Marathon Report

Posted by Aline on January 21, 2015

Last Saturday, I participated in a ten-hour marathon of painting (or drawing) one brave model. The day was broken into three 3-hour segments, with half-hour breaks for nourishment at lunchtime and dinnertime. The location was the studio of Adrienne Silversmith, the same studio where we meet regularly on Monday mornings.

We started with a few quick poses to enable the artists to get warmed up, so I had less time for the longer morning pose and brought nowhere near a satisfying conclusion. I like the hands, though.

The afternoon went better for me:

Afternoon Pose from the Marathon

That’s Larry Christian in the background. He works in compressed charcoal (no wiping out!) and doesn’t do long poses, so he would move around the room to get different angles on our model. He came around and plopped himself down in the chair I had been painting into my background, so there he is permanently ensconced in my painting. For many years, Larry taught life drawing at the NH Institute of Art; I took his course twice. There’s a blog post on that subject here (“Catching the Odd perspective”) and here (“Struggle with Compressed Charcoal”).

While painting away, we got to talking about a certain style of painting that has intrigued me for several years now. It’s not merely “loose”, it’s destructive! Adrienne described it more charitably, as construction, then de-construction. It fascinates me because I like it, and I can’t figure out why I like it. Here are a few links provided by Adrienne to artists that, to one degree or another, practice this style:
davidshevlino.com
maggiesiner.com

For those of you too lazy to click on a link, here is an example by Maggie Siner:

Portrait by M. Siner

Anyway, after six hours of painting, I felt brave enough to try something like it. I first painted a fairly straightforward figure, and then I started messing with the edges. Then I messed with the edges of the changes in values. By the time I quit, I had pretty much had pixelated the entire painting:

My result is more pointillist than the style I wanted to emulate, but I kind of love it. For the foreseeable future, I plan to run with it. But I’m still puzzled as to why it works, and my efforts are probably doomed to fail if I cannot figure that out. Is it the illusion of movement? Mine looks as if you are looking through glass bathed in water. So my surface is the moving part, whereas the figure in Maggie Siner’s painting would be the moving part in hers. Obviously, I am not even close to the ultimate goal, but I’m on my way. Perhaps.

Here are works from a few of my fellow marathoners, Nancy C and Cindy A, and I’m pretty sure if you’ve been following along, that you’ll have no trouble identifying Nancy’s painting. Cindy is one of the Cornwall Four, four of us who took Cameron Bennett’s 2013 workshop (inspired by the Cornwall painters of yore) and thereafter painted en plein air together on a regular basis. Discussed here perhaps.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

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

Very, very soon, the annual Love, Lust and Desire show at the McGowan Gallery in Concord opens! January 30 (Friday) 5-7 p.m. is the reception. Over 70 artists are participating. Unfortunately, I can’t be there because I signed up for another Snow Camp with Stapleton Kearns. I have ten pieces in the McGowan show, mostly nudes, all 8×11, all priced at $150 each. Original oil paintings for only $150! So definitely check it out if you like my nudes.

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

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

Smorgasbord of Art

Posted by Aline on October 22, 2013

My artistic output last week hit all the bases: nudes, portraiture, experimental landscapes, and plein air landscapes.

Skipping over Tuesday primarily because I don’t remember what I did and I do remember being unhappy with it, let’s start with Wednesday. Wednesday is usually a plein air day, but not last week. Adrienne held another one of her all-day figure study marathons, from ten a.m. until seven p.m. I had no pep, but was determined not to let my health issue stop me. But I could not keep it from slowing me down. Larry Christian and I were the only ones to stick it out to the finish, but I had to stop painting when I ran out of surfaces to paint on. For the last 45 minutes or so, I watched Larry working his charcoal magic on 10-minutes poses of the two models together.

I had two interesting compositions from a side angle:

Foot First

Girl Talk

Foot First was a pose of about two hours, I think. We were late getting up and running, and I had to cut out early to take my daughter to an appointment. The Girl Talk pose was maybe only 20 minutes. No, that can’t be right–it must have been at least an hour.

When the Girls next changed positions, they presented me with profiles of each. After 20 minutes, we found a compromise to keep me happy with long views of the profiles and Larry happy with frequent pose changes. Even as the models changed their poses frequently , they kept their profiles toward me. My view or angle would change slightly each time, but I managed to extrapolate from a current profile to the original profile.

Two Profiles

Thursday was the EEE class, wherein I am trying to discover abstract paintings in my plein air studies. The studies were 11×14. The class projects are 16×20. For both, I used a lot of paint applied with a palette knife. I love thick, juicily painted paintings, a la Van Gogh.

EEE No. 1

EEE No. 2

I was in the Mount Washington Valley and environs all weekend. The semiannual Artists Getaway Weekend organized by Byron Carr and sustained by Sharon Allen’s cohort of plein air fanatics brought together, in addition to Byron and Sharon, Bruce Jones, Sandra Garrigan, Patricia Sweet MacDonald, Jim O’Donnell, Elaine Farmer, a Gentleman Jim from Georgia whose surname I never got. I left for Bartlett after class on Thursday, taking only small panels (8×10) with me. I knew by that time that my fatigue will keep me from covering the usual amount of canvas. Sure enough, I finished only four paintings over Friday and Saturday, despite the fine weather we had.

Saco Riverbed

The Davis Farm

Thorn Hill Road View of Ledges

Mount Washington

The last painting, the one of Mt. Washington, took me only little over an hour, including nodding off time. ( Patricia caught me napping with brush in hand, so there’s no point in covering it up.) It is a simple composition, straightforward in execution. No broken color, no short strokes, no uneven thickness of paint. I was not surprised when many of my colleagues refused to believe it was mine. But they agreed I didn’t likely find it under the pumpkin truck either. I really could not have painted such a distant scene any other way on such a small canvas.

I have a new idea for this week’s EEE class: on my way back from Bartlett, traveling the Bear Notch Road, I took some photographs of the cloud shadows on the mountains up North and am planning to make something abstract out of those images for the class this week.

left center

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery and the East Colony Fine Art Gallery in Manchester (both are in Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester; at the Epsom Library in Epsom, NH; at the Manchester office of Congresswoman Carol Shea Porter; and at her studio by appointment.

Painting Faces

Posted by Aline on December 17, 2012

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

Close up of Becky’s Face

Close up

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

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

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

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

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

Attitude for 20 minutes

10-minute pose

5-minute pose

35-minute pose in charcoal

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

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

Members of Saturday Life Group at Xmas party

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

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

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

Slacker!

Posted by Aline on December 10, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

40-minute pose, view of the back

Yes, I do like backs.

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

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

The Struggle (with compressed charcoal)

Posted by Aline on November 26, 2012

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

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

I started with a test sheet of mark-making.

A test of handling

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

Gestures, no. 2

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

Gestures, no. 1

gestures, no. 3

Gestures, No. 4

Gestures, No. 5

Gestures, No. 6

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

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

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

struggle no. 2 still trying to complicate things

Struggle no. 3 Falling back on lines

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

Stuggle no. 4

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

Struggle no. 5–close, or there?

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

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

P.S. Larry was quite pleased with me.

Roaa

Posted by Aline on October 8, 2012

Pretty in Pink

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

Roaa No. 1, finished

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

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

Roaa No. 2, in Peach

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

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

Getting the Angles Right

Out of the Fog and Mist

Blackest Black

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

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

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

Paintings by Aline

A Painter's Progress

Tag Archives: larry christian

Marathon Report

Smorgasbord of Art

Painting Faces

Slacker!

The Struggle (with compressed charcoal)

Roaa

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