Workshop demo completed

This little painting started as a demo in my recent workshop in Telluride. It will soon be headed to its new home in MA! Click for larger view.

Fallen

8 x 12

Here is the reference material I used. The drawing is one of several studies I did of the small blue spruce that seemed to be everywhere. The pen and ink drawing  (dip pen, sepia ink and wash) was done on location. The stream was actually about 10 feet to the right…but I moved it.

I started the painting during the workshop to demonstrate the technique I use in my underpaintings. It was completed later after I got home from my reference drawings and memory.

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.

Lennox Woods- Work in Progress

This is a painting I have had on the easel since early this year. It is the first of the larger works I am completing for my Lennox Woods solo show in 2014. At 48 x 64 it is the smallest of the six or seven large paintings I have planned to anchor the 50 piece exhibition. I completed the underpainting on this one early in the spring, but other things kept me from making any more progress on it until recently.

All of these images can be clicked for a larger view.

This is one of the value studies I did when working out the idea of the piece. This is graphite. At this point I am working out the design in the proportion I plan to use for the large canvas.

After deciding on a design, I did a monochromatic study in oil (again using the same proportion, 3:4)  Not a great image, a little glare. 18 x 24
Here is a grid on tracing paper. I laid the tracing paper over the oil study and drew a simple grid. This gave me some measuring points for placing the horizon and main forms on the larger canvas. I didn't draw a grid on the larger canvas because I really didn't need it but also because parts of my canvas will remain transparent in the final piece and I didn't want the grid to show. So, I just used the distances indicated by the grid (each 3" square would translate to a 8" square on the larger canvas) eyeballed it and measured using the proportions from the smaller study.

Here are the grid and the study on the easel next to the larger canvas.
Here is one days work on the larger canvas. 48 x 64. I lightly indicated where the horizon line was, the main tree shapes. Then I started using a wipe out method in the background using transparent paint (Vasari Shale) which was applied with a rag. The trunks will eventually be darker but at this stage I just wanted to get the placement organized. I started on the dry brush in the foreground before I stopped for the day. The toned triangular area in the foreground will eventually be covered with some opaque paint, then glazed (suggestions of leaf litter and forest floor clutter).
Unfortunately, I forgot to photograph the progress on the underpainting, but here it is completed. At this point I was beginning to change the direction of the light. Initially I had planned to have the light coming from the left and illuminating the main tree trunk. While I was working on the underpainting, I decided to change that plan and create a softer backlit scene. I also decided I wanted to open up the woods a bit more, creating more distance between the trees in the foreground and the trees in the distance. The underpainting is really the last opportunity to make those sorts of changes so I take my time and try to pay attention rather than just slavishly following my studies. 

Here is the piece after I have put a first layer of paint on the tree trunks in the foreground, a couple of layers of paint on the foreground, and also put in a first layer of paint in the sky and carved out some negative spaces in the distant trees

A detail of the near trees on the left side. These are American Hornbeams which abound in Lennox Woods. They have a distinctive fluted sort of trunk and are part of the understory trees throughout the Woods. This is just a first layer of paint. Many more to come.

Here is a detail of the sky and distant trees.

A detail of the main tree trunk, a white oak, in the foreground. Again, just the first layer of paint.

This is the foreground area depicting the forest duff- which is sometimes several feet deep in Lennox Woods!

I hope to have this piece finished by year end. Stay tuned!

Evening Primrose
10 x 10
Available at Deborah Paris Fine Art

A few weeks ago I posted the start of this painting. I didn't touch it for a while, and when I started back to work on it, I really struggled with the balance between just enough and too much. I opted to leave a lot of the underpainting visible and just a whisper of paint on the flowers and leaves.

Lynne Windsor, a good friend and terrific artist, has started a blog. She is primarily a landscape artist but lately has been painting some lovely birds and nests. Click on over to see her work!

Hope Springs Eternal

Work in Progress
Evening Primrose
10 x 10

Many years ago, at the beginning of my former life, I had a law professor whose favorite phrase was "Hope springs eternal". He used it often- usually in an ironic or sarcastic way- to respond to student questions. It became a sort of mantra my classmates and I used to describe our miserable plight. Over the years, it still pops up in my head from time to time. A few weeks ago I was out walking and noticed that the Evening Primrose, a wildflower that blooms in north Texas in April and May were out. Spring offers a bonanza of wildflowers in Texas, the most famous being the showy bluebonnet. But, my favorite is the primrose- its delicate, translucent, pale pink flowers held up by impossibly thin, wispy stems- it seems too fragile to ever survive, much less thrive along the roads and across the fields of north Texas. And yet, it does. Hope springs eternal. These days, it means something completely different to me.

Seeing the Start

Work in Progress
30 x 70 triptych

Something happened yesterday in the studio that was, I think, a completely new experience for me. I've been thinking about painting some large pieces lately and buoyed by the imminent completion of The Constable Closet, I decided to start a 30 x 70 triptych this weekend. I filled up pages of my sketchbook with thumbnails and completed two underpaintings of pieces with a similar motif. I could see in my mind's eye what color harmony and effect I wanted and a general idea of the motif, but I still hadn't worked out the composition. I tend to work in squarer formats so composing this elongated horizontal was giving me fits. Plus, composing a triptych is arguably three times as challenging because each panel must stand on its own as well as support the whole.

So, when I went to the studio yesterday to start it, I still hadn't really settled on a composition. I thought I'd sketch some more and try to resolve it. I walked in and put the three panels up on my easel and moved the other two pieces I had already laid in to my work table. I looked at them, then looked at the panels and well, I "saw" the composition on the panels all laid out. I didn't think, I didn't conjure it up, I just saw it. It only lasted a few seconds, but I saw it.

I was taught to "see" the final work in my mind's eye and this is what I also encourage my students to do. But that exercise, at least to me, is more about the translation of the subject into paint-understanding what you want your finished painting to look like before you start- seeing the finish. This experience was more about process- more about "seeing the start". And I didn't "see" it in my mind's eye, I saw it on the panels. Or, maybe I just had one too many Diet Cokes.

Imagination & Execution

This past week I reread the book Art & Fear. I was first introduced to this wise little tome over ten years ago. Its one of those books that you can reread again and again, finding new and deeper insights each time. This time was no exception. The passages that seemed particularly apt had to do with what the authors call the "correspondence between imagination and execution"- that is, the place where your work actually gets made. The idea is that at the beginning the work can be whatever you can imagine but as it progresses- as you actually begin to make it- the possibilities narrow with each successive brushstroke, until at the end only a very narrow range of choices remain to complete the work. It is then its own thing, separate and apart from the world and what inspired it. In other words, as Annie Dillard (paraphrasing Paul Klee) wrote:

The painter...does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.
I have read those words a dozen times over many years and have only just begun to understand what they mean. I had this ridiculous notion that I was in control!

This past week I've been working on the large painting-the underpainting is posted here. This first image is one glaze over the foreground and trees and the sky laid in with opaque paint.

Once the sky was laid in, I began to adjust the values and color temperature. It gets tricky here because you have to remember that each successive glaze will darken that portion of the panting. In this next image, I've put several more glaze layers on the foreground and the distant trees, repainted a portion of the sky, and adjusted the distant tree shapes and color harmony throughout.


So far, I've done very little to the large trees in the foreground and nothing to the small piece of water in the very front. And the sky will need repainting again. There are zillions of little adjustments to edges and shapes and color needed everywhere now-each needing to be fitted to what came before-to the paint.

Telluride Plein Air- Day 4

Fishing at Lizard Head Pass

10 x 12

Lizard Head Pass (10,222 ft.) is about 12 miles south of Telluride. The day I went there started out sunny but weather in the pass can change quickly . I was just finishing up my under painting when a storm started to roll in from the southwest. I was packing up to go when a car pulled over at the pull out where I was parked. This fisherman got out and proceeded down to the stream. I thought he provided the perfect bit of scale for this immense landscape.

A Spring Evening

A Spring Evening oil on board 10 x 10
Available at Hildt Galleries, Chicago

In this piece I'm jumping the gun a bit, meteorologically speaking. Most of the trees around here are still bare but there are a few tantalizing glimpses of spring- flowering trees, daffodils and iris and longer, warmer days. And besides, a girl can dream, can't she?

The big news, at least for me, with this piece is that I painted it on gessoed plywood board instead of canvas. I have pretty much always painted on canvas. When I first began to explore painting in a more indirect way- under painting, glazes, etc- I read a lot about how glazes work better on a smooth surface. I resisted that for a couple of reasons-the main one being that I didn't think I could use the dry brush technique I like to use in my under paintings as effectively without some drag from my painting surface. Another being fear. So when I found this silky smooth board in my studio the other day, I'm not sure why I decided to try it. But boy, am I glad I did! I loved painting on this surface and while it certainly made the paint behave a bit differently, I really loved the way it took glazes. The paint just seemed to float on top of the surface making this lovely atmospheric envelope. Now the problem is I have no idea where this board came from! I'm pretty sure it was handmade, not commercially prepared. So, Steve (my husband) and I have been experimenting this week with gessoed masonite. I found some good information on line about preparing these boards, but I still have lots of questions - like how many coats of gesso, do you need to sand in between or just at the end, whether or not you need to seal them in some way so they are not too absorbent and what to do about larger pieces. So if any of you out there have answers to these questions, I'd love to hear from you!

A Dispatch from the Bubble

My husband and I set out a year or so ago to simplify our lives and to create - as we call it - "the Bubble". This is the place (both geographical and internal) where we can do what we do in a simple, purposeful way. For me, that means painting and trying to mine the vein of visual ideas that the landscape suggests to me. I have talked a little about this here.

Writing this blog has become an unexpected part of the Bubble for me. In addition to the opportunity to connect with other artists all over the world, the small paintings I have produced and posted here became the seeds of ideas for larger works and even series of paintings. Because I was doing many of these little paintings rather than just a few larger ones, I was able to develop the ideas more quickly and also to adjust the technical changes that were occurring in my work more quickly. The change in my working process from direct painting to using indirect traditional methods like glazing also contributed to this- making it necessary to have several pieces going at once, rather than the simple start and finish approach I have always used before.

So what I am posting here are two beginnings - lay ins which are done in the manner I talked about here - of a series of 10-12 larger paintings now in progress. These are all based on the same visual idea, the seed of which is the small Rick's Pool paintings I posted over the last several months. Here in the Bubble we find this to be fascinating stuff, but I realize it may be less than compelling to you out there in the world. On the other hand, all artists I know have a pretty intense inner life going, so hopefully you'll forgive this little navel gazing glimpse into mine.

A rift in the time/space continuum of the Bubble occurs this weekend when we travel to Canyon, Texas for the opening of the Panhandle Plains Museum Invitational on Saturday. I have talked about the Museum and this show here, and am looking forward to the road trip, seeing the Museum again, and visiting with artist friends I know who will be there.