I’m honored to have been selected again for inclusion in the second annual Hill Center Regional Juried Exhibition. The judge this year is Philip Kennicott, Art and Architecture Critic for The Washington Post. Here’s my painting, one of 65 works selected from over 450 works submitted by almost 100 artists. I must admit – I was surprised!
Blazing Canal. Gouache on Paper.
Beautiful Memorial Day weekend, leisurely breakfast at the kitchen table, spotting a bird flitting away from the weeping cherry next door. Just had to do a quick celebratory iPad painting of the tree — now decked out in its full greens, beautifully offset by the juicy dark shadows under the flowing branches. Have a good, peaceful and remembering weekend.
Weeping Cherry. original iPad painting.
Yesterday I read an interesting post by Daniel Gerhartz about the hubris of ‘needing’ to paint a grandiose image, while neglecting the “profound, staggering elegance of the subject right before my eyes”.
matching trees and white clouds outside my window on a drowsy spring morning. original iPad painting.
He’s talking my walk. I love looking at everything in my path. Right before seeing Dan’s post I had been mentally composing an image based on the condiment bottles before me on the kitchen table.
The sunlight was falling ‘just so’ on the tops of their caps, making stair-steps of light down through the bottles shaded by the window will. It would make the perfect line drawing or a juicy value painting.
salt and pepper shakers, meeting their match in the napkin holder. original iPad painting.
And looking up and out the window I noticed that distant treetops were the same yellow-brown-green as my neighbor’s weeping cherry, now that its flowers had fallen. And gorgeous clouds were slowly sweeping across a strong blue sky.
In honor of Dan and the daily, I decided to grab my iPad and make a few sketches of the loveliness at my fingertips. I also took some pix of the stair stepping bottle tops — they deserve a painting on canvas!
stairs on my table.
With some of my 7Palettes friends, I’m studying plein air painting with Carol Rubin this Spring. Last week, it was too chilly to paint outdoors, so we made line drawings of a complex still life Carol had assembled. Here’s a ‘line drawing’ made of oil paints. Our warmup exercises follow.
hat, vases & vegetation. oil on canvas.
Two 30 second drawings.
bottle, pot & dried hydrangea. charcoal pencil on vellum.
hat and more. charcoal pencil on vellum.
A minute-long ‘continuous line’ drawing — made without taking the pencil off of the paper.
hat, pots & plants. charcoal pencil on vellum.
A ‘blind contour’ — made while keeping eyes on the object. NO looking at the paper! (Well, maybe we got to take three short peeks. . . .)
no looking at the scribblings?? only the objects??? charcoal on vellum.
And finally, as depicted above, we made complex line drawings in black paint and then brushed thick white paint over selected areas to ‘erase’ lines as needed to make the ‘drawing’ more accurate or more interesting. A fun day. I did more at home using my own props. Will post those next time.
I recently studied portrait painting with Bill Schneider. After he did a wonderful demo, Bill had us emulate Nicholai Fechin’s gorgeous ‘broken color’ style, by copying (on a larger scale, so we could practice our facial measuring skills) some Fechin portraits.
Fechin’s portrait (L) and my copy. oil on canvas.
First I copied one of Fechin’s beautiful women. And then this precious child.
Fechin’s portrait (L) & my copy. oil on canvas.
The next day we painted from a live model, attempting to apply the broken color method on our own. Quite a difference in beauty, eh? (Just keeping it real!)
Working toward Fechin’s ‘broken color’ in painting from life. oil on Arches oil paper.
I ended the weekend workshop with lots to practice and mull. Thanks, Bill!
Here’s another study (unfinished) that I did during that wonderful Maggie Siner workshop awhile back. Maggie wanted us to be very definite in matching colors and then put a big juicy stroke in the MIDDLE of the shape we were working on.
Terracotta Pot, White Cat & Dino on Pig-shaped Cutting Board. Unfinished. Oil on Linen.
Never put your first paint stroke next to an edge, she says, or you’ll be tempted to paint the object rather than the shape. Maggie gave us a wonderful motto to paint by: Great shapes, not great objects, make a good painting!
This exercise, much different from that showcased last time, reviewed key principles for a successful painting: make an interesting pattern of darks and lights — and join similar values wherever feasible. This painting may be a bit hard to suss out because many shapes were ‘lost’ in simplifying the scene into only three values. Notice how the highlight atop the left ‘spoon’ melts into the light background. And how the highlight on the short central spoon creates a strange form when linked by the mid-tone to the tall spoon handle immediately behind.
Spoons in a Pitcher + Mango + Spatula & Candle Holder. Oil.
The task here was to decide which of the many values in the still life set-up should be grouped into the limited value choices. Paint obvious ‘lightest lights’ with white and ‘darkest darks’ with raw umber. Then ask the trickier questions: where do all of those other values in the set-up belong — in the mid-tone gray or in one of the other options? Which grouping makes the stronger composition? Decide on your answers and paint the shapes accordingly, in smooth, flat value tones. No cake frosting this time!
I had fun painting color and value studies during a recent workshop with Maggie Siner, one of my favorite artists. None is a finished work but each represents a lesson learned or knowledge deepened — the whole point of workshops.
Red Kettle. oil. 2014.
The first exercise, above, demonstrated that an effective image can be made with a few simple shapes, painted in colors and values that show how the planes change within the composition. We also practiced how to mix yummy, true colors, testing their accuracy with a palette knife extended toward the target area of the still life set-up. And then, most fun of all, we got to slather our thick, juicy, correctly mixed paint all over our simple shapes with our palette knives, as if we were icing a cake. Yum.
Here’s an iPad painting of the Carousel at Glen Echo Park — a well tended Dentzel creation from 1921. I worked to photograph it in some motion a couple of years ago and tried to preserve that feeling in this digital version.
This is based on a photo of our front yard after our wonderful Japanese maple has done its Fall drop. It only lasts a day or so, but what a show!!
Maple Leave Fall. iPad.