Summer Shack

I am almost finished with the painting that I started two weekends ago. I worked on it last weekend a bit, and this weekend I only had one day to paint and I painted non-stop for 8 hours (after I did my required 1.5 hour procrastination). That is what is so great about painting - I get totally lost in what I'm doing and time goes by unnoticed. Impossible for me to think about anything but what I'm working on.

My So Called House
Oil on 9x12 Canvas

There are a few things I still want to do - break up the cast shadow in the foreground so it doesn't look like a big triangle, darken the front shadow on the house, straighten the basement door and do a couple of things on the trees in the upper left. I also think I'm going to connect the light sections of the leafy tree on the right. I may put the rungs in the porch railing - I needed it to dry a little so it didn't get all muddy.

Working from one side of the painting to the other worked well for me because I was able to keep control of the color and not get all confused like I usually do. I'm pretty excited about this painting because I finally "got" some stuff that I've been trying to do for so long - simplifying the color shapes, minimal blending, and capturing light.  I also left out stuff that I didn't think worked in the composition. That was one of the things my painting teacher kept telling me last year - just because its there, doesn't mean you have to paint it.

The giant palette was really fun - (in the previous post I talked about Karin Jurick's recommendations). My favorites were radiant lemon, radiant white, indigo blue, portland grey medium, violet grey, horizon blue - the coolest colors that really made a difference for me. Also used cobalt blue for the first time which is an awesome color and one that I see on lots of other artist's palettes.

A new approach - Karin Jurick style

I'm taking a workshop in May and I received the supply list a couple of weeks ago. The artist teaching the class, Karen Jurick, has a list of paints that must be at least 30 tubes. I was missing many of the colors she requires so I ordered a whole bunch of new paint that came on Friday - 24 tubes.

This weekend I decided to try to use some of the new, very cool colors. Colors like "radiant lemon" and "violet grey". I was nervous because normally I keep my palette very small so I don't get confused. For example last week's raft painting used only 5 colors and I mixed what I needed from those. I found a video where she lays out her palette and it is amazing how many colors she uses.

This is an example from her Painting a Day blog :

Everything she does breaks all the rules from all the books I've read, and from what I was taught in last year's painting class. Not only does almost every book say use a limited palette - red, blue, yellow, white - with 2 of each (warm and cool) and a couple of earth tones - I've also been taught that you should  work the entire painting evenly. The rule is to move all over the canvas and not focus in one area.

Karin breaks those rules. I found a demo of her painting technique .She sketched out her scene and then began filling it in. Her sense of color and light is incredible and she seems to just understand the value she needs automatically. If you're interested take a look at her from the link above- I love her brush work and color.

This weekend I used a big palette and tried her method of painting from one side of the canvas to the other. I didn't sketch out the whole composition first, I just focused on making sure that the cottage was accurately drawn because of the perspective challenge. I also didn't paint on a dark ground as she does - I'll try that on the next one.

So far so good. I thought all the colors and the method of painting from one side to the other would screw me up, but it is working out pretty well. This is a painting of my house and is about 9x12. I'm only half-way done but I like where its going. The only negative is that I wanted to keep painting and I have to go to work tomorrow! The photo makes the colors a little too yellow and the contrast is too severe,  but otherwise it is pretty accurate. I will finish covering the canvas and then I will go back to deal with the light and shadow.

A Yellow Raft on Blue Water

Michael Dorris wrote a wonderful book "A Yellow Raft on Blue Water" that I read a long time ago. This painting makes me think of that, and it makes me sad. Michael Dorris was a great writer but a very tormented man - married to and then divorced from Louise Erdrich. He had a sad life - as a single guy he adopted Native American kids, and then learned they all had fetal alcohol syndrome. One was hit by a car and died. Later one of his other kids accused him of sexual abuse, and he killed himself in 1997.

So now that I've cheered you up with that lovely tale...

This is a painting of a raft on Long Sought For Pond (the greatest name for a pond EVER). It is another small one - 4x6 and painted on gessoed watercolor paper - and it was a quick one to warm up.   I may do another one on canvas and a bit bigger and see if I can do a better job on the water.

Teeny Tiny Paintings

This weekend was open studios at WAS. I don't open to sell anymore - or at least for the next 6 months or so. My door is open periodically throughout the day just so I don't seem completely anti-social but I do find the whole open studios thing incredibly distracting. It is busy and loud and its hard for me to focus so this weekend, instead of working on the big flower painting,  I painted 2 small paintings. And I mean really small - 2.5 x 3 inches. I took a picture with a pen as reference so you could see how small they really are.

 It was a lot of fun. I felt no pressure at all, I could do it with people milling around and talking and it was so satifying! I did one of the tulip vase and another of some peaches. The peach painting is a small version of one I did last fall.

That was Saturday, then today I did a couple of small paintings from my imagination so I could relax and enjoy the paint. So much fun!!

All and all it was great painting weekend. Which is bizarre to me, because I was not in a very good mood - the day job unfortunately was getting in the way.  But at the end of the weekend I remembered why I took the job in the first place and things were put back in perspective. Strange how the cosmos take care of you, isn't it?

Painting in Progress - Will It Survive the Wrath of the Frustrated Painter?

On my easel now. I started it a couple of Sundays ago and then put it down. The tulips are dead now of course. When you can only paint on weekends and maybe an occasional midweek-after-work-session, painting from "life" or at least "alive" is tough. I took a photo though - can't believe I remembered to do that - so I am now finishing it from the photo. I worked on it on Sunday afternoon and so far so good but who knows if it will survive to any kind of finished state.

Weekend only painting is a challenge. It takes a while to get warmed up to painting and I usually hit my stride Sunday afternoon just in time to wrap up for the weekend. Of course, having the attention span of a small child does tend to get in the way. My typical painting weekend day goes like this (aka, a day in the life of the ADD artist):

• Midnight Friday night:  "I'm going to get up really early  tomorrow and get to the studio by 8:30".
• 8:00 AM, roll out of bed, "Ok, grab something to eat and get to the studio"
• 9:00 AM: Still on couch after reading the last of nine "Real Simple" magazine articles, reach for the laptop to check Facebook "for a minute".
• 10:30 AM: After my 104th game of Bedazzled, my 15 year old son emerges from his dark, odoriferous cave and stumbles into the bathroom. I look at the clock and say "crap, I need to take a shower".
• 11:15 AM: throw a load in the washer, and, while folding the wrinkled mess of a load that has been in the dryer since last Sunday,  look at the clock and say "crap, I need to take a shower".
• 11:45 AM: back on my laptop. My son stumbles scowling through the living room on his way out of the shower, I look at the clock and say "crap, what the hell am I doing, I need to take a shower"
• 1:00 PM: in the car finally, on my way to the studio and drive by the junk store that holds all the interesting junky future still life items so I "just stop in for a minute"
• 1:45 PM: back in the car on my way to the studio after wandering aimlessly for 45 minutes in a store filled with ugly, useless junk and purchasing one plate for $3.
• 1:55 PM: SUCCESS - actually pull into the studio parking lot.
• 2:40 PM: only made it to the 3rd floor (I'm on the 5th) and in the third studio I've stopped into "for a minute" on my way to my studio.
• 3:00 PM: SUCCESS #2 (have to grab these little successes) finally in my studio." *deep sigh* I LOVE this little studio".
• 3:02 PM: Looking at the painting I left last Sunday and either thinking "Hmmm, this isn't so bad after all" or "OMG, what a piece of @#$@"
• 4:05 PM: after deciding that the 5' high bookshelf really should be on the other side of the room, moving it without actually taking anything off of it because I know I can move it without anything falling off, and picking up the half-dead Christmas cactus and broken harlequin teacup that I've had since 1977 (teacup not plant) that fell of the bookcase while moving it, I begin putting paint on my palette.
• 5:00 PM: Painting painting painting, painting, painting
• 9:15 PM: "OMG - how did it get to be 9:15 already? I just got here. Damn, I just don't have enough time to paint". Clean my brushes, hang up my apron, close the door, descend the five flights, get in the car, go home, eat, have a glass of wine, watch DVR'd "One Life to Live".
• Midnight Saturday night: "I'm going to get up really early tomorrow and get to the studio by 8:30".