A Splurge of Cats

Posted by Aline on November 27, 2017

It so happens that I undertook an obligation to fill a small table with salable artwork (by me) in the NH Institute of Art holiday sale. Mostly I paint large, unsalable items. As a result, I had a stack of small canvases and panel just awaiting to discover their purpose for being.

Meanwhile I have been in another slump. I knew I needed to do some painting, if only for this sale, but Inspiration was hiding somewhere over the hill and far away. The only solution was to paint cats. I live with five cats, and with their help, I have amassed a number of interesting feline images. For cats, one needs no Inspiration. Cats are per se Inspiring.

So last Friday and Saturday I painted six little cat portraits. They will be dry for the sale, which occurs on Sunday December 3. (Ugh! I can’t stand it–winter already! Christmas shopping already!–if only all my friends and family members were as nuts about cats as I am. But then I’d have to find something else to sell next Sunday.)

In addition to the six new cat portraits, I’ll offer a portrait that I painted as a demonstration last summer at the Art Jam on the Bridge in Manchester. I used as reference a photo of my cat Isis, who is not what you’d call “sociable”, although she feels entitled to most of my attention. She really wants to live in an one-cat household, and after eight years she still makes up to new people coming into the house as if hoping for a rescuer. Because of her imperious attitude with me, I have dubbed her “My Diva”:

My Diva, 12×9, $400 oil on treated carton paper; unframed; $450 framed

I love My Diva (the painting, not so much the model) so much that I paid $35 for a new iPhone cover with this image on it from Fine Art America. So worth it.

The six new cat portraits range in size from 3.5 x 2.5–(calling card size) magnetized for sticking to refrigerators and the like, to 6×8.

Do Not Disturb, 2.5×3, $45, on magnetized canvas panel.

Worried Kitten, 6×6, $75; oil on gessoed panel hangable without frame

Ninja Cat, 6×6, $75, oil on gessoed panel hangable without frame

Playing “Gotcha”, 8×6, oil on stretched canvas; $175 unframed

Clowning Around, 7.7×6, oil on gessoed panel, $150 unframed

Somethin’s Moving Over There, 7.7×6, oil on gessoed panel, $150 unframed

I’ll be adding the series of flopped cat based on my Milo, and a 6×6 portrait closeup of Milo. I discussed the series here, and I guess the price will be $250 each or $200 if multiples are purchased. The higher price I am asking for the 9×12 of My Diva represents the degree of my unwillingness to part with it.

In addition to all available feline paintings, I’ll select the best landscapes that are 9×12 or smaller, and offer them at rock bottom prices.

It would be really nice if you could come check out my wares. Here are the specifics:

HolidayFair_11x17

And the day after, in virtually the same space, I will be officiating at the Manchester Artists’ Association monthly meeting, which is another interesting event that is open to the public:

Rhonda McCune Poster December 2017

After that, I will retreat back into my hermit hole with my 5 cats.

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!

The Prodigal Cat Returns

Posted by Aline on August 13, 2016

In 2004, before I even started painting, I read an article in a cat magazine, while I was waiting in the veterinarian’s office, about what a great cat this newly recognized breed, the Pixie Cat, was. Smart, friendly and almost dog-like in the way they connect to people, Pixie Bobs look like a small version of a wild bobcat: short tails, spotted markings, tufted ears. I was intrigued, and set about looking for a breeder in New Hampshire. I found just one, and as luck would have it, she had a kitten with a “bad” tail that was in need of a good home. The tail was bad because it was too long and ended in a crook. I reimbursed her for her veterinarian fees and took title to the little fellow. He was about 10 weeks old. He had been named “Winchester” but we were not about to call him that. My granddaughter decided his name should be “Freckles”, for the little spots on his muzzle.

Freckles as kitten

He came to me already microchipped. We had at least two cats already, and there was a cat door available for free travel in and out. The other cats weren’t much into going outside. Freckles, however, was an adventurer. Once, a neighbor, who happened to be a firefighter, had to climb up a tall pine tree to retrieve him. Another time, he went missing for a whole week, so I posted laminated posters all over the neighborhood with his picture and a description of the crooked tail. Almost immediately, I got a call from an ex-neighbor who had just come to check out the vacant property she had for sale–he was stuck on her roof! She was ready to take him to her new home when she noticed the poster.

Frequently he could be found chilling’ on the rocker on the porch of a house up the block; they wanted to claim him as theirs too, but fortunately he had already acquired a rep and most neighbors knew where he belonged, even if they didn’t know me. He enjoyed car rides and would hop right into one without invitation. But I figured he was safe, because of his microchip. Sadly, I now know that for a microchip to work, it has to be looked for.

Freckles was one of my very first attempts at a cat portrait, and that painting is still one of my most successful, if you measure success by how quickly viewers fell in love with the subject. I had used that portrait as him Missing Cat poster photo.

Freckles_Cat - Version 2

Then in December of 2010, when Freckles was six years old, he got caught outside in a snowstorm. I never saw him again–until last week. All these years, I had hoped that he simply accepted a car ride with someone who decided not to check him for a microchip. (Vets do not routinely scan new patients for microchips. Asked why not, one vet answered that it would appear distrustful of the pet’s guardian.) But I realized he more likely was dead. I would look up at that portrait of him and feel my loss every time. He was my most special cat, the only one I ever sought out to buy from a breeder.

Monday morning I got the news that someone had scanned a stray cat in Nashua (about 20 miles South) and come up with Freckles’ contact information. None of my phone numbers was still good, but the fax number went to the firm I practiced law with–the firm that had often been visited by Freckles because I liked to take him everywhere with me. By one p.m. the responsible cat owner who searched for his true owner, she’s my hero, Belinda, met me in a parking lot and turned over to me a somewhat confused Freckles. He seemed content being with her and not very interested in coming home with me. But being Freckles, he accepted it. He did, after all, enjoy car rides. Here is a photo that Belinda shared with me, of Freckles napping in her daughter’s bed.

I had to quarantine him away from my other cats until we were sure he wasn’t carrying any contagious disease or parasites, but the vet declared him amazingly healthy for a senior cat on his own. Actually, amazingly healthy for a cat of any age. Even his teeth were good. The cat door has not been openable from the outside ever since he disappeared six years ago, but he is getting enough stimulation from the four younger cats occupying my house. He does seem to remember the house, not to mention the cat door, and he is warming up to me. He seems to want to be in the same room with me. The other four cats are showing him great respect, as is his due. He has only to look at them, not even a stare, just a look, to claim his lofty position as No. 1. His favorite perch, when we (my follower cat Milo and I) are in the TV room/art gallery is the top of a leather chair like the one that I sit in, so that we are on the same level.

Note the painting hanging in the background.

Two more photos: one to compare to his kitten photo and the other to mark his privileged occupation of my otherwise cat-free computer sanctuary. He has found the printer-scanner-copier combo to be a good place to hang out.

I’m not sure what all this has to do with my painting. It’s just a tale I needed to tell. A love note for my special cat.

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; and at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester.

Six Years of Incubation

Posted by Aline on June 15, 2016

In order to keep something going on my easel, I am taking a summer class at the Institute with an instructor new to me. Stuart Ober is leading a course called “Independent Explorations in Oil Painting”, a scope broad enough to cover just about any subject matter and any style. If I want to, I can switch between new abstraction experiments and long-shelved realistic projects.

First up: a double portrait that I started maybe six years ago, before my first class with Cameron Bennett. I had been using a photograph as reference, and so lost interest in it after being introduced to the joy and challenges of painting from life. But it was a quite large canvas, gallery-wrapped too, so not something to be discarded. It had haunted my studio from the window sill, and one of the cats had thrown up on the top, so the dried up vomit cascaded down the front of the canvas. Charming. My first job was cleaning off the vomit.

I do have photographs of a small study I finished all those years ago, when I was still more of a fumbler, and the start of the larger painting. You’ll have to imagine the vomit for yourself.

Study, 9×12, of Two Girls

Charcoal start to large painting of Two Girls

The girls are my two granddaughters, Tabitha on the left and her younger half-sister Natalie on the right. At the time of the photograph, Natalie was about 13 years old, yet she looks older than her 22-year old sister. Photographs do lie.

Photo of two sisters on Newbury Street

Newbury Street in Boston was the location of the photo. I had taken the two girls down to Boston for a First Friday tour of the South of Washington art scene (SOWA)*. To get them to accompany me, I had to promise a nice dinner out on Newbury Street. The wall between the restaurant and the street had been removed. We were lucky to get a table next to the sidewalk. Over their shoulders you are seeing the lights of street activity.

At this point, I have spent two classes attempting to bring the large portrait to a conclusion. It is so much better than it was when I cleaned it off, and even if I never get around to perfecting it, I’m not embarrassed by it.

After photo taken in Newbury street restaurant; Tabitha and Natalie, probably 2009

But I long to “finish” this painting in the academic sense, examining every edge. Too hard? Too soft? There is no deadline.

*Originally I had written (erroneously) “Market” for Washington, lapsing back to the days when I haunted San Francisco, where the Market Street delineated the artsy area from the more commercial areas of the downtown. SOMA is San Francisco, SOHO is NYC (South of Houston St.) and SOWA is Boston (South of Washington Street). SOWA is to be distinguished from the higher rent artsy district found on Newbury Street in Boston.

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; at the Bedford Library; at Bentley Commons in Bedford; and at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester.

ONLY A WEEK AWAY: Wednesday, June 22 is the reception at Labelle Winery in Bedford for 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. Since the live flowers last only a few days, you might as well plan to come for the reception (5-8 Wednesday), but the paintings and their floral complements will be on view the next day.

Who Am I?

Posted by Aline on April 6, 2016

I’m still in a funk. Not depressed–I am very active, working 20+ hours each week in gainful employment (preparing tax returns); going to classes, art receptions, movies; picking up and delivering artworks for exhibiting; playing bridge one afternoon of each week; cooking and cleaning (as minimally as possible); watching way too much TV. But I haven’t picked up a paint brush for weeks. Months.

Nevertheless, every waking moment not required by the above-mentioned activities I ponder, to paraphrase Gauguin: Who Am I, Where Am I Going?

This concern over direction started long ago but I have suppressed it, hoping I suppose that the answer would eventually reveal itself without any extra effort by me. In December I took a 2-day workshop on how to behave as a successful professional artist, and the difficulty I had in composing an Artist’s Statement brought home to me the quandary in which I find myself. I paint landscapes en plein air. I paint figures and portraits from live models. I paint animals from photographs. I paint impressionistically. I paint realistically. I paint post-impressionistically. Every now and then I even try to paint abstractly. I struggled to find a common theme that doesn’t fall back on metaphysical or philosophical musings. There isn’t one.

At this point, after some months into aforesaid hard pondering, I see myself with one toe in the Realistic Realm and a whole foot in the Van Gogh Wannabe Realm. Is it time to lift that foot with the toe in Realistic Realm and swing it around to plant it perhaps beyond Van Gogh–perhaps as far beyond Van Gogh as . . . Tommy Thompson? Eric Aho? Just as soon as I try to imagine that happening, I start to regret my animal portraits, my nude figures, my painted portraits, all that I love about capturing a real life moment.

Clearly, nothing can happen until I pick up a paint brush again.

Meanwhile, I am keeping fit by continuing the class with Deidre on Advanced Figure Drawing. Three hours a night, once a week on Tuesdays. Here is my output since the last blog:

The Guard, Unclothed

The Guard Unclothed was a 2-week pose, and I used the extra time to perfect the modeling of his body and to describe the background. Standing poses are the most challenging to me, perhaps because I would prefer a pose that no model could hold for more than ten minutes. Standing poses are academic and boring, which may be why I worked so hard on the background.

Two Views — of another pose that spanned two weeks. Two Views are not a matched pair. The paper is different, true, but they differ mostly in my handling of the modeling and background. One has background but little modeling. I have no title for it yet. The other, which I am calling “The High Priestess”, has no background and a lot of modeling. I think I prefer the first, rougher version, but that might be my preference for a back view. Breasts are so complicated. I love the head and shoulders in Priestess.

Next time, there will be another pairing of two views of one pose, as I finished this week’s drawing (below) and next week will move to the other side of the podium, whence I might avoid the breasts by doing a head and shoulders portrait. At least it’s not a standing pose:

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 Twiggs Gallery in Boscawen; at the Audubon Massabesic Center in Auburn, as part of an exhibit of Manchester Artists Association paintings and photographs; 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.

The In-House Model

Posted by Aline on December 9, 2015

When, a few months ago, I faced the fact that not enough artists were coming to my Monday morning life sessions to cover the cost of the model, I struck a deal with the model who lives behind my garage: my 19-year-old granddaughter Natalie. She now sits for me for free in exchange for her room behind the garage, and still gets cash when other artists join me for a particular session. She does not pose nude, but frankly, I was getting weary of painting the nude body anyway. Moreover, as I never tire of pointing out, paintings of nude bodies are difficult to exhibit. Americans are such Puritans! Except for museums, which unfortunately do not have room for a learner such as I, people running exhibit spaces are paranoid about the possibility that children might clap their wide eyes on a picture of a nude human being.

So you will see Natalie more often now. For the first pose pursuant to this arrangement, I had her dress up in her mother’s wedding gown. The gown had been hanging (literally) around since we cleared out attic and closets for a big garage sale that I had in early October. I retrieved it from the sale items along with some vintage items of clothing that deserved to be memorialized in paint.

Natalie was at first resistant. The gown was old-fashioned with lace and puffy sleeves, and covered her up to the neck–definitely not something that a modern girl like her would choose to wear anywhere, much less to her wedding. But the gown fit her like a glove, and after a while she got into the costume spirit of the enterprise. She has now spent a total of four Monday mornings in the thing.

The first week was just me and one other artist, so access to a good perspective on the model was not an issue. I chose a 18×24 panel and took my time, expecting to get a few more sessions with this pose. But more artists showed up the next week, so we had to move her out of the corner to get more good vantage points. But I have not given up on the first pose. I like the concept of the bride with her bare feet up, hair all frowsy, head thrown back in exhaustion:

The Wedding is Over (WIP)

The second pose is more formal. Natalie applauded the change because it got her closer to the fireplace and was more comfortable than the first pose. We all five started on portraits that were, at most, 3/4 length, so what she did with her feet was immaterial. (The feet were clad in slippers and resting on a toolbox stepstool.) I took photos at the end of the second and third weeks, then took a photo of her so that I could finish the piece using that as my reference. Today, I fixed some details and took another photo, its status today, which might be final. All four stages are shared with you below:

The bridal portrait (WIP)

The bridal portrait (almost done)

Bridal portrait–the real thing

The bridal portrait–finished, maybe?

Two days ago, we started on the third pose. Two other artists were with me, and we agreed to go at it again next Monday, but I think I’m finished with the face and hair at this point.

Snuggled up by the fire (WIP)

The snuggle for real–photo of the model in her pose

Natalie is all wrapped up in a blanket in front of the fire, the best pose ever, according to her. Next Monday I need to rearrange the folds of the blanket for the sake of the composition, bringing the back folds across her body instead of running down into the corner. Also, I feel that the blanket should be more in the shadow, competing less with the light on her face. I don’t want to bring the face into a more “finished” state. In fact, I’m afraid I have already lost a certain fresh quality. Here’s an earlier state of the painting:

snuggled early version

Another part of the scene that bothers me is the chair. I’m thinking maybe I should get rid of it. Or change the color. To what? I hate it when I find myself in a color quandary.

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 Center for the Arts in the New London Inn; at Apotheca, in Goffstown, NH; 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. My painting “Darkly” (link to it here) has finally donned a frame and can be viewed at E.W. Poore Framing Studio in Manchester, as part of the Manchester Artists Association “Artist of the Month” program.

Continuing through December 24 is another popup from East Colony Fine Art: at Salzburg Square on Route 101 in Amherst, NH, open Thursdays through Sundays, 11-5.

When Something Ends . . .

Posted by Aline on September 28, 2015

Something else comes along to fill the vacuum. Last week, I had to announce to all on my list of figure artists that I was ending the Monday Life Group, after more than five years I think. It does not work as a drop-in kind of thing unless a sufficient number of artists are willing to show up a few times a month. I needed five artists to break even at the other studio, three to break even at my home studio. When times were good, more than the minimum would show up, and I would have extra money to tide me over those weeks when not enough artists showed up; but when you get down to three, there’s just no slack to work with.

Being forced to paint every Monday from the live model was very good for me and for my progress as an artist; I feel lucky to have had that experience for so long. There is a silver lining though, in the opening up of a whole half day in my calendar. I’ll have more time to lead tours at the Currier, work on my blog and finally get to more floral paintings. Perhaps flowers will replace figures.

So here is the last of the MLG output: my granddaughter Natalie.

Natalie on arm of sofa

I booked her for only two weeks, and it just proves that two weeks is not quite enough to complete a portrait, no matter how loose the style. I would have like to do more work on the hair and skin tone, but I pressed to get a face in. It is a pretty nice likeness, right down to the pained expression. Her hip was hurting.

My other output last week was in Canterbury, the town center of Canterbury. I have many times painted in Canterbury Shaker Village, but never before in the town of Canterbury. We (plein air artists) were invited to paint during the Farmers Market and bring some works to sell, but Flo Parlangeli and I went out there in the morning, before the Market, so as to have something of the town to show, maybe sell. We were warmly welcomed by the people of Canterbury, especially the hospitable librarians. Chocolate cake with vanilla icing left over from a library anniversary party the night before! And bathrooms! The Market itself takes place in the Library parking lot. To paint our first painting, however, we set up outside the general store, called the Canterbury Country Store. I later learned that the Town owns that store, probably because it’s not really a going proposition. But it sells good ice cream! There was a constant stream of residents stopping in for one thing or another. That was when we noticed one coming out with the ice cream cone. We had to immediately take a break and try the ice cream. Also the storefront looks adorable:

Canterbury Country Store

Maybe I can count this as a floral painting.

We moved downhill to the Library and the Market mid-afternoon, where we were joined by Sharon Allen, Mary Crump and Ann Traynor Domingue. The Market was fun. School kids were given some kind of scavenger hunt which required them to ask an artist what “plein air” meant. That’s why we were invited!

I was at that point a little tired, and being pleased with what I had already painted in the morning, not in the mood to stretch myself. I looked for a convenient subject, one that allowed me to keep my easel shaded and the table with my paintings for sale nearby. By facing toward the sun, I can keep my painting shaded, and the painting itself keeps the palette in shade. The subject I found when I faced the sun was Sharon:

Sharon at Canterbury Market

I don’t know why she needed two things protecting her from the sun–her canopy chair was backed up by her ShadeBuddy–but my depiction is accurate (as always). Notice the plastic bag that she throws her oil-smeared paper towels in. She uses those blue shop towels, as do I, because they are much sturdier that ordinary kitchen paper towels, even Viva, and I wish I had got the blue towel more prominently present in the picture. Sharon has burned her name onto the back of her Guerrilla pochade box. See that orange straw coming out of the plastic cup? Sharon keeps Dunkin Donuts in business single-handedly. I believe, but am not positive, that Sharon was painting the musician who was playing his heart out just behind me. I could have done him instead, but it would have been complicated since I could not use my ShadeBuddy on the hard macadam surface where I was so comfortably chilling’ out. Yeah, I was just lazy.

The rest of my week was taken up with so much interference: meetings, exhibit chores (I was appointed chair of an exhibit in Concord — see below), physical therapy (I’m going to solve the new knee problem and maybe even the old lower back problem that keeps me from standing to paint). At my age, because of my age?, I am productive only half the time I am awake; the rest of the time I am chillin’ out. I like to think of chilling out as restorative, but worry that it’s not restoring anything useful.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

At the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Bernerhof Inn in Glen; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; and at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester. I have also had a painting at the Red River Theatre all month, which I had overlooked in previous posts, but it comes down at the end of the week. And for the month of October I have two paintings in the Womens Club of Concord, part of a three-part 20th anniversary exhibit by the Womens Caucus for Art. However, the hours during which the WCC is accessible to the public are unpredictable. You can visit the other two parts of the 20th Anniversary exhibits at the Kimball Jenkins carriage house and the Concord Chamber of Commerce.

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.

July in New England–outdoors in the heat of the sun

Posted by Aline on July 21, 2015

I feel a little as if I have been running around without purpose, just answering one call after another to paint outdoors. But now, looking over my output, I see there must have been other things absorbing my time and attention. Nevertheless, you are not likely to want to see the entire three weeks’ of artworks, and I am in the happy position of picking my favorites to talk about. I have painted in Manchester, Goffstown, Newport, Portsmouth, Rye, and Newington, all of New Hampshire, plus Gloucester, Massachusetts. Here are the best of the lot:

Uncanoonuc Garden

This location is on the side of a hill called Uncanoonuc. Actually, there are two hills by that name, next to each other, and even Wikipedia avers that they are “mountains” with impressive views of Manchester to the east, the Wapack range to the west, and on a good day, Boston to the south. From Manchester, the Uncanoonucs resemble the mounds of a woman’s breasts, and Uncanoonuc is a native American word meaning just that. One Uncanoonuc boasts a road upwards. Along the way is a retail plant nursery that has installed groupings of shrubs and flowers to show its customers how lovely is a good landscaping plan. The blue spruce caught my eye, in part because much earlier in my painting career, I had recreated another Little Blue Spruce.

Little Blue Spruce–Putney VT 2008

Well, I don’t think I can say my blue spruce technique has improved at all since 2008! The earlier blue spruce was growing at the studio of the “Putney Painters”, where I was taking a workshop with Albert Handell. Albert liked my spruce but thought I had crowded it too much with the other trees. I usually take the advice of masters to heart, but maybe 20 percent of the time, I stay true to my own original intent. I see his point, but I also admire the pluckiness of the baby spruce staking its own territorial claim under less than ideal circumstances. I’ll bet today it is crowding that building in the background.

In Newport, in the course of delivering and picking up a painting for the regional show at the Library Arts Center, I got myself invited to participate in the Garden Tour, as a painter. They had about ten different gardens open for tour, each with different attributes. I told them I cared only about the flowers, not interested in mountain vistas or water features, so they sent me to the site of an abandoned gravel pit. The homeowners have been reclaiming the land patch by patch. As each load of topsoil was dumped into a pile, stuff got planted . I chose to paint the pile devoted to the memory of a beloved dog who had passed the year before.

A Boy and His Dog . . .

The message set forth on the rustic sign reads “A boy and his dog are joined at the hip and heart forever.” So instead of flowers, I found myself focusing on hardscape elements of rocks and sculpture, so easily is the artist’s intention waylaid. When I had finished A Boy, I made another stab at featuring flowers. I went in search of a floral closeup.

Flower Box

I knew I was doomed to fail at the task of matching the glowing fuchsia reds of the petunias, but set out to try anyway. The next day, after the paint had set up a little, I was able to add cleaner, brighter color here and there so as to convey the sense of color, even if the exact color remained elusive. The straw strands in the basket came mostly out of my head, or rather, out of my memory of my favorite painting by Jamie Wyeth–Hay Bale.

Isn’t that the most lovingly portrayed hay bale ever? A living, almost breathing, hay bale. Don’t you feel like you could stab it with a pitchfork right on your computer screen? Just imagine how it looks in person, as I saw it on the wall of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts last year.

I have one more Exeter painting to show–it was painted “live” just before a lawn party at the Exeter Inn. I painted another during the lawn party, but I don’t love it so much.

Exeter Inn

I was pleased with the flowers in this painting, and I hoped my handling of flowers in the landscape might be improving.

Portsmouth and its environs saw a lot of me the past few weeks. And I saw just the tiniest fraction of paintable spots, so rich is Portsmouth in architecture and marine attractions. I accumulated three favorites:

Inlet, Boat ramp

Entering Prescott Park

The Zinnias are perhaps too carefully depicted. Reality is my downfall.

Wentworth by the Sea

The biggest challenge here was the shoreline–how to show the transparency of the water’s edge lapping on the rocky beach.

Again this year, David Curtis is giving his workshops on painting the figure in the landscape, in his garden. Our model was dressed as a bride:

Bridal Portrait

I’m growing weary of green! Note that the landscape portion of this figure in the landscape is not much more than fuzzy suggestions of landscape. I felt it had to be thus.

But not all work was done outdoors. Our Monday life group met twice:

Natalie 2

Sheridan

All in all, the lesson I have taken away from these three weeks of fairly intense painting is renewed awareness that I still suffer from a deficiency that has plagued me all along. I’m not “loose” (messy) enough. Is it that I’m so fast a painter that I end up wasting my time on “cleaning” and straightening and perfecting? For example, the windows behind the window box were never “finished” because, thank the lord, I realized I could not improve on their rough state. But examples of overpainting are too abundant. When will I ever learn?

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

with the East Colony artists for the rest of July at 163 (167) Water Street, Exeter, NH; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Bernerhof Inn in Glen; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the Firefly American Bistro on 22 Concord Street, Manchester (reception August 3); and at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester. Also, on July 23, from 5 to 8 p.m., the doors to all art galleries in Manchester are open and served by a old-time trolley. I am participating as a member of the Manchester Artists Association in a one-day exhibit at the Rines Center, on the Trolley route. It’s all free! See the Open Doors Trolley Night website for more information and a list of venues that have a show going on that night.

Ah, Youth!

Posted by Aline on June 11, 2015

There must be a trick to it, one as yet still being kept secret from me: How to portray youthfulness? I have hear it posited that the facial features of children fit into a smaller area of the head. As we age, the features enlarge and spread out. But what about a teenager? When do their features settle down in the spots preordained for their adult selves? Why is it so hard to portray rosy young woman without making her look like a made-up hussy? I guess it’s really the same old issue, that of getting a likeness, just with the added complexity of pinpointing an age range.

Monday’s model was my nineteen-year-old granddaughter. This is how the camera renders her.

Natalie in pose

For most of Natalie’s life, and certainly all of my [ten-year-old] life as an artist, I have been trying to capture her on paper. Every time I try, I fail. She always comes out looking older, more sophisticated than her much-older sister. Monday was my first opportunity to paint her from life and I sure hoped that would make a difference. One issue seemed to be the length of her nose (as I was presenting it), so I shortened it by bringing down the level of her eyes. That did help. Note that this adjustment is consistent with the theory that children’s features are closer together.

As I griped throughout the session, Laura opined that youthful features are best barely suggested as opposed to carefully implanted. It certainly did work for her painting. And now, in hindsight, I can think of some great paintings of children where that is certainly true–e.g., virtually all of Sargent’s paintings of children. Sigh. Sometimes it is harder to do less. No, it is always harder to do less!

Towards the end of our session, she asked me for a photo of her posing next to my painting, for her to send to her social networking sites:

Natalie as model

And here is the final. I would not dare to try to correct anything at this point, so glad I am to have got this close to the goal.

Study for Portrait of Natalie

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

with the East Colony artists for the rest of June at 163 (167) 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 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.

Encore Performance

Posted by Aline on February 24, 2015

Another no-show model, after what seems like an eternity without Monday Life Group, so once more into the breach I sprang. This is great for everyone except me; last time was very popular with readers of the blog; the artists mostly love me as a model for some inarticulable reasons.

The artists were only four in number this week, but such interesting works!

Fletch Goes Big

Fletch’s forte is the small pencil drawing. Here he not only deploys oil paint, he does it on a fair-sized canvas! You need to know that Fletch is bored by clothing and would not have come had he known we would not have the usual nude model. Plus he volunteered to do the modeling and let me use his equipment (I knew ahead of time that the model wouldn’t be coming so I left my gear at home), but I felt responsible for the glitch and was determined to take my medicine. I guess my point is, he was probably unhappy with with the situation yet he captured my gesture so well!

Jan Fills the Canvas

I do have a big head, but not sure if it is this big! But I love her confident brush strokes. Was it mean of me to make sure there would be a hand for the artists to cope with? I think Jan did a great job with the shadows, and making that dent in my cheek where I rest it on those fingers!

Nancy C Tiptoes into Color

Only recently has Nancy C started to bring her paints on Monday morning, in lieu of her charcoals. Her same blocky approach, emphasizing the shapes and values, is working particularly well in this painting. Isn’t the hair wonderful?

Portrait in Pastel by Nancy H

If I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be this one–because it looks so much like me! The right eye and the hand are so beautifully suggested.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

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

Marathon Report

Posted by Aline on January 21, 2015

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

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

The afternoon went better for me:

Afternoon Pose from the Marathon

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

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

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

Portrait by M. Siner

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

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

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

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

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

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

Fun and Struggles; Struggles are Fun?

Posted by Aline on January 16, 2015

Here is this week’s output of my Monday morning life group:

Paint, not charcoal

Strong shapes have always been Nancy C’s forte, conveyed in charcoal. The big news here is that Nancy brought her oil paints for the first time, starting out by doing a grisaille painting of the model, just as Jan did when she first started with us. (“Grisaille” means painted in monocolor, usually black but it can be any color.)

Jan's version

Well, Jan is certainly into color now! Bold, vibrant colors, strong shapes and brush strokes. . . . Interesting foot. (More on that below.)

Waiting Nymph

Nymph is mine. I had in mind “sleeping nymph” when we were setting up the pose, but she is clearly not asleep. The body part that I had the most difficulty with was her left arm. Getting the width of it just right doesn’t sound like rocket science, but for some reason, my brain does not always perform correctly. It’s important not to give up when that happens. Because I spent so much time fussing with the drawing of the shape, the painting of the shape fell a little short. But I still rate the painting as successful. Perfection cannot be the goal when you only have three hours minus breaks to complete a figurative painting from life.

Nancy and Jan were having a lot of difficulty getting the figure’s right foot looking like a foot, because it was so foreshortened from their angle that on the canvas it was coming out looking like a club foot. So we photographed it, and they are supposed to be working hard at home to render a believable foreshortened foot. Here’s the photo they are working from:

Pesky foot

I’m not sure, but I believe if you can get the toes to read like toes, the rest of the foot will become viable. I can’t wait to see if Nancy and Jan succeed, and they better bring in the paintings this Monday to show us!

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

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

Beginning Anew

Posted by Aline on January 8, 2015

First of all, it’s hard to get started. I’ve been dragging my feet for over a week, avoiding my first post of the new year. Second, it’s hard to be original. New Year’s Resolutions for artists come in two packages: Plan A: Get Better. Plan B: Get Better Known. The “How” of each? That’s what used to be known, before inflation, as the $64 question.

How to get better for painters: paint more? paint different? read more books? take more classes and workshops?

How to get better known (“do better marketing”): write a blog? send out a newsletter? join a gallery?

These two big objectives are basically incompatible unless you hire someone else to do the marketing for you. A spouse comes in handy! For a colleague’s summary of possible resolutions for an artist’s new year, s ee the blog of Sharon Allen. Now I don’t have to think about it anymore! Instead, I will press the Restart button next month when I have a convenient birthday. The older, slower, and lazier I get, the harder I must work just to keep up.

This week, I photographed all the works from our Monday life drawing/painting session; everyone seems to enjoy that. Our model this week was actually one of my patrons, one who buys my nude paintings, prints and drawingsof other people, and wanted one of herself. She had had a double mastectomy and wanted to record that achievement. She was a great model, and is pleased with the painting that I did of her, so “Mission Accomplished!” The following photos were taken with my iPhone, so the quality of reproduction might not be up to what we are used to from my Nikon D70. (I sure hope so!) After this array, I am including some stragglers, which should have been included in previous blogs but weren’t.

The Charcoalist

The Pastellist

The other oil painter

My painting

We all agreed on the color of her hair. Only mine has the egregious shine. The shine may be caused or aggravated by a mixture that I use as my medium, which includes Liquin. Oil paints lose their natural glossiness when they dry, but the Liquid helps to reduce that effect, but it also makes the paint when wet super glossy.

The stragglers are three from a week when I never got around to posting at all, or I posted on other subjects.

Bursting with Life

Isn’t she glorious? I see at least flaw that I want to correct–wrist of her right hand looks suddenly too narrow because of a stray blob of dark paint. Gwen has been extremely popular with the artists, but alas, we will not be seeing her for a while, at least for the duration of her pregnancy.

For the Monday between Christmas and the New Year, we painted Aubrey again, also a very popular model who happens to be an artist herself. I did not photograph the artworks that day, but our Pastellist (Nancy Healy) was good enough to bring her drawing back this week to show off how great it was, so I got the photo then, again with my iPhone. Nancy had taken a photo of Aubrey and worked on the facial features at home in order to get them just right.

My own painting was this head and shoulders version:

2015-01-02 15.47.54

I perhaps got too fascinated by the turquoise pendant. But isn’t it interesting how similar the two faces are. Almost as if we were both on the same painting spot. We were pretty close. I was lower down since I sit to paint, and Nancy stands.

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 New London Inn in New London; at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester; at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center in Manchester (but access is limited to patients and health care workers). Very, very soon, the Love, Lust and Desire show at the McGowan Gallery in Concord is coming! January 29 is the reception.

You may also 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.

Follow Up

Posted by Aline on December 22, 2014

As a result of my previous blog featuring myself as a model, which everyone seemed to enjoy more than my paintings of other people, I have resolved to try to show more artwork that is not my own, and to do a fresh self-portrait, if only to assure myself that my skills have improved in the last three years. So this week, I present such a self-portrait, and even more exciting . . . well, truly exciting . . . a video of another artist’s painting of our Monday morning model. You will see what I painted that day plus what is in effect a demo of what Tony Luongo did that same day.

Starting with the self-portrait, I have to say I am a little surprised that it looks so similar to my 2011 pencil portrait. That is to say, I haven’t aged a bit in three years.

Self Portrait 2014

I hope you agree I did a better job on the nose this time. Comparing a pencil portrait to an oil painted portrait may be unfair to the pencil, so for purposes of evaluating my skills, I will show you another selfie painted in an early portrait class (2008) that I took with Adeline Goldminc-Tronzo. Bear in mind that the earlier portrait was developed over several sessions and helped by the observations of the teacher. It was the best thing I did in that class.

Self-portrait_1

Same hair, same eyes, but younger lips and less saggy around the jaw. Oops, there I go again, concentrating on the wrong thing! Six years of practice have gone into a more courageous handling of the paint and a more accurate portrait (I think). And I did the new one in only a few hours. Credit is owed, however, to my colleague Dee Lessard, with whom I was painting that day, for her observations.

For our Monday painting last week, Aubrey was our model again. This is what I produced:

Tony set up his easel on Aubrey’s other side. I worried that he was not getting a good angle or enough light, but as you will see, he didn’t seem much bothered by such details. I never noticed that he had set up his smart phone on some kind of rack and set it to record his every move. After he got home, he sped up the action so that the final video takes only ten minutes or so. http://www.youtube.com/user/luongoart

In an interesting coincidence, it turns out that Tony also modeled for Cameron Bennett’s master’s thesis painting. Tony shared with me a photo of that painting in progress, and I wish I could share it with you, but since it was a work in progress at that time, I would need the artist’s permission first. The painting was a crowd scene, with me and other volunteers playing our roles as members of an audience to two mysterious floating figures furnished by paid models. Either the models or Cameron are magicians.

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 New London Inn in New London; at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester; at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center in Manchester (but access is limited to patients and health care workers). And for the month of December, at the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester NH.

My Life as a Model

Posted by Aline on December 12, 2014

I was forced (gently) to pose for my Monday life group because our scheduled model just did not show up. That happens rarely, but often enough so that we know how to cope. The organizer, unless someone else volunteers, has to step up and be the model. Not necessarily nude. It was too cold Monday in the studio for a nude model anyway. Having nothing much else to think about while I was posing, I plotted to snap photos of everyone’s interpretation of me and use them for my blog post. And Monday was not my first rodeo, so I decided to incorporate all of my experiences as a model. It’s a theme.

Back in 2011 when the model was late to Peter Clive’s class on drawing with color, I sat for maybe 20 minutes while Peter did a demo. Peter gave me the sketch:

Peter has a new website here.

Then a few years later, Cameron Bennett asked me to pose for a project that constituted his Master’s thesis in the MFA program at Lesley University. (He got his BFA from Massachusetts College of Art. The many art colleges in Boston confuse me–are there some with alternate identities?) I knew I could do it since (they said) I had sat so very still for Peter. The duration of Cameron’s pose might have been as much as two hours. After many months –while Cameron worked on the very large painting that utilized, as one smallish element, his charcoal drawing of me–I received my “payment”–the charcoal sketch itself. Alas, his large painting cannot be found on his website here. I think he liked the charcoal study better than the finished product; he seemed reluctant to hand it over to me. It is pretty awesome. Note the length of the nose–it’s right on! (This becomes relevant later on.)

IMG_0029_2

Finally, what you have been waiting for: the six pieces created/inspired by my recent gig–a full three hours. Well, actually 2 and 3/4 hours since we spent 15 minutes waiting for the scheduled model.

Those who voiced any opinion at all thought I did good, especially praising my choice of colors when I got dressed that morning (lime green and cobalt blue). Even one who does not draw or paint in color appreciated the color scheme.

Pencil

Watercolor

Charcoal

Oil

Pastel

Charcoal

I didn’t attach names, only media, because at least one did not want to be identified with her product. Contributors are: Barbara, Nancy C, Jan, Cavaleen, Laura, Nancy H. Somehow Louise got away before I could get a photo of her piece.

And just for good measure, here is my most recent self-portrait:

Not very recent though–2011 is the date on the photo. I was still doing long noses then. Otherwise, I daresay it looks mostly like me, staring in a mirror with unprecedented concentration. Note the same earring shows up in Peter’s sketch. Those were my 2011 earrings. I have moved on, albeit reluctantly.

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 Bernerhof Inn in Glen; at the New London Inn in New London; at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester; at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center in Manchester (but access is limited to patients and health care workers). And for the month of December, at the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester NH.

Celebrating Humanity?

Posted by Aline on December 5, 2014

In the context of the highly publicized current national and international events, humanity may not deserve a ticker-tape parade. On the macro level, humanity has little to brag about. But in the micro scale, the artist’s scale, things of beauty can still be found. Three different nuggets have tumbled together in my brain to form this topic.

Nugget No. 1: Have you ever stopped to consider what goes into the creation of a magnificent work of music? I was listening to the broadcast of a Beethoven symphony last week when the enormity of the achievement struck me: first, humans had to invent and perfect and pass down instruments; then an individual human had to come up with an arrangement of notes to be played on the instruments all together, only to be achieved after many years of practicing and learning and experimenting; then humans had to learn how to play the instruments and then how to play the notes as arranged by the composer, which required many years of practicing and learning and experimenting; then it all had to be pulled together so that the individual musicians played a complex composition as if they were a single organism. To bring the glorious sound to me, there’s the recording technology, the broadcasting technology . . . . My mind boggled. One symphony is an enormous human achievement–but an achievement by individuals working alone and together, all of the pieces contributing to the magnificent end.

Nugget No. 2: For marketing purposes, I have lately been mulling over and over a catch phrase to use to describe my own artistic output. Seeker of beauty? Finder of beauty? I was looking for some way to express the idea that I paint stuff that exemplifies beauty of everyday life, perhaps small stuff that ordinarily gets overlooked. No messages, no “concept” other than beauty. Sure, I’m an environmentalist, a landscape painter, convinced that we are hurtling toward our own doom by destroying our atmosphere, but I have no urge to paint, say, an oil refinery as a villain. If I were to paint an oil refinery, it would be to discover the beauty of the shapes, lines, and values to be found there. I went back to the mission statement offered to me by Cameron Bennett where he used the phrase “preserving humanity”. I think he means preserving a record of humanity, since I do not know of a way for art to actually keep us safe. Is there a dark thought inherent in the idea that such record might one day be needed? No, I rejected such a gloomy interpretation. Perhaps the combination of “preserving humanity” and “discovering/revealing beauty” could be expressed as “celebrating humanity”?

Nugget No. 3: last night I attended the reception for a show of works by Peter Granucci. The show is called “Memorial to Lost Species”.

Peter Granucci, Alone in Grief

The drama and anguish exhibited in the above image is repeated in perhaps 20 paintings, all with a human figure and many with the skull of a nonhuman creature. Peter created frames for each piece, which extend the grittiness and turbulence of the backgrounds of the paintings. The captions on the paintings are pointed references to the losses of species, and the grief we, mankind, ought to be experiencing as a result– humanity grieving for the species destroyed, grieving for the world lost, grieving, ultimately, for its own viability. Peter certainly had a message, and he wasn’t satisfied with just one painting to convey that message. Before inspiration took him into this deep dark place, four years ago, he was like me, painting beauty. He celebrated the beauty of the female form. His drawings of the female form are simply exquisite. But when an emotion overtakes an artist, the output has to reflect it. Think Picasso’s “Guernica”. Now think Granucci’s “Memorial”. The show will be up for the rest of December at the Art Gallery in New England College, Henniker, New Hampshire.

So I am a little shaken by Peter’s message. And the events on the news. How can I thank about “celebrating” humanity when humanity does so much that is wrong?

Nevertheless, I share with you the last two weeks’ of Monday life painting:

Better than Climbing Trees

The title is a reference to the fact that, after modeling for us in the morning, Robbie was off to climb trees in the process of cutting them down. That was the Monday before Thanksgiving, and that Wednesday we got hit with lots of wet, heavy snow that felled a lot trees over power lines–my family went without a Thanksgiving dinner this year. Just thinking, a little adumbration perhaps?

A Lovely Nude

We think this new model might be the answer to Rebecca’s “retirement” (have you missed Becky?). Interesting how she and Robbie are in almost identical poses, leaning against the wall.

If you remember my very large painting of a cat awakening from a nap (“Nap, Interrupted”) that I started last summer but shied away from finishing because I was afraid of the whiskers . . .

Nap, Interrupted

here she is with whiskers. I had to finish her because I promised her to the Currier Museum for the month of December. Here is how she looks on the wall of the Museum’s Community Gallery, on the lower level where the classrooms and auditorium are:

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 Bernerhof Inn in Glen; at the New London Inn in New London; at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester; at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center in Manchester (but access is limited to patients and health care workers). And at the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester NH.

New Muse

Posted by Aline on November 22, 2014

In Saturday Life Group this morning, we had a new model. Her name is Gwen. About halfway through the morning, I realized why she seemed so familiar to me: She had modeled for the figure painting class I took with Sean Beavers last June. You can see the results of that class here. I had recruited her for my Monday group, but, after collecting all her contact information, I forgot her name. What good is contact information if you can’t remember the name of the person you want to contact?

Anyway, everyone there this morning was just thrilled with her. “So graceful” was how Nancy put it. “Beautiful . . . everything about her is beautiful”, observed Steve, “even her pregnancy,” Gwen’s baby is due in February, so she is not all that large with child yet, but we will see her again in January, I hope.

For my part, I haven’t had this good an SLG session for months. I usually don’t bother looking at my sketch pad after I get home. Today I not only looked, I “fixed” (sprayed with fixative to prevent smearing of charcoal dust) them and removed a few from my pad in order to prep them for framing! Here they are, in order of importance, low to high:

Gwen in Five Minutes

Gwen in Ten Minutes

Gwen in Twenty Minutes

Gwen in Forty Minutes

The Ultimate Gwen (50 minutes)

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

Three Pies on One Finger

Posted by Aline on November 11, 2014

The three pies are: Landscape en plein air; animal portraiture from photo; and human portraiture from life. I am happy with all three.

First, the landscape happened when I went down to Boston to collect the painting that was on exhibit at the Arboretum. A week ago, Thursday, October 30, was a beautiful day–yet another beautiful autumn day in New England–if this is climate change, it’s hard to root against it! Not willing to devote the trip solely for pickup, I brought my painting gear. The Arboretum allows me, because I hold a handicapped designation (walking disability–I can walk, but not real far, and even less far with my painting gear on my back), to drive into the garden and park wherever I need to for the sake of art. The top of Bussey Hill would have been inaccessible to me if I had to rely on my legs to get me there.

On Bussey Hill (in the Boston Arboretum)

From Bussey Hill, the highest point in the Arboretum, you can see the skyline of Boston, and that view was my original target. But when I got up there, the skyline view was mostly obscured with trees still hanging onto leaves, so I found a better one. The distant blue mound is probably Blue Hills, to the west of Boston. Painting foliage in this way is what I consider to be my forte. So far, the world has not beaten a path to my doorway in response, so maybe I need to find a new forte.

For portraiture, I have two examples since I have had two meetings of the Monday Life Group after my last posting. The model who posed pregnant and nude for us a few months ago has delivered of her baby, a little fellow named Montain. That’s a heavy name for such a small scrap of humanity, so I think of him as Monty. At only a few weeks old, he participated in his mom’s modeling gig. He was very well-behaved, but he did squirm. It was an extreme test of the artists’ ability to memorize gestures and get them down so as to create a recognizable babe in arms, not just a blob in swaddling clothes.

Introducing Monty

He lost a sock at one point, which delighted me. He actually sucked on a pacifier most of the time, but I managed to suggest a face without pacifier. Perhaps I should have gone with the pacifier? Inasmuch as it felt a little bizarre to have mom nude while the babe was fully clothed, we asked her to return next week prepared to pose for us clothed. The next image is the result:

Take Two: Mother and Son

Monty’s head is a bit misshapen, so this one must be taken as a work in progress. Funny how I never noticed that strange shape until I saw this image.

Finally, something different. I love cats. I own two female cats, and I live with another two male cats, which one of my granddaughters left behind when she moved out. The boys are quite young. Lively. Pushy. I have resorted to keeping them separated from the girls, who are exceptionally intimidated by them. The boys leave no stone unturned in their effort to make sense of the world around them. Causing stuff to fall to floor is one of their favorite experiments. But they have stolen my heart.

Partners in Crime (WIP) 16×12

Blue, the one on top, is just turning one year old this month. Milo is probably one and a half. Milo is more respectful of my space. Blue respects no one’s space, but he does not aggravate the girls as much as Milo does. Blue will leap on me without warning and just cling onto me until I cradle him. Bad habit acquired when he was more of a kitten.

I only have a little bit of work left to complete this painting, after which I will have giclees made of it since I have heard that animals sell. Whether the granddaughter gets the original or a giclee for Christmas remains to be decided.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

Dazed and confused

Posted by Aline on November 1, 2014

I’m finding it harder and harder to keep all my balls in the air. The blog ball is usually the first to hit the floor. As my years pile up, I seem to slow down. All too often, I tell myself, “You deserve a break.” “Deserve” maybe, but “can afford”, not so much. Could the train of artistic success be slowing down to the point where it may become sidelined altogether? (I can’t resist mixing up a few metaphors. Trains, jugglers, they seem to go together OK, as in a circus somehow.)

Maybe it’s time to focus on the good stuff that has happened. Thinking . . . Well, I got into a regional juried exhibit at the Center for the Arts (CFA) in New London. To be more accurate, one of my paintings got into the exhibit (as an exhibitionist, I was always a nonstarter). The chosen painting is “Enchanted”, a 4-foot tall gallery-wrap. [You can see it on my page titled “Studio Landscapes.] I painted Enchanted quite a while ago, and it has hung at Hatfields, and at Kimball Jenkins, then briefly at East Colony, where I noticed how warped it had become. I knew I had to do something to correct that issue before taking it up to New London, so I decided to mount it on a larger, stiff board, like plywood. But plywood that large would be quite heavy. So I am using instead a large piece of foam insulation board, which I painted dark brown.

Enchanted, on foam board

The board, for all its stiffness and success in correcting the warp, is kind of a fragile surface. That’s worrisome, and I am now debating whether to glue on some thin slats as to mimic a frame, which would protect the edges. Such a project it has become!

frame added

The reception for the CFA exhibit is this coming Friday, November 7, 5-7 p.m. at the New London Inn, 353 Main Street, New London, NH. Unfortunately, there’s little chance I will get there. That Friday is one of my Boston Symphony Orchestra Fridays, and we rarely get back to Manchester before six p.m., and New London is another 45 minutes North. But if you are in the vicinity of New London next Friday night, do check it out and let me know what I missed.

Another upcoming date to be hyper-aware of: Saturday and Sunday, November 8 and 9, are NH Open Doors. My personal studio is not participating, but I will be at East Colony Fine Art Gallery on Sunday, demonstrating my painting. The hours for East Colony are 10 to 4, both Saturday and Sunday. The address is 55 South Commercial Street, Manchester NH.

I have two new figure studies to show you. One is Margaret, clothed in a striped shirt. The second is Nancy, clothed in a different striped shirt. Nancy is one of us artists, but graciously filled in when our scheduled model couldn’t get there on Monday. Nancy usually sets up the pose and lighting for us, so when it came to setting up herself and lighting herself, she was handicapped by not being able to judge how it looked. Looked pretty good, I guess. I’m happy with my result. I do love stripes! Why to people assume I’m being sarcastic when I say that?)

Margaret Sept 2014 16×12

Nancy as Substitute Model

Although it looks as if I had more time with Nancy, and therefore she must be on a smaller canvas, both paintings are on 12×16 panels. I was forced to paint in a background around Nancy because I was painting over an earlier painting, and I hadn’t covered it up with a neutral ground the way I had done for the Margaret panel. When forced, I can stretch.

But the Margaret was a struggle, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to show it on the blog. It does look better “in person”. (Note to self, must come up with better term to express personhood of a painting.) But today I couldn’t resist juxtaposing the two poses and their stripes.

Here is a Mark Your Calendar alert: The NH Institute of Art is holding “Art and Soul“, its 4th Annual Auction in Portsmouth this year. Thursday, November 13, 6-8:30, at Discover Portsmouth, 10 Middle Street, Portsmouth, NH. I have donated my Lotus Studies to the cause (see it on Studio Landscapes page), and the family of my recently deceased friend and law partner, Hilda Fleisher, has donated something from her large collection of contemporary NH art. I can’t wait to see what it is, out of all the pieces with which I became familiar during her life. This event is always fun, with great music and food, and artwork. Tickets cost $45–worth it!–and all proceeds go to fund student scholarships.

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). Two Lowell Cemetery paintings are on view at the Arts League of Lowell, 307 Market Street, Lowell, Massachusetts. In a few days, Enchanted can be see at the New London Inn (address above). 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.

Aftermath. What is the value of a painting that you love?

Posted by Aline on September 23, 2014

So, last Saturday was Art in the Park, which I was anticipating in my previous post. The weather “cooperated” beautifully. I chose this unfinished oil painting on paper (9×12) to offer for my (free) raffle.

Grey-eyed cat (wip)

You might remember Grey-eyed cat as one I painted during the Art in Action event last April. The raffle rules were, to be eligible to enter, you had to answer this question, “What medium did I say in my blog I tried last week for the first time?” The answer was on my website, so anybody could look it up on their smart phone. A few did. A few guessed (wrong). A few didn’t bother with that detail. One little girl was so determined to win the painting that she got her mom to take her home to look it up on their computer. I’m happy to report that her extra effort was rewarded! Congrats to Rebecca; I know my Grey-eyed Cat will have a loving forever home.

My tent was situated across the path from the Entertainment: three musicians playing folk songs together and performing solo. I had brought my plein air painting gear, so I set up and painted a scene of the musicians. Mind you, the only one who stayed in one position for any length of time was the middle one, Michelle. It was a test of my memory and experience.

The AITP Musicians

The aftermath of this painting was a little weird. The next day, or maybe it was later Saturday night, Michelle posted on Facebook that she wanted to buy the painting and asked the price. I replied, on Facebook, that I wanted her to have it, but we should discuss it privately, via email. Unbeknownst to me, she jumped to the conclusion that I was going to give her the painting and spread that all over Facebook. Meanwhile I tried to find out what she would be comfortable paying, and I thought we had reached a resolution (half the usual price, payable over five months), but she later backed out, saying she couldn’t afford it. No counter, no hint as to what she could afford, so I guess her original offer to buy was impulsive. It just makes me sad –after being so happy. I don’t mind giving a painting away to a friend who appreciates it, but I feel that a stranger who is not willing to put up some bucks does not really value it.

What is the value of a painting anyway? To the artist, a painting’s value has little to do with “market” value. [I’m not talking about “investment” grade paintings here–a subject absurdly foreign to the experience of most living artists.] The paltry few hundreds of dollars on a painting’s price tag doesn’t go far toward covering an artist’s costs when you take into account the years of learning and practicing. A painting is created with joy, and you could say once created, it has no further value to the artist. It becomes the remembrance of joy. Sure, it could be exhibited, perhaps win an award, enhancing the artist’s reputation, etc. None of this has anything to do with a “market” value for a painting.

I had a similar inquiry recently from the exhibit of my paintings at the Cancer Center–a patient would have bought a particular painting if the price I quoted was within his/her expectations. I guess it wasn’t, even though I knocked a hundred off the usual price. I can imagine the patient’s disappointment to learn that the painting was not “affordable”. But why not? Why not negotiate with the artist, try an installment plan? What is it about paintings that they are so little valued, even when loved passionately?

Before I started making my own paintings, I bought other people’s paintings. I remember how hard it was, especially in the beginning, to screw up the courage to spend hundreds of dollars on a painting that I fell in love with. When you consider how much can be spent on a restaurant dinner these days, isn’t it ridiculous to expect a painting, which lasts forever, to be cheaper than a gourmet meal for two couples? I never regretted what I paid for paintings, or for the cost of framing them (usually more than the painting!). But that is hindsight. How to convey this perspective of value to someone who has never before thought about paying for a painting? I have no clue.

To offset that glum discussion, I want you to see two paintings from the Monday group, last week and this week. Last week, we asked my daughter to pose clothed in Dee’s garden, and we enjoyed the experience of working from the clothed model so much that we had Robbie keep his clothes on yesterday:

Poolside

Sneaker

This weekend I am off to Vermont for a weekend of plein air painting in the Upper Valley, with Sharon Allen and others. The result should be a bunch of new paintings to love. And value, perhaps.

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!

Art in the Park

Posted by Aline on September 17, 2014

Before I get caught up in narratives of what I’ve been doing in the recent past, allow me to tout the upcoming event, “Art in the Park”, this Saturday, September 20, at Veterans Park in Manchester NH (rain date is the next day, Sunday, September 21). This is an annual art show from the artists of the Manchester Artists Association. We put up tents; we put up racks; we cover said racks with artworks. We wait. . . for people to come by and ooh and aah and maybe buy a piece or two. Many cards and prints will also be on sale. I am sharing my tent and racks this event with Linda Feinberg, who writes poetry to go along with her cards and other artworks. This year The MAA is also sponsoring a children’s art show in conjunction with our own, in order to support the value of art making in the schools and to encourage potential artists to carry on. If at all possible for you to visit us at this event, I beg you to do so. It’s important for not just me, but for all the constituencies involved–artists in Manchester, artists in New Hampshire, school children, and the general public– who need more art in their lives! To encourage high attendance, I am going to give away a piece of art–probably a drawing–via something like a raffle (not really a raffle because no payment will be required). To qualify for the gift, you might have to answer a question about the artwork I am about to post in this blog. So pay attention now!

Mostly what I have been doing this past week is tweaking the paintings of the past month, hopefully for the good, but I have also been drawing at my life groups. The Monday life group has a new model, Robbie, whose face I found to be more interesting than his body, and I tried out a new medium: pastel pencils.

New model, Robbie

Robbie, 2

Our Saturday group got together for our first meeting of the Fall, for our standard short poses followed by a few longer poses (but not long poses by the standards of Monday’s group). I used charcoal.

5-minute pose

10-minute pose

20-minute pose

40-minute pose (my favorite)

40-minute pose (wish the edges were more interesting)

Finally, here is your first view of “Nap, Interrupted”. I started it a month ago, then had to leave it alone while I pursued my landscape paintings. Yesterday I tweaked it a little, but not so much as to make it worth another round of photos.

Nap, Interrupted (WIP)

This painting of my smallest cat, Grace, who, by the way, has an earlier post entirely devoted to her (see it here), was prompted by (1) the sale of my other gigantic cat painting called “Fur” (hmmm, I thought, cats sell!), (2) a great photo of Grace I had been saving to paint, and (3) a 2 by 4 foot canvas (dimensions that match the photo) just lying around. Also in my mind was something Paul Ingbretson said, to the effect that you should paint every painting with the hope that your painting will be the one to first draw the eye of anyone who enters in an exhibit space. I am certainly doing the hoping here. Whether the hope is ever realized . . . , well we can only hope.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

Continuing the Garden Binge

Posted by Aline on August 28, 2014

Encouraged by the success of the red parasol painting, I returned to the David Curtis garden in Gloucester two more times. I have provisionally titled these two by the most prominent prop–a reflecting ball and a black kimono, respectively.

The reflecting ball was, to me, an annoyance, but I had to deal with it.

The Reflecting Ball

David advised us to paint portraits rather than a figure in the landscape, but as you can see, I ignored his advice. Two weeks prior, I had already committed to painting that tree in the background. Plus, the less real estate I needed for the reflecting ball, the better. David praised (I think it was intended as praise) it as telling a story. Why does mine tells a story and the others not? A women in gypsy outfit gazing at a reflecting ball? Must be a story in that, right? The answer lies in the fact that I painted a figure in the landscape, not a portrait. To tell a story, you have to back off a bit, gain some perspective.

Last Sunday we gathered around our model decked out in a black kimono and holding a fan.

The Black Kimono

This one I enjoyed a lot, almost as much as the red parasol. It was allegedly the easiest of the Curtis Garden Series. Certainly it presented nothing as complicated as that red parasol and cupid statuette; the fan? –not even close. Then why, when I could complete the Red Parasol with 15 minutes to spare, am I dissatisfied with Black Kimono? Something about her right arm doesn’t look correct.

Yes, our model actually held that fan up for twenty minutes at a time (she braced the elbow against her side), but her feet would fall asleep. Whenever the timer signaled her break, she would forget that fact about the feet, try to take a step, and collapse in the grass. Gracefully.

We all enjoyed ourselves very, very much–including David, I guess — he invited us back next Sunday. Since Bea is going out of town for Labor Day weekend, I shall have to drive down alone.

The Ultimate Opportunity in figure painting occurred on Monday, when our life group left the studio to meet with our model in the Lessard garden.

The White Floppy Hat

We will meet again next week to work on the same pose. I could almost call the painting finished, but it would be a pretty rough finish. I think I can do better: The head is slightly too large. Some of the spots of light on her could be more delicious–meaning more contrast between light and shadow on her.

All three of these garden paintings demonstrate the benefit of using a dark (mostly burnt umber) ground. I’ve been using previously painted-on panels, having sanded them down first. The ground helps to hide the remnants of the original painting, which might otherwise be distracting. The darkest ground provides the best cover, but my real reason for choosing a dark ground is the lovely foliage depth that occurs so effortlessly. I can leave the ground showing behind her in the whole upper right section.

All that help, still not “finished”. What magic took over when I painted Red Parasol? And how do I get that magic back???

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; a single painting is on view for one more week at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester; at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center in Manchester; 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!

New (to me) Teacher: David Curtis

Posted by Aline on August 4, 2014

Yesterday Bea Bearden and I drove down to Gloucester, Massachusetts, to attend a plein-air-with-figure workshop in a garden attached to the home of David Curtis. Although David, as we are encouraged to call him, is an anointed master painter (member of the Boston Guild of Artists), I had not been acquainted with him, his work, or his teaching before Friday, when I got the call from Bea and signed up for the workshop. I feel extremely lucky to have got the opportunity. For the past few years, I have not been signing up for plein air workshops (unless they involved the figure somehow). I’ve taken so many plein air workshops in my short career as an artist, and done so many plein air paintings, that I had begun to feel I could not learn anything new. (“Know it all” syndrome.) Besides, it is the figure that I wanted to concentrate on now, so that’s where my workshop budget went. However, in one casual Sunday afternoon (three hours) David Curtis conferred upon me new insights into plein air painting. The kind of insights where you might say, oh, yeah, why didn’t I see that before! Maybe you did see it, but I hadn’t, not consciously at least.

Here are my two favorite insights:

First: On an overcast day (that’s what we had yesterday), the light comes from overhead, not at any angle. Hence the tops of flowers, e.g., are catching the most light. Duh! you say? I know. Obvious when you think about it. But I had never thought about it before.
Second: Did you notice, in the Sargent exhibit at the Boston MFA a few months ago, that there were very few skies showing? The absence of sky, usually the lightest element in a landscape painting, allows there to exist in the painting a different lightest object–one not at the top of the painting, which is, after all, a damn awkward place to suffer a focal point (unless you are focussing on clouds). From this opportunity to create a lightest spot elsewhere on the canvas comes the power to be unusual, to be dramatic, to capture the viewer. We all want to capture the viewer, and hang onto her. Now we have a new tool–eliminate the sky as an element of the scene.

We were a group of nine students in Gloucester, all quite accomplished painters. On the way home, Bea and I congratulated ourselves on the fact that we held our own in this company. We will join them again for two more Sundays later in August, and I am so looking forward to it!

Due to the speed with which I work, my painting was completed within the three hours of the workshop. Even better, it is one with which I am very happy. The flowers gave me the opportunity to paint just the kind of landscape that I like best, and the lovely model with her coral dress and orange-red parasol were a feast for the eyes. Thank God I brought my cadmium orange and cad red light. And my perylene red and quinacridone magenta. All were needed for the many reds and pinks in this painting.

Did you speak?

I made sure that my angle on the stone cupid showed off his best side too. Can you tell that the flowers inside the ring of granite stones are impatiens? The dabbing technique to simulate flowers and leaves is something I adopted back when I was first studying landscapes with Stan Mueller, and he encouraged it. It’s not something I can always work into landscapes vistas, and maybe that’s why I prefer not to do vistas. I began this painting with a burnt umber ground, applied to cover up the Campobello Island seascape underneath. (I’m getting more and more ruthless in my painting demolitions.) The dark ground helped me speed toward completion.

Today I worked on another portrait of my daughter Nancy. The Group (Monday Life Group) agreed that we wanted to paint the blue patterned kimono that she uses as a coverup between poses. My parents had brought this kimono back to me from Japan in 1966 or thereabouts, and after five decades it is finally coming into its own! However, it was not possible to deal with the pattern in the time given to us. Moreover, the wet blue paint did not allow for adding fresh whites and pinks where needed. So this is a Work in Progress.

Nancy wearing a kimono

After the kimono dries, I will add the patterns using this photo I took with my phone.

Nancy in the blue kimono

I don’t know if I really missed the tilt of her head as much as the photo suggests, but someone did tell me recently (Paul Ingbretson, I believe) that we humans have a hard time overcoming an innate desire to untilt heads. I have noticed as much in myself before, so I was trying extra hard this morning to counter that tendency. Sigh! Regarding the size of her irises, that was a deliberate decision to exaggerate them in order to get across how one perceives Nancy’s eyes. They come across as large.

Last week Nancy had posed for us nude, but wearing quite a deep tan–from walking the dog, she claimed. Her droopy eyelids of last week caused me to bring her a large iced coffee this morning in the hope that we not get the sleepy look again.

Nancy wearing a tan

I almost want to hide this one from you, because I feel I butchered the nose. Still, it’s interesting as a study of skin tones.

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; two paintings are hanging at the Bedford Library as part of the Womens Caucus For Art exhibit “Summer Bounty”; a single painting is on view at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester for the summer; 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!

Fast or Slow, Which Works Better for Me?

Posted by Aline on July 25, 2014

You could rightfully assume that when I turn up on the web after a longer-than-two-week hiatus, I’ll be accompanied by a raft of new paintings. Sorry to disappoint. Although many hours in the past 17 days have been spent on various kinds of art-related activities, painting actual pictures was only a smallish part of it. One workshop with the accomplished portraitist Mary Minifie produced a single portrait (representing three days of labor), while another three-day one with Paul Ingbretson on composition produced nothing but horrible practice scribbles. Even worse, last Monday’s session with our lovely preggie model was lackluster, the result not as appealing to me as my first painting of her.

One saving grace: as a small favor to me, my friend Arthur offered to sit for me to do his portrait, and I managed to turn that into a big favor. Immediately upon viewing the painting after the first sitting, his mom declared herself a buyer. And after the second sitting, my model asked me to do another one for him. Although I wasn’t timing either session, I think the first sitting lasted about an hour and a half, and the second about an hour. Hence: 24 hours on a Margaret produced with Minifie versus 2.5 hours spent on Arthur winging it on my own. Both paintings are 11×14, so there was no size differential. No surprise–Arthur’s portrait looks rough while Margaret’s looks delicate.

Arthur

Margaret July 2014

Mary Minifie started with the selection of clothing and background. The goal was to enhance the beauty of our model’s skin tone, and also to create a pleasing composition, in which color plays a major part (a point that got made again in the second workshop). That took one hour. I thought then that it was an outlandish amount of time to spend on the selection of drapes to form a background, but looking back, I appreciate its importance. My photograph of the painting, even when adjusted, may not convey the right color impressions over the internet, especially when the actual hue, value and intensity had been so carefully calibrated. When you look at the completed painting, can you appreciate the rightness of the color of the background? What about the color of her shirt? What about that bit of white in her bodice? The shirt, by the way, was painted with a lapis lazuli from Michael Harding that I found in a batch acquired through eBay. So beautiful–the blue used by Vermeer, before ultramarine was invented.

The next big chunk of time was spent on Mary’s demo of, and our attempt to duplicate, the egg approach to portrait painting. We first tried it on a small 5×7 panel, then on our big panel. The basic idea: paint an oval in the shape of the model’s head matching the tint of each area of the head and neck, gradually increasing the detail as we decreased the patch of skin being matched in paint. In theory, the features start to emerge. Attention is also given to her pearl earring, her red hair ornament, and her hair itself. Margaret was much better at holding her pose than Arthur, of course. In theory, the better painting should result from this approach.

However, I am happier with my portrait of Arthur. It reminds me of a tour de force by Rose Frantzen titled “Portrait of Maquoketa”. Maquoketa is the name of her home town in Iowa, to which she had returned after a period of trying to “make it” in the Big Apple. She set out to paint all of the Maquoketa residents who were willing to sit. You really should visit this page where the story and all of the portraits are kept. In the meantime, enjoy this cover of her book, which contains all 180 of the portraits and a clever flip-book effect in the corners, whereby you can watch a painting in progress.

Frantzen book cover

Frantzen’s method is called “alla prima” because the paintings are completed in one sitting without any kind of underpainting or academic preparation. Alla prima (or almost alla prima in “Arthur”‘s case) suits me better than the classical approach mastered so well by Mary Minifie. Alla prima is something I can do now, whereas the more academic method would take me years to master, and I don’t have that kind of time left to me, unfortunately. Although I expect to live to be 100, I’m not sure I will be able to paint until 100.

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; two paintings are hanging at the Bedford Library as part of the Womens Caucus For Art exhibit “Summer Bounty”; a single painting is on view at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester for the summer; 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!

Hands and Feet

Posted by Aline on July 8, 2014

Last week, I hadn’t done much new in the painting department, so I looked for a topic that I could discuss using past doings. I came up with “hands and feet”, and even got started with this text. But then my computerized photo library went kerfluey, and as you probably know, kerfluey computers tend to soak up all available time until they are fixed. “Fixed” has still not occurred, but in the meantime I found the time to produce new art–because I sent the recalcitrant Mac Mini to the geniuses at the local Apple store. Luckily, I was in a position to repossess an iMac I had loaned to a granddaughter–I am very much into Redundancy, and it has worked for me.

So I will complete what I wanted to say originally about hands and feet, and seque into a somewhat more moments issue, one that has less to do with drawing and more to do with an entire approach to painting.

This will not be my first discussion of hands, but I am shocked to see that it has been so long since I first addressed that subject. I thought maybe 18, at most 24 months. But it was over 45 months ago! See that earlier blog from October of 2010 here. My overall strategy when trying to depict hands and feet with paint is to first swipe in the larger shape and then try to array the fingers and toes with quick, unlabored strokes. If the strokes work, then I push the paint around a bit, add light and dark values, toying with the elements–before wiping them out and starting over. If the first strokes don’t work, or the toying with them loses the first good strokes, I don’t give up hope.

[Not giving up is the most important part of painting. Eventually, if you keep trying, it comes together, more or less. Mine have come together before, so I know the next one will too– eventually, as long as I keep trying.]

Let’s examine a few efforts:

Large quickie of a pose

These are perfect examples of what I always TRY to do–get the shape and size correct, let my strokes suggest fingers if I am lucky. Below are some hands I had been working on the last two weeks–first are the “draft” ones, then the finished ones:

Detail, Week 1 of Pose

After second week, I’m not exactly proud because there is little improvement. Sometimes that happens too–I keep trying to find the magic, and I keep getting the pedestrian.

Take a look at yesterday’s hand:

29 Weeks

As I worked on her hand, I was consciously applying what I knew I was going to write about in the blog. We can only speculate whether that helped. I painted that hand at least five times, not changing anything really, just varying the contrast, the values. But I did that very same thing to the entire body.

This was a first-time model, recruited by one of our regulars when she learned that we value the opportunity to paint a pregnant woman. We have her for next Monday’s session too, but I think I am content with this effort and so plan to work on a portrait next week.

I set up the lighting for “29 Weeks” to create maximum contrast between the light hitting her directly and the shadows behind her. But even while planning to paint a “light and shadow” version, I was pondering whether I am more attuned to “local tone” painters, as one of my DVD experts, Quang Ho, terms it. Van Gogh, for instance. Van Gogh paints relatively flat colors, representing the actual color of the object without showing the effect of light or shadow. To separate elements one from another, he often outlines them in a dark line. To create texture and interest in large shapes, he makes patterns. No gradation, no atmospheric perspective. Here’s a good example:

A Meadow in the Mountains Le Mas de Saint-Paul 1889Paul (1889), by Van Gogh

Imitating Van Gogh gives me a instantaneous rush of pleasure–it could be the thick paint, the permission to abandon shading, the richness of color. Whatever, I feel good even when the painting turns out not so good. Achieving a quality result result after hours of laboring over the core shadows, the half tones, the reflected light, etc, etc, leaves me with a feeling of accomplishment, but no real “high”. As I painted “29 Weeks” I was thinking about that even as I painted light and shadow. Maybe, for next week, I should try the Van Gogh approach and see how it comes out. And see if it gives me a “high”.

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; two paintings are hanging at the Bedford Library as part of the Womens Caucus For Art exhibit “Summer Bounty”; a single painting is on view at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester for the summer; 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!

Afterglow; Exhaustion

Posted by Aline on June 10, 2014

My show was Sunday. Many of you remembered that, and succeeded in getting there, for which I am most grateful. Others of you may have tried to come, but gave up when you couldn’t find a parking spot. If so, I apologize. I never thought to check my reception date against the schedule for the Fisher Cats games. I won’t ever overlook that detail again! [Fisher Cats is the name of a AA minor league baseball team, farm team for the Toronto Blue Jays; its stadium is pretty close to the building where East Colony Gallery lives, and its parking lot becomes a Fisher Cats parking lot on game days. The building owners tried to save us prime spots in the front of the Gallery; unfortunately, the normal signs there declare “Do Not Park”, so, in the absence of guidance, people were probably afraid to park there!]

Nevertheless, we had a decent turnout for our party, and I got to reconnect with some people I had not seen in a long time. Alas, I did forget to take pictures, but this was because I was too busy talking, so that was a good thing. Usually, at these shindigs, I am too shy to engage people in talking about my paintings. Having people there whom I already knew was such a blessing!

Meanwhile, I had an extremely busy week of painting: five-day workshop with Sean Beavers on figure painting; one night class with Deirdre Riley on the same subject; two paint outs, one in Exeter, New Hampshire, and the other in Goffstown. And the Monday life group met as usual yesterday morning. I’m sure it was good, in the abstract, to be painting so much, but it may not have been beneficial for the output. I was spreading myself too thin, especially as exhaustion began to take its toll. I must accept the fact that, at my age, I can’t keep performing day after day at the same high energy level.

The workshop paintings fared better than the landscapes. For Sean’s class, we had one model in the morning, doing one pose all week; and another in the afternoon, doing his same pose all week. Two completed paintings emerged, plus one half-done portrait:

Figure and Detail

After spending three days on the figure, I developed an urge to paint the model’s portrait. Since I had space on the same piece of canvas, and needed to fill that space with something, my decision to lay it down next to the figure was a no-brainer. Only problem was, I was really too far from the model to paint a decent portrait. I couldn’t see any nuances in the facial features with my uncorrected eyes from a distance of 15 feet. Moving my easel was not an option because (a) I would have obstructed views of the artists on either side of me, (b) my spot was my spot for the afternoon painting, and that would have meant two moves, and (c) let’s not kid ourselves–this is only for practice. The fact that I ended up doing close to the same thing for the afternoon painting just means I’m consistent.

Competing Lights

For this pose, Sean set up a spotlight with red cel in front of the model, and one behind the model with a blue cel, emulating sunlight. The effect was quite dramatic. Fun! I spent four days on this painting, and so had only one day to fill with a practice portrait:

Portrait version

Again, my inability to see detail that far away, and the shortness of time remaining to me, meant I could not produce a finished portrait, but I got the big pieces right. Sean was actually impressed! But bottom line, the face in my figure painting is more interesting that this “forced” portrait. (To me.)

The paintout on Saturday in Exeter ended with a wet paint sale to benefit the American Independence Museum, which had organized the event. We had a gorgeous day. Every other day last week it rained at least a little bit. My goal for this event was to paint something pedestrian but so well that someone would want to own it. I failed. Not in the pedestrian part but in the wanting part.

Exeter River with Japanese Maple

I’m not sure the name of the river is Exeter. I got many complements on the beauty of this painting, but no one wanted to own it. For the second one, I went even further Out There–Ashcan School?:

Municipal Parking

This painting quite simply failed to be beautiful for some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on. (If I could have identified the failing, I would have fixed it.)

Winding up the week, yesterday I did a figure in the morning and a landscape in the afternoon. Both will be getting more attention–we will repeat the Monday pose next week. Same is true of Deirdre’s class from last Tuesday. And the landscape, well, you’ll just have to wait for that report because, with luck, I shall have time during the week to bring it to a new level of Van Gogh-ness.

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!

Matters of Life and Death

Posted by Aline on June 1, 2014

“Life”, in that painting from life is one matter; “Death” in that painting in a cemetery is another matter. A good balance. First, the studies of a living person: Becky again. Three of them. Done at the class I have been taking Tuesday nights at the Institute. Deirdre Riley is the instructor.

Large quickie of a pose

The first week our longest pose was a comparatively short one–perhaps 40 minutes. At the beginning of the course, one or two of the other students thought they preferred short poses, but now I think everyone is into the idea of the long pose and the possibility of achieving a polished drawing or painting. This coming Tuesday, with luck, we may get the first of a carryover pose, repeating a second Tuesday–upon which event my product will no longer be half-done. It’ll be seven-eighths done. (The reason I am not finishing even a sketch in the three hours is because I am using 20×16 pieces of canvas, instead of the usual 9×12 or 11×14.)

The second two poses were each for the entire duration of one class, or three hours less break times.

Pose No. 2

Almost Standing

I seem to be having trouble getting the length of Becky’s torso right. The first one, it looks too short; the second one, too long. But “Almost Standing” had potential, I thought.

Saturday was a beautiful, if chilly day to work outside. I packed up my new Soltek easel for its first trip out into the field. Flo Parlangeli and I launched ourselves southward toward Lowell, Massachusetts in response to an invitation to paint in a garden cemetery there. The Lowell Cemetery is on the National Register of Historic Places. It was modeled after another famous cemetery, the Mt. Auburn, in Cambridge, Mass. The two of us were, apparently, the only New Hampshire artists there on Saturday. In fact, when we got there we were entirely alone and thought perhaps the event had been cancelled. But others showed up later, and I had two of them competing with me for the best take on the Ayer Lion. I fell in love with the Lion the minute I laid eyes on it. Hey, it’s a large putty-cat and you know how much I loves me my putty cats! The sad and dreamy expression on his face spoke to me. I hope I captured it in my painting.

The Sad Lion of Lowell

My second cemetery painting was inspired by the sight of profuse white flowers emerging from the shadows around a dark and mysterious crypt-structure. From my web search for May-blooming shrubs with white flowers, I have concluded that the genus of the plant is Spirea.

Spirea Fall (as in “water fall”)

In exactly one week, Sunday June 8, I will be finished cleaning up after the reception for my and Larry Donovan’s Featured Artists show at the East Colony Fine Art Gallery. The reception starts at two o’clock and ends at four or whenever people drift off. My paintings look better in person, so I hope lots of my followers will be able to view the exhibit and come to the party. If I have any scrap of presence of mind left, I will take photos and post them next week.

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!

Hung!

Posted by Aline on May 29, 2014

Frontispiece

I should have posted as soon as I got the pictures uploaded, but I wanted to expound on the process a little. Unfortunately, life, or more accurately, death, got in the way. Not a member of my family, rather the man who rented the room upstairs from me. I had to find the body, which was an unsettling experience. He will be missed around here for sure.

Meanwhile, my show is up. My colleague, Larry Donovan, and I had to agree on the arrangement on our shared wall, the wall that you see as you walk in the door. That is the photo I called “Frontispiece”. You can tell which are mine.

The longest wall is next to the entry, and I managed to hang 13 of my paintings on it, allowing Larry the remaining three, smaller walls. I had prepped 21 paintings with about five that I considered “must see”, but one of them didn’t make the cut. Freckles, my cat portrait, just didn’t look like it belonged with all those nudes and faces. In the end, what looked best on the wall determined which paintings won a place on the wall.

One of my new jobs for East Colony, which as a collaborative does require each member to take charge of one or more tasks needed to run a gallery, is as the keeper of the customer database. So as that person, I had to print out our postcard labels; then as the Featured Artist I applied half of the labels to postcards (Larry did the other half), bought my postcard stamps and applied those to my postcards, and put them in the mail, all of which I accomplished Tuesday. Now all I have to do get ready for the day itself: bring in a flower arrangement (one of the other artists volunteered to bring another one in), make sure I have enough wine at the ready (Larry’s goddaughter, a baker, is preparing eating treasures), figure out what to wear, and get there early enough to set up. I think I can handle it. Whew!

Next week my blog will include the half-done paintings from a workshop I have been taking with Deirdre Riley and possibly a plein air painting from Saturday, but the forecast is rain, so no promises.

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!

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:

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!

Two Sittings

Posted by Aline on May 12, 2014

Last week our regular figure study group met as usual, but at the end of our session, we all agreed to try to duplicate the post at the next session. I had been happy enough with what I had after one session, except for one problem hand, so I planned today to fix the hand and start on a portrait, yet another of Becky. Instead, I spent almost the entire second session “dithering” (some would say) with what I had. I’m wondering if I have overworked and ruined what had been a decent painting. Fortunately, I photographed the earlier version so we may compare the two:

Small work in progress

After second sitting

I am inclined to favor the second version now that I see them together. Certainly a lot of the elements that I worked on called for help. The model stand has a life, yet stays back where it belongs. Her right hand looks more like a hand. The face is more delicately portrayed. The dark background works better to show off her skin tones. Does anyone have a strong opinion either way? And what do you think of the lavender shadows? It’s what I saw today, and I have never seen them before. My eyes may be changing, or perhaps the way we set up the spotlights did it. I had trouble seeing what I was doing until I brought a spotlight to aim at my painting and my palette, but then I had the bright light in my eyes, and my gaze was shifting between the model and the painting. Terrible conditions, really, so the lavender may have been a trick of the light. My brain misperceived.

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).

Art under Stress

Posted by Aline on May 11, 2014

I’ve had a bad week. It started a week ago Friday night when I downloaded my bank statement and discovered all my money had vanished. Someone had been systematically withdrawing a few hundred here, a few hundred there, using apparently a clone of my debit card. I managed to freeze the card and send off agitated messages to the bank, but that was going to have to “it” until Monday because I was committed for the entire weekend to “Art in Action”–a semi-annual event in Londonderry that combines display and demonstration. The bad stuff continued the next morning–Saturday–when I was packing up my car with all the gear required for Art in Action: My backpack could not be found. This Creativo ArtPak backpack contained all of the supplies I was going to be using for the demonstrations: Soltek easel, Rosemary brushes, Michael Harding oil paints, palette knives, brush holder, brush washer with Gamsol, brush tube, little container of Liquin–all inexplicably gone. And I could not do a damn thing about it until Monday. Fortunately, I’m big into redundancy, so had no problem gathering up a backup easel, paints, brushes. I even had a second brush washer. Off I went to Londonderry, with my little Prius loaded down with display panels and 8 paintings (the display), and my two helpers sharing the front passenger’s seat. The helpers were my daughter, who would also serve as my model, and my boarder, who performed as the muscle.

Whereupon an interesting phenomenon revealed itself: despite, or because of, the stress I must have been suffering subconsciously, I was easily able to zone in on my painting. Maybe I zoned too much, to the point of ignoring the small streams of people flowing past me, instead of engaging them like I was supposed to. Some kind of compulsion held sway over me; perhaps I just needed the escape from daily woes that always comes from surrendering to the art. Whatever, I turned out some good stuff to show you and was looking forward to getting them published last Monday . . . when the knockout blow came. I found out that the perpetrator of my losses was someone whom I had loved and trusted. There would be no more escape into painting for the rest of the week as I juggled that mess alongside urgent tasks and important meetings related to my many volunteer activities.

The crisis is over. The bank has restored the funds to me and the perp found another patsy to cover the theft so as to avoid prosecution from the bank; and my homeowners insurance is covering the loss of the backpack. I am starting to sleep better. The hole in my life that represented a certain loved one is still empty and most likely will stay that way permanently. But I am moving on. So here, a week late, are the three paintings I was working on during the Art in Action show.

For the first one, I asked my daughter to sit for her portrait again (she did this for me at last Spring’s Art in Action ). I didn’t want to include her dog this year as I wanted to complete a more serious oeuvre. I had a spotlight lighting up her right side and a black drape behind her. We started about 10:30 and I declared it finished about 2:30. Nancy looks sad and tired, and that was her on that day. But she loves the painting and my portrayal of her. Can’t ask much more from a portrait.

Portrait of my daughter

The next day, Sunday, I worked from a photo that another artist, Rollande Rouselle, had emailed to me with assurances that copying rights belonged to her. She wanted to see what I could do with it.

Haitian boy, photo

I had it on my iPad and was able to set up the iPad practically next to my easel. I cropped the photo in order to enlarge the facial features.

Working Boy

The hardest element was the bundle of sticks, but I worked at it until the blobs of paint conveyed the idea, and then I quit.

I still had about an hour left so then I picked out a photo of a cat from a book of cat photos, and got this far on it.

Grey-eyed cat (wip)

My efforts to paint the perfect “Fur” a few months ago stood me in good stead. Should I finish? Once you get the eyes of a cat, the rest is window-dressing.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

It’s About the Paint

Posted by Aline on April 28, 2014

Don’t be confused about contemporary art dialogue. Yes, concepts are important. The concept behind your art, Aline, is painting itself. Don’t forget that. Your art is about painting. If some frou-frou contemporary artist asks you what your art is about, just say: it’s about painting, and all that painting does: it’s about being flat, it’s about creating depth, too, it’s about the illusion that paint does so well, and it’s also about representing the integrity and presence of the paint itself. The content of your paintings is not just the landscape or the figure, it’s also the paint. But, tell that person you paint the figure because you are a humanist, and you are out to preserve humanity in your art. Tell him your art is a process of preservation. Explain all the ways that painting is a human process, and that that is ultimately what you are doing with your art: representing and preserving humanity in your art, through the process and medium of painting.

—Cameron Bennett, April 21, 2014

Two weeks ago, my blog described the confusion and frustration I had experienced when a nonrepresentational artist challenged my mostly representational approach to painting. One of my favorite teachers galloped to the rescue with the above advice. In effect, he says, there’s no quandary; I am not “just practicing”–I am “just painting”! He explains that the whole spectrum of artistic styles, approaches and genres, representational and nonrepresentational, boils down to the handling of paint. And when I choose to paint a figure with my paint, I do so to “preserve humanity.” Wow. That makes me feel important! I’ve never been good at memorization, but that’s one phrase I am committing to memory.

Thus reinforced, I have decided that my figurative works shall be the subject of my month as Featured Artist at the East Colony Fine Art Gallery. They constitute the most of, hopefully my best, recent works. I have been checking them out and filling in backgrounds and fixing flaws. Risky business, that. But if I spoil a painting by fixing its flaws, it just goes on the discard pile. I will have more than enough to pick from. The two that I did last week are candidates:

Easy Chair

Girl in a Newsboy Cap

I filled in background for these two:

Say, What?

Warmth in the Shadows

I considered the painting below as a candidate, if I could get rid of the “snarky” expression I objected to when I first blogged about it (here).

still a WIP

But to do so, I had to open her eyes, I felt. That’s a tricky proposition since I don’t have the model to look at. It’s hard to get the whites of the eyes in shadow without it looking weird. So I’m not sure I will ever get the eyes right. Maybe you don’t like it anyway. I am going to include as many clothed figures as I can come up with, so as not to overwhelm a public more accustomed to landscapes and still lifes.

Last week, East Colony celebrated the advent of Spring in New England with its annual “Petals 2 Paint” show. 28 floral designers each chose a painting or artwork to serve as inspiration for a floral display. It was the best year ever. Here are a few of the most original, which includes my designer:

Cauliflower and Granny Smith

Grace in Profile, Abstracted in Flowers

Sally’s Chinese

Underwater Moonshine

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 French Hall (the main building) of the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester, 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!

Seeing Red

Posted by Aline on April 21, 2014

The cover story this week is my Friday painting of Becky, wherein I decided to create a bright red background to set off her figure. Backgrounds are so often a pain in the neck. Are there rules? I don’t know, but I suspect there are some, and I’m pretty sure one of them is, no bright red backgrounds. I always think of Rembrandt, who knew a thing or two about painting portraits. All his backgrounds are dark and subdued. You don’t notice them because you aren’t supposed to notice them. Sargent, too. But what about Cezanne? He did at least one self-portrait in which the background was a quirky yellow and orange pattern of expressive shapes.

Cezanne, Self-Portrait

I decided to go with Cezanne on Friday, and express myself in red.

I started this painting still puzzling over the “practice or paint?” conundrum, so I gave myself permission to play around. But this is what happens:– pretty accurate portrait, rendered about as tightly as I ever get in a three-hour session. Perhaps the red background is my inner abstract artist expressing frustration!

Saturday we had our last Saturday Life Group meeting until next Fall. Becky was again the model. After the quick one-minute poses, the five-minute pose and the ten-minute pose, I got a back view for the 20-minute pose. That was OK, because it meant my side of the room would get a frontal view for the next, longer pose.

However, we paid dearly for that privilege with the last long pose (“long” in this group means between 40-60 minutes). I could have moved to a different part of the room in order to get more of her body in view, but all of us in my corner went with what we got: Half a back, a head of hair, and a draped cube. All three of us deployed color to add interest. I brought out the compressed charcoal to better make an impression of expression. Compress expressive impression? Whatever. It’s the liveliest of the three:

Stripes with Hair

Change of Subject: What is majorly on my mind these days is my upcoming stint as the Featured Artist at the East Colony Fine Art Gallery. Larry Donovan and I are sharing the spotlight for the month of June. We have talked a little about serving up a coordinated theme, and we have picked a title that will permit just about anything from either of us: Through the Artist’s. . . [Window/Eyes/Viewpoint]–one of those words. My dilemma is what to showcase: portraits, nudes, landscapes, or those few abstract-y paintings I have produced. I am so conflicted that I am ready to trash all the good advice about picking one style or facet and just put up my favorite works whether they look like they came from a single artist or not. For example, I’d like to show this little half-hour plein-air sketch as well as the six-hour “Margaret and Her Nook“:

Water’s Edge

Sometimes I discover value in a pile of forgotten panels. I never photographed Water’s Edge before, but I did frame it and hang it on my wall, where I grew ever fonder of it. Such a slow-growing affection is a stark contrast to Margaret and Her Nook, which I knew was going to be a successful painting before I had even finished it.

I am planning to construct a floating type frame for “Darkly” as advised by my mentors [see wailing a week ago here, and the painting here], and I am wondering–if I made similar frames for all the paintings I want to feature in June, would that unify them sufficiently to allow my public to appreciate the disparate styles? Each painting would be mounted on a larger backboard painted black, which backboard will be framed in a simple box, also painted black. Water’s Edge might call for a narrow gold fillet around the painting itself. I’m thinking that is the only way I could get away with showing my crazy quilt of art. But will Margaret shine from such a frame?

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 French Hall (the main building) of the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester, NH; and at her studio by appointment (email: alotter@mac.com).

Just Practicing

Posted by Aline on April 15, 2014

I got my head spun around this week by a glimpse into the perspective of another kind of artist, the kind that has found a home in the world of “contemporary” art. I am using the word “contemporary” here in the sense that has come to be associated with it in the art world, namely, nonrepresentional art. Plenty of contemporary (in the original meaning of the word) are painting representational pictures, elegantly and successfully, but it seems like few of them are represented by tony NYC galleries or being acquired by museums. There’s a bias in favor of abstract. All the buzz goes to the unconventional. Something called a “concept” has become more important (perhaps) than the skillful execution. What I have been working on these past nine years is skillful execution, and I’m not even there yet. But if only I could reorient my brain in the direction of coming up with concepts, I might not need to get any better with the representational skills.

This particular angst is nothing new for me. What is new is the spin, the perspective, the insight. I was at a gathering of students celebrating the last class with a party. At Bea’s, of course. I had taken the same class last semester. It was the Explore, Express, Exploit class, triple E we call it–the class in which I tried very hard to do something different. See, e.g., prior blogs here and here. The party included a critique, not just by the class instructor (Patrick McCay), but by all present, students and professors. Tongues had been loosened by copious supply of wine, and the critiques soon dissolved into many conversations occurring simultaneously and uproariously. Being on a diet, my wine intake was limited to one glass, so I was able to observe and be entertained by the chaos. It was such good sport that, when they ran out of paintings to critique, demand was made for me to submit two of my paintings from last semester to the withering analyses. (I had the two outside in my car because they were on their way in the a.m. to the Institute for hanging in an exhibit.) So, yes, they were framed, and clearly “finished”. Nevertheless, many potential improvements were found by half the crowd and denigrated by the other half, all good fun and maybe a little educational, and the party was about to come to an end, its ostensible purpose having been fulfilled, when a visiting dignitary, the dean of something and second in command at the Institute, demanded to know what direction I was going, given that one of my paintings had ended up representational and the other did not. (That may be the longest sentence I have ever written!) I tried to dodge the question, which was not difficult since everyone else in the room was still talking all at once, but he silenced the room and insisted that I provide an answer. Ahhhgh! I confessed that I had no idea where I might be headed, that in fact my usual MO was plein air painting and working from the live figure. Both, I didn’t have to say, being totally representation. So he said, and I quote, “That’s just practice.”

I don’t really disagree–what I have been doing is a lot of practicing, but toward what? For the first time, I wondered if there is a chance for me to see over the fence into that field of unconventionality, that field seeded with new concepts. One needs a goal, and I guess the one I had set for myself was to become a portraitist. But I haven’t been working very hard toward that goal lately, and maybe that is the fault of my goal, not of me. If portraiture is not the right goal for me, then I can’t stay excited about it. It may be time for me to Explore more deliberately an Expression that is beyond representational. Exploitation, what’s that?

Meanwhile, I am still practicing. Last Tuesday’s figure session produced this one:

Beard with Hands

His forehead is too high, but I can fix that.

Friday I had a simultaneous committee meeting and the need to drop off those two paintings competing for my attention, so I took in my charcoals. In the first 20 minutes I produced a drawing that I liked so much that I could not bring myself to touch it after the break.

Ghost Face

My start-over produced this drawing.

Becky, A Head Shot

Her nose is too long. Damn! Too-long nose cannot be fixed without resizing the whole bottom half of the face. [I fixed a problem with the shape of her left eye–on our right–that I only noticed after posting the image to my blog.]

Today, I decided at the outset not to obsess over any details, to try to be conceptual instead of representational–just as I have decided at many outsets before this. Today, however, I have the added consideration of last Thursday’s critique. Sure, I had that Friday as well, but it was too new then. Hadn’t sunk in.

Sweet Thinking

Is it, in terms of direction, an inch or two away from my usual? I kind of think so.

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 French Hall (the main building) of the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester, NH; and at her studio by appointment (email: alotter@mac.com).

Back to Figure School

Posted by Aline on April 7, 2014

A major disappointment to me was the cancellation of a workshop with Dan Thompson at the Institute. It was to be on the subject of painting the portrait from observation. I took an earlier portrait class with Dan Thompson and I wrote about it in this blog. (here) So instead of advancing my practice of portraiture, I was dealing with a broken furnace that week. It was a cold week, too. I may have mentioned being too cold to sit very long in my computer room. Lots of stuff got wait-listed that week, a fact whose relevance is hinted at below. (Ending a sentence with two prepositions! Exciting times!)

Our weather has shown dramatic improvement lately. For instance, I haven’t been wearing a coat. What have I been doing with my time? Not painting. Paperwork. Meetings. Reports. Nothing you would want to hear about assuming I were free to tell. I found only two recent paintings that you have not yet seen, and one of them I never intended anyone to see. I dislike it for being too dark and sultry. But in my desperation I have reconsidered, and hope it looks no worse than work that I have seen better artists display proudly. To some, dark and sultry is a virtue.

Dark and Sultry

No, it’s no good. I still don’t like it. Ironically, this is the same model whose face I tormented in the Dan Thompson workshop mentioned above.

My other painting I like quite a lot, just not sure why. It’s accurate, it has good lights and darks I think, proportions good, skin tones good, composition good, etc. But what’s it about? Can I show it? What the heck do I title it? As you can see, for now the title refers to the light source.

Overhead Lighting

The painterly quality may be what I like most about this painting.

The overhead light source is thanks to Jack, our newest member. Jack retired from a career as a filmmaker and photographer, so he has some great equipment that he shares with us. If I recall correctly, the overhead light is composed of 400 watts of illumination, covered by a diffuser so it doesn’t blind the artists

Well, tomorrow is another day, isn’t it? Scarlett was right. But literally, tomorrow is Tuesday, another life group day, and I might, I just might do something worthwhile. It keeps me going back.

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 Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; 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; and at her studio by appointment (email: alotter@mac.com).

<a href=”http://fineartamerica.com/art/all/nude/canvas+prints” style=”font: 10pt arial; text-decoration: underline;”>nude canvas prints</a>

3 drawings and a painting

Posted by Aline on March 17, 2014

I confess–I haven’t done much art in the past month, since my return from Florida. I might be suffering a little bit of burnout. Or discouragement: I received yet another rejection from the Oil Painters of America. Will I ever paint a picture good enough to win OPA’s seal of approval? If I live long enough, and then only maybe. Perhaps I should switch to painting still lifes. I met an artist older than I who entered the field later than I, taught himself from materials found on the internet, and concentrates on paintings of one kind of object in still life paintings. Not a beautiful object per se, but so lovingly and beautifully rendered by this artist that he wins prizes, and gets into OPA exhibits. I long ago resolved to stick to the one medium so as not to spread myself too thin, but perhaps I should also have chosen to stick to one, still, subject matter. I’ve always had a serious tendency to bite off more than I could chew.

Then there was the weather: My answer to the cold and snowy conditions was to favor drawing to painting–lugging around the oil paints and easel is that much greater a burden when you are slipping on ice or slogging through snowdrifts. In a related story, not at all helping to get me out of this funk, was the loss of heat for a week, last week. Oh, the irony! I had an automatic generator installed after the freak October blizzard shut everything down in 2011, yet lost heat earlier this year due to an electrical problem. This second loss of heat was due to a malfunction in the furnace, but we screwed around for days trying to solve the issue without going to the pro. Lesson learned. Go to the pro immediately, damn the expense.

On a more upbeat note, recently I was in the news! In a good way. The Bernerhof exhibit got some publicity, and the reporter used the material that I had written up for my contributions very carefully and accurately. Stellar job! Here is a link to the article. Bernerhof article The stuff about me appears on the third page. I’m confident there will never be a better article written about my painting.

Between the Tuesday Life Group, the Friday Life Group and the Saturday Life Group, I did get in some art making. I have picked out my favorites over the last month to show you. I believe, despite the judgment of the odious OPA, they are, you know, kind of, like, OK.

Margaret in B&W

Dennis, Shirtless

I managed to rein in all urges to polish his face, humming a mantra in my head “Carolyn Anderson”. (She who can suggest all with a single stroke.)

Georgia, Reclining

Shelley’s Back

On the last two, because they presented a simplified view of the figure (no breasts!), I was able to spend time on representing the quality of the flesh and drapes more accurately. Each of those two poses lasted about 50 minutes. In 50 minutes, you are lucky to just get the drawing close to accurate. In hindsight, I particularly appreciate how I rendered that draped pillow under Georgia’s head, and particularly regret leaving that clump of hair looking so stiff.

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 Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; 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; 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 this feedback form.

Oscar Night

Posted by Aline on March 2, 2014

Finishing my Oscar Night painting was a top priority when I got home after my Florida trip, along with tax returns and a report that I have to make annually to the Sierra Club regarding my NH chapter’s activities. (I mention that nonart stuff as an excuse for not posting a blog last week, as if anyone noticed.) The title of my Oscar painting is “Going for Gold”, and there is no longer any reason to conceal the title of the movie it represents–our Oscar Night party took place Saturday. Nobody had much difficulty matching my painting up with “Chariots of Fire.” Some other artists made it very hard to discern their movie, but not my favorites: Bruce Jones’ circus scene (“The Greatest Show on Earth”) and Rick Dickenson’s portrait of the ship that played the Bounty in “Mutiny on the Bounty”. I wish I had thought to snap a picture of each of them, but I found them on our Facebook page:

You can figure out which is which, can’t you? And that is a wonderful photo of Elaine Farmer laughing in front of the Bounty. For more pictures of the event: Facebook page for East Colony Fine Art, with photos of the shindig. Here is a snapshot of our group, those of us who stuck it out to the end, anyway. (I was not the only one feeling the pain.)

East Colony Artists on Oscar Night

You’d never know that we usually have a hard time finding anything to wear that is not spotted with paint, much less something fancy to wear on the Red Carpet. We had an actual Red Carpet laid down as you approached the entrance to our Gallery, and other trappings, including champagne, of an extravagant star-studded celebration. Popcorn too, for the unstar-studded populace. A large, flat screen TV was playing snippets from our Oscar-winning movies, with music, but the crowds precluded us from taking it in–but crowds are a good thing. The game of matching paintings with Oscar titles was taken very seriously by everyone, even though nobody was sure of what the prize was going to be.

And here, at long last, is the absolute final version of Going for Gold.

I took it in to hang last Monday, but then realized that I did not like the frame. More precisely, I loved the frame by itself, which was a match to the one on “Margaret and her Nook” (see next photo), but not on this particular painting. So I took it home again, and rooted around in my frame inventory to come up with a modest, thin frame. I wanted black, but could only find gold. So I added the vertical black strips on each side to simulate a black border. (I’m sure my faulty photography is responsible for the left border above looking slanted.) The new borders were barely dry when I hung the painting Friday afternoon. Here is how it looked on my wall:

See, straight borders on both sides. Above the Oscar painting is one I call “Athabasca Falls” because, you guessed it, it is a painting of Athabasca Falls in Alberta, Canada, as night was falling. Long story, that. And on the right you see Margaret and her Nook. On the pedestal is a giclee of Freckles, a cat I used to know–and love. That’s my browse bin with other giclees on offer. I’m not sure who the gentleman is–he was sitting with his wife on a big ottoman and I could not ask them to move. Behind him is a short bio and photo of me hanging in a frame. This is my “half space” for two months. Some “half spaces” are a little larger than this one; usually I can hang about six paintings, but then, all three of these were larger than my usual.

I have been bad at getting the word out about these events. In June I will be sharing the Featured Artist spot with Lawrence Donovan. He’s the guy in the front, on the right, in the tuxedo. We are trying to work out a theme that we can both live with. And I have resolved to beat the drum very loudly to get everyone I know out for my opening reception. So get ready, y’all!

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

Heady Stuff

Posted by Aline on February 3, 2014

I’ve been saving up my heads, maybe subconsciously in order to use some cute/puny title such as the title above. Good heads, bad heads. The bad heads are, it should go without saying, on me, not the model. My progress on head-making is not as fast as I feel it should be, so I am more often than not disappointed in my output. On the other hand, when a head turns out good, I’m taken by surprise. You could say my life is a constant trip from disappointment to surprised delight, and back again. Its’s a trip with no Arrival. What I ought to do is just shut up about it. So I will. I present these heads in no particular order, sans judgement. Maybe you will like one or two of them.

Serious Rebecca

I wasted a bit of time trying to convey the way her earring looked both metallic and dull. Sigh! What’s with me and the accessories?

Serious Margaret

My art buddy Tony would call this “trois couleurs” because he likes to throw around his French. It started life as black and white on toned paper, but after I added white for the highlights, I thought she looked too pallid–hence the pink. For the pink I used a piece of pastel. My drawing box contains various types of charcoal and charcoal pencils, white pencils and white “charcoal” (who do they think they are kidding?), and stubs of pastel-like sticks in several shades of pink and one blue. Don’t ask me why. It just happens.

This is Margaret again. I tried to tease a little “Mona Lisa” smile out of her, so this one is captioned “Not so serious Margaret”. Many models have a hard time keeping their eyes open. That doesn’t matter so much when you are concentrating on painting or drawing a figure, but it becomes mighty exasperating if you are doing a portrait.

Oh, the Hair

You are supposed to hear the title of this drawing with the same inflection as the newsman lamenting the Hindenburg disaster. (Oh, the humanity!) Not implying the hair is a disaster. Au contraire (Tony, I like to do the French thing too), the hair is wonderful but daunting. of course, in 20 minutes I could only suggest the presence of masses of hair and perhaps that is just as well.

Daydreamer

Ok, this is cheating a little. But there is more head there than body.

DSC_0605 - Version 2

Here is another example of the three colors, and another, real cheat–this is a zoom in on the head to make it fit within the topic. Here is the whole drawing:

Can you tell that she is pregnant?

This is an example of going against the measurements. Her chin and jaw as observed came across as too manly. I think it was an effect of the angle. I shaved it back to make her look more like herself.

While these heads are not all pleasing me, at least I have learned to get matching eyes. Mostly. Eyes are difficult because there are two of them. Both should be about the same distance from the nose and on the same horizontal level. Both should be the same shape. But usually you are observing them from a 3/4 perspective. One eye is farther away and on the other side of the nose. Its size, shape and position is greatly affected that that. Cookie cutter eyes don’t work. Picasso was on to something when he painted eyes from two entirely different perspectives.

19533_00_picasso_woman

Picasso’s “Woman Seated in a Chair” is in the collection of the Currier Museum of Art, here in Manchester. Since becoming a docent there, I have come to appreciate this piece more than before.

I am 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 Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester; at the Manchester office of Congresswoman Carol Shea Porter; at the McGowan Gallery in Concord–the all-too-short exhibit of “Love, Lust and Desire” in which both sizes and prices are severely limited; and at her studio by appointment (email: alotter@mac.com).

Two Works Progressing

Posted by Aline on January 27, 2014

I painted a second layer on my Oscar Night piece entitled “Illustrating Heroic Effort”. I tackled it intending only to tinker with the background, but the figure jumped under my brush. Also, I thought I should let you know a little secret: that painting does not come in the horizontal shape that I shared with you last week. My composition required that horizontal format, but I didn’t want to use a large, expensive, stretched canvases for this short-term-gratification project, and I didn’t want to buy a custom frame for it. My solution was to center the action on a 12×16 canvas and paint black voids at top and bottom so that the illustrated part looks as if it is coming to you via TV, where the wide-screen movies are presented with black bands top and bottom.

Oscar Night phase 2

Here, for the sake of comparison, is phase 1:

Illustrating Heroic Effort

The biggest change that I have made to Version 2 is the darkened background. Peter Granucci has taught me that every well-designed painting is either mostly light, or mostly dark. I was having trouble deciding which way I wanted to go with this one. Version 1 is the mostly light version, with the dark accents (also necessary) being the shadow side of the figure. This version 2 is a mostly dark version, with the highlights (again necessary) being the lit side of the figure. However, the sky and ocean are also light. Too much light perhaps, for a mostly dark painting. I’m leaning toward returning to mostly light. I think the black voids on top and bottom go better with the higher key value scheme.

After painting this layer, I received belated but good advice from Cameron Bennett, who, as an illustrator himself (which I had forgotten because all the courses I took with him were for doing portraits), took an interest in my ruminations re illustration vs. Fine Art.

Oops! That term “Fine Art” beacons me down a detour that I eschewed last week but can no longer suppress (what? you never mixed a metaphor?): so many terms used in the field of art are terms that sound generalized but that have come down to us with meanings very specific. Fine Art is not art that is lovely or “fine” but something that is created to be sold in an art gallery or be exhibited in an art museum. A lot of it is not lovely. “Genre” usually would mean a “kind” or “category” of painting; instead, it refers to a specific subject matter (ordinary people and places, daily life) for painting. “Modern Art” doesn’t mean art that is modern, in the sense of being made today–not even in the sense of breaking away from classical traditions; Modern Art refers to a specific collection of nonrepresentational art made between 1900 and 1950, give or take. (“Nonrepresentational” means, at least as I am using it here, without attempt or desire to accurately represent reality.) “Contemporary Art” used to mean art that is made by living artists, but now it excludes representational art and includes dead artists, and is working its way toward meaning the nonrepresentational art of the period between 1950 and . . . ? I wonder if this sort of morphing of general terms into terms of art (pun slightly intended) occurs in other fields as well. I can’t think of any in the field of law.

Anyway, Cameron gave me some specific suggestions that I hope to implement before my annual Florida trip (next week). Mainly, the hands are not sufficiently suggestive of motion. It just looks like I can’t paint hands. (Maybe I should insert well-painted hands in a box in the corner so as to squelch that impression.) Version 2 might be a little better in this regard. The increased blurriness just happened when I painted the new background over the hands.

My other Work in Progress is actually no longer in progress, but I have the in-progress photo to show you where I was with it at midpoint. This was a two-session pose, so I chose a larger canvas (20×16) for it.

Soft Treatment wip

At this point, I was intending to paint the pattern on the coverlet and was also prepared to fuss quite a bit with the yellow drape.

Formalism with Becky

By the following week, I had lost interest in the coverlet and had become more concerned with unifying the color scheme. So I slashed ruthlessly at the drapings.

I never did get around to painting the left side of the (unstretched) canvas. I can cut away those two inches, but if I do, I’ll have to saw down a panel to mount it on and order a custom-sized frame for it. I’m not sure it’s worthy of that much respect. If only the facial expression hadn’t turned out to be so snarky!

Here’s how it would look as a 12×16:

Cropped Version

Strangely, I find I miss that slashed coverlet treatment, which probably demonstrates how schizoid I am between classical representation and modernistic suggestion-of-reality representation.

Thank you for listening to me work this all out. I see now that what I need to do is fix that snarky expression and then reevaluate the amount of respect due this painting.

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 Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester; at the Manchester office of Congresswoman Carol Shea Porter; and at her studio by appointment (email: alotter@mac.com).

Pussycats and Ignudi

Posted by Aline on January 14, 2014

Fur. Final 20×16

I finally “finished” (I had to stop fussing with it because deadline to submit was Friday) Fur. Note the size of the painting–it is much bigger than life. I’m pleased with its furriness, and proud of the gold heart locket which I dreamed up without any help from a reference photo. Now, cross your fingers in the hope that the juror for this exhibit, Eric Aho, isn’t a dogs-only lover, and isn’t allergic to cats (but I am, so that’s not determinative).

I don’t often create something specific in response to a call for art, but in the case of Purr, oops, I meant Furr, I like to think the Call for Art got me thinking, which led to the inspiration to paint this particular picture. The title and theme is “LOVE”, and the juror is an abstract landscape artist whom I greatly admire, which made me stop and consider the possibilities. The idea of Love led, of course, immediately to the idea of Cats, and thence to the idea of the fur that makes cats so lovable. To tie more unmistakably into the exhibit theme(as if that mattered!), I included the heart locket. The claw showing at bottom left is my acknowledgement of the unpredictable and imperious nature of Cat, whose soft furriness conceals a weapon to punish whoever fails to give proper respect. All that thought, but the result is likely to be yet another canvas stashed away in a portfolio. That doesn’t matter. What matters is, I painted. I submitted. I tried.

Our model for Tuesday Life Group showed up armed with thumbnail reproductions of Michelangelo’s paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, from which selection we were to choose a pose. The pose we chose was one of the twelve naked, male figures lounging in the corners of each of the three major sections. Before going any further, I’d better show you the drawing that resulted:

After Michelangelo Ignudi

We were puzzled by the wreath—an item I associated more with Roman emperors than with Christian iconography. On a whim, I included it in my drawing, and was pleased with the effect–it added interest and weight to the top of the page, but I didn’t believe that had been Michelangelo’s purpose in so adorning these particular figures. So I was off to Wikipedia to find the explanation. Turns out the wreaths are acorn wreaths, and the figures wearing the wreaths are called “Ignudi”. And that’s it. No more knowledge to be had. There is a suggestion that they could be angels; angels don’t necessarily come equipped with wings. As for what the Ignudi were doing in the corners, I bet they are purely decorative. Those corners would have looked “naked” without the Ignudi. According to Wikipedia, the painting of the Ignudi demonstrates, more than any other figures on the ceiling, Michelangelo’s mastery of anatomy and foreshortening and his enormous powers of invention. So there you are–he was showing off. Not so different from the reason I included the wreath in my drawing.

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 Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester; at the Manchester office of Congresswoman Carol Shea Porter; and at her studio by appointment (email: alotter@mac.com).

Sublime to . . . .

Posted by Aline on December 30, 2013

Rebecca in Silhouette

It probably looks as if I am obsessed with shadows, but there was another reason (excuse?) for me ending back on the shadow side of Rebecca last Friday. I thought we were going to have seven artists crowded in the East Colony studio, so I set up in the far corner. It didn’t hurt that I was next to an electrical outlet (hot water teapot and easel light). And with my recent interest in the abstract, how awful could it be to gaze directly into the light?

The bluish structure in the background is a big ladder on which we clipped the spotlight. Remembering how Assael dramatized his nudes, with red spotlights, I pretended my spot was orangish. I give myself a pass on the likeness because of the difficulty in seeing into the shadow against the light. I like it a lot, so it is Sublime.

Fur (wip)

. . . Ridiculous? This is phase two of the Love project that I described two weeks ago (here). I don’t really have a plan for finishing it. I will keep playing with it until I am satisfied or until I have made a mess of it. Right now we need some whiskers to punctuate the fur, and the heart-shaped locket could be improved. Maybe a catchlight in the eye that is showing? It does live up to its title, I hope.

Not much else in the way of art making got accomplished. Christmas was a wonderful surprise, with all my family together for our big breakfast, an event which not even an abscessed tooth could ruin. Today the tooth got taken care of, and I am still in recovery from that experience. Not that bad really, but a shock to the system. An excuse to goof off.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

Duality Continues

Posted by Aline on December 16, 2013

Before I get into certain issues involving the EEE class, check out these pretty decent likenesses I achieved using charcoal on Mi-Tientes pastel paper. First, from the Friday life group, here is Rebecca.

Portrait, Rebecca December 2013 (12×9)

I truly cannot count the number of times I have tried to do a portrait of Rebecca, with varying degrees of success. I posted a bunch of them in this blog (“A Month of Beckys”) about 7 months ago; over a year ago I included the very first one here in a blog titled simply “Becky”. Despite the annoying texture of the pastel paper (I chose the more highly textured side by mistake), the one I just completed is the best. That’s encouraging since it means I am still improving and have not yet hit my limit, if there is one.

My other likeness attempt came as part of the Saturday Life Group’s meeting. A popular male model whom we have not seen for many months was back in NH, and one pose gave me the opportunity to try for a likeness of his face. Looks pretty accurate to me, but I may be biased. Here are both of the longer poses from Saturday–the first one, as you will see, did not afford any view of the face–and I remembered to use the smoother side of the paper:

Mike No. 1

Mike No. 2

Drawing a man who is “ripped”, as they say, is a lot of fun, and just what we needed after so many months of rounded flesh.

Putting all that likeness stuff aside, we can get to the bigger issue: can Aline come up with a paintable abstract concept, and go on to paint it appealingly? Jury is still out, but hope has not stopped springing. The two that I am going to show you are both from the EEE class, of course. Thursday was our last class. Many of my classmates intend to take it again in the Spring. I, however, am putting my money on the Master Portrait Workshop with Dan Thompson and don’t feel I can afford the luxury of taking two courses in a single semester. But I stray from the main story: the EEE class adjourned halfway through our allotted time at the Institute to regroup at Bea’s place, to eat, drink, be merry, and critique each other’s works. First up was my now-familiar abstracted landscape evoking stained-glass windows and Monet. Patrick stood by his initial eval, but my classmates objected strenuously to the light-colored wedge, which they felt was distracting. Peter Clive was present as well, so I asked for his opinion. He advised repeating the wedge shape in the lower right corner. Classmates seemed happy with that solution. Therefore, on Sunday, after having endured a few restless nights trying to make sense of that advice, I dutifully inserted Wedge Minor into the masterpiece (please hear that with ironic inflection). This smaller echo remains as unexplained as the original Wedge Major. Fortunately, it being abstract, I didn’t have to justify it in terms of a representing a recognizable object. Most important, the new element has to blend into the scene as if it had always been there.

This is your first view of this piece as translated through my Nikon SLR, so this version looks better simply because of that. I had the devil of a time getting an image without glare inasmuch as I had ladled on the paint and parts of the painting will reflect glare no matter where you set up the light sources. My solution was to go with less light and increase “exposure” in the editing room. Details got lost, however. There are more of the red dots in the middle background, for instance.

My last EEE project, started Thursday after a lot of planning, is complicated. Shiao-Ping Wang presented a program at the recent meeting of the Manchester Artists Association, a program that I had, as program director, requested of her. “How do you translate an abstract concept into a work of art?” She showed us how she did it, explaining how her love of water became represented by a specific shape that she repeated in many inventive ways. A few days after that, I saw a call for art for an exhibit on the theme “Love”, to be juried by Eric Aho, an abstract landscape artist whom I admire. Here is a short video with Eric, which gives you an idea of what he does as an abstract landscape painter. Because of the juror and because of Shaio Ping, I decided to make an abstract painting for the show, based on something I love, namely, cats. And fur is what I particularly love about cats. Patrick had shown me years ago his painting of white chickens using a brayer instead of a brush. The breasts of those chickens looked unbelievably soft and downy. So what I intend to make is a painting about cats, using furriness as the symbol and perhaps deploying a brayer in my quest for irresistible texture. But yet another influence out of the Contemporary Gallery of the Currier Museum led me to plan a hidden image of a larger-than-life cat face in the background of my abstract, furry foreground. So far, I have completed only that background. I have to let it dry now, before attempting the more difficult task of layering on the furriness without totally obliterating the face.

Love and Fur WIP (20×16)

(By the way, as the party was breaking up, Patrick told me that I had all of the other aspects of art making under control–I just needed more help with the conceptual aspects–advice that suggests I should reconsider my decision to take the portrait workshop instead of another dose of EEE. )

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

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:

Just One Thing

Posted by Aline on December 4, 2013

I went a whole week without painting! That made me feel disconnected somehow, as if I had landed on some strange, new level of existence. But I got other stuff done, stuff that needed to get done. And there was Thanksgiving. No problem there–went to my son’s house to get stuffed and was not allowed to bring even one dish. I had to “sit” the gallery for East Colony the day before Thanksgiving, during which I read parts of some art books. I never get around to finishing books anymore. And I copied some Van Gogh drawings out of one of the books. On Friday I went to a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert–Brahms and Beethoven, an unbeatably enjoyable combo, enjoyed that day by probably the oldest audience I have ever seen there for the Friday matinee–younger folks were apparently out Black-Friday shopping. Saturday, East Colony held its annual holiday gift sale, for which I contributed 6×6 panels, and someone finally bought “Toughie”. (When I created Toughie for the Womens Caucus for Art show a few years ago, I thought Toughie would be gobbled up by the first person to lay eyes on it.) Forgot who Toughie is? Here’s a reminder:

Toughie

But all week I was thinking about finishing the painting of Margaret that I started last week (link here), and yesterday morning I got to do that. Yesterday morning, the painting already looked so very close to being done that my fellow artists asked me what I was going to do with the rest of 3 hours. “Bask”, I replied. But as it turned out, I had no extra time for basking. I worked slowly and carefully and painstakingly to reach this conclusion:

Margaret and her Nook

The background needs cleaning up, especially around the head, where my habit of correcting the drawing by painting the negative space is revealed. After working on this painting, I understand too well why my slap-dash works had to be called “studies”. Should I strive to become a more polished painter, or may I return to striving to become looser? Can I do both? Talk about being of two minds! I am torn in two.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

The Ghost of Steven Assael

Posted by Aline on November 26, 2013

Actually, Steven Assael still lives, but his spirit visited me this morning. You may remember how impressed I was by him in the course of a workshop that I took last summer. I was impressed and frustrated. Read all about it here. This morning, at our regular meeting of the Tuesday Life Group, I felt as if I had, for the very first time, successfully applied his method for painting a nude, and boy! did it feel good! Not all of the painting is a success . . . yet. Our model will be giving us another session next week in the same pose. But I am so thrilled with this start that I had to share it with you. While I was still in the act of painting, I wanted to shout out to the room for the other artists to gather around and see what I was accomplishing. Here is the image:

Margaret and her Nook WIP

The big deal here is the quality of the skin, especially on her back. The key technique: I feathered it with the fan brush that I acquired for the Assael workshop but never got around to using because I never got this close to finishing. My heretofore preferred way of painting nudes is more impressionistic. Perhaps the only significant difference is a simple one: Assael feathers his brushstrokes on the skin; my Impressionistic style favors obvious unmodulated brush strokes. I guess it has taken me several months to let go of my old conceit and actually try to create the kind of glow achieved by Assael. To see what he did as a demo for us, click here. This new painting method may not represent a permanent new me, but it is something that fascinates me, and offers new challenges for painting nudes. Keeps it interesting!

And on another track, way off to the side of the above:–my exploration of abstract landscapes. Here is a Work in Progress:

Imaginary Elements WIP

Here is the finished painting: (I need to know what you think–then next week I will report on the class’s reaction.)

Imaginary Elements

Here is another start on something, another abstracted landscape I guess. I’m thinking it would make interesting wallpaper at this point, so I have to dig down and find a more compelling reason for it to continue in existence.

The Start of Something

Remember how I bellyached about not have having any photographic record of all my Blackstone Valley paintings? One of my buyers came through with an image of the Castle Hill painting that they purchased.

Castle Hill

This is a fairly accurately rendered painting of funky farm buildings located in Whitinsville, Massachusetts. I think the stone wall stole the show. The wall was built by hand by men employed by the landowner to keep them busy (and earning money) during the Great Depression. The funky buildings resulted from the same impulse, I believe.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

Only People

Posted by Aline on November 19, 2013

I am still trying to paint an abstract landscape in the EEE class, but the current effort is kind of a mess and I left it behind to dry in the classroom. Fresh eyes this Thursday will, I hope, inspire me with what to do to make it something I can be proud of.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working hard on the figurative side of representational art. Some nude, some clothed, some full figure, some portrait. I am happier with the the painted ones, but I’ll start you off with the drawings –selected drawings. Some of them are disappointing and I don’t want the world to see how uninspired I can be. Here’s my favorite:

Map of the Back

Graphite, charcoal pencil and charcoal on drawing paper–not an ideal combination. I was feeling my way with the media. But I like the result moderately well. The next pose was a standing one, with the model’s head silhouetted against the bright window. Hard to see well enough to represent. I tried, but am sparing you the result. We (the Saturday Life Group which meets at the NH Institute of Art) are now drawing in a studio with side windows, instead of the studio with the overhead skylight. I prefer the side light, but it’s hard to take when it’s in your face.

Grumpy takes a cup of tea

“Grumpy” because he prefers to pose in the nude plus he can’t really enjoy that tea while posing. We promise not to make him keep his clothes on again.

Dennis in his clothes

It was cold in the studio that day, so we had to let Dennis stay dressed. He was happy about that.

Map of a different back

Mike is a new to us, relocated here temporarily from California. He’s a real pro, when it comes to modeling–comfortable and inventive with his props, like the pole and the “stool” he was sitting on. For the next pose, I chose to draw a portrait of him:

Portrait of Mike D.

At last, we’ve reached the paintings! There are two of them, both painted in the workshop studio behind East Colony Fine Art’s gallery. The challenge again is the lighting, but not from windows–either there’s too much fluorescent overhead, or you can’t see what you are doing. We are wising up and bringing task lights that clip on easels, or hang around artists’ necks.

Leaning against the wall

Challenging circulation

Well, that’s a stupid name for a painting. Sigh. Yes. Do you know how hard it is to distinguish one nude (painting) from another by its title? So many nudes, so many standing, so many sitting, so many reclining. Then you try identifying by the color of the drape. So many blues, so many reds, so many yellows, etc., etc. The major distinguishing feature of the last painting was the fact that Margaret’s leg kept falling asleep. Of course it did–what else could we have expected? But that became my idea for a title.

The first one is of a new model and I’m not sure she would be comfortable with being identified by name, which makes titling the painting even harder. The elements of this painting just came together so beautifully, and I quit working on it before I spoiled it. Always a good thing.

Both paintings were done in oil, on the brown carton paper sold by Judson’s Fine Art Outfitters, with very little medium. Does it appear to you as if I were working in pastels, not oils? I think it’s that combination of the dry paper with the unmodified paint. The paint drags across the surface of the paper. When you stop to think about it, that’s what pastels are: pigments without the oil binder. So when the paper soaks up the oil and leaves the pigment sitting on top, you get the pastel effect.

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:

Health Matters, yes it does!

Posted by Aline on October 14, 2013

You may not have noticed, but I did not publish my usual post the week of September 30, or the week of October 7. Before Friday evening, I had been drafting a post in my head; I planned to use it to mull over the phenomenon of retirement generating more “optional” stuff to do and the psychology of slowing down anyway just because the pressure of earning a living has been lifted. Thinking philosophically or finding excuses, whichever you prefer.

But before I could commit those weak ramblings to the ether, an event occurred that provides a better explanation of my inability to perform at peak levels for the past weeks–perhaps the past few months, even. Unsurprisingly, I am all over that new, more concrete excuse, like a rat diving on cheese, and say in celebration, hail to the UTI and its curability with antibiotics.

How it all went down: I had been feeling kinda crummy for a few days, and even had a spell of faintness, but nothing interfered with my performance of essential tasks. I got to appointments, shopped for pet food, cooked, etc. Suddenly, late Friday afternoon, in the middle of trying to reconcile a bank deposit for one of my nonprofit organizations, I started to feel really chilly. I suspended that banking task and went to prepare an early dinner. I turned on the central heat and plugged in a space heater. I kept getting colder. By the time my hamburgers were ready to be served, perhaps only ten minutes, I was shaking uncontrollably–paroxysms might be the right word. I couldn’t talk, much less drive. Ambulance was called–by my 17-year-old granddaughter. Big scare put into family. Not so much me– I could not focus on anything except my desire to get warm. After a few hours of hydrating and testing in the ER, Good News! I was in terrific health but for this one thing, a UTI (urinary tract infection), curable with the right antibiotic (Cipro). The doctor said something about the infection being well-established, suggesting it had been present in my system for a while. That got me thinking of a health event that occurred on my way to Castine, back in July, which I could not explain. I looked up the symptoms (vomiting with lower back pain), but didn’t follow up with my doctor because the symptoms evaporated.

This morning I was infused with a microburst of energy, which resulted in the images that I will be sharing with you below. In the past three weeks, I have been more prolific than would appear from this meager supply of five images. The weekend of the Blackstone Valley Plein Air Competition resulted in four paintings. I forgot to photograph any of them, and had to leave them there for another month. One has been sold, and if the other three are too, we shall be at the mercy of the buyers for decent reproductions. It was a marvelous weekend, and I will go again next year if invited. I’ll save the details for when I actually have visuals to go along. Two additional paintings are at the Institute, drying. They are from my fall semester class with Patrick McCay, called “Explore, Express, Exploit”. They should be ready for photographing next week.

Here is the painting I made of Dennis on the Tuesday before Blackstone Valley:

Dennis in Plaid Shirt

I complained a lot about the plaid shirt, but I secretly was enjoying the challenge. Looking at it now, from a new perspective, I admire the casual but effective depiction of his feet.

After Blackstone, I hit the ground running. Well, painting. I met up with the Cornwall Four (including me, four of us who took Cameron Bennett’s “Inspired by Cornwall” workshop in August) at a new water location in Auburn. I identified it today from a map as Clark Pond:

Clark Pond in Auburn

The scene had everything–almost too much–bridge, the start of fall foliage, water, reflections, lily pads. Yet I added the rock formations on the left; really, they added themselves. The lily pads raft together to form little islands, which may confuse the eye. One of the first lessons that I learned in my first landscape painting experience, from Stanley Moeller in 2005, had to do with water lilies. He told me to underline them with “black” (darkest of pigment, which was not necessarily black) to indicate the shadow they cast upon the water. I couldn’t see but the thinnest of shadows, but he said “Trust me” and I did. And do. Still heeding his advice, I added the most delicate and unobtrusive of shadows under my pads. This painting came under critical review by Peter Clive last Monday at MAA and when I am more of myself, I will be making some perfecting changes–playing down the reflections of tree trunks in the water; playing up the light on the rocks and bridge; settling down the water on the other side of the bridge, which doesn’t recede like it should.

The next day being Tuesday, I did a figurative of new model (to us) Michael, but I don’t like it, so I’m not showing it to you. Wednesday, I was back to Clark Pond:

Clark Pond in Auburn

What a difference two days made! We have liftoff! (Fall foliage is a Big Deal here, where tourists flock jus to stare at our trees. How strange is that?)

Margaret

I wasn’t feeling too great last Tuesday, when I painted this new figurative featuring Margaret. I get a lot of kidding about how fast I paint, so Tuesday, someone commented that I wasn’t going as fast as usual. I felt that too, and hoped the slowing down was for the better. I concentrated on the flesh tones, trying to get them just so, a la Steve Assael. Now I’m wondering if it was just the UTI manifesting itself in sluggish behavior.

Friday morning we got together in the back of East Colony Fine Art Gallery to try it out as a location for figure study. The podium is quite high since it started life as a work table. The lighting is abominable since it consists of fluorescents over a worktable. But there was room enough for my core group of artists, and plenty of easels. Along with Margaret posing nude, my daughter Nancy posed clothed. Nancy was “shadowing” Margaret to see if modeling is something she could do. Naturally, I chose to paint Nancy:

My Daughter Nancy

Another plaid shirt. She has my mother’s admirably straight nose. We had the fluorescents off and a small spotlight on our models.

That night, of course, was the night of the ER, and I have been recovering ever since. Now that I know what symptoms I should have noticed before, I am noticing them, but my fatigue should never have been overlookable. I suspect the paroxysms of shivering took a lot out of me. On the bright side, the back pain I have been putting up with for weeks has subsided–not arthritis after all!

Bottom line, I have been shirking all but the most imperative of duties. One of those duties: I took upon myself a viewing of “Gravity” 3D on the iMax screen. I heard it should not be viewed any other way, and I was worried I would miss out if I didn’t act today. I can now report that the advice was justified, and worth the prioritizing.

The rest of this week will be taken up with Tuesday Life Group, trip to Boston to collect my painting at the Arboretum, and bridge–all on Tuesday, Adrienne’s Fall Figure Marathon all day Wednesday, docent training at the Currier and my Triple E class with Patrick, Thursday, then a drive to Bartlett for the 3-day Fall Artists’ Getaway Weekend. Glad I found out what ails me before all that went down!

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

The Heck with Nudes!

Posted by Aline on September 17, 2013

Who would’ve thunk it? We got bored with nudes! So last Tuesday, we asked our model to keep his clothes on, and he was very happy to do so, being very new to the experience of modeling in the buff. We all had a really good time, and we all produced pieces that we are proud of. So I decided it was time for another sharing of my blog with my fellow artists.

Nancy C’s

Nancy Crowley works most often in charcoal, and most often will do the whole figure. We were surprised to see she was focusing so much on the head. I love the blocking of light and shadow in this one.

Jan’s

Jan Wittmer joined us very recently and has become a regular, but I can’t say I know what she usually does. I thought this was brilliant though. I learned later that this was her second take on this pose, which may account for the fact that it is not overworked.

Nancy H’s

Nancy Healy is a pastelist, and probably the one of us with the most experience being an artist. She always does masterful work. You can tell she is standing at her easel.

My own

This is the photo that I took with my phone, so I am not giving my image any advantage over the others. Actually, it is at a disadvantage, being the only one in oils and therefore the only one with light bouncing off the globs of oil paint. Ah, well. You can tell I was sitting at my easel.

Invitations:

I had two event postcards to get out before this week, and got around to neither of them. Coming up on Friday of this week (September 20) is the reception at the Boston Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway, of the Jamaica Plain Open Studio exhibition of “Artists in the Arboretum”. The reception is in the Visitors Center and starts at 6 pm and ends at 8. I will be there, but cannot promise to stay until 8 unless the food and company is particularly good. The exhibit will continue through October 13, and you should confirm viewing times by calling 617-384-5209.

The second one is a “Call for Collectors and Art Enthusiasts”: Blackstone Valley Plein Air Competition. There will be a reception and an auction on Sunday, September 29 at 6 p.m. The judge for the competition (known as a “juror” in art parlance) is the well known Cape Ann artist, Charles Movalli. The competing artists are outstanding, and I guess I just feel grateful to be included. Bev Belanger, of East Colony Fine Art Gallery, is also participating. I should be scared to death, but I’m too old to get worked up over such things. I think. It would be awfully nice to see some familiar faces or names. The address for the reception and auction: Alternatives’ Whitin Mill, 50 Douglas Road, Whitinsville, Massachusetts.

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 Stella Blu, an American Tapas restaurant in Nashua; at the law offices of Mesmer and Deleault at 41 Brook St in Manchester; the East End Art Gallery in Riverhead, Long Island; at the Manchester office of Congresswoman Carol Shea Porter; at the Boston Arboretum Visitor Center, 25 Arborway, Boston; and at her studio by appointment.

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