HAPPY HOLIDAYS to EVERYONE!

Merry Christmas

and 

Happy New Year!

Bromeliads

Bromeliads

This was the most interesting and challenging photo I had from Villa Catalana from last year. I've never painted gravel, or bromeliads, and I wanted to try. Once again I turned to copying a photo, because it was a splendid photo, of truly splendid bromeliads in a beautiful environment. I have not yet gotten good at the art of making up paintings out of my head, there are too many things I want to paint that I don't know how to.

I believe it's the colors that I like most about all these plants, and about the painting.

I've been thinking I need to go on a painting binge again, so today I went through part of my backlog of photos and made a point of picking out the ones that I had a feeling about, mostly the feeling that I had when I took them. Not all of them seem like ideal candidates; some are very simple in composition. I want to see if I can put in any of the magic of place I felt in those locations, and make them come alive.

Tackling a weakness head-on

I figure the only way to get good at painting flowers is to paint a lot of them, and this year is the perfect year for it!

My wildflower expert friends had been saying how many more flowers there were in the Columbia Gorge this year, more than any year they could remember. I got a chance to join them last month and we hiked two days to see the yellow flowered Balsamroot that covered many hills in bright yellow. We were lucky enough to get those great Gorge spring skies as well (not showing in this painting) and I got lots of photos I want to paint. This one was my favorite, and after a warmup sketch of another photo, I jumped into work on it.

There was so much of this one color of lighter yellow-green that I started by painting it over the entire canvas panel. Then I roughed in the yellows, followed by the darks in the top trees and beneath the large clump in the lower right sweet spot. That anchored everything important and from there I struggled with the flowers (hard) and the leaves (much harder, trying to get the values right.)

Sometimes you have to paint detail, darn it

I want to paint loosely; I don't want to paint details. But when it comes to flowers, I feel like I need to paint some level of detail—more than I want—because I haven't painted enough of them to know how to capture their form in a loose fashion. The last thing I wanted to do was try to make this look photographic, and I'm happy it doesn't, but I am trying to paint flowers that are detailed enough to be recognizable, because I'm a gardener and a plant lover. (For you other gardeners, there are alstromerias, astrantias, barberry, corydalis, and one allium.)

What I did here was put in the background foliage first, getting both the shape and the overall dark-light and color pattern of the gentle curves down before I even thought about where the flowers would go. I felt like the background established the structure, and that structure was really the most important element of the painting. I still remember this planting as incredibly dense, dozens of different plants crammed together and foliage so thick you couldn't poke a stick through it, and I wanted to get that overabundance in the painting.

When it came to painting the flowers, I quickly discovered that my reference photo wasn't sharp enough to be able to make out the separate flowers in the big clumps of alstromerias, and in the end I didn't even try. I settled for working up only the bottom two clumps as realistically as I could, and capturing just a rough color pattern of the rest of the alstromerias.

The purple astrantias were just as difficult because they're so textured, such fuzzy little puffballs, in all shades of dark red violet to near-white. Again, if I wanted them to be identifiable, I had to make them somewhat detailed.

The lesson for me was, the first time you paint something, it's very much a learning process. I wasn't painting the flowers so much as trying to figure out how to paint the flowers, and this painting is the result.

Hang around with creative people

I've had the glass rings and most of the copper pieces in this mobile sitting on separate shelves in my studio for three years. Every few months I would pick up the rings and chastise myself for never finishing it. Fast forward to two days ago when I was at a garden meeting talking with several friends who all do creative work or hobbies—sculpture, glass, painting, and garden design, and I mentioned to a new friend who is multi-talented that I was getting back into glass and metal work. The next day I was in the middle of working on my current painting when I suddenly started seeing mental images of the rings and some of the copper finally assembled into a mobile. After the third one I stopped trying to paint and pulled out all the elements and started arranging them in different ways, and Shazam! I have a new mobile! (And it feels so good to finally finish it!)

Recreating the light of late evening

Last year's paintout at Villa Catalana Cellars was a really spectacularly lovely evening, despite the presence of too many yellowjackets (fortunately they weren't interested in the food I'd brought to eat),  and as the last light was waning I got a photo from the house patio. It didn't begin to capture the colors my eyes saw in the sunset though, so when I got ready to finish it in the studio, I made myself two references—a dark one that showed the colors and values of the clouds and sky, and a much lighter one so I could see all the foliage and pond details that came out black in the dark image.

Since I usually work from photos in the studio, this happens to me all the time—getting a photo that shows my composition but not what my eyes were really able to see. This is the first time I've ever used two photos, and it really helped me a lot. I really wanted the dark shapes to be somewhat differentiated, to recreate the sensation of being just able to make out things in the dim light. The only really tricky parts were finding the right values for the white tiles on the pagoda roof, and the hanging lights there and on the pavilion. I settle on a muted brownish-orange for the hanging lights.

Painting a loss

I was in the middle of working on a landscape painting when my brother called to say that our mom, whom I'd just spent a few days visiting in hospice, had passed. Just a week shy of 94 years old, her body had been almost completely disabled by a massive stroke. Later that day as I was standing in front of the canvas again, I wondered what it would look like to see a person's life energy leaving the body and going back to the timelessness of the quantum vacuum, as it's now called. Instantly I saw this beautiful image in my mind, and really wanted to paint it, as symbolic of Mom.

Now I remember those first days after her passing as full of thoughts of her long and purposeful life, our family, and the love between us, not of the pain of her loss. The hours I spent working on it were actually happy—like I was being imprinted with the true nature and beauty of Life, instead of the sadness of physical loss. It became a permanent memory of her, from the point of view of that unknowable, non-physical part of us. When I look back on those first days after she passed, they're full of love, not of pain. I'm very thankful for that.