New work to share! Here’s what’s on my easel, about to be signed. Sons Sam & Will, with their families, and Pat & I visited the Virginia side of Great Falls on the Potomac River last Christmas. I finally got around to making a studio painting of the magnificent scene!
I’m not great at landscapes, but I think I made real progress on this one!
Day 5 brings another experiment off my beaten path. We were told in a workshop to draw a wandering line around our canvas without looking — and then turn it one way and another to see what it might suggest. We developed and painted expressive compositions out of our simple lines. I like how this turned out. I imagined the figure on the right as a mother and the other figures her sons, heading outside. She’s saying ‘Be Safe, My Sons!’ Now she’d probably be saying: ‘WEAR YOUR MASKS — and be EXTRA CAREFUL!!’
For Day 4, here’s another recent painting — based on an early morning drive south of Half Moon Bay in California around Christmas. I loved how the masses were knit together in form and color by the nestling mist — and the interesting, barely-there trees out on the cliff point. I’m still ‘California Dreamin’. With this coronavirus stuff, I don’t know when I’ll be able to fly out there again. Road trip???
This is the second painting I entered in The Tonalist Society competition.
My Day 3 painting hearkens back to a trip to Havana a few years ago. This striking statue guards the ornate staircase of a decrepit mansion, now serving as home to a dozen families. We trekked up four floors to reach an avant garde ‘paladar’ (privately-owned restaurant permitted by the government in an experiment in capitalism). It was good, but not as memorable as this ‘Decayed Beauty’!
For day 2 of the challenge, I posted a more recent piece which includes some of those gorgeous pines(?) in downtown DC. I call it ‘Lighting a Candle’ . . .
A new art society was formed in the last year or so ~~ The Tonalist Society, which encourages and recognizes artists who work in a ‘tonalist’ style. As you can tell from earlier posts in this blog, I admire the work of Terry Miura and Marc Hanson who often paint in this style. I decided to enter two paintings in the first annual juried show. This is one of the two.
During my hiatus on the blog, I posted from time to time on Facebook, so I’m going to update my postings here to include that material ‘for the record’. A painting buddy challenged me to post seven paintings in seven days. Here’s what I offered for Day 1:
Challenge accepted. I’ll start with one that’s different from my usual style ~ some abstracted shells done in a class at the Yellow Barn last year.
Sometimes it’s fun to challenge yourself: can you make a painting in a very limited number of strokes? Say, 15? I decided to try it the other day. I placed three shells from my beach-combing stash on a sheet of paper and attacked, carefully plotting color and placement of each stroke. At 15, I was itching to do ‘just a few more’ to beef it up ‘just a bit’, but gritted my teeth and concluded the effort. Here it is, along with a snap of the shell subject.
In keeping with the spirit of the test, I made only a few light guidelines for size and placement, before constructing the design via ‘color-shapes’.
My most recent small painting features some bright cardinals showing off among their Plain Jane pals. It was based on photos taken last year. Our feeder is empty and there are few birds to watch now. (Our neighborhood has been encouraged not to use feeders so birds won’t gather and spread a new virus among themselves.)
For the artists who are reading, this painting was an experiment in “cmyk” colors — a very limited palette of cyan, magenta, yellow and black. This group of colors is used with great success in color printing, but it’s pretty rare to see it underpinning an oil painting or water-based art.
For this attempt, I used the closest hues in my paint stash: manganese phthalo, quinacridone violet, azo yellow and ivory black. I managed to mix everything in the painting without resorting to additional colors ~~ other than the male cardinals, for which I dipped into cad red. I can’t say I enjoyed the experience or like the outcome! I’m not sure whether I’ll try it again!
#22. Birds in the Backyard. Oil on Primed Arches Oil Paper. 8″ x 10″
We have some short native tulips in our yard that thrill us every spring. One of my recent 10″ x 8″ paintings features these beauties. . .
Red Tulips. Oil on Primed Arches Oil Paper. 10″ x 8″.
Lastest funny off the easel — in my occasional effort to humanize toothbrushes! Composition is a bit too busy but . . . it is what it is.
Toothiness 2 – NO, Mama, NO! Oil on Primed Arches Oil Paper. 8″x10″.