, instead of linseed. I thought perhaps that was the secret. After a couple of emails back and forth, I learned that the M. Graham paints are more free-flowing (which also might have caused me to think my panels were slippery), and thus need less thinning. Solvents, says M. Graham spokesperson, have a dulling effect. I try to use my solvent only to clean brushes anyway, but in Florida I may have stuck to that rule more faithfully than usual. Anyway, at this point I am so enamored of the brand that I don’t want to go back and use up my old paint, which is a considerable amount. I can’t be that profligate, so the only solution is to paint up a storm to use up the old stuff as fast as possible.

Here are two more paintings from Sierra Club calendars, painted while gallery-sitting a month ago:

Amber Waves Trillium Forest

And a still life that got lost:

Carved Eagle with Candlesticks (colored pencil)

“Carved Eagle” is from my drawing class, one of the earliest ones. I contributed the candlesticks for this setup. The same eagle-object was included in a more recent drawing posted here. I have been using colored chalk more than the pencil lately, and we have had a live model to draw instead of the crazy objects. Funny thing, as experienced and, do I dare claim “competent”?, as I am at drawing the nude figure at Saturday Life Group, nothing I have done of the model in this class has pleased me, whether in pencil or chalk. I kept none of my efforts and have no photos of them. Take my word, they were uninspired.

Finally, two of my Marco Island paintings have been “fixed”, starting with the Thai Pavilion’s better background tree and lights on the bamboo and roof supports. You can get an idea of what I mean about the glossy paint in the upper right section. No matter how I tried to keep the glare off Thai Pavilion before photographing it, I still got some shine. You can clearly see how I got the shapes of the bamboo by cutting in with the sky color. That is dry paint.

Thai Pavilion

San Marco-AFTER San Marco–BEFORE

San Marco Catholic Church was the site of the sudden fierce thunderstorm that overtook me at my easel. (Go here for original story.) Beside changing the color of the sky, I corrected perspective and added adornments. It’s better now, don’t you think? (No shine here, possibly because in changing the color of the sky, I switched from M. Graham Ultramarine Blue to someone else’s Cerulean Blue.)

I still have not photographed the ninth painting on Marco–I keep forgetting about it, poor stepchild that it is. Plus I had sworn not to post it until I had fixed its problems, but the problems don’t look so important to me now–I would be willing to show you. My current attitude is, it may not be worth my time working over this painting to make it perfect. Am I getting to the point of my artist’s life when not every painting must be worked over to perfection? What’s up with that?

I started the above painting months ago, and even discussed it in my Blog for December 28 and again on January 10. The photo references were taken last year on Marco Island and it has taken me this long to complete the project. Every week or so I would fuss a bit with it. Here is a record of my progress:

December 28 January 2

January 3 January 24

February 1 February 14-tents colored

February 21–tree added

The sides are deep, about 1 and a half inches, and the staples are on the back of the stretchers instead of the sides. That makes this piece “gallery-wrapped” and able to be hung without a frame. Catch is, the painting is supposed to continue around all four sides too, so at the end, I had that task to perform. Here is what one side–the bottom side–looks like. (Look to the left of the photo.) I deliberately made the sides out of focus.
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I have not decided whether I like this painting or not. It reminds me of my childhood art–in grade school I won an award from the Scholastic something or other competition for a painting of cotton pickers, whom I depicted without burdening myself with historical references or pretense at authenticity. In the foreground I had one female figure sitting relaxed under a tree with a child–a theme echoed by the central figure in the Farmers Market.

If this painting has any merit, it may be in the drawing of the figures, which I do think are sprightly. My friends Mary and Jo Ellen may even recognize themselves in the crowd. But I did not do as I intended–I had intended to paint the crowd much more impressionistically, summoning up the images in the viewer’s mind with the merest suggestions of bodies in motion. Instead, as you can see, I painted them so carefully that the people may even recognize themselves.

Part, or perhaps most, of the fault lies in the amount of care and time I took to produce this completed painting. I spent hardly any time on the buildings, and I feel good about them. But the very ground under my peoples’ feet became a huge problem for me. Because my photo references were all over the place, I tried to apply logic to establish a consistent pattern of light and shade. The question of how much shadowing and at what angle tormented me. The need to consult my logical (left side) brain in order to perform an artistic (right brain) task may have deprived me of the freedom and spontaneity to just splash and smear the people onto the canvas. Sigh. I just hope the painting has some merit notwithstanding the left brain involvement.

Another issue that gave me trouble was the four umbrellas. I have been watching the webinars given by Johannes Vloothuis, and took to heart advice that triangles are bad, bad, bad! But you can’t draw tents without using the triangular form. Plus, my white tents were boring, boring, boring! If “boring” had only meant “unnoticeable”, that would have been all right. But my white tents were both boring AND noticeable, so I colored them. A friend (Stef–thank you!) suggested stripes, so one of them acquired yellow stripes. I grew a new tree to cast shadows on another.

The triangle at bottom left, though technically risky, I left in because it keys the motif of the whole scene and besides, was the only opportunity to include closeups of the luscious veggies that I had photographed.

Perhaps I should start over, repainting the scene on a new canvas without using any photo references. A noble experiment. Don’t expect anything like that until this time next year.

I caught the 6 a.m. flight out of the snow-blanketed, shivery northeastern part of this country on Friday morning, March 4, and returned after midnight Saturday March 12 to a wet but cleared driveway, lined with half-piles of dirty snow. Seven and a half of the eight days in between I enjoyed sparkling sunshiny southwestern Florida–Marco Island to be exact. Eight days, nine paintings.

Mary and I wasted little time getting our easels out after reaching her home on Marco Island. She suggested subjects around the perimeter of her house that had attracted her painter’s eye, and mentioned that her painting of the banana tree had won a prize. “Sold!” I exclaimed in jest, “I too want a prize-winning painting!” Here is a photo of the plant that I chose for my prize-winning painting:

I had ordered a box of paints and panels shipped to Mary’s address from one of the mail order internet suppliers–gessoed art panels and M. Graham oils in blue ultramarine, cadmium red and azo yellow, plus diozinine purple (my substitute for black), and a titanium white with alkyd for its faster drying. I had never used either these panels nor this brand of paint before. The panels were slippery compared to canvas. This effect seemed to increase as time passed, perhaps due to a drying of the paint? To overcome the slipperiness of the panel surface, I was loading my brush with extra paint. Not Van Gogh thick, but almost that thick. The paint was wonderfully creamy–yummy, really. Because I had only primary colors, I found myself doing more mixing. At one point, the entire painting seemed to be in various shades of mud.

I almost panicked, but then I reminded myself that I was in sunny Florida, having fun and damn it, this was going to be a prize-winning painting. So I took a page from the Van Gogh bag of tricks (I was already in Van Gogh mode with the thick paint) and added dark purple outlines for drama, hit a few spots with purer color, and the whole thing came together beautifully. In my humble opinion, the Banana Tree is my best work of the week, totally deserving of this prize from me at least, but then none of the others are quite finished.

My next painting, on Saturday, was also in Mary’s back yard. Two Royal Palms growing together like this was unusual and, I thought, lovely:

About the only thing I want to change in this painting is that little tower of foliage on the shrub in the background. I find it distracting and unnecessary. The paint was so thick on the leaves of the little tree next to the Royal Palms that it was still wet a week later when I packed it to come home. I haven’t had the courage to check up on it. (All of these photographs were taken before I left Florida.) Notice the sea to the horizon–the Gulf of Mexico. What a prime location!

The next day (Sunday) we went to an area or town called “Goodland”–a fishing village of small cottages and trailers, restaurants and boating stuff–acres of boat storage five stories high, boat launching areas, creeping gentrification, and wild bars (so they say). Bars as in cocktails. That’s a lot of interesting man-made material for a painting, but I couldn’t wean myself entirely from nature, so it is a combination:

The Banyan Tree. These trees drop tendrils from their adult branches and the tendrils become roots, creating quite a remarkable abstract sculpture. Two years ago, I had painted a banyan tree in Boca Grande, but considered that no reason not to try again. In the background I suggest detail but do not provide any. The one thing I want to fix on this painting is the palm tree in the midground. I should either remove it altogether, or make it less defined, less hard-edged. What you also see in the midground is a smallish marina with boats, and in the background, two-story houses not typical of Goodland’s homes.

Actually, the Banyan Tree took two days because we were chased off by threatening clouds on Sunday. Sunday was what Mary calls a “silvery” day, meaning cloudy, with subdued shadows. Monday was different–full of bright sunlight and prominent shadows. If my painting looks a little schizo, that’s why.

After Monday morning painting, we had lunch at the “Little Bar” restaurant, the only eating establishment on Goodland open for business on Mondays, after which we went off to find a more typical dwelling to paint:

“One-story House on Canal” I can’t find my reference photo, although I know I took one. I know because I remember returning my camera to the car before setting up my easel. And I’m sure of the camera being in the car because during the painting of this picture, a young cormorant was fighting with a fish, trying to get the darn thing down his too-small gullet. The struggle went on and on, and I longed for the camera, but knew if I made a move in any direction, the cormorant would carry his fish off to a new location. Life is full of regrets.

Anyway, I am going to have to study my photo to fix the architecture of this little house on the canal, because what I saw (and painted) does not make sense to me now. However, I am pleased with the light passing through the lattice somewhere in the entrance, and the light reflections from the water onto the boat. The boat–again painted as I saw it but my eyesight isn’t that great anymore–the seat back is flipped the wrong way, isn’t it? Must be flippable like that so someone could sit there while repairing the motor? Anyway, I believe that boat needs a person in it, and that is what I would most like to fix in this painting.

Tuesday: a friend of Mary’s invited me to go with her to the Naples Botanical Garden. Artists are welcome to paint in the Garden only on Tuesdays until noon, and Mary had an appointment that kept her from going with us. With all the choice plants (hibiscus to die for!) around Mary’s house to paint, I felt no need to focus on flowers. In the Asian Garden, there was an impressive bamboo collection, and behind a species known as black bamboo, stood an attractive Thai pavilion. Here is a reference photo and my painting:

I want to work on the bamboo a little more, lighting the side hit by the sun, and figure out a better way to resolve the hill on the left. You notice, I suppose, that I overstated the presence of a body of water. I like to paint water, so shoot me.

Tuesday afternoon, Mary and I went off to paint on the Esplanade, in part because Annie’s Ice Cream is close by. We lazily set up on a bench in the plaza near the bar, which was celebrating Mardi Gras. We diligently ignored all the shenanigans and stuck to our painting. Here is a reference photo, partial at best, and the painting I chose to create:

I never intended to match up frond to shadow of frond, but perhaps I went too far in ignoring reality. This painting may not be fixable–I like it better in person, so maybe it just doesn’t photograph well. The ice cream (peanut butter fudge) was good.

Wednesday: Mary had mentioned how long she had been eyeing a working boat up on blocks next to the Little Bar where we had take lunch on Monday, and I agreed that it would make an interesting subject. So back we went to Goodland to paint the boat “high and dry”, which has become the title of my painting.

This is my second favorite from the week, after the Banana Tree. Not until comparing painting to photo did I see how upturned and perky I painted my boat. I should change the name to “High and Dry but Still Perky.” But there are a couple of things I want to change. Under the boat in the center of the painting I originally had yellow like the color of the brush on the right. I covered the yellow with blue green paint to push it into the background, but now I think I should have left it yellow, to show how high this boat is off the ground. I also worry a little about how the narrow roof lip can cast such a wide shadow, but the reference photo backs me up on that point.

Thursday: I am down to two days left, since my plane back North leaves Friday at 7:15 p.m. The weather forecast says “showers” and seems to suggest “scattered” as well. Mary has another appointment to go to, so she drives me to the Catholic Church that she attends, where I will be safe to paint alone. The church is architecturally worth painting. I find an angle I like and get set up. I have the shapes outlined and am just noticing how sharply the sun and shadow planes are contrasted, when rain and darkness and wind descend upon me from my rear. Without notice of this impending hurricane, I could do nothing but hang onto my easel for dear life. Somehow I managed to get off these photos, probably when I realized I had to get the camera into a more protected spot.

So I’m thinking, a storm that moved in that fast will leave just as fast, the sun will come out and dry me off, so I will just wait it out. But then the thunder started. I somehow found a way to pack up enough to move (two trips) to the shelter of the church. Soaked to the skin I was. The only damage to my equipment was to the paper towels, which were mush. The sun never did come out and dry me up, at least not until hours later. I worked on the painting from memory:

Now that I have had a chance to compare the painting to the reference photo, I am astonished to see for the first time there is a strip of windows under that higher eave. I did not consciously omit them. I just omitted them.

The railing in the lower cupola is just a detail that did not make it to the initial drawing. I want to add it to the painting. The left side of the tower needs to be widened. Not sure whether to add the decorative molding.

Although this has nothing to do with painting, I have to report an outstanding concert experience Thursday night at “The Phil” (Philharmonic Center for the Arts) in Naples. Leon Fleisher, super pianist. Super venue. Only a very wealthy and culturally sophisticated community could support such a luxurious structure and vibrant institution. I’m thinking no wonder so many people move here to retire, and maybe not such a bad idea, hurricanes notwithstanding.

Friday. Last day. Mary asked me if there was anything I wanted to paint, and I requested a bridge over a canal. She found me one.

But since I took all my painting photos Thursday afternoon (in the lovely post-storm light), and I have had no time since getting home (long story) to photograph my start on the canal bridge, I cannot show you what a rotten job I did on the bridge, and you can be sure that I will be fixing what can be fixed before I post it. Suffice to say that it looks like a foot bridge, not a car bridge, and I got the perspective wrong on the dock. But the foliage and buildings look great!

Hope you enjoyed this maybe-too-long post. I just had to record it all for the sake of my own memory. It was a great week. Thank you Mary!

Newmarket, New Hampshire is a little town tucked away in the space between Manchester and Portsmouth, between Maine and Route 101. You don’t stumble into it on the way to somewhere else, at least I haven’t. You discover it only when it is your destination. It became a destination for me when I joined the NH Plein Air artists group. In fact, Newmarket was my first outing with that group. Four of us painted on the far side of the Lamprey River, looking back at the town. In these two of my earliest plein air paintings, I first labored over an old mill building and then the dam and bridges. I have learned a lot about painting both indoors and out since I did these, but they are still representative scenes from Newmarket:

Pretty primitive, but thank goodness I can see that now. I must be improving.

Yes, New Hampshire is blanketed with adorable little towns, but Newmarket is evolving into something of an art magnet. Artists are settling there. A new art supply store located there. Annual Old Home Days produce artists’ easels set up on sidewalks and riverside locations, accompanied by the artists themselves, painting en plein air. Two art galleries–Ampersand and Cornerstone–vie for attention. The Lamprey Arts and Culture Alliance (LACA) is based in Newmarket.

So when I was invited by Christopher Volpe to submit plein air pieces for a collective exhibit at the Cornerstone, I jumped at the opportunity. I had met Chris at last year’s Canterbury Shaker Village paint out, and greatly admired the beauty and simplicity of his work. Upshot: I have three pieces in the plein air show that begins March 12 and ends April 7. The reception will be March 12, a Saturday, between 4 and 7. I’m not sure I can be present at the reception because that same day I will be in Boston with an old friend from Germany–but maybe she will agree to visit Newmarket after I give her my sales talk.

The three pieces included in the exhibit are the Sawmill that headlines my blog, the snow scene that opens this entry, and the painting below, which depicts a suspension bridge on Davis Path, in the White Mountains near Crawford Notch.

You probably remember the snow scene from my recent blog on the snow camp.

I am posting this blog entry in advance of the usual Monday schedule because tomorrow I fly down to Florida for my third annual visit with Mary Crawford Reining, fellow plein air painter, who lives on Marco Island. Last year I discovered how to use my telephoto lens and returned with some fabulous pictures of birds. See them here and here. The long lens will travel with me yet again and I hope to return home with not only fabulous photographs but a few good plein air paintings as well.

A while back I posted a blog entry called “Fun with Nudes”, which was delightedly received by my cohorts at the Saturday Life Group, whose motto is “I see naked people”. Teapots may not have quite the same resonance, but they are shapely. These drawings are from the NHIA class that I am taking with Peter Clive. And it really IS fun to capture the lights, reflections, shapeliness of random life objects deposited on a table with no special organization or composition. We students are spread on all sides of the table, and whatever object lands in front is pretty much what we get to draw. The one above, “Teapots against Black”, was the last one I drew and it was done very quickly. My original effort is below.

Before I started the black one, Peter Clive had suggested to me that I fill in this background with black, and I think now that would have been a good thing to do, so please imagine this one against a black background. The title will have to be “Teapots with Eagle.”

A brass horse has found its way to the table for three weeks running. I avoided it last week, but here he is from the previous two weeks.

“Brass Horse” and “Brass Horse and Mask”, respectively.

Still life has has always conjured up for me images of fruits and flowers and their containers. I have collected a fair number of fruit and flower paintings by other artists. (One of my favorites is Jelaine Faunce from Nevada.) I have never yearned to paint fruits myself, maybe because the challenge they seem to pose is the realism of the rendering–not my cup of tea. But drawing these crazy ill-composed unrelated objects with colored pencils, crayons, charcoal, inks, etc. without rules, rhymes or reasons has just been a blast.

Next week, the class will be drawing from a live person, so this may be the end of my flirtation with Still Life as a subject matter.

Just to keep them all together, here are the pieces Still Life No. 1 and No. 2 that I posted in a previous blog entry. No. 1 is a painting, not a drawing, and actually predates (I think) the beginning of the drawing class.

That suitcase has found its way into the last drawing, with which I opened this entry, the one on black background. Full circle.

Last week I brought up the subject of painting from photographs taken by someone other than the artist. I subscribe to the generally accepted principle that, given a choice, first paint from life, then paint from your own photograph, and lastly paint from the photograph of another only with permission from the photographer.

Painting from photographs, even those you took yourself, can be dangerously stultifying for an artist, but no less an authority than Albert Handell gave me permission to do so after viewing two of mine, which he admired. (Light in the Forest and The Greening of the Forest in May). Nevertheless, some of my personal favorites are ones that I painted en plein air (outside and from life, sort of) and alla prima (all at once without tinkering later in the studio). But sometimes I fall in love with a photograph, and seek permission to paint from it. You can find some examples of that in my album pages “Studio–New Hampshire” and “Eclectic Mix”. But other times, I don’t have enough information or time to get permission, which is what happens when I getting ready for a sitting stint at the Manchester Artists Association Gallery.

I’m no better than the average bear at getting my act together, so most Saturday mornings I am packing my drawing materials for SLG (Saturday Life Group), which runs from 9:30 to 12:30, and my oils for an afternoon of gallery sitting from 1:00 to 4:00. Obviously, a lunch has to be packed too. No time to print out any new photographs to paint from, or contact any photographers for permission to use theirs. So like last week, this week I popped a selection of favorite pages from old Sierra Club calendars in my oil painting backpack.

So that’s my excuse for painting the wave. When you think about it, no wave can really be painted from life. The shapes change too fast. Worse than trying to paint a sunset. I have painted surf en plein air (Rhode Island), and got a lovely feeling or impression of it, but when it comes to anatomizing a wave, you have to have a photograph of it. Once you have painted maybe a hundred waves, you can probably construct one out of your imagination, but this is my first closely observed wave.

As far as the copyright is concerned, I’m hoping that my use of the photograph qualified as “fair use” for educational purposes or that my years of service to the Sierra Club will count for something!

At the Gallery, I could only spend an hour on the wave because I needed to let the thick paint dry a little so that I could more successfully smudge it. Yesterday I spent probably another hour smudging.

But meanwhile, back at the Gallery on Saturday, I had another two hours to kill. I always bring at least two canvases (two 11 x 14’s fit in my pochade box), so I brought out some drawings from SLG. I don’t try this often, in part because the exhibit opportunities for a nude painting, (shorthand for “painting of a nude person”) are few. The general public, it appears, are not ready to see nude paintings in a public space unless the public space is a museum. I had a couple–from two different mornings, so two different models–to choose from:

Here is the resulting painting–I choose the easiest one.

I belong to an organization, The Women’s Caucus for Art, which puts on a number of exhibitions during the year, and one called “Flowers Interpreted” is coming up. Since I don’t usually interpret flowers per se, I was happy to find inspiration from a Sierra Club calendar closeup of a field of poppies and coreopsis. Painting from someone else’s photograph is a serious deviation from “best practices”, and not just because of copyright implications. But inspiration cannot be denied.

Speaking of copyright infringements: There is a school of thought that holds that artists may safely (i.e., legally) paint from others’ photographs of nature because the photographer did nothing to set up the photograph–he or she just recorded it. I’m not sure how distinguishable that would be from the AP news photo of Barack Obama that inspired Shepard Fairey’s iconic image (“Hope” poster, buttons, etc), which became the basis of a celebrated lawsuit. The AP argued that Fairey “copied all of the original, creative expression in the photograph.” Fairey argued that his use of the photograph constituted “fair use”–a copyright concept that permits the quotation of written expression. The AP and Fairey settled their dispute, so we will never have a court ruling on that matter but if Fairey did more than take inspiration from the photo, if he actually used the photograph to digitally manipulate it and transform it into his poster image, it seems to me very, very distinguishable from an artist looking at a photograph to inform the way he/she depicts the same subject matter in a painting. One of the AP statements suggests that digital manipulation is exactly how Fairey created his image. (Some artists project a photograph onto their canvases and trace the image instead of trying to draw the image–this to me seems closer to digital manipulation and therefore closer to copyright infringement.) (Reminder and disclaimer: I am a tax lawyer, not an intellectual property lawyer. But I am well trained in logic.)

In an excess of caution, however, I made changes to the contours of the hills presented by the Sierra Club calendar photograph.

Another painting that I worked on last week was painted entirely out of my head, with not a single photograph reference to help me out. As a result, I am a little nervous about its accuracy. Here is that painting:

I woke up a few weeks ago about 2 or 3 a.m., to see a snowy landscape out my window that was lighted up by a pink sky! No, NOT SKY–the snow must have been falling from such low-hanging clouds that the reflection of the city lights were amplified overhead. Each falling snowflake would also be reflecting light from the clouds.

I wanted to record this phenomenon in a painting, but not enough to get up out of bed and paint it in the moment. (Regrets.) So I had to do it from memory, which meant that I had to reason out all those important choices that I usually only have to observe. Shadows or no shadows? Should the pink of the low-hanging clouds be reflected in the snow on the ground? How light, exactly, was it?

I am looking forward to our next overnight snowstorm so that I can check on all such issues. Maybe I will haul out the paint and do it right this time.

Today I have a number of paintings in progress and a few revisited paintings, but nothing new and finished. So I was casting about for a fresh story line. I’ve already done the idea of makeovers and the WIPs, and I don’t want to bore anyone, especially you, with the same painting over and over with small refinements that the photographs perhaps don’t capture. So today I thought you might like to see what my tiny studio looks like with multiple projects underway at once.

Starting from the left of the above photograph, which I took this morning just before going to work: Upside down on the drafting table you see the Farmers Market painting. I have pretty much finished the painting, but have to paint around the edges of this “gallery-wrapped” canvas so that I do not have to frame it. I started with the bottom edge, and am waiting for that edge to dry before tackling the other three edges.

Behind the lamp is a portrait I painted in 1964 of my two children, as a Christmas gift to my parents. It was the last painting I painted until I started to paint landscapes in 2005. My daughter Nancy was then almost two years old and my son Andy only a month old. The lamp contains a special bulb that gives off daylight spectrums, or some such thing. The daylight from the right is coming from the North, which is what artists want in a studio because it does not change as the sun travels across the sky from morning to night. But my north light is obstructed by the hemlocks growing outside my window. Since I am a certified treehugger (volunteer for Sierra Club), no tree removal is planned.

On the window sill are three paintings , two that I began Saturday while gallery sitting at the Manchester Artists Association Gallery. The one on the left was inspired by a Sierra Club calendar photo of a field of California poppies. The one in the middle you might recognize as one of my recent snow camp paintings, still drying on the sill. The one on the right was inspired by my awakening during last week’s snow storm to look outside and see the sky all pink. Behind the shelf unit, you may detect other paintings in waiting. These are older ones I am not satisfied with, yet. Someday I may figure out what they need and move them out for public viewing.

Under the window is my backpack and my art cart, two ways to deliver the gear to an outdoor painting spot. The cart has been handy for getting gear to a class, but the backpack works better for traversing unpaved surfaces. The floor lamp delivers wide spectrum light to supplement the north light. Also important to note are the camera on tripod, which I use for photographing final versions of paintings when I want a really good image, and my bright blue chair that allows me to scoot around the space and get some distance from whatever I am working on at the easel.

The space is too small, however, to allow for enough distance when I am painting on a 24 x 48 canvas, as I am right now. Below is a shot of the other side of my studio space, showing the easel, the palette on tripod (which I also use for plein air painting), and the current painting in progress. In the background, on my closet door, you can see three nude drawings from Saturday Life Group, which got tacked to the door last year and have never been replaced. The still life on the wall to the left is by Nevada artist Jelaine Faunce. The TV on the right was intended for displaying my digital photographs for use as painting references, but I still haven’t worked out the kinks.

In the back you can see a sliver of my bedroom, from which this space has been carved. The studio space originally was a separate bedroom, but by the time I moved in, the two rooms had merged into one huge room with windows on three sides. My Chickering grand piano had occupied this space until I recognized that art was my priority and I sold the piano, which had been mine since I was ten years old. Sometimes you just have to let go.

The studio is now separated from the bedroom space by these racks of storage:

Top Shelf Bottom Shelf

On the top shelf I keep large canvases, a few framed charcoal drawings, and an assortment of the wet panel carriers (“Art Cocoons”) invented by fellow artist, Patricia LaBrecque of Goffstown. On the bottom shelf are many panels ranging up to 16×20 in size. That red object is the back of a homemade doll house that I now use for art library storage. I have so many books describing how to paint this and draw that–if I could have only read and absorbed all of them, I could have become a great artist. A knowledgeable one, anyway.

In front of the bottom shelf you get a glimpse of the rolling caddy with brushes and media (oils and solvents) on the top. I can also set a cup of hot tea there and so far have not tried to clean my brushes in it, but once I enter the painting “zone”, I always forget about the hot tea until it has got cold.

Only one more angle remains. It looks pretty sloppy. Two sets of shelves hold backup brushes, watercolor supplies, sketchbooks galore, a binder with data about my first 100 paintings (I gave up the tracking effort after that) and lots of paint tubes. Behind the farthest unit is a covered litter box and assorted supplies. Yes, I have to share my limited studio space with the cats. The sneakers don’t belong here at all! They have probably been sitting there for weeks, unnoticed. What with the snow, I have been living in my snuggly Emu boots except when I have to don the special Snow Camp boots.

One last view is necessary to round out the picture–

The easel way in the background is used for drying paintings (the other snow painting right now) or for examining artworks that are under review. Moving forward, the light that I use to supplement the obstructed north light is another one of those all spectrum lights that is suppose to mimic daylight. I have to angle it just right to avoid having it create a glare on my painting. Beneath the light, hanging on the big rack of canvases that I showed you before, is a dandy thing with pockets to hold tubes of paint and other things. The waste basket at the bottom is important too–I have to use a lot of paper towels in the course of painting.

So there you have it. Thanks for visiting!

Nature give me the gift of a Snow Day yesterday, and I used it to make improvements to my Snow Camp paintings. The paint was still malleable–a benefit usually denied to me because of my work schedule.

I am leading off with a close up of the first painting to help you detect the opalescent color of the snow. One of the Big Insights of the weekend was Stape’s insistance that we portray the ineffable quality of the color of snow. (“Ineffable” = incapable of being described in words.) After struggling with the concept, I would like to suggest that snow is also incapable of being depicted with paint.

But there is some science behind Stape’s opalescent idea. White, I am told, contains all colors, and thus reflects all colors back to our eyes. So Stape’s method does make sense. He asked us to lay down very pale shades of the three pure primary colors (red, blue, yellow) next to each other. The result should be a vibration of color that would come close to the true color of snow. This Big Insight was revealed to us on Day Two. I applied it to my painting of that day, but the result was a little disappointing. The snow just looked lumpy. Yesterday, however, I worked it over, lightening the colors and blending them slightly– without mixing them together (mixing would have meant death to vibrancy, as the mix would have produced gray). (Why mixing three primary colors does not produce white instead of gray is one of those mysteries like time being a fourth dimension–which I take on faith.) Here is the painting in its entirety, Day Two version against yesterday’s version:

I can’t really see it here either. You may have to trust me when I say that, in person, the effect is worth having. Here’s another closeup:

I tinkered with some other features of this painting while I was at it–of course.

The Day Three painting also had an issue with the color of snow. I mentioned yesterday–no, that was Tuesday (yesterday was the day when time stood still)–about the sun lighting up the vertical planes, which had the effect of showing the horizontal surface as if in a bit of a shadow. To appreciate the enormity of my observation, you have to have read John Carlson’s book on painting landscapes. His famous analysis holds that the sky is the lightest element (barring snow) in a painting because it is the source of light; the next lightest surface is the horizontal surface because the light from the sky hits it directly; the darkest areas are the verticals (they get the most indirect light) and in between light and dark are the slopes. All rules have exceptions, of course, and when the sun lies low in the sky, it will override the above scheme to make the lightest surface that which it hits most directly–verticals! What fun!

So here is the before and after:

Perhaps you need a close up?

The puzzlement for me was HOW to show the brightest white of the snow when all those vertical planes were facing away for me. Answer: Backlight. Cheat.

As long as we are on the subject of lit vertical elements, here is one of my early paintings which a few years ago won a place in the New England Biennial exhibit at the NH Institute of Art.

When I look back at my previous works, I am sometimes awed by the fact that I was able to produce some good paintings before I knew as much as I now know, or now think I know. Maybe knowing stuff is not the key. But knowing more about painting snow is for sure going to change my style vis a vis snow. Naivete begone! Now, what am I to do with all those old paintings of snow in shades of gray or blue?