Catching up–Bartlett Style

Posted by Aline on September 8, 2016

I have been not performing, blog-wise, up to the standards I set for myself this summer. If I had met those standards, two topics would have been set before you already and the third would have been pulled together for today. The problem, as often happens, is just when I gather my thoughts and my photo illustrations, I notice something in one of the paintings that I must, MUST fix. Then after the fix, a new photo must be taken. It has been a summer of revisions and regrets.

One topic was to have been: best and worst plein air (marine) painting of the summer, covering why I thought one was good and the other not–but wondering how I could have rescued the one that was awful. A second topic was to have been the rest of the works resulting from the Stuart Ober course–you’ve seen the portrait of Sparkle, but I did a bunch of other stuff that never would have got started but for the impetus of taking a course called “Explorations in Oil Painting.” One of them could have been a topic in itself, as I worked on a 12 by 36 of “Impressions of Manhattan from the Whitney Museum”, a complex skyline with streetscapes that can always be improved or added to. I’m still adding.

This week, I hoped to be posting all the Figure in the Garden paintings from David Curtis’ garden, 2016 edition. Those paintings are finished, but the last one still needs to be photographed. I scaled up to 16×20, making the photographing more challenging.

And now, as topics pile up, I just got back from a workshop up North with Michael Chesley Johnson, for which blog I made promises. I feel a little like Mickey Mouse must have felt in the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. (Disney movie “Fantasia”)

I am going to take the advice I always gave my tax delinquent clients: do current returns first, then the past-due ones. Therefore, today without further ado, without messing about, I am posting photos of the three plein air paintings from the last two days, showing what I can accomplish in the approximately two hours available for each, before stopped by lunch and/or rain. Raw footage, as it were.

Excuse me while I go snap photos of each one with my iPhone.

. . . .

Eight students gathered at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett NH to learn plein air painting from Michael Chesley Johnson, of Campobello and Sedona, for perhaps the shortest workshop ever–two days. We were lucky with the weather, in that the rain held off Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning until I was able to get one painting each time close to completion. I produced a third painting during the Wednesday rain. . .storm is too strong a word. Rain Event. More of that later.

Tuesday morning MCJ opened with a demo of how to paint rocks. We piled into a gazebo near the Jackson Historical Museum– it was shaded, just the right size for 8 students and a teacher, next to a rock-filled Wildcat River, and near our next stop: a preview of the museum’s upcoming show. Then lunch at a local deli, then back to the Wildcat, a river responsible for the phenomenon known as Jackson Falls. We got some sun, but mostly clouds, so we got experience with painting en plein air on overcast days. How to find a “hook” when there are no lights and shadows to create drama? Well, falling water is always interesting. Unfortunately, New Hampshire has been suffering a record drought, so instead of impressive, thundering cataracts of water, we got meandering trickles.

(MCJ photographed me working at the Falls and posted it to Facebook, if you are interested. I was wearing my usual distinctive hat, so everyone who knows me recognized me. I could probably link to it, but I don’t have time to learn how to do that! Got to get this post done.)

Jackson Falls, v. 5 or 6

Day Two, or Wednesday as most people know it, we headed down into the Valley to experience the location of Albert Bierstadt’s “Moat Mountain, Intervale, New Hampshire”. That is why I have titled this painting Bierstadt Meadow. Most of us chose to paint the ledges that are to the right of my scene, but I’ve a bee in my bonnet all summer about the pinky-purplish grass that shows up at this time of summer. It is most prevalent along highways. It was not present in this meadow, but there were other plants sporting colors in the same family, so I thought I would try to fake it.

Bierstadt Meadow with Bluebird House

We were treated to very little sunlight, but the weather forecast did not include rain. Nevertheless, Sharon (Sharon Allen, who organized this workshop and spends half her life painting around Mt. Washington Valley) “felt” it would rain and urged us to move to a sheltered location–under a bridge in Conway from which we could paint a red covered bridge from below and to the side. When we got there, most of the river (Swift and Saco merge near here) was, well, absent. We were going to get more practice painting rocks. However, a puddle under the bridge reflected the red covered bridge, and I chose to make that the subject of my painting.

Under the Bridge, of Another Bridge

All of my paintings were painted on the carton paper sold by Judson’s plein air supplier. The paper slows me down a little because it absorbs paint, making it harder for me to cover the surface. But once my surface is juicy with paint, I can go to town. The geometric shape on the right is the stanchion [is that correct term?] of the overhead bridge. When the rain blew in [is Sharon a witch?], it disturbed the puddle and handicapped me. Oh, well. Had to fake it.

Since I probably will not get to the topic, best and worst marine painting, and I cannot NOT show you the best, I will now show the best. Two “tall ships” came to the Portsmouth area. August 12 was the day I chose to visit them. One docked in Portsmouth for people to tour. The other docked in New Castle for people to ride. I would have bought a ticket to ride if my timing were better, but as it was, I had to wait for the “Harvey Gamache” to return to port before I could grab a photo of it. Meanwhile, I painted its expected path from New Castle’s Grand Island Park. In my studio at home, I added the sailing ship using my photo as reference.

The Harvey Gamache Passing into New Castle

I have some happy news: two of my pet paintings will be part of a nationally juried exhibit in a museum! The museum is the Annmarie Sculpture Garden and Arts Center in a place called Solomons, Maryland. The Sculpture Garden is affiliated with the Smithsonian! The two honored paintings are “Sparkle”, which had been sold but the owners have agreed to lend the painting for this exhibit; and “Partners in Crime”–the two tuxedo cats on a cat tree.

Partners in Crime

The exhibit’s theme is “Fur, Feathers, and Fins–Our Faithful Pets”. It will run from October 7 through January 29.

Other places where you can catch a few of my paintings are:

NH Antiques Coop in Milford NH
Ellis River Art Gallery in Jackson NH
Bartlett Inn in Bartlett NH
Red Jacket Resort in North Conway NH
Bernerhof Inn in Glen NH
Mesmer & Deleaut Law Firm in Manchester NH

As usual, you may view paintings with prices and order prints, phone cases, pillows 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!

Abstracting the Landscape, Part 2

Posted by Aline on May 18, 2016

Having recently come off a weekend devoted to abstracting the landscape (see previous post), during which we painted from photograph, imagination, memory, music and purely abstract concepts, I resolved to apply my newly acquired abstracting skills to actual landscapes. No, more correctly expressed: I resolved to TRY to apply those abstracting skills to actual landscapes. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. The spread of nature’s delights is so seductive that it is almost impossible to reduce a painting to a few good non abstract ideas.

Upper Ammonoosuk Falls, wip

Upper Ammonoosuk Falls, final

The photo on the left is the result of my painting for two hours at Upper Ammonoosuk Falls, getting sucked into the whole nature thing, trying to capture all the rocks and water rivulets. Fighting with myself. Until finally I heard myself remarking to another artist, by the way of encouragement, that depicting falls, boulders, etc. was hard because of the clutter. Clutter. Such an important non abstract concept. I went back to my painting and swept the water down over all my clutter. And it worked. So what if the scene never looked quite like that!

This morning I went over all four of my weekend paintings to see if any adjustments were needed. In the photo on the right you can maybe detect minor but important touches: the large rock slab in the virtual center was grayed back so as not to compete with the white of the falling water; the indeterminate brown area in bottom right was darkened and sharpened so as to clarify that it sits higher and in front of the falling water. I also added a few strokes of white water to the cascade, just to gild the lily. (By the way, while spell-checking Ammonoosuk I discovered YouTube videos of this spot, featuring reckless youths diving into the pools. Here is one of them.)

But did I really abstract my landscape? I did a better job than usual in reducing details. It’s a start. Maybe I’ll do better on the next one?

The next one turned out to be a panorama of intensely green fields dotted with intensely yellow dandelions, backed by periwinkle mountains, covered by gray clouds threatening rain. Because of the high chance of rain, we had driven south to Conway, where there is a bridge overpass that could provide us shelter from the rain while giving us a river’s edge view of an old-fashioned covered bridge. But we each of us got sucked in by the dandelions, and set about creating rain shelters within which to paint. I was riding with Sharon, so we had to find two ways to create painting studios out of one SUV. She had the tailgate. She also had the bright idea of creating a shelter for me out of my big yellow poncho and the two doors of her vehicle. Here’s a photo of me getting set up under my yellow tent. 20160513_152644

The tent cast such a strong yellow light over my painting (but not my palette), that I thought I was losing my mind when every time I scooped up a big blob of white paint to use in the sky, it turned yellow as soon as it hit the sky. The yellow tent had to have affected the rest of my painting as well, but it was only obvious in the sky. As a result, I had not much of a good idea of how my painting was coming along. This is not a good situation to be in, for a painter. However, I was trying to be abstract, so maybe, I thought, hue doesn’t matter. I blocked in the elements I wanted: the intense green pasture, the intense yellow dandelions, the intense blue mountains. Added a few tree and shrub features. Still a result not so abstract, but the important thing was, I was thinking abstractly.

Dandelion Field, wip

Dandelion Field, final

The one on the left is the painting as it was on Friday afternoon; the one on the right received some help today. It needed more yellow in the dandelions since it no longer had the benefit of a yellow poncho glowing all over it. I cleaned up the sky a bit. The photos do not do justice to the yellows and greens. Oh, well. Just keep in mind ALWAYS–the original looks so much better than the photo.

For my third painting, I was fortunate to be able to pick the group’s subject of the morning, and paintings always go better when one is inspired by the subject. There is a railroad that goes from North Conway north through Crawford Notch to a station near the base of the Cog Railway that climbs Mt. Washington. To get through the Notch, the train must travel on rails cut into the granite sides of the pass, and in this particular place, also bridge a gap in the rock face. Especially with the morning light casting a shadow of the rails onto the granite, the tracks create a pattern both arresting and intriguing.

No. Conway RR trestle, wip

RR Trestle in Crawford Notch

On the left side is what I got done on site. We were painting from a parking lot surrounded by growing things in various stages of greening (the trees budded out almost before our eyes–not just overnight but over lunch), so my view of the area below the trestle was obscured. I had installed rough representations of that obscuring growth, but I was bothered by the fact that you could not tell how far away the trestle was, nor how high it sat on the side of the granite face. So I scrubbed the growing things and tried to transform them into rock face. At home, today, I tried to improve on that aspect, as well as the rock formations above the trestle. I’m not convinced that my changes improved the perspective.

For our last outing, we chose a spot not far from our home base (the Bartlett Inn). As before, I resolved to think abstractly, just capture the shapes and colors that represented the site. The color for this one was blue. Intensely blue sky, intensely blue water reflecting the sky. A nice snaky curve in the waterway, good aerial effects for the more distant mountains. Simple elements that I should be able to use for an abstract landscape. Alas, the landscape had other ideas.

Saco River, wipe

Saco River, Bartlett, final

As an abstracted landscape, a pretty miserable failure. But more than passable as a normal plein air landscape, so I forgive myself. The changes I made this morning to the earlier version on the left were mostly in the light greens and the sandy shores. I don’t understand why the blue of the water looks so different now. I think there might have been too much contrast in the first photo. You can tell I have played around with the photo’s color cast, trying to match up with the original painting. The truth of the water lies somewhere between the two versions.

My companions for the weekend were my roommate, Betty Brown; chauffeur, Sharon Allen; colleague from Snow Camp, Suzanne Lewis of Rhode Island; young artist Stephen S from Hooksett; new members Leslie and Paul, from Massachusetts, and of course, the esteemed organizer of this semi-annual Getaway Weekend, Byron Carr of Contoocook. Some if not all of these people have websites where their paintings of the same scenes may or may not be posted.

If you are a regular reader, you have noticed I am employing a different format for the paired photos. WordPress has added new options, and I am learning how to use them. You can click on the above photos to enlarge them and to read their captions. Do you like this format?

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

At the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Bernerhof Inn in Glen; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the New Hampshire Antique Co-op in Milford; at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center in Manchester, part of the Healing with Art program; and at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester.

Please save the date of Wednesday, June 22 for a reception at Labelle Winery in Bedford of the Petals 2 Paint show whereat floral designers create live flower arrangements inspired by a painting by participating East Colony artists. This has been an annual event of the East Colony Fine Art artists for many years, but this 2016 show seems likely to be our last as a group. Since the flowers don’t last more than a couple of days, you might as well plan to come for the reception.

Kickstart

Posted by Aline on May 9, 2016

I have continued to be Very Bad and Unrepentant. Finding oneself takes time. I had to write an artist’s bio last week, and instead of reciting biographical facts about myselves, I skipped merrily over past incarnations to state affirmatively–I’m all mixed up but happily so. Here is how I put it:

Pursuing a profession in the arts is inevitably a struggle because excellence is never actually attained. One is always reaching. Aline has found herself reaching in more than one direction at a time, which for a long time has confused her and perhaps worried her followers. But she now has decided to embrace the diversity of her subject matter and styles and celebrate each on its own terms. Her style ranges from loose and impressionistic to refined and deliberate. Meanwhile, she has served notice that she will be experimenting with abstracted landscapes as well.

And indeed I do today have something to show for that last bold statement. I attended a three-day workshop on Abstracting the Landscape with Barbara Danser, who teaches at the NH Institute of Art but last weekend (yes, including Mother’s Day) was teaching for the Currier Art School (an offshoot of the Currier Museum of Art, which I serve as a docent). Barbara started us off slow, with a photograph that we chose from many that she had ready. Then she had us paint the same scene without referring to the photo. I believe the purpose might have been to divorce us from the details and focus us on the big picture (so to speak). Also to this end, I believe, she imposed time limits as a way of weaning us away from detail in our paintings. In the beginning, the limit was fifteen minutes for each effort. Later on, she allowed us 30 minutes, perhaps even more when she saw us close to accomplishing something.

From Photo

From memory of photo

After that one use of a photo for inspiration, Barbara gave us “Prompts” as inspiration. The first one involved a female walking on a beach in the mist.

Beachwalker in the mist (6×6)

For the next one, she played some music. I wish I could remember what it was–classical for sure. Debussy?

From a musical prompt

I deployed my palette knife more than usual because that is a faster way to lay down lots of paint. Once I had the paint on the panel, I could move it around. I had been using paper to paint on, but with the one above, I used a panel that I had previously painted on. There is no trace of the original painting showing through.

After lunch on the first day (Friday), Barbara gave us another photo to work from: that of a wave. We had a choice of waves. I chose the more dramatic of the two:

Wave from photo

Naturally, we then had to paint the same wave from memory:

Wave from memory

After the wave, we got no more photos to use as references, but we examined the works of other abstract landscapists to get us in the mood. I also found myself mentally referring back to paintings I had painted years ago, which was a little spooky.

The sequence of the next seven paintings, and the specific prompts for each one, has gotten a little muddled in my mind. What I can remember about each one I have put in the caption, which I believe you will be able to read if you click on the image. All of them were either 8×10 or 9×12, but I have accepted WordPress’s suggestion for varying the apparent sizes.

Light drenching land and sky alike

another music prompt

Trees, spring green

no idea where this came from

New Mexican artist, minimalist

Trees, avoiding green.

Rain drops, musical notes. The Last One.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

And save the date of Wednesday, June 22 for a reception at Labelle Winery in Bedford of the Petals 2 Paint event whereat floral designers create live flower arrangements inspired by a painting. This is an annual event of the East Colony Fine Art artists and seems likely to be their last show as a group. The flowers don’t last more than a couple of days, so you might as well plan to come for the reception.

Monadnock

Posted by Aline on June 3, 2015

“Monadnock”– a word applied to a lone mountain rising from the land. Wikipedia claims it comes from a native American word, but I have my doubts. Maybe the “nock” portion, but come on, “mona” must be from “monos”, the Greek word that we combine to signify singularity–monopod, monocle, monotony. Mount Monadnock in western New Hampshire is, they say, one of the most climbed mountains in the world–second only perhaps to Fujiyama in Japan. It provides a fairly easy day hike with a lot of bare rock face from which to admire the views. I used to do it once a year. My husband, in the sixties when we visited his aunt on Snow Hill, would run it in the morning from Snow Hill and back again. Before breakfast. Looking back, I wish I had gone with him, but I didn’t get into mountain hiking until decades later.

These days, I paint Mt. Monadnock, usually from ground level. Last Friday, however, Cindy, Fran and I drove to the top of Pack Monadnock to paint one of the many vistas presented there. All three of us chose Mt. Monadnock as our subject matter. Pack Monadnock and its neighbor North Pack Monadnock are East of Mt. Monadnock, and there is yet a third, Little Monadnock, to be found in southwest NH. We like our Monadnocks, but here’s the only one that has achieved star status:

Wapack Trail (Southward)

The black flies were unmerciful, but an occasional breeze and generous slathering of bug repellant helped to keep us focussed on our painting. The Wapack Trail is well-used, so we had lots of company complaining about the black flies. The State maintains the road and the vistas here, and charges each visitor by car $4 each–except “seniors”; I get a free ride. Thus is the manned fire tower cost offset, partially anyway. By the way, that yellow triangle painted on the rock in the right foreground is the trail marker for the Wapack Trail, which runs along the ridges of the Wapack Range, from Massachusetts to Greenfield, NH.

I could go on and on about my connections to Monadnock and the reasons I am drawn to paint it, but that would bore the heck out of most people. So here is a successful figure painting from Monday’s life group session:

Bridal Gown

Our model was Tam, who comes here from Vietnam. She posed for us in her wedding dress. She was exquisite.

Coming up in Exeter are two events worth noting: Bruce Jones has arranged for East Colony artists to exhibit their paintings at a storefront on Water Street, for one month, while the owner looks for a buyer for the space. Our exhibit will coincide with the first Friday Art Walk on June 5, and the American Independence Museum paint out on Saturday June 6. I’ll be participating in both.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

with the East Colony artists for one month at 163 Water Street, Exeter, NH; at the Bedford Public Library; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Bernerhof Inn in Glen; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the Library Arts Center in Newport, NH; at the Sharon Arts Center in Peterborough, NH; at the Buttonwoods Museum in Haverhill, MA; and at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester.

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

Mt. Washington Valley in May, 2015

Posted by Aline on May 24, 2015

Last weekend was the annual spring artists’ getaway to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and I was happily present. This time I took some larger panels to paint on, instead of those 9×12 carton paper supports I have been relying upon lately. I’m a big girl now and I want to paint bigger. I took three 12×16 panels, one 9×12 panel, and as back up if I needed them, a small stack of the carton paper sheets.

There were eight of us, not very many but very select. Walt and Ann from western Massachusetts; Suzanne from Rhode Island; Helene, my roommate, from Nashua, NH; Betty from Wolfeborough, NH; and of course the stalwarts and leaders of this plein air event, Sharon Allen and Byron Carr. It was a great weekend, with the weather cooperating for the most part–rare for a New England spring. Weather forecasts for rainy Saturday afternoon sent us off course in search of meaningful nonpainting pursuits, none of which really panned out (the museum in Jackson was closed), whereas the weather stayed lovely and would have been ideal for painting. [virtual teeth gnashing] I made up for it on Sunday and the good thing is, I never had to dip into the reserve supports of carton paper.

My first painting Friday morning was this one from Pear Mountain Road.

View of Mt. Washington from Pear Mt. Rd.

I added the telephone wiring after I got home. I did not want to smudge my lovely blue sky by trying to add the wires into wet paint; besides, at home I had some new tools called “French curves”. I don’t know the proper method of deploying them, but I picked out an appropriate curve and used it as a guide for my brush. The resulting lines are almost too confident. These wires wee a necessary element of this painting. Here is what it looked like before I added the wires. The greens in this cell phone version are more accurate than the ones in the expensive SDLR Nikon version above. (more whining complaint below.)

View of Mt. Washington wip (cell phone photo)

After lunch four of us gathered at Jackson Falls. I have painted various versions and aspects of Jackson Falls over the years. How to make this one better? Feature a big rock instead of all that white water.

Portrait of Big Rock at Jackson Falls (cell phone photo–because Nikon version too dark)

Since I was working large, I had no trouble filling each half-day stint with just one painting. I was pretty happy with how things were going so far. The next day we went looking for a covered bridge because of the Stupid Weather Forecast. The one we chose is not open to traffic, and usually we would have been content to paint it or paint from it at road level. This day, however, my painting buddies discovered a way to get underneath the road with a view up at the bridge. This created a curious problem, one I did not recognize until I had already committed to my vantage point. Damn covered bridge is essentially four stripes of almost equal width running across the top of painting–that is, if you want to show the water too. Nothing more monotonous. I struggled with the size of the stripes. I messed with the edges. I toned down the red so as to push the thing into the background. Still awful. When I got home, I decided it couldn’t hurt to try scrumbling shadowy darks over the left edge of my bridge, and I think that may have saved it from the scrap heap. Here are the before and after:

Convergence of Saco and Swift Rivers (before)

Convergence of Saco and Swift Rivers (after)

OK, the colors don’t match. For some reason, photographing all of these paintings has been unusually frustrating. The new Photos app that Apple has forced on me does not give me a way to adjust the level of yellows, blues and reds. I am not coping well!

That accounts for my three large format, 12×16, panels. Sunday morning, after the usual fabulous breakfast at the Bartlett Inn (but no rancho huervos this year–I forgot to complain about that!), Sharon and Betty and I followed Byron up a road off Route 3 between Twin Mountain and Franconia Notch:–white water, moss-covered rocks, deep pools. For the best spot, you needed to be pretty adventurous, but I found a tidy little version close to the road and fought off Sharon for it. I included some Trillium at bottom left because I saw some on the slope to adventure spot. This may be my favorite from the weekend.

Woodland brook 9×12

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

one last week at the East Colony Fine Art Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Bernerhof Inn in Glen; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the Library Arts Center in Newport, NH; at the Sharon Arts Center in Peterborough, NH; at the Buttonwoods Museum in Haverhill, MA; and at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester.

New Hampshire’s Fall Foliage

Posted by Aline on October 21, 2014

Last weekend was the annual Fall Artists’ Getaway Weekend to the White Mountains, based at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett, New Hampshire. We had some rain, but we also had some glorious, warm sunshine. If only the wind hadn’t accompanied the sun, we would have had little to complain about. As it was, Byron Carr flourished, creating one of his most spectacular paintings (and that’s saying a lot) under threat of rain. Unfortunately, and as usual, taking a photo of it never occurred to me when it counted. So you’ll just have to take my word for it.

I have my own version of a cloud painting. This was my first painting of the weekend, Friday morning’s painting.

Pumpkin Patch under Cathedral Ledge

It was actually raining when we set up. Umbrellas intended for use against the sun turn out to serve also against the rain. Who knew? Gradually the clouds rolled away leaving the Ledge exposed, but I stayed with my initial impression, with the Ledge almost totally obscured. The green patch is surrounded by pumpkins but appears itself to have been freshly sowed in something growing bright green–a cover crop perhaps. The intense green is unusual at this time of year, but trust me, I even downplayed it a little.

Although I had driven up to Bartlett the day before, Thursday had been a solid, hard rain day. I left Manchester kind of late (around two o’clock) and arrived at Bear Notch Road about four o’clock, in no hurry, enjoying the views without any urgency to paint them. Bear Notch Road connects the Kancamangus Highway (a famed scenic highway) to Route 302 at the center of Bartlett–a great shortcut through the hills and woods. Bear Notch is a two-lane road with overhanging trees. The trees were still in full leaf, orange, red, and yellow. The rain was unrelenting. I felt as if I were floating through an orange cocoon, what with the rain slick on the road reflecting back at me all the oranges, red, and yellows of the trees. I studied the effect as best I could, trying to memorize the elements. But I didn’t stop to photograph it. Story of my life, right? (Well, it was raining pretty hard.) So, to get to the point of Bear Notch Road description, when I finished the Pumpkin Patch before my companions were ready to move on, I started a painting of my memory of the orange cocoon. I continued to refine and improve on it over the weekend, and again today. I added the white line, although Bear Notch has none, in order to facilitate identification of the ribbon as a road, not a river. My problem then was getting across the idea that what you are seeing on the road is water reflecting trees, not just fallen leaves. Only you can tell me if I succeeded.

The Orange Cocoon

Friday afternoon we relocated to Jackson, all the way around to the other side of what I think of as the Mount Washington wilderness. There are the two routes leading northward out of North Conway: 302 runs to the west of Mt. Washington, and 16 to the right. Eventually, each route gives access to Mt. Washington. The western route offers the Cog Railway. The eastern route has the Auto Road. All weekend we got no farther North than Bartlett on the West and Jackson on the East. This was kind of strange, but the weather did limit our painting time somewhat, so we tended to stick closer to home base.

In Jackson, the Jackson Falls are always a big draw for artists. But we had another motive: reception at five in the Jackson Historical Museum, for exhibit opening and sale of White Mountain paintings, both old and contemporary. Yes, there were many Champneys for sale. Here is proof. Upstairs in the Museum are paintings from its permanent collection, grouped by the area of the Whites being depicted. In the center of this room is a topographical map with the locations identified. A treasure. Downstairs I discovered that I really like the works of Edward Hill, but could not afford to buy any. Upstairs, I discovered I really like William Henry Hilliard, especially this work of his called Eagle Cliff.

Eagle Cliff, by W.H. Hilliard

I have my own version of Eagle Cliff from Profile Lake, which I call “Profile Lake”, the cliff being not a prominent feature in my painting. See it here.

The food at the reception was outstanding, by the way.

Ah yes, my Jackson painting. Sharon and I set up in the parking lot of the Museum, in part because there were good views of the town center and of the river that flows down from the Falls, and in part because we’d be on the spot, parked and ready for the reception at five o’clock. I chose to paint a small section of the river where artfully arranged boulders create happy little rapids.

This is actually a cropped photo. I will be cutting the painting down as cropped, which I can do because it was painted on paper. Guerrilla Painter “carton” paper. The top part of the painting is distracting and irrelevant, and I shouldn’t have wasted my time or paint on it.

Saturday we revisited May Kelly’s. My idea. Last Spring we painted in the back of May Kelly’s, an Irish pub-type restaurant. My painting was of the back of May Kelly’s. See it here. Around me, other artists had been painting a terrific view of the valley with the Saco River with White Horse Ledge looming over all. Shortly after I got home in May and photographed my painting, the May Kelly painting went missing, never to turn up again. Perhaps one disadvantage to painting on paper. Anyway, having lost the earlier version, I was eager to paint another version of the back of May Kelly’s. As before, other artists’ attention was focused on the valley view. We got rained out, and headed indoors for lunch and reconnoitering. Terrific lunch! By the time we finished eating, the rain had let up a little, but instead of finding a new location, we went back to the Inn and worked on our unfinished paintings. I had taken a reference photo of the back of May Kelly’s just before the rain hit (finally, I remembered to take a picture), so I was able to finish that painting using the photo. In fact, the photo was enormously helpful because it revealed to me how wrong one of my angles was.

May Kelly’s, v. 2

After finishing May Kelly, I worked on Orange Cocoon some more, getting advice from anybody who was willing to give it, about how best to convey the rain reflections. Saturday night, per our tradition, we got pizza in for supper and reviewed all the paintings that we had created over the weekend. Byron as usual and as appropriate (he organizes the weekend) had the most, and one of the best. Byron Carr. Link here to his website. Other great artists participating: Elaine Farmer from Amherst, Sharon Allen from Derry, Bruce Jones from Exeter, Diane Dubreuil from Connecticut, Penny (sorry, can’t remember her last name) from Maine, and Phil Bean from Milford.

Sunday I meandered my way home, looking for a spot that needed painting. I didn’t find it where I expected to, along Route 153 through Eaton and Purity Springs. But on a whim I left the main road (I think I was on Route 28 at this point) to explore up a hill to a place called Moultonville, and happened on just the right spot: an eye-catching scene accompanied by place to park and another place to paint, all without risk to life, limb or property. According to one of the interested residents who stopped to engage me in conversation, the subject of my painting is owned by an artist, last name unknown.

Moultonville Home

So another productive weekend in the company of some of my favorite people comes to a close. You can’t ask for better.

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 and the Bernerhof Inn in Glen; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester; at the Manchester office of Congresswoman Carol Shea Porter; at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center in Manchester (but access is limited to patients and health care workers). One painting is hanging this last week in the Boston Arboretum visitor center. My two cemetery paintings (seen here) are on view at the Arts League of Lowell, 307 Market Street, Lowell, Massachusetts. And in Portsmouth’s Levy Gallery, you can find 8 of my newest 6×6’s as part of the annual Women’s Caucus for Art 6×6 show.

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!

Two weeks of earnest painting

Posted by Aline on June 21, 2014

You know what I just realized? Painting from photographs is way (I mean WAY) easier than painting from life. Obvious? Not until now. Until I painted the Haitian boy carrying the bundle of sticks (see here), I had not painted from a photograph for so long that I had forgotten what it was like. I don’t remember thinking it was easy. But then came the Haitian boy, and I just popped it out with hardly any effort, followed by a pretty decent cat portrait. Then yesterday, after painting two successful landscapes from photographs, after being dissatisfied with two plein air efforts, it hit me. Wow! I’ve been doing all this the hard way. The hardest way! No wonder it has been a bit of a struggle.

On the other hand, I suspect that past struggles to paint from life are exactly what made painting from photographs seem easy.

I will show you first the stuff painted from life, then the recent landscapes from photographs.

Extended pose, green

This large (20×16) figurative work is unusual in that the model (yes, Becky) is standing and we had close to three full sessions of three hours each to work on it. This was the last pose from the open studio course I took with Deirdre Riley.

Extended pose, red (12×9)

Yet another seated pose of one of my all-time favorite male models–so I tried to Think Different, but Better. We had two of our unmoderated Monday sessions for this pose, so I tried to get the drawing perfect, and apply the paint with gusto. Towards the end, I wiped out the left hand (appearing to our right) and started it over after asking him to spread that pinky finger the way I remembered it originally. Good decision. You even get a feeling for his finger pressing into his flesh. (By the way, because of my request, our model traced his fingers on his thigh so as to ensure consistent finger spread between breaks–I call that Above and Beyond the call of model duty!)

After the Monday morning of figure painting, I indulged in a Monday afternoon of landscape painting. I went intending to paint a barn, but found myself seduced by a massive tree and the lavender stones at its base. After about an hour and a half, I had the canvas covered, mostly in green and more green. Horrible. Yesterday I took it in hand and glazed it over in darker shades to alleviate the poisonous green. Here is the Before and After:

Poison! (wip)

Cured! (12×16)

I hope you feel as if that branch is reaching out to grab you. Takes me back to my childhood obsession with the Oz books, in which grabby trees were pretty common.

Wednesday I met up with colleagues (Fran, Cindy, Bea), whom I had last summer dubbed the Cornwall Four (here) because we were drawn together by the workshop “Inspired by Cornwall” last summer, given by Cameron Bennett.

We were in the woods next to Dorrs Pond, on a path trafficked by dog walkers, joggers, distracted school children, disabled adults, delinquent teens, delightful immigrants–and I was accessible to all of them. My chair was uncomfortable–I had to lean forward to paint, and my back could not take it. Enough of excuses. I just felt dull about the whole thing. So yesterday, I tried to pizzazz it up. Mostly a matter of spreading darker colors over most of it and lighter colors where I remember the light being. It satisfies better, but I don’t think it is going anywhere.

A walk by Dorrs Pond (11×14)

All that straining and effort to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. What a contrast to the next project. It all started a week ago Friday when Sharon Allen picked me up for a jaunt up North. It was raining, but we were hoping that as we got father north, the sun would appear. It didn’t. But we were on a mission: To paint or photograph the barns of Madison, New Hampshire. Our effort was part of a larger event organized by the Friends of Madison Library, a fundraiser in which our paintings would eventually be offered for sale, commission to the Friends. So we drove around photographing five barns that are part of the event, and whose owners didn’t mind having artists set up painting on their properties. We didn’t encounter any such thing, nor did we ourselves try to paint in the rain. Sharon had brought a tent for us to paint under, just in case we were overcome by irrational desire to paint through the rain. Instead and more sensibly, we photographed madly, even through windshield streaming with water.

So Thursday, with my dissatisfaction with the two plein air paintings painfully in mind, I decided to tone my canvases in burnt umber. Start dark, I strategized, and then block with in the lighter values. It worked! (Chorus of hallelujahs)

Madison Barn #1 (11×14)

Madison Barn #2 (11×14)

I used acrylic paint for the layer of dark. New puzzle. Do I report the media for these two paintings as “mixed”? Some of the dark acrylic undertone definitely shows up in the finished painting. But if I had started on a canvas that was primed in white acrylic, and left some of the white showing, I wouldn’t call that mixed media.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

You may also view paintings with prices and order prints 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 using the private feedback form below. 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!

Artists’ Getaway Spring 2014

Posted by Aline on May 20, 2014

As promised, I have returned from our semiannual getaway to Mount Washington Valley with landscapes of the North Country. Despite still feeling out of sorts, I pulled myself together enough to produce five small paintings. I felt inadequate, so I took only 8×10 panels and a packet of 9×12 carton papers. This morning I took the photographs, and I guess they aren’t so bad. All were dry, already! I use a lot of Michael Harding paints, which are slower drying than some for some artists, but for me, they dry fast.

Starting from the beginning, Friday morning, we gathered at “Fourth Iron”, a railroad bridge over the Saco River, near the highway (Route 302), with a parking lot made to order for painters and fishermen. We had four new painters with us: Bea Bearden, Kitty Clark, Jeri Bothamley, and Michele Fennel. The “seasoned” painters were Byron Carr (the organizer of the weekend), Sharon Allen (the keeper of NHPleinAir artists), and Jim O’Donnell. We were later joined by Morgan, a regular whose last name has not made it into my memory bank, and newbie Ruth Sears and her guy friend Joe. Add to that mix the innkeepers Miriam and Nick Jacques, and you’ve got quite a lively group, ready to paint and party.

Back to the Fourth Iron. Some of us, including me, painted the bridge; others painted the mountains; still others split off to paint nearby at the Notchland Inn, which, I learned for the first time, has a parlor designed by Gustav Stickley. I have a painting of the Notchland Inn somewhere in my piles of landscapes, and an earlier one of Fourth Iron. Before Hurricane Irene washed out the original road and trees, we had to hike in a little bit to get a good view of the bridge, or scramble down the riverbank to get this view we now get from the parking lot, which was created from the remains of the original road:

Fourth Iron

After lunch, we headed south to North Conway, to an area called Flat Rocks Conservation area, and found a spot on the shoulder of the road where we had nice, unobstructed views of the rocky stream flowing by. We were interrupted by a serious rainstorm, so I never “finished” the painting.

Discovered Bridge

After coming in for the evening, it is our custom to take in what we have been working on and lean them against whatever we can find back at the Inn, mantels, window sills, floors. Luckily, the dog Noodles pays no attention to the wet paintings (mostly oils, a few watercolors) on the floor, and he is not a shedder (“cockapoo”–I painted his portrait as a puppy years ago). A few artists told me they liked my “stone bridge”. They were not, I later learned, referring to the iron bridge built on the stony embankment. So a lousy rendition of a big rock is now officially transformed into the shadowed tunnel under an imaginary but charming stone bridge.

Saturday, Sharon and I went exploring for potential new painting spots in the valley. We stopped at two farmhouses to interview the farmers (of alpacas and strawberries, respectively) about a mysterious road that showed up on Sharon’s GPS. When that investigation bore no fruit, we returned to North Conway to paint behind the restaurant where we ate Thursday night. Mary, the proprietress had told us we were welcome to paint there anytime, and it was a fantastic view across the valley with the Saco River cutting through. I, however, turned my back on that view and took on the fantastical restaurant itself. Ambitious.

In Back of May Kelly’s

Mary brought us coffee and two huge slices of gluten-free chocolate cake, so that was lunch and so much for sticking to my diet. We finished up about two thirty and went back to the Inn (Bartlett Inn). A very tall, very old white birch was still standing on the grounds in front of the cabins, and it was slated for removal, so Sharon and I each painted a portrait of it, dead but still beautiful.

Last Hurrah

That evening, as is our custom, all of the artworks were produced for comment. This is when I learned of the Stone Bridge. When asked which of my paintings was my favorite, I said the birch. Either the company disagreed with me, or they were anxious to help me make it better–whatever, it elicited several points of criticism: the foreground rock was too prominent and should probably be removed totally; the background green was . . . too strong?; the tree on the left was too distracting–it should be de-emphasized by bringing in branches crossing in front, or perhaps (my own suggestion) soften its edges (that is magenta on its right edge!). What do you think?

Sundays we usually pack up, check out of the Inn, and look for one last painting location before wending our ways home. Thanks to Sharon the explorer, this year we collected near a marshy area south of Conway, at Dollof Pond, with a view of Mount Washington. I looked it up on Google maps and found another pond nearby that I wish we could paint just for its name: Pea Porridge Pond. Oh, well, cheating not allowed.

Blue View (off Dollof Hill Road)

Thus ended the tenth annual Spring Getaway. I felt strangely unfulfilled. The next morning, Monday Life Group got me out of bed and into the studio. I brought a used panel, not even sanded down, not even toned over. To reduce distractions from the old painting, I applied a layer of burnt sienna, then added Gamblin’s Fast Matte ultramarine blue. Of course, these underlayers would not dry in time for me to paint over them, so I was asking for trouble, double trouble. The photo below isn’t good either, because light catches the wet paint on all those little protrusions. I dialed the exposure down to minimize the light bumps for you.

Nude with Texture

Something about this painting really appeals to me. The flesh may be a little “muddy” but color is all relative anyway, so I’m not bothered by that. What thrills me is that her right leg looks so real, so fleshy! Her face isn’t bad either. If only I had just a little more time to bring all of it up to that level of accomplishment.

Now I am moving into Panic Mode over the imminence of my Featured Artist stint at East Colony. I have to “hang” this coming Saturday!! OMG. But then it will be done and all I have to do is enjoy. I am paired with Larry Donovan, an artist whose works I noticed long ago at East Colony, so I feel quite honored to be in this position. Who’d a thunk a few years ago, when I hardly knew what was up? We are looking forward to seeing all our friends and collectors at the reception on Sunday, June 8th, from two to four. He wanted two to five, but I am just not up to three hours on my feet, making nice.

I am looking forward to seeing YOU if you are at all able to come, if not to the reception, then at some point between May 24 and June 28. Let me know when you are in town and I will try to be at the Gallery.

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 and Bernerhof 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 Manchester office of Congresswoman Carol Shea Porter; in the lower level of the Bedford Public Library, Bedford, NH; and at her studio by appointment (email: alotter@mac.com).

You may also view paintings with prices and order prints 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 using the private feedback form below. 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!

Up and Down, Back and Forth

Posted by Aline on December 11, 2013

Well, I committed an unforgivable sin last week. I forgot to go the EEE class! Forgot! Such a quixotic thing the brain is–simply because I had no Docent Training class in the morning (finally graduated), my brain relaxed, dozed off, and failed to remind me that I had the class Thursday evening. I need a calendar that punches me in the arm a half hour before I’m supposed to be someplace. But instead of class I had an nice dinner out with my daughter, who really needed to get some food in her system.

I had big plans for that EEE class, the next to last class in the course. Now I have only one left and no time to make up for the lost Thursday. . . because everything takes longer that it should, and so many unexpected chores keep popping up with regularity. Now I am going to have to execute on my big plans without the help of the EEE class.

And by “the class” I include not only the instructor but also my fellow students. Here’s why. A few weeks ago I posted a work in progress along with the finished version and cryptically (some might say “coyly”) asked you to ponder their merits before I commented myself. Well here is my comment: I was sitting at my easel trying the wrestle something out of the WIP version–my effort to go abstract with landscape, remember? Not feeling it, frankly. In an effort to achieve more drama, I was applying black paint (gasp! I used to not even own black paint) to the areas that had drawn my mind’s eye, and then kinda went nuts with the black, finding patterns to outline all over the place. Suddenly, I heard whisperings behind me, classmates talking about something they were admiring. I ignored, continued my Van Gogh-like thrashing. The classmates behind me moved in to stop me, called for Patrick to see what I was doing. The whole class stopped and watched as the piece was placed on an easel for all to consider, and Patrick immediately without much thought at all declared it to be an “award-winner.” I am virtually certain that now he has had a few minutes to think about it, he would take that pronouncement back. Anyway, I was not allowed to work on it anymore, and frankly, that was OK with me, because I was sick of it. It’s still in the classroom, left to dry, then there was Thanksgiving, then the class that I forgot. So my image is from the phone:

Imaginary Elements

My classmates enjoyed the stained glass feeling. I was enjoying (somewhat) the process of applying thick, dramatic paint, but when it was over, I did not get that singing-heart feeling that some of my paintings give me. Maybe abstract is not meant for me. Patrick already told me not to try pure abstract.

Meanwhile, on an entirely different track, I am trying to duplicate the success of last week’s “Margaret with her Nook.” Here is another look at Nook, with the background cleaned up:

Final–Margaret and her Nook

Yesterday I started on the Shadow Side of Becky, and remembered to take progress pictures with my phone. Next Tuesday, I hope to complete this painting, which is a large 20×16 oil on linen:

WIP No. 1

WIP NO. 2

WIP No. 3

WIP No. 5 with camera

I chose to be in the dark for this painting in part because I have enjoyed chiaroscuro effect that comes with drawing the figure out from darkness. Also because I have learned that to make a figure rounded, I needed to find a bigger range of light and dark. So far, I am liking it lot. I just hope I find it within me to bring it to the same level of finish as I found with Nook.

Reminder to those of you within driving distance of the Currier Museum: I have a painting hanging in the Community Gallery and you can get into the entire Museum for free if you arrive before noon on a Saturday.

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; in the Community Gallery at the Currier Gallery in Manchester; at the Manchester office of Congresswoman Carol Shea Porter; at the Studio 550 Art Center in Manchester NH, as part of the annual 6×6 show of the Womens Caucus for Art; and at her studio by appointment (email: alotter@mac.com).

Two Projects Are Resolved, and a Theme Continues

Posted by Aline on November 11, 2013

Bear Notch sunset 24×36

Bear Notch Sunset (named for an overlook on Bear Notch Road in Bartlett, NH) is the piece that I started as an abstract painting inspired by Tom Thompson. Like all of my previous attempts to paint abstractly, it morphed into a recognizable landscape. But this time I collaborated–I gave in to my natural predilection in order to rescue the painting (after all, 24×36 canvases don’t grow on trees), but am still determined to keep working on the abstract angle. Proof: here is the one I started immediately after declaring Bear Notch Sunset finished:

Design Inspired by Nature 11×14

I had no photographic reference for Design Inspired. It grew from a mental image, which I tried to capture in paint, thinking if it’s successful as a design, I might do a larger version. However, I currently am not inclined to go big with it. Not that I didn’t enjoy the expressiveness of applying this thick, dark pigment. (I switched internally for inspiration from Tom Thompson to Vincent Van Gogh.) But I don’t feel like repeating that design; I’d rather come up with a new idea to use in the same manner. Maybe not a landscape.

Unfinished business: I promised images of my four paintings from the Blackstone Valley Plein Air Competition at the end of September, but I have only one to show you. Two of them were purchased, one to persons unknown, and the other to a nonresponsive purchaser for whom I have only an email address. A third I donated to the sponsoring organization (“Alternatives”). But the fourth has come home, and, alleluia! it was my personal favorite:

In the Shadow

The little community was aswarm with painters (25 but seemed like more), while I was tucked away in this secluded spot that the director had led me to. I felt very special. I was on the balcony of one of the red brick mill buildings that Alternatives inhabits. The roof over the balcony cast a huge shadow over the millstream below. It may help your orientation if I tell you that the waterway disappears over the edge of a dam on the right. The play of shadow and light on the water and on the aquatic plants intrigued me, but I worried that you couldn’t tell what was happening. Others have assured me that they easily “read” it as what it was. Was the subject matter too abstract for the customers? Or just not evocative of a landmark? Doesn’t matter, I’m happy to have it still in my possession.

The Alternatives event was outstanding, as good as Castine except with respect to the number of avid collectors at the finish of Castine. Both were first-time events, which makes the undertakings even more admirable and their success amazing. Alternatives treated the artists like kings. We got box lunches delivered to us in the field on the first day, and a buffet luncheon back at headquarters on the second day, and more food at the auction that night. High class all the way. I wish I had made a point of meeting the juror, Charles Movalli, but at that point I was on the edge of wipeout and still had the drive home ahead of me (2 hours at least).

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

Fixing up and the Start of a Bushwhack

Posted by Aline on November 4, 2013

Thanks to everyone who appreciated the drawings last week. Black and white can be boring, especially when not brought to a polished finish. It is fun for me to go back through them occasionally, hopefully to discern some progress being made, and drawing is the backbone of (most) painting. I will show you perhaps an exception at the end of this post. (latest project being painted mostly from my head without references)

And today’s post is full of color! I made small refinements to three deserving plein air pieces. The first goes back to Castine, Maine, on the pier facing the student (Maine Maritime Academy) ship, the U.S.S. Maine with its tug. I had allowed the lit facet of the yellow tug to brown down, which sacrificed drama, and more importantly the contrast that had attracted me to the scene in the first place. So here’s the original, and after it, the new and improved version:

The State of Maine (with tugboat)

My second redo is actually a finishing up. A Spring painting of the valley behind Franconia Notch in Sugar Hill was interrupted by showers, and the sky was left as blank white canvas. One of my closest friends and admirer of paintings begged me not to touch it as he thought it perfect as is. Do I listen to such pleas? Well, I hung back for yea these many months but decided I had to fill in that emptiness–without violating my friend’s sensibilities. I concluded that what he liked was the extra crisp edge of the mountain range line, so I made sure to keep that sharp, and the high contrast between sky (light) and mountains (dark), so I maintained that contrast as well. While there, I punched up some of the other small lit areas–meadow, roof top. Here’s the before and after:

Franconia Notch, May 2013

Finally, I applied the advice that I had received at the Manchester Artists Association meeting last month, to my first painting of Clark Pond (link to that post here):

Clark Pond in Auburn WIP

Clark Pond will now be framed and readied for exhibit somewhere. (Probably East Colony Fine Art Gallery, where I just took down my figurative show and put up landscapes that are dearest to my heart. Each show lasts for two months.) I was excited to learn that the Currier Museum is allowing us docents-in-training to exhibit one of our own pieces in the Museum (basement) for the month of December, but I have another project in mind for that particular honor.

And that project is the one I am calling a bushwhack, since I don’t have a trail to follow, and have no clue how to reach my rather amorphous goal–to paint an abstracted landscape inspired by Tom Thomson.

Here’s the scoop: I am painting in Patrick McCay’s EEE class with a start from the photo of the cloud shadows. (posted here) In addition to experimenting with the idea of abstract landscape, I was influenced by a book that Bruce Jones brought to Bartlett for the getaway weekend–a book full of the paintings of Tom Thomson, a Canadian artist working during the earliest decades of the last century. Thomson painted juicy, blocky abstractions of landscapes and used the complementary colors of dark blue and orange to great effect. Here is a stunning example:

Sunset by T. Thomson

I wanted to paint something that had that same impact. My painting looked like this when I left off a week ago Thursday:

Bear Notch WIP

Something about my painting wasn’t working. Patrick suggested that it evoked a forest fire with the dark spots represented charred remains of forests. In theory I didn’t care what it evoked since abstraction was my principal goal. But it wasn’t working as a whole, so last Thursday, I abandoned the abstraction goal and transformed my painting into an identifiable landscape that I hope will have almost the same impact as the Thomson. You will have to wait until next week to judge. (I forgot to photograph it before I left the class studio.)

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

Back to the Drawing Board–Literally

Posted by Aline on November 1, 2013

Maybe it’s the result of my overbooked life, but I suddenly found myself longing for the simplicity and discipline of the black and white drawing. Never mind that it turns out not to be simple after all (a fact I had almost forgotten). Pencil drawing also turns out to be sloooow! But drawing has acted like balm for my chapped soul.

It started a week ago Tuesday. I was running late and really preferred to stay in bed, but I had to show up for Tuesday Life Group because I am the one with the key. So I unearthed a drawing pad, grabbed my box of charcoals and pencils and charcoal pencils, and rushed to the studio. My drawing pad, looking back on it, was intended for pencil, not charcoal. I used the hard and medium charcoals that day, and the image, being mangled in the pad all this time, is greatly degraded, but I think you can tell it was a successful session:

TLG 10/22/13

You might wonder how I can treat a successful drawing so carelessly. The process of making a successful drawing is pleasurable, and I have the remains of the image to remind me how pleasurable. But nudes, especially not painted ones, don’t have any other purpose than to give me the pleasure of creating them. No one buys them. And I have so many stored away now that I can’t take the time to enjoy them as past projects. When this drawing pad is full, it goes under the bed with all the others.

Next was a Friday Life Group session with Dennis again as our model. I kept trying with the hard charcoal.

FLG 10/25/13

As you can see, I got enamored of the podium Dennis was sitting on, and the shadow he was casting on the wall. And his hands, but I had to do those separately:

Dennis’ Hands

Working on interlaced fingers is a little like working on a jigsaw puzzle. I did them a second time hoping that my understanding would have improved with practice. Not so much, I’m afraid.

The next day was Saturday Life Group. We had a new model, one that was obviously a yoga practitioner. SLG starts with five 1-minute poses, then one 5-minute, then one 10-minute, then one 20-minute. I sketched all but the 20-minute on sketch paper. Usually I throw them away afterward, but first made photographs for the blog:

1-3 of the 1-minute poses

4-5 of the 1-minutes poses

5-minute pose

10-minute pose

In all of these drawings, I was facing the windows (our venue has changed–no more overhead skylight), so the model is backlit. After the ten-minute pose, I changed paper pads and started using the drawing (as opposed to sketching) paper. I still hung onto the charcoal. I first toned the sheet with a film of charcoal powder so as to enhance the play of the backlit around the edges of her body.

20-minute pose

Reclining portrait

A good likeness, this one, except I dropped a few pounds off her tummy. Finally, I switched to charcoal pencil.

Recumbent

Graphite pencil got the nod for this one; by comparison to paint or charcoal, it takes a much longer time to build up the darker values. Nevertheless, I could not resist depicting the Halloween-themed drape behind her.

Dennis in pencil

I needed a few more hours to work on the values.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

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:

A Cloudy Day on Top of Cannon Mountain

Posted by Aline on July 22, 2013

Cannon Mountain is a ski mountain, owned and operated by the State of New Hampshire as a State Park. During the summer, one of the ski lifts, a tramway, takes tourists up to the top–and down again–to enjoy the view from the top and the sights along the way. Today I was lucky to be on the tram that passed over mama bear, grazing in the path of the tram. Ordinarily the views both from the tram and the top are of distant mountains in Maine, Vermont, Northern New Hampshire, and Canada. Today, those views were momentarily available on my ride down. Down, after enduring the wind and chill of the summit, trying to make a painting. Good thing I don’t really like to paint long-view vistas, because the only objects visible were those located within 100 yards.

For photos of what it could look like from the top of Cannon Mountain, check out the website here.

For how it looked today before the clouds completely enveloped the summit:

Housing for a Cannon ski lift (or, what I could see before clouds completely socked in)

I tried another painting when I got back down to parking lot level, but really dark and threatening clouds came rolling in our direction and we hied it out of there. We drove over to Crawford Notch prospecting for sunlight, stopped by the Bartlett Inn to make sure our October Artists Weekend reservations were in, and, failing to discover any better weather, ate our way home. (Stopped for supper at the Yankee Smokehouse in Ossipee and for ice cream at Morrisey’s in Wolfsboro.)

Most of last week I spent laboring, still laboring, in the effort to whip my files at the law office into submission. On Friday, however, I took a break to attend my portrait class with Dee Riley, and produced this drawing of new model, Dennis.

Portrait of Dennis in charcoal

I did not think (and neither did Deirdre) until today that his ear looks awfully small. Maybe he has small ears. The class will be spending two more sessions on this pose. I will miss the next two classes because this Friday I will be in Maine for the Castine Plein Air Festival, and next Friday I will be at a plein air with figure workshop with Cameron Bennett.

Cameron taught portrait drawing and painting at the NH Institute of Art before moving to England last year. He is offering this workshop at short notice to coincide with his visit back home to New Hampshire. Most of his old (previous, some also like me, old) students are excitedly looking forward to seeing him again, getting the scoop on practicing art in England, and sopping up all the learning he acquired in the byways of Cornwall, because the title of the workshop is “Inspired by Cornwall”.

As we are already nearing the end of July, let me alert you to Trolley Night coming up on August 1. Trolley Night, a/k/a Open Doors, consists of trolleys providing free transport between the art venues of Manchester, starting with Langer Place, where East Colony Fine Art Gallery is located. Trolley Night in Manchester used to happen four times a year, then it was three times a year. Now, only twice. So don’t pass this one up. The East Colony Gallery puts on a special show just for Trolley Night, in addition to the regular exhibit: Picnic! is the theme of the special show. So come Thursday, August 1, between 5 and 8. The food is great, the people welcoming, and the art fantastic.

If you have voted in the Currier poster contest at my behest, thank you (whether you voted “correctly” or not). If you have not done that yet, here is the link to the Museum’s home page: Currier. Look there for the link to the poster contest. This may work better for those of you who had trouble with my link to the contest site.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery and the East Colony Fine Art Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Kimball-Jenkins Gallery in Concord, NH; at the Bedford Library in Bedford; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at Stella Blu , an American Tapas restaurant in Nashua; at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester; at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center in Manchester (part of the Healing with Art program); and at her studio by appointment. Two paintings are also hanging in the Manchester office of Congresswoman Carol Shea Porter.

Do overs and lupines

Posted by Aline on June 25, 2013

A couple of months ago I posted a rave on Anders Zorn, and I think I may have found him a few new fans. Today, I have another, similar artist for you to sample, through a click back to Robert Genn’s site here. The artist is Joachim Sorolla (WA keem SarOYah), a Spanish contemporary of both Sargent and Zorn. He was a master of all the same skills that I admire in Sargent and Zorn, plus he was a magician with white. Not actual white, but that hue as changed by light and shadows.

And now for a commercial: please visit this address for a view of all the artworks accepted into an online exhibit called “Women’s Rights, An Artist’s Perspective”. My painting “Grandma’s Jewels” was juried into this exhibit. All of the artwork in this and similar exhibits is something called “conceptual”, that is, a message is conveyed, to the most intense degree of drama possible. Picasso’s “Guernica”, for example. I think it would be hard to be a conceptual artist all the time, but some artists thrive on it. Personally, I just like to find something beautiful and paint that. Beauty does not convey message, at least not any message that packs a punch.

OK, with all that out of the way, on to this week’s topic: Do-overs. Lupines. In the past few weeks, I have been outside doing a lot of plein air painting. My best paintings have a way of being alla prima, without any going back to correct or improve. In fact, I cannot think of one that I was able to turn from mediocre into superlative. Yet I keep trying! Of my two from the Forbes House (discussed last week here), I did produce one winner, the little one of the “coverlet”. The other one was a bit messy, and I took a knife (palette knife) to it, thinking to reclaim the panel for another project. But that damned Urge to Fix overcame me, and I repainted the bloody thing, using the ghost images as my guide to the placement and shape of the boats.

Milton Landing, before scraping

Marina, repainted

I’m afraid the result may not have been worth the effort, but no effort is really wasted in this learning process. Or is it?

Then last Thursday, I took the day off to go lupine painting with the lupine experts of the NH Plein Air group. Lupines are a flower that blooms in June rather extravagantly in some places. The town of Sugar Hill has so many lupine fields that it holds a “lupine festival” every year to encourage visitors to the area. Lupines come in shades of blue, pink and white, sometimes within one plant, but mostly blues and purples. They look a lot like the Texas bluebonnet. I have had trouble painting lupines in the past, but I wasn’t giving up on them. Yet.

I produced three lupine paintings. Not happy with any of them. The first was the obligatory field of lupines against the backdrop of receding mountains featuring Mount Washington on the misty horizon. The second was lupines by the lake. In both of these, I was really more interested in the receding mountains and the lake, respectively, than I was in the lupines. The lupines seemed kind of stuck on. An accidental presence. So I painted a quick lupine closeup as my third and last opportunity to conquer the lupine hazard.

When I got home, with the advantage of distance from the actual scene, I decided the problem was my schizo approach to the lupines. To make the first two paintings better, I had to downplay the lupines, stop treating them as pimples on an otherwise idyllic landscape. And for the third study, I just needed a few more strokes to define the nature of the lupine and its leaves. Not so much of a do-over, more of a touch up.

I hope you have not been holding your breath! Here they are, the befores and the afters:

Field of Lupines, BEFORE

Field of Lupines, AFTER

Pearl Lake BEFORE

Pearl Lake, AFTER

Lupines close, BEFORE

Lupines, AFTER

Not only am I cursed by this compulsion to fix mediocre paintings, I am cursed by the compulsion to write about it, doubling the time and effort expended. Should I make this my last lupine festival, or is there hope for me?

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery and the East Colony Fine Art Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at Stella Blu , an American Tapas restaurant in Nashua; at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester; at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center in Manchester (part of the Healing with Art program); and at her studio by appointment. Two paintings are also hung somewhere in an office of Congresswoman Carol Shea Porter, probably the Manchester one.

Living Free in New Hampshire

Posted by Aline on June 10, 2013

This week’s obsession is a poster contest announced by our gem of a museum, the Currier Museum of Art, in Manchester. First, if you are not already familiar with New Hampshire’s notorious motto, here’s a little background.

State Emblem

“Live Free or Die.” The motto achieved its national notoriety after the NH legislature determined that it must be written on our license plates. Some uppity commie liberal type objected to having such an inflammatory statement attached to his personal motor vehicle, and sued all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to get it removed. Well, that’s the story my memory came up with, but I know better than to trust my memory anymore, so I looked it up on Wikipedia, and it seems the offended motorist was a Jehovah’s Witness, who reacted not by suing but by covering up the “or Die” portion of the motto because death for a political cause was unacceptable in his religion, and the Supreme Court got involved because he was prosecuted under a criminal statute for defacing the license plate. His conviction was overturned under the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution–the State could not force him to express a sentiment with which he did not agree.

Although that was something of a slap down, the motto remains on the license plate. I had to look to be sure. New Hampshire does live by the motto: seat belts are not mandated for adults; helmets are not required of motorcyclists; soda cans do not come with a refundable deposit; and taxes, at least those that would reach a broad segment of the population, are abhorrent. Cigarettes, fireworks, gambling and liquor are encouraged. They generate revenue. When we say “free”, we don’t mean “tax-free”. For a comedic take on New Hampshire’s philosophy, see Juston McKinney’s YouTube analysis.

In defense of free living, New Hampshire was an early adopter of same-sex marriage, thereby proving it is an independent thinker. I believe there is also a law on the books to the effect that gun-toters must be allowed to enter courtrooms and legislative chambers with their guns on board. In that last case, the death resulting from living free may not be that of the free liver lover. So you see we have a lot of scope for comedy here.

Anyhoo, the Currier has a contest going for the best poster on the theme of “live free AND _______”—you fill in the blank. The idea is to describe or celebrate something wonderful about New Hampshire, where you may live free and also do some constructive things, things other than killing yourself on the highway.

I had an immediate super-brilliant idea and decided to compete, ignoring the fact that I have zero experience or training as a graphic artist. I ordered ten poster boards from Dick Blick, mostly because you can’t order just one. Extras would be good because I would surely mess up the first few attempts. Then I explored the internet for some hints on how to go about painting on poster board. There wasn’t much out there to help me, but I did learn that applying oil paints directly to the board would not be advisable.

Luckily, I keep some acrylic paints on hand, so I planned to paint a base of acrylic, which would seal the surface and prepare it for the eventual painting in oil. The base would coordinate with my background colors. Once I got going, very confidently since I thought I was still just painting the base, the whole thing just sprang to life. My first acrylic painting. I was stunned. And happy.

Then began the process of lettering. OMG. I proceeded with great care (and concern). Again I conceived a plan: The letters are to consist of their outlines only, because I wanted the background painting to show through. I drew the my letters freehand. I did not want mechanical-looking letters but I did some measuring. I cut them out with an Exacto knife. Not as easy as it sounds. Hard, in fact. I stuck them onto my poster with museum putty to see how they looked. I repositioned them. I redid “. . . and” to make that piece smaller than the “Live Free“. I outlined them using a pen. I painted around the outlines. The unevenness bothered me. I didn’t want it to look professional but I wasn’t going for sloppy either. I tried blurring/bleeding edges with my medium (I was using oil paints at this point). Kind of liked that. Wiped out the word “Free” because letters were too crowded together. Painted with acrylic paint over the wipe-out to create fresh, clean surface for next go ’round.

And that’s where I am. Today I am researching the kinds and uses of stencils, vinyl lettering etc. Should I give up on the outline plan? Guess I am going to have to show you in order to get any feedback.

The above is a close up or detail of the painting, showing paper letters positioned where I planned to outline them. I wished I knew how to make the letters look as if they were actually hanging in front of the poster.

Above is the whole thing, with all of the letters positioned; I must have corrected “HIKE”‘s position before penning its outline in red ink.

Above is the state of the poster before I darkened the upper outlines and before I whitened the “HIKE” outline, and yes, before I got up in the middle of the night to remove the crowded letters forming “Free”. I like “HIKE” now, but am worried about “Live Free”. All of my options for stenciling or applying letters involve letting go of the open outline design. What do you think I should do?

As for the subject image, if you have been reading for a while (over a year). you will recognize it from a 9×12 study that I did for a Patrick McCay course at the Institute called “Explore, Express, Exploit”. I published it in this blog from October 2011. Here is the original inspiration:

The Lone Looker (photo)

I am well and truly exploiting that image of the guy on the rock outcrop that I photographed at 2011’s bike race up Mount Washington, thus fulfilling the promise of that course.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

The White Mountains of New Hampshire

Posted by Aline on May 20, 2013

New Hampshire has a Seacoast region, a Lakes region, and countless quaint farms and towns, but to the rest of the world, New Hampshire means but one thing: the White Mountains. They do rather stand out, compared to all those other things. I believe “white” comes from the glimpse that early seafarers got of them, when covered by snow. Or perhaps it was the sun glinting off the granite.

In any event, they became the subject of many 19th century paintings. Champney, Bierstadt, and dozens of others explored and painted the Whites. For a complete rundown, go to White Mountain Art. Right now there are two major exhibits of White Mountain paintings, one in Jackson and another in Plymouth. The former we have visited twice before. The latter is housed in a brand new Museum of the White Mountains on the campus of Plymouth State College. We stopped there to check it out on our way to Bartlett last Thursday. We came away with a map showing the coordinates of several locations, that is, the coordinates to the spot where the painter stood to paint or make his sketch (probably not many of the paintings were painted outdoors). My painting buddy, Sharon, aspires to paint like the Old Masters, and her enthusiasm led her to download a GPS app to her smartphone, and led both of us over hill and dale in search of the right spots. It was fun. Unfortunately, progress or tree growth interfered with many replications.

My plein air painting No. 1 is a covered bridge not far from Plymouth.

Smith Millenium Bridge

Friday, we got in two painting segments: the first was in the strawberry fields below Cathedral Ledge.

Strawberry Fields (Cathedral Ledge) (No.2)

Usually, my first painting is my best, I think because the inspirational tug is strongest with the first try. If you don’t count the covered bridge–it was on the way into the mountains, not quite there yet–this is the first. And it could be the best. But there are four more, and you might like one of them better.

Friday afternoon we went on our first expedition in search of Old Master painting spot: Mt. Adams as captured by Champney. The actual spot was right in the middle of the Auto Road up Mt. Washington, but we found a better one off to the side.

Mt. Adams (No. 3)

Mount-Adams-Benjamin-Champney-1852-24-x-30-inches

The snow-streaked mountain in the background of my painting is Mt. Jefferson, and on the far left is the beginning of Mt. Washington, which is a sprawling kind of mountain, lumping its way to the highest point in the Northeast. (Last January I had painted a view of this lumpy part of Mt. Washington on that misery-filled plein air weekend.)

Saturday we found our own spots. The day before, on our way back to the Bartlett Inn from the Mt. Adams spot, a stream near the highway had caught our eye and so the next morning we went in search of it. Sharon sometimes ends up in my paintings, and I was particularly glad of the added interest her hat brought to the scene.

Roadside Painter (No. 4)

After a while, the noise of the traffic hurtling by next to us faded from consciousness and all we heard was the gurgling water.

In the afternoon, Sharon introduced me to Echo Lake, at the foot of White Horse Ledge. It was an idyllic spot. Sandy beach, picnic benched (excellent to paint from–you can really spread out your stuff), lively visitors (and I don’t mean the black flies)–one of whom demonstrated the echo for the rest of us.

White Horse Ledge over Echo Lake (No. 5)

My painting had at one point a much more literal depiction of the ledge, but its very literalness bothered me, so I loaded up my palette knife and spread paint liberally. Perhaps something in between would have worked better. Supposedly there is an image of a horse, whitish maybe, delineated in the cracks of this ledge, but I sure couldn’t see it and I wasn’t about to fake it either.

Sunday was a travel day, but we did get in one painting late in the day before heading back South. It was the product of another Champney search, this time in Sugar Hill. Mt. Lafayette is on the left and Cannon is on the right. Personally, I would call it another view of Franconia Notch.

I’d say this is about half done. The dark clouds arrived, threatening rain, before I even touched the sky. The sky had been a dull gray before that anyway. Cannon is a ski mountain, and I’m not sure I want to put the ski trails in. But why not? I don’t know. View is from Lovers Lane, in Sugar Hill.

All of my paintings on this trip were 9×12, except Roadside Painter which was 10×12. I figured I was out of plein air practice, and the smaller format would help me finish paintings. That was correct. Perhaps smaller will mean more salable too. Eventually, I plan to take them back to hang in Bartlett Inn.

Or I may take them to the Beacon Hill Art Walk on June 2. I am trying to decide whether to take only figurative works, only landscapes, or the best of both. I’m sharing a tent with Bruce Jones, who does beautiful work in the style of Don Stone. I’m not sure I want mine compared to his.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester (Langer Place, 55 S. Commercial St., Manchester, NH); at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at Stella Blu , an American Tapas restaurant in Nashua; at her law offices at 41 Brook St in Manchester; at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center in Manchester (part of the Healing with Art program) and at her studio by appointment. Through May 30, nine of her Boston Arboretum paintings will be displayed at the Leach Library in Londonderry, NH. On Sunday, June 2, she will be participating in the Beacon Hill Art Walk, in Boston.

Race up Mount Washington

Posted by Aline on April 22, 2013

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

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

Mt. Washington Phase 4

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

Fans

Awaiting the Stragglers (3-legged dog)

View of race with vista

Whew! (a top female finisher)

Andy with bike

A Very Special Guy

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

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

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

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

Figure in Turban and red drape WIP

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

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

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

Aging

Posted by Aline on April 9, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

LL&D No. 1

LL&D No. 2

LL&D No. 3

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

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

Phase 3–Biking on Mt. Washington

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

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

Jon seated on stand wip

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

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

Hello, Again

Posted by Aline on April 1, 2013

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

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

Phase 2 of Mt Painting

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

Reclining Male on Brown Sofa

Portrait Fletch Mar 2013

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

Fletch portrait on darker bkgrd

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

Reading (Nook) from back

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

Portrait Grace Mar 2013

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

Potpourri–Nudes, Landscapes, Almost Abstract

Posted by Aline on February 11, 2013

Sideways (12×9)

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

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

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

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

Mangroves, Ding Darling

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

California Landscape

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

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

Mt. Washington from 302, No. 4

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

Jackson Community Church, looking west, BEFORE

Jackson, AFTER

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

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

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

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

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

Frozen Moments

Posted by Aline on January 28, 2013

My boots were duck hunter’s boots, so wide and thick that I have a hard time climbing stairs in them. I wore four layers on my legs, four on my torso, three on my arms and hands, two on my head, plus a scarf to wrap around my face. My equipment held up well, creaking a little bit but not refusing to lock and unlock. My brushes were frozen but not brittle enough to break. My Gamsol did not turn into jelly in subzero temperatures like my Turpenoid did two years ago. Nevertheless, painting plein air this past weekend in the North Country was a fool’s enterprise.

My biggest surprise was my paint. I made the mistake of leaving it outside overnight. Freezing oil paint is a good way to prevent the large gobs of untubed paint from drying out; it does not damage the paint. But my paint never had a chance to unfreeze before I set out to paint that first crisp morning. (“Crisp” is such an understatement that it is funny–temps were around minus 14 with strong winds adding emphasis.) Once I got my brushes working, I could only poke at the paint and smear it around a little. (Sharon reported that she couldn’t even make a dent in her yellow with a palette knife.) Meanwhile, my face was so covered up that I couldn’t really see what I was doing, and gusts of wind (which fortunately you do hear coming) would periodically force me to hang onto the equipment and endure sprays of snow until the wind died down. I lasted about 20 minutes not counting set up and break down time. Sharon soldiered on for about another ten minutes. [Sharon Allen is the leader of the NH Plein Air painters group, and for the weekend, my chauffeur and guide.] Below are photos of the spot we were painting and our two attempts.

Mt. Washington from Rte 302

Heroic Effort (Sharon’s)

Heroic Effort (Aline’s)

Just for comparison, here is a painting I did in the fall, after a snowfall on the mountains, from the same spot.

Mt. Wash. from 302

Somewhat wiser after lunch, we sought out a sheltered spot for our next attempt. Nothing like an indoor viewing point for sheltering from wind, so we drove up to the Glen House, across from the Mt. Washington Auto Road, and obtained permission to set up in a corner of the restaurant. Sharon painted the view to the north while mine was southwest.

Plein air? Not.

Glen House Painters

In my view is Mt. Washington, but a shoulder obscures the top, so no buildings are visible. It’s the hump toward the left side of my panel. Route 16 runs through the painting but I decided to leave it vague.

Indoor painting of Mt. Washington

The next day, Saturday, was a little better. I think the temperature rose to 5 degrees, and the wind had died down. Nevertheless, we got lots of passersby commenting variously on our bravery, determination, and insanity. I was by that time in total agreement. Knocked down a peg or two was I! Below are photos memorializing these efforts.

Artist or Terrorist? (Sharon)

Frozen Stream

This green tinted frozen water was what had fascinated both Sharon and me. We had not realized how hard it is to depict frozen water. I had never learned of any way to signal to the onlooker that, hey, this is frozen water here–not flowing water, not an empty field.

WIP Sharon

Jackson Community Church, looking west

Jackson Community Church looking east

Above was a view we had planned to paint Saturday afternoon, but the wind! I guess we were lucky to get in a halfway decent morning. The church in this photo is the same one I was trying to paint from my location in the parking lot of the Jackson Historical Society, up river and to the right in the photo. You can see the sign on the building in the background behind Sharon’s easel, which is why I didn’t crop her Work In Progress down to just the painting itself. The Jackson Historical Society has a collection of White Mountain Art, including a few by Benjamin Champney. Metcalf, Gerry and Shapleigh were my favorites in that collection. The parking lot was a great place to paint if you don’t mind being interrupted by passersby, and since these passersby were on their way inside to see White Mountain art, they got our full attention.

But we never found a suitable spot to paint that afternoon or Sunday either. Every time we spotted a paintable spot, we would check the flagpoles. The flags kept up the whipping all the way home. We took pictures and persuaded ourselves that in doing so, we were doing artists’ work. We wandered through Conway, Albany, Moultonborough, Meredith (lunched there), Weirs Beach, Alton Bay, Chichester, Northwood, and Nottingham (there we stopped by Jenness Farm to buy goat milk soap and socialize with the goats).

The Friendly Goats of Jenness Farm

So I conclude that to get more use out of my duck hunter’s boots, I must be alert to a good painting day around home and just seize it. Carpe diem! We have a few warmer days coming up this week.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

In February, you can also view some of my paintings and drawings at the McGowan Gallery in Concord, NH, and at the Artstream Gallery in Rochester, NH. Receptions for those shows are, respectively, Feb 1, 5-7; and Feb 2, 5-8.

If you happen to be near Orlando, Florida on February 14, 15 or 16, you should go to Nude Nite, a happening at this location: 639 W. Church St. (Blue Freestanding Warehouse just East of I-4). One of my paintings was invited to participate. This one:

Standing Tall

Studies, Ending, Beginning

Posted by Aline on December 5, 2011

This is the last study for my large Mt. Washington Bike Race painting. I numbered it “4” but in fact it is 5 if you count the two portraits in the series. I have started on the big canvas, but the drawing is so rudimentary that I am saving it for a future post, when I hope I will have something of interest to display.

Meanwhile I would like to share with you a minor triumph–well, sort of a triumph and certainly a very minor one. Last Summer (can’t believe it has been that long ago) in the Portraits course I was taking with Cameron Bennett, he crushed me with the observation that an eye was too low on a copy of a Serov portrait that he had assigned us as homework. Here is a link to my report on that last effort. Last week I finally got around to correcting that flaw. I used a ruler. I laid the ruler under the eyes of the original, then under the eyes of my copy. I couldn’t find any discrepancy, yet I had to agree the there was something fishy about my eye. Of course, the color was wrong, but could that obvious flaw have create the misimpression that the eye was too high or low?

Original, by Valentin Serov

My copy of Serov portrait (A)

My copy, after retouching eye

Original Portrait by Valentin Serov

Finally, one more workshop piece, from our (NH Plein Air artists) most recent meeting of the Peter Granucci workshop series, which ironically, requires indoor practice from photographs. The subject this month was snow.

Snow Shadows

A Best Week

Posted by Aline on November 13, 2011

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

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

Alpaca Farm in North Conway

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

Alpaca Farm v.2

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

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

Alpaca Farm, v.3 (Final)

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

Andy as Supercyclist

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

Whew!

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

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

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

Arrangement of elbow and knee

Leg on Blue Draped Pillow

Right Side with bent elbow

The back from a left angle

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

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

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

Bartlett, October 2011

Posted by Aline on October 17, 2011

Bike Race spectator on Mt. Washington

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

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

Lower Falls

Mt. Washington Valley with Moat Mt. and cornfield

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

Alpaca Farm in North Conway

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

Head Shot

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

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

Gray Alpaca

White Alpaca

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

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

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

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

Views from the Top of Mt. Prospect

Posted by Aline on August 29, 2011

Last week I teased you with photographs of the scenes I painted from the Weeks State Park location but not the paintings I worked on there. This week I am making up for my laziness by posting those two paintings as well as two paintings that I started on location at the Bedford Farmers Market.

First, the painting above shows the view from the Weeks house toward Vermont, a northwesterly direction. One of the locals told me that the pond just visible was the Martin Meadow Pond, but I am sure he was wrong about that. My little sliver of a water feature does not even get named on Google maps, while the Martin Meadow Pond is much larger, and is visible from another break in the trees to my left. What attracted me to this view was the little taste of a vista, enclosed by the foreground of foliage. It was a difficult position to manage because I did not feel free to take up the whole path with my easel. That’s always a consideration for a plein air painter–keeping out of the way of the folk who are there for the same view you want to paint. From time to time, the park ranger would wander by to check on my progress. What he would see was pretty much a mess–big smears of muddy colors–until close to the finish, when I cleaned up the edges, hit the shapes with some brighter colors, and refined the details. When he arrived at that point, he was blown away–couldn’t believe it! “Wow!”

Wow is always a good word to use to compliment a painter.

The second Weeks painting was on a much larger panel, 20 x 16, I was already tired, and frankly a bit bored by my choice of subject matter–the tower. There was no reason to continue working on it at home, except that front page article in the Concord Monitor, posted in last week’s blog. So I worked on it yesterday:

On to the next subject–Farmers Market in Bedford. My friend and fellow painter, Suzanne Whittaker, lives in Bedford and was asked to be an attraction at the Market by painting there. She sets up a tent every Tuesday afternoon, 3 to 6, and paints a still life. Other artists join her when they can. My joining her depends on my getting the use of my car on a Tuesday afternoon, which so far I have been able to do twice. Instead of painting her still life, I try to paint a piece of the market scene. Of course, nobody stays motionless long enough for me to capture their image, but I can get the structures and add anonymous figures suggested by the real people. As you will see, I go for colorful stuff:

The Bread Seller, 14×11

The Apple Hill Stand

The guy in the baseball cap noticed me looking his way a lot, so he came over afterward to see what I was doing. Most of my admirers were the children. They always asked the price, bless their uninhibited souls. They always want to buy, and are so disappointed when they can’t afford the price. One of these days I may just bring paintings to give to them. Better than dying with hundreds of paintings that my children will have to dispose of.

Dogs are welcome at the Farmers Market, so I have been taking Justice with me. He is a shy dog, particularly fearful with new men. But he seemed to enjoy our first day at the market, and never barked once. Things were different last week. We were closer to the traffic, hence to the other dogs. But that wasn’t the worst of it. A drum circle came to use Sue’s tent about one hour before closing time. I couldn’t reposition myself at that point, two hours into my painting, so they closed in behind me. Poor Justice huddled under my chair for that hour, frantic to get away but pinned in place by the leash I had him on. So when Mr. Apple Hill came over to check us out, after the drumming had ceased, Justice greeted him like a long lost friend. So funny. So there are worse things than strange men. . . much worse! And then it got pretty good–the vendor next to us sells homemade gourmet treats for cats and dogs, and gave Justice her leftover samples to take home.

So far it is looking good for us to return to the Farmers Market in Bedford tomorrow–if you want to see us there, the Market is located just off Wallace Road in the Benedictine Park.

Paintings by Aline

A Painter's Progress

Tag Archives: mountains

Catching up–Bartlett Style

Abstracting the Landscape, Part 2

Kickstart

Monadnock

Mt. Washington Valley in May, 2015

New Hampshire’s Fall Foliage

Two weeks of earnest painting

Artists’ Getaway Spring 2014

Up and Down, Back and Forth

Two Projects Are Resolved, and a Theme Continues

Fixing up and the Start of a Bushwhack

Back to the Drawing Board–Literally

Smorgasbord of Art

A Cloudy Day on Top of Cannon Mountain

Do overs and lupines

Living Free in New Hampshire

The White Mountains of New Hampshire

Race up Mount Washington

Aging

Hello, Again

Potpourri–Nudes, Landscapes, Almost Abstract

Frozen Moments

Studies, Ending, Beginning

A Best Week

Bartlett, October 2011

Views from the Top of Mt. Prospect

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