Tag Archives: photography

Exhibiting

Posted by Aline on

I haven’t written a blog for two months.  I have thought about it a lot, but what to write about?

(1) It’s winter, and dreary sunless winter most of the time.

(2) I can’t go to Florida for my usual reinvigoration because I’m working at tax returns in order to support my art habit.

(3) As I get older, it seems as if everything I do has to take longer.  Five times longer.  I have turned into a snail.

As a result of all those factors, forget about blogging. . . I haven’t even been painting!

Two months–that’s December and January, and little bit of February, assuming I finish this start and publish it today or tomorrow.  During those months I was busy with a different aspect of the profession of art making.  I was exhibiting.  So I’m hoping that’s a subject that might be amusing for artists and non artists alike, especially since so much of that was compressed in that stretch of time.

There are two kinds of exhibiting:  juried and not juried.  For the juried ones, the process starts with the application or “entry”.  The artist obtains decent photographs of the artwork and sends the images electronically to the juror(s).   For the unjuried ones, the artist usually need only identify each piece by title and size.  For all of them, the artist must consider the logistics of getting artwork to the place of exhibit, and then getting pieces back home at the end of the exhibit.

Entering multiple exhibits requires some basic record keeping.  You don’t want to put forward the same painting in different, overlapping exhibits.  You can’t deliver paintings to two locations at the same time.  You can’t deliver paintings when you are tied up at work either.  Friends and families are helpful in this regard.

I was particularly busy with the business of art these past few months.  Maybe because  I was not getting many rejections, a turn of events devoutly to be thankful for.  The effort required for me to keep all my exhibit balls in the air sapped my energy to actually keep painting–with the exceptions of commissions of pet portraits and the re-creation of lost paintings.  Yes, on two occasions I submitted photographs of paintings that I could not find!   But let’s go back to the beginning.

In November, I responded to a call for art from a Boston gallery, the Bromfield, for smallish pieces to go in their annual Winter Show.  I have never exhibited in Boston before, so I decided to go for it.  Of 4 images submitted, 2 were accepted.  Both were 8×10 rather abstracted landscapes involving water.  Lake’s Edge, which was on my wall and on my business card; and Water Layers, which I distinctly remember seeing when I was offering 8×10’s for $100 each in Littleton’s Art Festival.  But I could not find Water Layers in any of my home places for stacking older paintings.  Thank goodness I tried to find it right after getting the acceptance, because that barely gave me enough time to paint a copy of it from my photograph of it.  Oil dries slowly.

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Water Layers, 8×10, plein air, half hour painting at Baboosic Brook in Merrimack NH

The exhibit at the Bromfield Gallery required three trips to Boston:  one to deliver; one to attend the opening; and one to pick up at the end of the show.  I took a friend with me each time because venturing into SoWa (South of Washington) arts district alone  intimidated this boondocks artist.  Yvonne, another artist, accompanied me on the first and third trips.  It wasn’t the neighborhood that intimidated me; it was the traffic and fear of accidentally getting on the Mass. Turnpike, because that has happened to me before when trying to find something in the South End.  Parking in the neighborhood of the Gallery was also a challenge better handled with another person riding shotgun.   Alas, all of our good luck in finding the place and scoring a parking place got washed out by a blowout of one of my snow tires as I was pulling into a dubious corner space.  I had rammed my poor tire into a sewer grate.  AAA to the rescue.  Yvonne missed a delivery of a turkey to her front porch back in Manchester.  Come to think of it, I guess I owe her a turkey.  Just glad I was not alone!

The middle trip, the one to the opening, was pretty darn delightful.  My friend from grade school in Wilmington Delaware, Jackie, accompanied me.  There was a Christmas crafts fair going on, and all of the galleries at 450 Harrison Street too, as was usual on the First Friday of a month.  As soon as we got here, about five o’clock, Jackie and I allowed ourselves to be seduced by a restaurant called 500 in Italian.  Cinquecento.  As we were investigating the menu posted outside, passersby stopped to encourage us and even advised which meal to order.  Since we did not have a competing agenda, we went for it and ending up spending a boatload of money, mostly for a carafe of wine that cost $35.  Good time, great meal.  Girls night out.  Christmas shopping got done too–later.

Let this be enough to whet your appetite for more show war stories.  Now that I have a toe in the water (to mix metaphors), I shall be more likely to wade on in.

Places where you might catch a few of my paintings are:

  • NH Antiques Coop in Milford NH
  • Bartlett Inn in Bartlett NH
  • Red Jacket Resort in North Conway NH
  • Mesmer & Deleault Law Firm in Manchester NH
  • McGowan Gallery in Concord NH
  • Armory Cafe Gallery in Somerville, MA
  • Great Bay Community College in Portsmouth NH
  • Currier Art Museum in Manchester NH
  • Ellis River Art Gallery in Jackson 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!

On Photographing Oil Paintings

Posted by Aline on

I have, from time to time, complained about fog or glare appearing in my photographs of artwork.  I tried to eliminate glare by cutting down on lighting, but it didn’t always work.  The larger the painting, the harder it was to eliminate glare.  When I started, I didn’t have a lot to photograph so I would take the artwork outdoors to a spot where the lighting was indirect.  As I accumulated piles of panels to photograph, I wanted to be able to run through them relatively quickly–indoors and at night.  I would flood the studio with full-spectrum artificial light.  Instead of aiming lights at the artwork, I would bounce light off the ceiling, through a mirror, etc.  I thought the only solution was to avoid the light that rakes across the surface of a painting.  Yet my research on the internet kept producing advice to set up lamps aimed at 90 degrees from the artwork.

The result of my low lighting solution to glare was unsatisfactory color capture.  I started using my iPhone instead of my once expensive, leading edge digital SLR Nikon D70.  But all that is in the process of changing, since I attended a short workshop at the NH Institute of Art, conducted by the chairman of its Photograpy Department, Gary Samson.  I learned a new concept:  polarization.  I’m no scientist, as Republican climate-change skeptics are so fond of saying, so the explanation that follows may read like a Mother Goose tale to someone who actually understands the physics of light.

Rays of light have direction, and bounce off surfaces like oil paintings.  To polarize these bounces is to neutralize them, or counteract them, with filters that somehow deflect the bounces before they reach the camera.  You need a filter for the camera lens.   You also need filters between the light source and the art object.

I started by acquiring a filtering lens for the Nikon, and rephotographing some recent works that had troubled me.  Despite the fact that I could not figure out exactly what I was supposed to see through my new circular filter, the photographs did improve.  Compare the original hazy image with the new polarized image.

John Brown as gardener

John Brown, posing as gardener or farmer (FOG FROM REFLECTED LIGHT)

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John the Gardener  (NO MORE FOG; COLOR ALSO MORE ACCURATE)

But then I tried to rephotograph a painting that I had varnished with a high gloss varnish.  I could not get rid of the glare.  So I rummaged around Amazon and then eBay until I found affordable gizmos to hang filters from the spotlights, and a large sheet of polarizing film from which to cut out sheets to hang from the gizmos.  I don’t think it mattered whether the film’s polarity was circular, as with the camera lens, or parallel.  Circularity was necessary for the camera so that the camera could still autofocus.  I take that on faith since I don’t understand it.

Alas, the filters for the spotlights did not solve the varnish issue.  I am so sad.

Two other advances in my photo technique have resulted from that workshop:  I set the Nikon to take the photos in RAW format.  That’s super-large format to accommodate enormous amounts of data for the purpose of manipulating the data in the finished version (jpeg) of the photo; and I bought a photo manipulating program better than “Photos”, which comes free with all my Apple devices.  Adobe Lightroom, about $145 from Amazon, compatible with Macs and IOS.  Headache!  Powerful software equals massive learning curve, and hey,  I hated learning how to operate the remote control on my DVR.

As a result of all this upheaval, my diligence with blogging faltered over the past couple of months.  I’m hoping that by the end of January, I’ll have all the bugs worked out.  Meanwhile, here is a decent photo of a 16×20 painting that I did over the summer–from a reference photo I took in my neighborhood.

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Russell Street Roofs

Reminder for folks in the Chesapeake Bay area: see two of my animal portraits at the Annmarie Sculpture Gardern and Art Center in Solomons, Maryland.   The exhibit’s theme is “Fur, Feathers, and Fins–Our Faithful Pets”.   It will run  through January 29.

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

  • NH Antiques Coop in Milford NH
  • Ellis River Art Gallery in Jackson NH  (in January 2017)
  • Bartlett Inn in Bartlett NH
  • Red Jacket Resort in North Conway NH
  • Bernerhof Inn in Glen NH
  • Mesmer & Deleault 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!