New Website for The Landscape Atelier

 

While I have been shockingly unproductive in the studio since the Lennox Woods Show opened on March 29, I have been busy teaching and doing lots of things that have needed to be done for a long time. Years, in fact, in some cases! One of those things was to create a stand alone site for The Landscape Atelier. It is still a work in progress but it's up, so click on over there for a visit!

Remarked Lennox Woods Catalogs

I have been having a great time this week filling orders for remarked catalogs, that is, Lennox Woods catalogs which include an original pen and ink drawing. Each one is different and includes a personal note. Click for larger view.

  If you would like one of your very own, click here.

The Lennox Woods film

I am still decompressing from the show and the week long workshop at our new Atelier space immediately afterwards, But I do want to share the final film which played at the opening in both venues. Allen Phillips did a great job!








The Ancient Forest from Archfern on Vimeo.

Lennox Woods Show Schedule

Only a few weeks away from the opening of Lennox Woods- The Ancient Forest. This project has been two years in the making and it is hard to believe we are almost at the finish line!

For those of you who are in the Dallas-Ft Worth area and plan to visit the show, here are some details. The show is in two venues- Galerie Kornye West and The Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT), both located in the Cultural District of Ft. Worth. March 29 is Spring Gallery Night, an annual event sponsored by the Ft Worth Art Dealers Association., so there will be other galleries hosting events as well. Spring Gallery Night runs from 12:00 noon to 9PM on March 29. The Lennox Woods show will open at noon at both venues.

I will be at the gallery from noon to about 5:30 and I will be giving two gallery talks, one at 2PM and the other around 3:30 PM. 

BRIT is hosting a member reception from 6-8 PM which the public is also invited to. I will be there from 6-8 PM and will be giving a talk at 6:30 PM.

The show will hang in both venues through May 8.

Catalogs (which include five essays about the Woods and the work, as well as color plates of most of the paintings ) will be available for sale at the opening and are also available for purchase here. A portion of the proceeds from catalog sales go to benefit the Red River County Historical Society.

You can read the Southwest Art Magazine article about the show here.

Hope to see you there!

Spring?

With cold temperatures and an ice storm just this week, it is hard to imagine that spring is just around the corner. But, it is!  So, it's time to start thinking about painting and drawing outdoors.  Field Sketching I and II  online classes are coming up in April and May, just in time to kick off a great season of work outdoors!  Working from Nature and direct observation is the time honored way to learn how to paint landscapes. Unfortunately, many aspiring landscape painters miss the essential first step: learning to draw and sketch in the field. If you are unable to draw the landscape you will have a much more difficult time learning to paint it convincingly.

Most classes and workshops jump into plein air painting without giving students any tools to make a success of their efforts. This course is designed to give you the tools to draw and sketch in the field with confidence, both improving your plein air paintings and leading to better, finished work in the studio. More information and registration are here.

                                                                        Spring Bouquet

                                                                   10 x 12

Lennox Woods Exhibition Catalog

I am happy to say the Lennox Woods Exhibition Catalog is now available! It contains 64 pages, with five essays about the history and ecology of the Woods and of course, the art. It also has over 40 images of drawings and paintings.

You can purchase the catalog here. 

Please note that the catalog will be available for shipping in mid March. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the catalog will benefit The Historical Society of Red River County.

Southwest Art Magazine Article

I am thrilled to say that the Southwest Art Magazine article is now out. It appears in the March issue. There is a link to the article below.

Link to Article

Sprint

Reflections on Winter

16 x 12

It's a sprint to the finish line! That's what I told a friend yesterday. Actually, it's more like a slow motion ant farm. With two ants (me and Steve).

I have a brand new online class starting at the end of February. This one is called Understanding Values in the Landscape. Value problems account for a lot of what goes wrong in painting. So, learning to sort out those pesky values is an essential part of learning to paint well. We'll cover Carlson's Theory of Angles of course. In addition, we will study how to create certain effects of light by careful attention to the value range or 'key'  which is used and how to compress the value range effectively from what is seen in Nature and what our materials are capable of producing. Students will learn the value ranges to use to create the illusion of a sunny day, an overcast day,  a foggy or rainy day, backlighting, patchy sunlight, nocturnes, etc. So, give yourself an early Valentines Day present, and sign up here!

News for the New Year

A Patch of Sunlight in a Wood

60 x 48

I am very excited to say that I will have a feature article in the March issue of Southwest Art Magazine. The article will include the work for the Lennox Woods show! After spending the last two years working on this project, it is very gratifying to have this happen at this time.

My schedule now is long days in the studio followed by dinner and returning in the evening. I have about five weeks to finish and there is still much to do.

Less Is Not Always More

 Whose Woods These Are

54 x 72

(click for larger view- pardon the homemade photography)

Sometimes it's just less. One of the great challenges of this project is to find a way to convey the Woods in a way that is authentic but still suggestive and full of mystery. And to do that in sizes ranging from 12 x 16 to 72 x 96.  In a 12 x 16 you can use one brushstroke to describe what requires a complicated passage in a larger work. But more importantly, you have to find the right balance between what Asher B Durand called imitation and representation. There are some things which can be imitated and some things that can only be represented (I would use the word suggested perhaps). The right balance is essential to capture a sense of place and yet retain the mystery and mood you want to convey. I wanted the paintings to look like the Woods without being literal portraits- to convey a palpable sense of what it feels to be in this place. That requires something more than suggestive generalization and less than simply copying what you see.

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas!

Spreadsheets. Really?

Illumination

48 x 64

(click for larger view)

Spreadsheets. Not a word I would have ever included on a list of things I might learn about over the course of working on my solo show. But, here I am two years later finding myself creating spreadsheets to keep track of and organize over forty paintings for the show.

The exhibition will hang in two separate venues (Galerie Kornye West and The Botanical Research Institute of Texas) and is organized around the theme of the four seasons in Lennox Woods. Early on, I worked out the number of pieces I would paint for each season and the size ranges and how many in each range, and roughly how many of each would hang in each venue.

As the work begin to take shape, other things needed to be kept track of- what pieces had been photographed, what was finished and what was work in progress, how many of each group still needed to be started, and the frame status for each piece.

Then, some pieces were sold and others left the studio for the gallery. Some pieces were varnished and others had not been (making it easier to work on them again if I wanted to).

When we started working on the catalog I needed to keep track of what information had been given to the designer of the catalog and what was still needed. And, of course, the deadlines to get the work finished, photographed, framed and delivered.

It turns out, spreadsheets are a great way to organize all that information in an easily accessible and organized way. Spreadsheets. Who knew?

What Might Have Been

What Might Have Been

48 x 40

(click for larger view)

Lennox Woods is a 300+ acre oasis of old growth forest surrounded by fields, pastures, third or fourth cut woods and pine plantations. Driving down the dirt road to its unassuming entrance one can immediately see the change in the landscape. The fact that the Woods exist today is because from the mid 19th century, the Lennox family preserved them, protected them from logging and then gave them to the Nature Conservancy to be protected in perpetuity. It could have all turned out very differently.

I thought a lot about all this while I worked in the Woods over the last two years. But, I also came to understand the idea of "what might have been" in much more personal terms. When I first came to the Woods I had certain ideas about how I would paint them. Although I spent several months just looking and drawing, I did have some preconceived ideas of how I would approach the work. Over time, many of those ideas dissolved and reformed into new ones- influenced both by the Woods themselves and the rhythm of my own life. Those things combined to produce a very different body of work than I would have produced in a shorter span of time or if my own life had not been upended in various ways during the process. I don't know what that work would have been like, but I feel confident that the body of work that I will exhibit this coming March will be stronger, better, and deeper. That is something else I learned in the Woods. 

What I learned in the Woods

Summer Respite

42 x 24

(click for larger view)

Now that I am closing in on finishing the work for the Lennox Woods show, I thought I might do a series of posts about what I have learned during this two year process. There are all sorts of things. I have learned a lot about my materials that I did not know. I have learned about patience and frustration. I have learned about the challenges of working on a large scale and of working on a long term project. The list goes on and on. So, I am going to tackle this one little piece at a time, and in no particular order of importance.

I have learned to slow down. To those who know me, I can hear your snorts of laughter! Yes, I do have a reputation for "being in a hurry, multitasking, getting a lot done in a short period of time and generally living by the "to do" list. But, exactly because of that, learning to slow down has been an important lesson, both in how I create my work and in how I approach it. Over the last ten years, the techniques I have adopted have necessitated that I slow down. Gathering field reference, eschewing photography and working indirectly have all made it necessary for the actual making of art to be a much slower process than it was when I was an alla prima, direct painter.

But now, I have slowed down in other ways. Spending time in the Woods has led me to a much slower, contemplative way of approaching Nature. Simply sitting on one spot and listening can lead to all sorts of things. In the end, that experience ends up on the canvas.

Working on the "big boy"

One of the most exciting things about painting for my solo show next spring has been the opportunity to work in large formats. I have learned so much about how to go about this, mostly by trial and error. These days my studio is a jungle of easels and paintings, but I cleared away some of the clutter to show how I started this large painting, 72 x 96 , aka "big boy" which will be the centerpiece of the show.

I have described in another post how I use sketches, drawings, memory and imagination plus a study to start the process. A grid is made on tracing paper over the study and proportional squares placed on the larger canvas in charcoal. In this first image you can see the 18 x 24 study (which is at the underpainting stage) on the right, the grid in the middle, and big boy on the left with the charcoal grid laid in. All images can be clicked on for a larger view.

 Here is the grid. The main shapes and lines in the composition are traced in pencil after the grid format is drawn in in pen.

Here is the 18 x 24 study (unfinished).

Here is the underpainting more or less complete. This took about two days of work.

Up on my little stepladder working on the underpainting.

A Summer Idyll

I continue to work steadily on the Lennox Woods body of work for my solo show next spring. There will be five large scale paintings - 48 x 60 up to 72 x 96-  and a total of about 42 paintings in the show. I started with the smallest of the "BIGs" as I call them, and am working my way up in size. I am working on several of them at the same time, plus others as well- usually about 8 to 10 pieces at a time. 

In January of 2012 when I first started on this journey, I was out in the Woods one day with Steve and Allen Phillips (the filmmaker for the project). Allen and I managed to wander off the trail. I didn't know my way around the Woods very well back then and neither did Allen. But, he had a GPS on his phone and we knew if we kept heading north we would hit the dirt road that runs along one side of the Preserve. So, we kept going instead of doubling back to find the trail. It was winter so bushwhacking through the Woods wasn't too hard and we got back into some spots that would be hard to find in any other season.  Pretty soon we came upon a small pond. It was a big surprise because the only water I had seen in the Woods was Pecan Bayou and the small streams it spawned throughout the Preserve. This pond looked self contained, although Steve thinks it is fed by a spring on adjacent property. Anyway, having found it, I knew I wanted to come back.

Here is a study for the 60 x 72 painting I am now working on.

A Summer Idyll

20 x 24

I started with lots of sketches, working out my ideas. This is my preferred way to work- hunting for motifs, then using drawings to work out designs and to gather reference materials.

Once I had the design organized and the field reference I needed, I started the 20 x 24 study.

I made a grid of the study and traced the main shapes and lines. I gridded the large canvas with proportional squares with vine charcoal, then drew in the composition.

Here is the studio with the large canvas on the left, the grid in the center and the study to the right of that. Just to get an idea of the scale, the painting on the easel behind the grid is 36 x 48!

The Morning Room

There are places in Lennox Woods which have the feeling of a separate space - a room if you will - that one can enter and inhabit apart from the larger surrounding Woods. Of course, it's not true, but it feels that way. One spot like this is beside a small stream which is part of Pecan Bayou, the watershed which nourishes and makes the Woods possible.

I often take a sketchbook and camp stool here and I particularly like it in the early morning hours. So, it wasn't a surprise that when I got the idea for this painting, its title -- The Morning Room - came with it.

This is a study for a larger work (30 x 40) which is in progress now. My photography, as always, doesn't capture the hazy morning light very well. But, you get the idea, right?

The Morning Room

18 x 24

detail

detail

Summer and a Studio Visitor

Late Afternoon Light

16 x 20

This painting recently found a home in Chicago. Thank you Hildt Galleries! It reminds me of those hazy afternoons that summer brings. So far, we have had a cool spring and our start to summer has been cooler than usual as well. I am not complaining!

My days start with an early morning walk and then the rest of the day is spent on Lennox Woods- working steadily toward my solo show next spring. But occasionally I have a studio visitor. A few days ago I came back from my lunch break and found this guy waiting on my studio steps!

Last Light in the Woods- Lennox Woods

This painting began as a monochromatic study for a larger (48 x 64) work which is still in progress. During last month's workshop I took it out to demonstrate some glazing techniques and then decided to finish it - albeit in a different palette, season and light effect than the large piece. 

Last Light In the Woods

18 x 24

Recently Adopted!

These four paintings recently found new homes. Thanks to my wonderful collectors!

 Sunset Pines

11 x 14

 Dusk-Edge of the Woods

18 x 24

 Aspen Twilight

20 x 24

Winter Morning

18 x 14

Ft. Worth, Bernini and an Article

Yesterday I drove to Ft Worth to deliver a painting. After meeting with Paula Tillman (Galerie Kornye West owner) about the upcoming Lennox Woods show, we headed to the Kimball Museum for lunch and to see the Bernini: Sculpting in Clay show.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) was the artistic titan of the 17th century and the author of the Baroque style. His dramatic naturalistic style was the perfect sculptural counterpart to the painting style of Caravaggio and his followers. This show, which originated at the Metropolitan Museum, traces the development of some of his most famous sculptures through the terracotta studies or bozzetti he created to work out his designs.

One of the things I love most about seeing original works of art, and particularly studies and drawings of artists that I love, is the palpable sense of being in the presence of the artist. In this case, that feeling is almost overwhelming. Seeing the thumb prints in the modeled clay, the textures created by quickly applied tool marks, the measuring points used to scale up the figures- one feels acutely the presence of the master and for a brief instant, can trace the movement of his hand as well as his thoughts.

This was not the first time I had seen some of these terracotta studies. Many years ago (too many!), Bernini's bozetti were the subject of my senior thesis. I traveled to Boston and spent a week in the Fogg Museum looking at their collection of bozetti and digging through their archives for unpublished research. So when I saw them again, together with the others from collections around the world, it was like greeting old friends from one's youth. Familiar, yet different, and seen through a different, more experienced lens.

Coincidentally, yesterday an article was published in Professional Artist Magazine tracing the careers of fours artists including me. The theme was "its never too late" which in my case meant not a late start, but a detour.  It was interesting to experience the Bernini show and relive those times many years ago when I first saw that work and have this article appear in print on the same day.