Paint On The Brain — by Patricia Ryan

New Limited color combinations

2012-01-26T19:02:00.000-08:00

Last week after I stopped working on the river painting in my last post, I pulled out 4 pieces of paper to try some new color schemes. But I was really tired of trying to make finished paintings out of what should be just a quick exercise (although nothing is very quick if I'm doing it) so I kept thinking of some things Robert Burridge says: "If it's boring you, turn left and keep going," and "Don't give up! At what point did this painting become a bad idea?" I used a half-inch brush and picked 4 different color sets, and had fun just slapping the paint on the paper to make 3 different landscapes and one bird shape. They were all extremely simple in this first pass, but it really felt good for a change just to play. Obviously I haven't been doing that enough.

Green Hills

After they all dried, I picked up one of the landscapes and the bird and started developing them. The landscape was another split complementary—red-violet for the main color and yellow and green for the complements. I chose to make the red-violet the dark color this time, with the green for the background and yellow for the sky. When I first brushed them in, I was astounded at the aerial perspective I'd gotten, even with the almost pure colors. The yellow went to the background as I wanted it to. I've had really mixed results with yellow depending on what colors it's with—sometimes it really wants to come forward. As far as its temperature, it really is midway between the hottest and coolest—red-orange and blue-green—perhaps that explains why it can go either way. Anyway, as I worked on the painting I feathered the green and yellow forward into the hills, and took the red-violet softly toward the distance. I added one more color, yellow ochre—after all, it is a yellow—which makes a nice, more neutral accent. This is really the first value study I've ever done.

I've heard lots of people say how instructive it is to paint with a limited palette, but they always choose colors they can mix to get a full spectrum. This is using only 4 colors, but the color combination is anything but full spectrum. And yet it looks rich, full, balancing cool and warm. I don't want to use the word mood to describe the effect; I'd rather say it has a distinct flavor. I guess tone might mean the same thing, but it's too bland and too much like mood.

Bird Spirit Rising

The bird has an analogous color scheme, running from violet through yellow, over half of the color wheel. The yellow adds just a bit of warmth to the fundamentally cool combination. I love blues and greens and violets. (Saving this for the web has shifted the violets on the bird to be a lot more neutral gray.) When I looked at the first pass of the design, I knew it was far too simple, and I didn't want to end up painting feathers. I added the different grid patterns on a whim—after remembering that I'm just playing here. I'm a big fan of several of the early modern painters who interwove their main designs with random patterns to make them more interesting. Even though I think of it as a gimmick, I think it works for this sketch, and it was fun doing it.

I pulled one more trick to take some of the drudgery out of my work—I skipped gessoing any more sheets of watercolor paper and used sheets from a Fredrix canvas pad. I don't really care about the canvas texture, but they stayed much flatter than the gessoed 140 lb. paper. I liked them so much I picked up 3 more pads at the Blick store sale! I've almost forgiven Blick for murdering my Art Media store in Clackamas. Not quite, but almost.

A limited color palette

2012-01-01T15:42:00.000-08:00

Last week I started work on another one of my recent landscape shots, one of the Tualatin River near the historic community of Willamette on an overcast afternoon. I worked on it for a few sessions, trying to make something I liked out of it. In the end I felt happy with the colors I got, and some of the brushwork, but it still falls way short of what I'd like to be able to do. I was looking at one of my favorite books on painting, Ted Goernschner's "The Workshop Experience" and decided I want to do some experimenting with limited color palettes. I wanted to reuse the same composition, using a split complementary color scheme of yellow, red-violet and blue-violet. For the first time, I succeeded in getting some photos of the painting process. I only did one session a day on this, as I needed to take that much time between sessions to screw up my courage and go forward with these rather unfamiliar colors.

The first session was limited to blocking in the larger masses, except for the tree foliage on the left. Not sure why, but I left that till last.

In the second session I worked on the background, the foreground, and the shrub and tree structures.

In the last session, I finally laid down the tree foliage and made a few more adjustments in the shrubs in the foreground.

I'm going to stop here for now, even though it doesn't look finished to me. I want the colors to soak into my brain for a while. Maybe they'll help me grow some new brain cells that aren't bogged down in a rut. I keep thinking of something Carolyn Lewis said in her video, about painting from photos: "Make your painting look better than the photograph."

And by the way, Happy 2012, and I hope it's a great year for everyone!

A frosty solstice

2012-01-01T14:38:00.000-08:00

I was running errands in the afternoon of the day after solstice and was surprised to find Oregon City still covered by clouds and ice fog. I went to the college campus to shoot some photos of frost-covered plants. After I parked and was taking pictures I saw an area a quarter mile away where the sun had broken through and was lighting the tops of some trees up like candles. I more or less ran over there, but by the time I got there, another bit of fog cloud had blown in front of the sun. I walked around enjoying the look of everything with its thick coat of frost, hoping the sun would come back out. My shoes got soaked and my fingertips were getting frostbit, but finally it did come out. It stayed out long enough for me to get all the photos I wanted. What a treat!

Thank you, David Hockney

2011-12-21T21:19:00.000-08:00

I started visiting the David Hockney website earlier this year while I was working on my dachshund paintings. I remembered he had done a book of paintings of his two dachshunds, and I googled and found his official website. I had become a fan of his years before when I was living in Southern California and first saw his strongly graphic and brilliantly colored paintings of the hills and canyons west of LA. I'm sorry now (duh) that I never saw any of his shows while I lived down there, but that was back in the days when I was afraid to go into art galleries. I think he's a brilliant artist and he's really made me think—in ways that find lots of blank spots in my brain—about what it means to create two-dimensional images of three-dimensional space. I gather from my reading that that's what cubism was all about, but as much as I love Nude Descending A Staircase, I don't get the sense of space from cubism that I do from Hockney's work. I think that to actually see what's in front of you and be able to analyze the differences between what it looks like and what it actually is, and then to convey that sense of direction and implicit motion in the painting, has got to be the most difficult thing a visual artist can do. I've been trying to capture an emotional sense in my paintings, but he gets not only the emotion but the feeling that your mind is really there inside the scene. It constantly boggles my mind that he was able to ask all the questions he must have had to ask in order to create those paintings of his interiors, and especially of LA and the iconic drives around it, like Mulholland Drive.

Anyway, I discovered to my great delight that since 2004 he's been making hundreds of paintings of his native Yorkshire countryside in the UK, and has made available on his website several slideshows of plein air sessions that I watched over and over for days on end. I really love how his paintings embrace all the trees and small plants—down to the hedgerows and roadside weeds—of the countryside, and the individual attention he gives to every single plant. Since I'm a complete sucker for the plant kingdom and good landscape paintings, nothing could make me happier than seeing one of my favorite artists take this particular journey.

I went back to his website last week and found a DVD for sale, David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, that focused on his Yorkshire work, and I ordered it. It arrived yesterday and I spent the evening watching the almost two hours of material. It's great, really great. You get to watch him set up, get his paints out, make his initial sketches and go to work on them, in the wind, in the cold, while the light changes and all the colors shift, while people come by and stop to watch—or ask him if he wants to come paint the wall in their pub. And he talks about the work, he answers questions and asks some, too. Several of his friends and contemporaries add interesting commentary. I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it, but my favorite scenes are of him painting, and of him talking about how he went around for months with sketchbooks, drawing the individual species along the roadside, learning each one. His passion for his work just makes me feel that much more committed to the absolute necessity of painting as a way of life.

This morning while I was warming up in my studio I realized how much he is inspiring me. First, to focus on the images I feel a strong connection with, even if they don't look like conventional painting scenes. And second, not to be afraid to paint them even if they seem complicated or too detailed. Watching him paint shows me it is possible to pull out and simplify the few forms and lines that comprise the important elements of a scene in a way that conveys all of their emotional weight and visual textures. And third, that this year I need to start getting out into my garden to start drawing and sketching my beautiful plants, even though my garden as a whole is still in its infancy and not the paintable paradise I hope it will be in a few more years. I want to make a sketchbook like his. That's my goal for next year.

There's one other thing I want to mention that I really love about his paintings—the way he paints roads. He shows a road as what it really is: not an object, but an experience. It's the experience of driving through a place, of winding this way and that, going up over hills and down the other side, seeing different patterns and colors on each side. I love driving slow along the local narrow country roads—when I'm not getting tailgated—and luxuriating in the visual riches everywhere you look—fields of wildflowers, tall stands of firs and little Christmas trees in overgrown weeds, cows of many colors, dogs wandering, and cats hunting moles. I love to see the small differences in the plants from one month to the next, the changes of colors as growth and death leapfrog each other through time.

You can also find this DVD for sale on Amazon. Now that I've discovered him again, I really hope he keeps making more slideshows and videos. And more paintings, of course.

Cold-weather time is studio time!

2011-12-21T18:39:00.000-08:00

Flying Kimonos

When the garden went to sleep with the first frosts, I was pretty darn ready to hang up my garden gloves and get back into the studio. I was also ready to try something new. I'd been buying printed origami paper over the summer when I came across it, and one day I picked up an awful old leaf painting on a small canvas, and started collaging on top of it. My first thought was to recreate the leaf shapes against a contrasting background, and when I finished that it didn't look anything like leaves. After looking at it for a couple days I decided the shapes really looked like flapping kimonos. I went on the web and found some images of Japanese doll faces, and found ones of both a young girl and an old woman, and added them. After that I added some very un-authentic (but fun) streamers along with some clouds, and finished it up by painting on top of the background to separate it more from the design. It's no work of art, but it was a really fun change.

Clifton Park Woods

Just last week I was rummaging through the local Goodwill store and came across a beautifully carved and painted wooden frame with just a few small nicks in it. I thought about it for a minute and snapped it up. I brought it home and took out the botanical print that was in it and cleaned the old paper off the back. I played a bit with a color scheme that would look good in it and decided on a fall scene that I photographed in central New York in early October and had been wanting to paint. I worked on it for a couple days and was really pleased with how it looked in the frame.

So far, so good. I have a small stack of fall scenes I'll be working on for the next several weeks. And I'll be sneaking out on nice days to whisper encouragement to the buds on my hellebores, and try to talk my two forsythias into giving me some flowers this next year. In a few hours it's the winter solstice, and knowing that the days will begin to lengthen soon does a lot to keep me looking forward to the signs of growth that are starting even now. Nature may look asleep, but she's really busy dreaming!

Priceless Gold

2011-11-12T13:51:00.001-08:00

These are the days I look forward to as summer winds down in September. When the leaves start looking old and tired, the sun starts moving south, and the ground is as dry as baked bones, I start thinking of the sweet, cool rains of fall, the chill mornings and freshening breezes, and the slow awakening of the red, orange and gold colors lying hidden in the greens.

My garden is loaded with gold this year—and I feel richer than I ever have! My oldest Sango Kaku maple was the first tree to show color, and that was early in October. Now most of the other trees are in show-off mode and I'm spending a lot of time at the back windows just enjoying looking out.

Thanks to the maples, dogwood, and the weeping larch, my path down from the house is a lot more colorful this year.

If you go to the Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden when the maples have turned and look past the long bridge, you'll see a beautiful pair of Japanese maples—one red and one gold. Ever since I saw that arrangement, I've been wanting to recreate it. I'm on my 3rd and 4th maples now, but I think I have the ones I want—my small O Isami, and the red Beni Otake.

Almost all the maples are in color now, including my little laceleaf viridis:

and the beautiful crimson palmatum Hilleri, which has gone through pretty much every shade of red now, from dark brick to orange-red and lipstick, to finish up at cherry. It finally got taller than I am this year.

The Satomi dogwoods are sharing the spotlight, with the one in the most sun going gold and red again, not as dark so far as last year, in fact so bright it glows. It's hard for my eyes to separate the colors in person, it's actually easier to see in a photograph. This is the one I planted bareroot as a single stick, and after 6 years it's at least 7 feet tall.

Although I can see bits of the big O Isami from my house, I have to walk down into the garden to get this view of my little maple grove, the O Isami and three Sango Kakus.

My paths are going to be getting a bit of dressing this winter. One of my friends has a bunch of long pine needles she really wants to get rid of. I got enough the other day to line the first two paths. I hope to get a thick enough layer to suppress the weeds. They're very nice to walk on. They're too slippery to put on the sloping paths, but I hope they work for the level ones.

The hydrangeas aren't going to bed either, without one last show of color, a lot more muted but still beautiful. These flowers were rich purple in full bloom, now they're pale blue-violet with fuschia frosting.

Have you ever seen a hydrangea do this? Maybe it feels like a poinsettia this year. I don't remember if this mophead is a named variety or one of the bargain pots I got at Fred Meyer, or what color the flower is. I'll have to wait until next year to find out again.

What a wonderful finish to the gardening year—to wake up to such riches.

Oh my—O Isami!

2011-11-12T13:21:00.001-08:00

My big Acer japonicum O Isami is so gorgeous I wanted to give it its own post. I've gotten several good photos of it at the peak of its color over the last week and a half, and I can't decide which ones not to share. Every look I take at this tree makes my jaw drop.

It started out going lighter and then shifting to gold, but as soon as the leaves got gold they developed crimson edges, and many kept getting more colorful every day.

The individual leaves developed different patterns, a tapestry of opalescent brilliance.

I couldn't resist breaking off one of the more colorful leaves to play with.

I selected this variety two years ago at Meadowcroft Farm after seeing a 12' specimen growing on their grounds and seeing its rainbow of colors—red, pink, orange, gold and purple, and multiple shades of each color. I love the rounded leaf shape too; I'm somewhat partial to the maples that show it—circinatum, shirasawanum, and many of the japonicums I've seen. I tried one in a shady area and it didn't develop any color past a medium gold, so when I got this big one last fall I knew I had to put it where it would get more sun. This one gets full direct sun till about 11am.

A week later it seems to have maxed out color-wise, and last night's rain brought half the leaves down, but the leaves are almost as beautiful on the ground as they were on the tree. They make a great background for the Pinky Winky flowers and the fading hosta.

As long as it keeps looking like this, I'll keep going down to look at it.

New glass for the Beavercreek Craft Fair

2011-11-03T18:54:00.000-07:00

Another art and craft fair this Saturday, right here in beautiful downtown Beavercreek! I've been cooking glass for the last two weeks and have ten new pieces to show. Since I found out this summer how great the paler colors look in shady areas and even inside a room out of direct light, I've been wanting to make more pieces in these delicate tones. This took me a long time to figure out because I'm naturally drawn to the deeper, richer colors, but in a shady garden like mine, they just don't show up nearly as well as the lighter colors. So I have a bunch of new ones—like this one:

I've also been wanting to work out some shapes like my big radiant stars, but in a smaller, less pricey size. I think this 5" one has possibilities. I'll see how it does this weekend:

The BCT craft fair this Saturday is at Beavercreek Elementary out on South Beavercreek Road, and they're going to have over 100 vendors! That seems HUGE to me. I'll have my glass and greeting cards towards the back of the room where Santa will be posing for photos. I'll have cards of many of my paintings, and also of photos that I've taken around Oregon.

I've signed up for another local craft fair the first Saturday in December, at the Lions' Club Craft Fair. It'll be just south of Oregon City on Hwy 213. It's a lot smaller than the BCT fair, around 40 vendors, and it should be fun too. Both shows are from 10am to 4pm. I'd love to see you there!

The sorrow of loss

2011-09-11T21:52:00.000-07:00

The art and gardening community lost a really wonderful person recently, Bee Smith. I went to her wake yesterday and saw her beautiful garden again, and listened to young and old people tell their favorite Bee stories and their tributes to her strong and loving personality, her talent for getting people to do things. As one young woman said, Bee was mature in all the good ways, yet in all the other ways—and that was also good—she never grew up. I only knew her for a couple of years, but she welcomed me with a big smile to gatherings where I got to know most of my current closest friends. It was painful to see so many of those friends feeling so deeply the pain of this collective yet very personal loss, and I woke up in the middle of the night crying for them and for myself, reflecting on the longness of life and the shortness of our friendships, and remembering how hard it is, every single time, when you lose someone who's important to you.

I try really hard to be philosophical about death, trying to see it as just a part of the Big Picture, and trying to have the knowledge that I will one day die make my life even more rich and purposeful. But that doesn't make the sorrow any less real, or any less important. My logic compels me to believe that if anything in life is important, then everything is. That means that loss and sorrow are in themselves two of the things that we simply must experience in order to become human. I don't feel like I can explain that, or justify it, even to myself, at this point in my life, but I believe that someday—in some lifetime—I will understand enough to be able to.

Late this afternoon something dawned on me about Bee. She was so strong and fearless that you just wanted to lean on her. But what you didn't realize is that all that time you're spending with her, that fierce energy and hunger for life is rubbing off on you. You don't feel it happening—the only thing you know is that being around her, you gradually go from being completely intimidated and at times mildly horrified by her bold decisiveness, to thinking, "Oh yeah, of course we can do that, what a great idea." And now that she's gone on to her next job, you find that she woke up something in you, that you're resonating with a bit of that boldness and independence, with trust in your own ideas. You feel your kinship with all life, including rocks, and feel like everything is going to work out just the way it's supposed to. Bee was the kind of person who could do anything, and everyone who knew her is stronger for it. Everybody needs a Bee in their life at some point. I'm really glad she was in mine.

New colors, new big designs!

2011-08-22T19:40:00.000-07:00

I finally stopped making glass for the Art In The Garden show this Saturday, and got pictures of them all today. The wind wiggled them a little but wasn't a big problem.

First, my favorite new color combinations...

Cranberry and greens

Shades of blue, aqua, and plum

Four or five shades of green

Cranberry, orange, and gold

I also started playing with larger designs, to fill up my new kiln. These are a bit over 6" across. First I tried using 1/2" strips...

Deep cobalt and aqua

Deep cranberry with grape streaks

Then I started seeing what I could do with the thinnest strips I could cut, almost down to 1/4". It took a couple tries and I had to change my firing program to get good solid joins, but I finally got what I was shooting for...

Aqua, lime green, and 2 shades of pale blue

Orange streaky glass with rich yellow.

These new radiant stars take a lot longer to cut and I used up a lot more bandaids, but I love the look. I also worked with pale tints of glass for the first time, and found that the paler pieces work really well in dim light situations, either very shady outside, against dark backgrounds, or even inside a dimly lit room. The pale tints, which would wash out in bright light, show up wonderfully in shade or shadow.

I'll have all these pieces and more at Estacada on Saturday, from 10am to 4pm. I'll also have a selection of prints and paintings and photo cards.

I hope to see you there!

Art in the Garden is coming!

2011-07-21T14:45:00.000-07:00

The Art In The Garden show and sale is coming to Laurel Hedge Gardens again! The last Saturday in August a wide variety of garden and fine art and artists will be at this wonderful display garden a couple miles north of Estacada. This is a great excuse to come see some great art in one of the most beautiful gardens in Clackamas county. There are about two acres of all kinds of settings—oriental, contemporary, English, and ponds—with beautifully built structures, bits of whimsy and notes of elegance, great views of the surrounding hills, and a layout like a Disneyland for gardeners. They have a great shop with hundreds of reasonably-priced antiques and accents for house and garden, and a selection of unusual and hard-to-find plants that you can see right there in the gardens. Besides being amazing designers, the proprietors are committed plantsmen and very experienced with gardening here in the land of Crispy-Like-An-Oven vs. Where's-That-Summer-You-Promised?. Everywhere you look you'll see something beautiful, and every bit of it makes you feel right at home. Even without the art it's well worth the drive to Estacada just to spend a couple hours in the midst of all that beauty. And all that and wine-tasting, too! Hip Chicks do Wine are great!

I'm cooking up glass as fast as I can, trying out different color combinations and new designs, including several larger pieces from my new kiln. I'm going to take some paintings, but mostly it'll be glass, glass, and more glass! I've got a dozen pieces now and I hope to have at least two dozen at the show. I'll post pictures of some of them soon.

For more information on the show, including pictures from last year's event, follow the link to Laurel Hedge in my links section.

Celebrating the sun

2011-06-11T14:47:00.000-07:00

The Sun Rises In The West

Week before last, I felt a painting wanting to come out in between gardening sessions, so on a damp day I sat down in front of a blank sheet of paper. I freshened my liquid acrylics, which had been sitting there for quite a while, and started just making graphic strokes. When I had some lines down I felt really good and happy about it, but couldn't figure out why because it looked awkward, uneven and inexplicable. I did like the colors though, so I kept playing with it, overpainting and eventually drawing shapes on it. After another day it took on the feel of a sunrise. I still was really having fun with it, and I realized it made something in my mind feel really good about the combination of well-defined simple shapes and the rough texture of the layering of the thin paints. I came up against a wall after that, but it was warming up so I went back to work in the garden and let it sit for a few more days. Today, after two long days of weeding, I wanted to work on it again, and ended up finishing.

I think it owes a lot to the time I spent looking at Richard Diebenkorn's work last year, but it also seems linked to the at-long-last arrival of temperatures hitting 70, and having the sun be out when I got up in the morning.

I took my car in for an oil change this week and the manager said "We're going to have summer from July 28th to August 4th." Well, I'll be ready.

I said NO to coal

2011-06-02T15:08:00.000-07:00

This morning, after watching Robert Kennedy Jr. on tv, I watched the seven minute trailer for "The Last Mountain". I then logged onto the Portland General Electric website and switched my power sources to 100% renewable energy, and NO COAL. There's nothing perfect about what choices I have at this time and on a fixed income to get the power I need to run my home and do my art. But there's nothing acceptable to me about the mining, processing or burning of coal to get that power. I figured out that it will cost me an extra $150 or less a year to get my power from all renewable sources, and even though pennies are hard to come by in these times, I'm willing to pay that to help eliminate coal as a source of death, illness, pollution and environmental destruction in America. For my part at least, my artwork will henceforth be COAL-FREE. I know I and my plants will breathe more freely.

A new kiln!

2011-05-29T12:36:00.000-07:00

I got a new kiln! I ordered an Evenheat Studio Pro STP with an automated controller and an 8"x8" chamber. My old kiln is an Evenheat and I felt very comfortable buying a new one. Plus I got a great price on it from Fusion Headquarters in Newberg. It's really different having a controller so I can actually follow recommended firing schedules with the required precise control of temperatures for multi-layered full fusing. To start with I had to do a few experimental firings to figure out the schedule for the type of pieces I've been doing, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to make one bigger than I've been able to do before.

I made a big 2-layer ring of mixed opal and transparent glass scraps, 6 inches across. It came out pretty good, not far from what I expected, and is now hanging in the garden.

Once I got the firing schedule figured out, I started doing multiple pieces at once, and that worked great too. I've been really happy to see how consistent and repeatable the kiln operation is. Now I can start doing different types of pieces, lots of things that would have been completely impossible in my old kiln, now that I've got that controller.

One of my multiple firings, I did 3 pieces using the same color scheme of shades of green with amber, browns, and touches of cranberry. I had been previously siezed with this compulsion to add metal bells to some of the glass pieces, so the short icon that came out of this firing got belled:

It has found a home hanging off my front porch, where one late afternoon sunbeam has been coming through the trees and lighting up the lime green and cranberry, during afternoon sunbreaks. The bell's only going to ring if the wind hits about 40mph, but I love the warm shine of the tin, and I do love combining the metal with the glass.

I also went on a blue binge, layering a cold light cobalt blue on top of a warmer medium blue—I call it pthalo—it's as close to a summer blue sky morning as I can get.

I had been looking at my garden before the first leaves appeared and thought a lot about how I can add interest to my winter garden, and I decided that some more complex installations would go a long way toward giving me the visual treats I crave during those bare months. The first idea I came up with was to fire single-color rectangles and hang them between the rails of the wood fence between the house and the barn, where they'll catch the morning sun when it's out. The first pass of six pieces took me two firings, and I decided to hang transparent cranberry, orange, and yellow pieces on each side of the gate.

This is how it looks facing the house in the afternoon light. The orange is the only color that shows up brightly unless you're quite close to it. I'm thinking of putting some lime green pieces next to these. I'm also wondering how opal glass will work, if it's fairly light. It'll show up better against the dark barn and shadows than most of the transparent will. But every now and then from the house, when the sun's in just the right place, I can see all three colors, and it's a nice surprise. As the season goes on, they'll mostly become obscured by the foliage of the hydrangea, dogwood, and grapes planted on the fence. But when the leaves drop in November, they'll be back with their bright colors to light up my winter and spring mornings.

The infinite riches of May

2011-05-28T22:42:00.000-07:00

Liberty apple blossom above forget-me-nots

I heard on tv a Chinese description of a private garden—"Infinite riches in a small room." I loved that phrase, it really describes the month of May in northwest Oregon. As the days begin to warm, however so slowly, the first tentative leaves and blossoms shortly EXPLODE into a lushness that would do any jungle proud. In just a few weeks the country goes from still-bare branches on everything but the flowering plums to all the cherries and maples in flower and full leaf, all the conifers showing their bright new growth, and rhodies and azaleas and more in psychedelic effulgence.

I'm really proud of this pieris because it's actually only about 8" across, and half of that is new growth. I got it late spring, a year ago, at a going out of business sale for 50 cents, and made it wait in a 3" pot till fall, when I finally got around to planting it out. This one really is working hard to make me happy. I appreciate that.

The Peppermint Ice hellebores I bought decided late blooming was better than never. It's nice not having to wait till next year. This one was definitely worth the trip to Al's for, but I haven't decided about the mislabled one I paid the double price for that turned out to be a single. I guess the lesson for me there is to never buy flowers—especially expensive ones—out of flower. Oh well, learn the hard way.

Green grow the babies, oh!

2011-05-14T19:39:00.000-07:00

This is exciting—it's the first year I have so many baby plants growing in the spring. Usually it's only weeds that I get to watch getting bigger every day. This year I've got these little lettuces. After weeks being just bigger than specks, they're finally starting to get visible.

The big clump on the left side is where the bag broke open while I was making the two rows. The front row is supposed to be French lettuces and the back are supposed to be Italians, and on close inspection they do look slightly different. Pretty soon I'll be thinning them out and see how they taste! Mmmm! This is my first ever home-grown lettuce!

My strawberry pots are looking good, leaves are getting bigger and I can see baby flower buds on both my Quinaults from last year, and the TriStars I bought this year. They're both everbearing. This pot is the Quinaults.

The two spinach plants in the center are getting almost covered right now, they're getting more leaves but the leaves aren't getting very big. I'm hoping they'll show a little more vigor soon, but either way I'll be tasting them soon, too. It could be there's only enough room for one plant in there. Live and learn.

I was going to put both sets of strawberries in the bed behind my back door, but I had a traumatic event when I bought a big box of fresh California strawberries a few weeks ago that convinced me to keep them in elevated pots. I was cleaning them and cutting the tops off in my kitchen sink, and after I put the last one on the bowlful, I noticed a piece of leaf I'd left on it. I reached over to pull it off and it turned around and crawled back into the berry! It wasn't a piece of leaf, it was a big old earwig! Bleccchhhh! So I took that one and the tops out and trashed them, and then carefully sliced all the others up without finding any more bugs. I've had ants and pillbugs get berries on the ground, but I have a full complement of earwigs in my garden, and I don't even want to give them a chance at my berries. Anyway, now they're up at elbow height, away from bunny rabbits and ground bugs, and I can just walk out in the morning and do comparison nibbling. Last year I got about 3 berries a week from my Quinaults and they bore ripe ones all the way into October, and I didn't get them planted till late. Two pots means twice as many, I hope!

So with all these dry days—let's see, I think there have been 6 or so, so far this spring—what have I been doing? Just this—

Weeding—weeds, weeds, weeds. This is the second dump load, another 30 pounds (20 gallons) of weeds, mostly little bitter cress, grasses, chickweed, and pigweed. I'm almost caught up, I've pretty much cleared the orchard, there are just a few patches I still really need to get. I do need to get into the veggie garden soon and check on everything in there. We should have a couple dry days next week, so I'll be getting down there then and get some new pictures. I can see things growing!

So exciting!

Trying to picture glass

2011-04-26T22:38:00.000-07:00

I never thought of myself as a fan of red or gold, but this is now one of my favorite color combinations—for the glass, at least. I took this photo with the flash against a white background and then photoshopped the background to black, so it's something of a false effect—you'd barely be able to see any of it on against black.

I've been trying to find a way to get better photos of the glass pieces that show off the colors even in a small size, such as the thumbnails that are used on Etsy. The shots of the pieces outside against my trees are what they really look like outside, but depending how much light there is that day, different colors show up better and the piece can look quite variable. Like this one:

Plus, I would like to have a setup for shooting them inside the house, on the days when it's just too cold and foul outside. I can shoot if it's just drizzling, but when there's ice on the patio or the piece is whipping around in the wind, it's really more than I can cope with.

So I tried photographing some against a white background with lights on it to provide a little backlighting.

But although this shows the true colors of the glass, the problem is that the pieces never actually look like this, except in the photo.

When I added the flash, it makes it more as it actually appears, because you almost always see the light reflecting off the front as well as that coming through the glass. And the colors against the plain white background do show up better, even in small images. The hot spots from the flash reflections are a problem, and would never do for real commercial photos, but I can live with them. So I guess I just need to use multiple photos. I'll probably skip the photoshopping—that's just for fun.

Finally, some decent gardening days!

2011-04-18T12:39:00.000-07:00

Not all my camellias made it through the winter (or the freezing temps two weeks ago) with their buds intact, so maybe this one is going all out to make up for that. This is an unnamed seedling I bought at Al's five years ago—it was the first camellia I planted here. It has semi-double red and white variegated flowers, and has been growing steadily every since I planted it—unfortunately too close to a main pathway. What was I thinking? I've been trying to figure out how to move it without seriously upsetting it, and I think I've finally found out how. I considered shaping it back, but it has a lovely loose form and as you can see, is certainly bloom-silly some years. So this year will be the year of the move. I was out yesterday afternoon weeding, and looked up and saw the late sun hitting the top of it, and all those beautiful flowers, and had to take a picture of this display. This is why I love camellias, and why I grow them. Mmmmm.

Yesterday morning while it was too cold to go outside I cooked up a new glass piece. I've done two of these diamonds, but this is the first one I'd call successful.

Medium turquoise blue, a bit of lime green, and some intense lemon yellow. Seems like a nice bright color combination, one that might show up well among the greens of the garden. I like how the shape turned out—almost straight on the edges.

So, a great day—glass, murdering weeds, and fifty red & white camellias!

Ice Rainbow Garden Jewelry in two beautiful nearby gardens

2011-04-16T21:15:00.000-07:00

If you live near Estacada or Wilsonville, you can now see my glass pieces hanging in two beautiful gardens. Matthew and Darin of Laurel Hedge are garden designers who sell antiques and art pieces as well as select plants at their shop and gardens just NE of Estacada on Currin Road. They are open every Saturday now through mid-October, or by appointment. Hughes Water Garden is on Stafford Road south of I-205 just NE of Wilsonville. They have a wide selection of water plants and hardy plants and garden and pond art of all kinds, and are open most days through September. Both places are truly inspiring places to visit if you're looking for ideas for plantings or designs. Links to both photo-filled websites are in the sidebar.

A little moonlight

2011-04-14T11:50:00.000-07:00

I finished this painting a month ago, but I've been too distracted with the beginning of gardening season to get it outside to take a photo of it. It's my second attempt to use my wet-surface ink technique on a canvas panel, and I feel like this one is a lot more successful because I was able to retain almost all of the textures created in the wet surface inking process. I did almost ruin it trying to use acrylic paints to enhance the textures, but I was able to stop myself in time and remove them, then continue using the inks. The difference in results is attributable to the transparency of the inks.

I would like it a bit better if the colors had been lighter, but this one just came out dark and I don't yet have a way to fix that. Maybe in the future.

In like a lion, out like a wet, grumpy lion

2011-03-26T16:03:00.000-07:00

First rainbow of 2011

March in the Pacific North West—well, the trees love it. And if they're happy, then I'm happy. So far this season I've measured over 13 more inches of rain than we got by the end of March last year. Pretty wet. But at least we're finally getting some sunbreaks when the temperature is over 45º and I'm getting outside to get a few things done. Been working in my veggie garden, and today I planted a brand new Darrow blueberry I just bought. A terrible thing happened to my Bluecrop plants—all 5 of them—when I went out to look at their flower buds early this month, I noticed they didn't have any! I'm thinking that the big freeze we had right before Thanksgiving killed their buds right as they were forming. Only one Bluecrop has two flower buds, on a really low branch that is semi-sheltered in the branches of the blueberry next to it. My other two blueberries, a Legacy and a Darrow, both set a nice crop of buds. The Darrows are particularly fun because they're quite large, so I bought another one this morning. Lesson: don't put all your eggs in one kind of berry bush—diversify!

Dig a hole, find a rock

Typically, there was a nice big rock right where I wanted to plant it, but at least this rock was loose and came out easily. Isn't that lovely soil? Nice wet, brown clay. Mmmmm.

Last summer I was visiting a friend who lives nearby and on her back deck she had a beautiful big round bowl right at elbow height on a simple wrought iron stand, overflowing with leaf lettuces just ready to pick. I really wanted one just like hers, but pricing wrought iron stands turned out to be pretty discouraging. And forget about finding a big, good-looking shallow bowl like hers. Still haven't seen one like it. But this winter while Goodwill hunting I did find a very strange but fairly tall and sturdy vinyl-covered steel stand and a low rectangular purple plastic tub that actually fit it—sort of—so now I have a lettuce tub on my patio!

The latest style: Shabby Cheap

I filled and planted it yesterday in between showers, and laid the fir branchlets over the top as disguise. If you were a hungry finch, would you be able to tell there's tasty lettuce seed sitting right there for the taking?

On my way down to the veggie garden this morning I found what my neighbor calls a "widowmaker" right next to one of my heavily traveled paths.

A sign from above

This one's only a little over an inch thick, but it got driven in pretty good into the dirt. This is why I don't work outside when the wind's blowing more than a medium breeze. You never know when or where one of these air-to-ground missiles is going to launch itself.

Lots of great plants are showing up in the nurseries now, and I've been out there getting my share. Got some great deals on heucheras, including my favorite Amethyst Mist. The plants are starting to pile up on my patio now.

The waiting room

Got a nice Choisya Sundance that will look really great with the Amethyst Mist, Tiramisu heucheras and more hellebores. The soil is warm enough to plant now at 42º, all I'm waiting for now is for it to be a bit less soggy (too much to ask?) and the air to be a bit warmer. There's no sign of 60º yet, not up here in the toes of the foothills of the Cascades. The weatherman said last week that we'll usually see it around April 11th, and that's only a couple weeks away.

Hellebore Heaven—at last!

2011-03-11T19:46:00.000-08:00

I love hellebores! I'm so hungry for flowers this time of year, and here they show up with their great colors and keep blooming till the next garden players are ready to take over the performance. When a late afternoon sunbeam backlit this young, dark red beauty, I grabbed my camera and ran outside to get a picture. In the shade it looks like dark mahogany, but when the sun hit it, it really looked this red. Ahhhhh.

Both the red and this pink are unnamed seedlings. I think it will be many years before I have enough hellebores. Tough, evergreen, drought tolerant, need only a little bit of sun, love bare clay devoid of humus, bloom for weeks and weeks—and some make babies for you!

A dachshund triple portrait

2011-02-28T08:42:00.000-08:00

This last month I've been working on another dachshund portrait, this time a triple study of Boomer and his two housemates. I was really amazed at how well this went. I'm not a fan of photorealism, but it does help a lot in creating likenesses. I wonder how many more dachshund studies I would have to do before the forms and proportions became engraved in my mind, and I could begin to draw them from my memories. Or any subject, for that matter—trees or flowers or clouds or mountains.

In any case, this one has been fun, and interesting, and time well spent.

Sunshine, snow, mudbugs—and Spring!

2011-02-24T14:30:00.000-08:00

What a treat, to wake up to a snow blanket over everything, and yet know that Spring is coming soon! Not until the hydrangea buds have to make it through another two nights of brrrrrr temperatures, and some additional number of nights around freezing, but it's coming!

I know it by the hellebores who refuse to be cowed...

I know it by the sunshine lighting up the colored glass...

I see it in the glowing clouds shining through the trees...

and even in the skeletons of gardens past...

it's in the sky, the clouds, the trees, in the small things you only see under your feet, alive and growing. It's in the sun returning, in the birds going after mudbugs. It's almost here!

Publish book...check!

2011-02-12T18:44:00.000-08:00

Two and a half years ago I wrote a book on menopause, and spent a lot of time looking for a way to publish it without breaking my budget. I looked at publishers, agents, marketing campaigns, and self publishing packages from printers. I read books on how to write letters to everyone in the publishing industry, I got lists of agents and what they handled, and lists of publishers and what they publish. I researched my market online, I went to Powell's and skimmed through every book they had on menopause, and still thought mine had possibilities. I got it copyrighted, wrote my first query letter to an agent, and sent it off into oblivion. I decided I would much rather publish it myself than spend an unknown number of years writing query letters. But self publishing, besides having the potential to be the fast track to nowhere, was still not free. Even if I did all the work myself that I could, it was looking like $200 to $2000, just to get into print. But then there was the Kindle.

Last year, I started studying up on how to publish on Kindle. Amazon had been adding more and more support for authors, and I found everything I needed to know—although some of it was a bit confusing and took a while to sink in—on their forum. So bit by bit, month by month, I converted it to Kindle format, tweaked and polished and read and re-read it, again and again, and thought about all the fun and the scary things that could happen if I actually got it done.

One thing a bit different about doing a book—I couldn't have done it without lots of help from friends and family. Not like a painting!

And last Friday, on the first day of the Year Of The Rabbit, I finally got it up there on Amazon, and it's live! And except for the copyright fee, it cost me exactly nothing. I guess the age of individual self-expression has really arrived.

Got something to say? Write a book!

What lies beneath our feet

2011-01-21T13:05:00.000-08:00

Basalt Cliffs

Acrylics on paper 11x14

I have to admit I have a weakness for stones. I was lucky to have a father who would take us on day trips to mountains and mountain streams where we could leap around on and climb up and slide down granite boulders. I wore out more than one pair of pants that way. I love the basalt boulders in my garden—even if they do make planting difficult sometimes—and the beautiful bluffs and cliffs around here. Every time I've been able to be around the hexagonal structure of basalt columns, I've loved seeing them and photographing them. So ever since I saw this cliff last year, I've wanted to make a painting of it. The colors and shapes of the columns have a natural beauty I can't resist, and the staining and moss and lichens on them make them even more beautiful to me. And that's beside my fascination with the way they originate within the earth and the processes that form them. I can't imagine I could ever get tired of seeing them, and they're one more thing about Oregon I love.

My sap must be rising

2011-01-17T16:04:00.000-08:00

It stopped raining (after 2.6") and I can't stay inside—I keep making little trips out in the garden. I've checked all the hellebores again, pulled a bunch of windthrown branches off of them, and glared menacingly at some weeds. Big fat buds are starting to open. I looked out back this morning before the rain stopped and saw both my witch hazels are blooming—yay! It seems like they're a little bit earlier this year, but I didn't write it down last year so I'm just guessing. Hooray, color in the garden! Daffodil tips have broken ground—and that's pretty much it for now. So I should be able to sit still, but I can't! I tried a little painting work, then the sun came out and I had to get out in that. We're supposed to get two dry days starting day after tomorrow, I'll be out there weeding if it's not too cold, windy, or smoky.

And tomorrow I'm going for the first plant-shopping trip of the year with three other plant addicts—maybe that's why I can't concentrate! I'm frapturous.

Ring Thing

Yesterday while it rained I finished putting together my first larger glass piece for my garden. If you look very closely at this photo you can see a thin rectangular wrought iron frame, with four fused glass rings tied into it with copper wire. While the sun was peeping intermittently through the selfish clouds this afternoon, I walked all over the garden with it, looking for a relatively uncluttered place to photograph it, maybe with a bit of sunshine on it if any could get through. Turns out I have no nice uncluttered backgrounds, just my dark green house and dark brown barn, but I did figure out where I want to put the Ring Thing—at the front entrance to my future meditation garden, which will materialize a year or two from now.

I actually got a really nice feeling of satisfaction when I finished putting the piece together. It's the first time I've ever assembled anything like that, and that feeling made me eager to do another one. It might be time to start pulling out pieces of the filbert wood I put away last fall, and see what it will take to put something together that will hold some glass. That will be more work than just repurposing another candle stand, but it could be a logical progression. I know one thing—I want the next one to be taller, so it's easier to see against the sky.

Douglas Firs in my garden...or rather, they are my garden

2011-01-09T16:17:00.000-08:00

Nothing says country garden like a couple dozen 80-foot-tall douglas firs. I wrestled for a few years with how to paint trees that tall on a small canvas—before I gave up. I couldn't think of any way to capture how much I love them, how much I appreciate having this tiny piece of second-growth forest around my house, making the shade garden I've always wanted. Their two-feet-across trunks and feathery needles that animate in the tiniest breeze, the rough red and grey bark, the massive amounts of oxygen they pump out every night, the life-saving shade they give in the hot summers, and the immediate quieting of my mind and balancing of my spirit that happens when I go out and just stand there at the base of these huge, massive, multi-ton pillars of living energy.

Then I discovered the art of Emily Carr, and couldn't believe how perfectly she caught all of that and much more. I've looked through The Art Of Emily Carr dozens of times since then, and that finally came to a head for me last week and I tried a painting of the three trees close behind my house, from a photo I took the year I moved in. I know it doesn't look like an Emily Carr, but if Emily Carr had a bad dream and that bad dream came to my garden, IT could have painted this:

Three Firs 11x14

Acrylics on paper

Well, anyway, with any luck they'll be there for many more years, and I'll have lots more time to keep painting them—now that I know it's theoretically possible to paint them.

I went outside half an hour ago to check my new-last-year Meadowlark forsythia for flower buds—nothing very big yet, but lots of tiny ones. I walked around to the south side just in time for the sun to come out and hit me smack in the face. I feel like we're halfway through the worst of winter—adding two minutes of daylight every day and coming that much closer to the gradual warm-up and everything starting to grow again. Ahhhhhhh. So good.

Why make art?

2011-01-04T10:35:00.000-08:00

Memory Oil on canvas

It seems to be automatic in me every now and then, to scrape everything off the table in my mind and look at what I'm doing and ask myself why I'm doing it. Something about January is inspiring me to do that now. Maybe it's because our calendar just started a new cycle, and I'm hoping the new year will bring me new challenges and skills. Or maybe it's because it's 28º outside for the fourth? or fifth? morning in a row, the ground is frozen so it crunches when you walk, the rhododendron leaves are curled up like cinnamon sticks, and there's still snow on the roofs from a week ago. There's no such word as "rooves", right?

Through the year as I'm making each glass piece or painting, one wish comes up every time—that someone else will like this piece as much as or more than I do, and decide they just have to take it home and put it in their house or garden. That actually only happens on rare occasions, and yet I never seem to learn, I always think it will happen. As a painting is coming together and suddenly takes on its first glimmer of presence, or when I brush the kiln dust off a piece of glass and see the light shining through the colors for the first time, my emotions well up, my ego leaps into the saddle and goes charging off with my heart in tow, wanting that feedback from the universe—Yes! you are an ARTIST! And this is a beautiful work of ART and someone will desire it! And I feel like that is the reason that I made this piece, for that as yet unknown person out there who feels and sees just the way I do.

Well, sometimes it happens, and sometimes it doesn't. And what I seem to end up with, inside me where I need to have room to think, is a big clutter of post-it notes that say, "Someone will want this," clogging up my neural pathways.

That's what the scraping is for, to clear all those out and throw them away, to acknowledge that it doesn't really matter if anyone else ever wants any of these, I'm still going to keep making more. And while I'm at it, I want to scrape off everything anyone said this year about my work—good, bad, or what-are-they-saying?—unless it actually stimulates or inspires me to go make something. I want to throw away everything I've read or heard about what's "great" or "trendy" or "important" in the art world. This year, for some reason, I feel a very clear imperative—that the only thing that's important to me about my art is that no matter what, I must keep making it. Everything else, every other thought or idea about what I'm working on or why I'm doing it, no matter from where or from whom it comes, is irrelevant.

But why is that? Why am I making art, instead of doing something else? Is it because I recognize there are mental benefits I get from art? I know the creative stimulation keeps my mind active, always looking for patterns, for colors, studying other works I like, examining, comparing, ending every day with questions and getting up in the morning to find answers. It's obviously working out my brain cells—how could that not be good? I see spiritual benefits as well in the act of creating, shutting off the logical mind in active meditation, letting the indescribable forces flow through me, driving my hands and my ideas to make something new, something which I could never have thought up or derived without that effort to let go of control and constraint long enough for the new work to come forth. The third level of purpose seems to be creating something I'd like to keep. I adore beauty and having beautiful things around me, and even though I make an awful lot of things that don't merit that description, every now and then I hit the jackpot with something that really brings a new dimension to my space. Fourth, it's clear to me now that I have a drive to achieve. I want to have achievements to look back on, evidence of my efforts and signs of my personal progress. Even if no one else ever sees them, I want them. Even if they never get to be as good in anyone's eyes, including mine, as other works I find, they bring me a level of enjoyment that I didn't have before. There's one more reason that I learned this year about myself—I'm always wanting to move to something new. I want to see new work that I've never seen before, just like I want to hear new words and music, to laugh at new silliness, and see and understand new levels of knowledge about the familiar things around me. So that's the fifth purpose—I want to keep expanding into the previously unknown.

All of those reasons make sense to me; they feel like whole, self-sufficient truths. They could be the origins of this undeniable urge that I have to make art. Probably only psychologists or behavioral scientists will ever really care whether the irrational drive or the rational rewards are the true determiners of why artists must make art. Maybe someday it will be connected to one or more genes, but then you have to ask why any being would have those genes, and how far back in the evolutionary path do they go? In any case, the practical point for me is that I'm forced to recognize that the reason I'm making art is not to make it for other people. I'm not going to start a new painting because someday someone's going to look at it and say "Wow! I want this!" So I can throw that thought and all the thoughts like it away and the only thing left on my table will be what's real for me—real, proven, and reliable—I'm going to make art because that's what I want to do, that's what I'm driven to do. I don't have to think about it, I don't have to have a reason, I don't have to explain it or justify it in any way. I just have to make art.

Have a Happy New Year doing what you simply must do!

Oh, My Stars!

2010-12-28T20:58:00.000-08:00

A new shape is coming out of the kiln—8 point stars. I finally solved the riddle of how to put one together, and found I can make a nice little 4-plus inch star. There should be lots of great color combos possible, even though they're a bit constrained by the desire for symmetry. In the first one I wanted to try and combine lime green and cranberry. That turned out a bit harsh and unsatisfying, but the addition of a few contrasting colors—aqua and pale gold—blended them together in a way I really like.

I ended up having to fire this one twice, because two of the pieces crawled apart as they melted instead of joining together. Oh well. I would just as soon learn all my lessons now before I move on to bigger, more complicated pieces.

I tried a second star on Christmas Eve, in a mix of reds and ambers that has become one of my favorite color combos.

Everybody stayed put this time, and I loved the way it turned out. I love the small irregularities in shape from the varied shapes of the chips, the subtle color changes from the overlapping hues, and the way they look like melting, colored ice. The light reflections off of every rounded edge and the perfect smoothness of the glass makes them really fun to touch, too. I'm beginning to have thoughts of the possibilities of three dimensional texture I might have with even this simple layering process.

Fun fun fun!

The 12 Days of Solstice

2010-12-21T18:03:00.000-08:00

Our Hardy Plant Society chapter had our solstice party this afternoon. We contemplated the confusion about today being both the start of days getting longer (that's GOOD), and also being the first day of winter, which will last for the next three months (that's BAD). Not that bad, really, because the hellebores are starting to sprout, the pieris and heather and rhodies are all covering themselves in fat buds. In just a "few" weeks, the witch hazels will start blooming, then crocus and daffodils will start popping up, and the next thing you know, it will be spring!

We sang a song today that I really enjoyed, and I wanted to share it with you. So with permission of the talented Carol Koshkarian who wrote it, here is "The 12 Days of Solstice":

On the first day of Solstice, Apollo gave to me...Rain and 40 degrees.
On the second day of Solstice, Apollo gave to me...two muddy boots, (...yadda yadda yadda...)
On the third day of Solstice, Apollo gave to me...three thousand slugs,
On the fourth day of Solstice, Apollo gave to me...four soggy beds,
On the fifth day of Solstice, Apollo gave to me...five Golden sunbreaks!
On the sixth day of Solstice, Apollo gave to me...six ponds a-brimming,
On the seventh day of Solstice, Apollo gave to me...seven lawns a-swimming,
On the eighth day of Solstice, Apollo gave to me...eight streams o'er-flowing,
On the ninth day of Solstice, Apollo gave to me...nine molds a-growing,
On the tenth day of Solstice, Apollo gave to me, ten gutters leaking,
On the eleventh day of Solstice, Apollo gave to me, eleven culverts seeping,
On the twelveth day of Solstice, Apollo gave to me, twelve gardeners weeping....

Enjoy the lengthening days, the holidays we have to celebrate, and the rest of 2011! Best wishes to you all!

Conquering portrait anxiety

2010-12-21T11:38:00.000-08:00

This is Boomer. His family are my friends at Meadowcroft Farm, whose garden I painted last year. They were agreeable to having me try some portrait work of their three dachshunds. She sent me some photos and I quickly picked Boomer, the senior partner, as my first try. I hadn't done a portrait in 25 years, human or canine, but I grew up with pet dachshunds from when I was 7 or 8 till I left for college, so I felt like I knew them well enough to be able to do it. Plus, Boomer and his other housemates were friends of mine, and I thought I had a chance of getting a good likeness for that reason.

I was determined to do a fairly loose study, and started with some pencil sketches. With those under my belt, I grabbed my liquid acrylics and threw a head sketch onto a small canvas panel. I took all of the sketches to my friends, and he looked at the acrylic and said "that's him". But the next time I picked it up to work on it, I went into panic mode. If the acrylic was the one they connected with, I had to continue with it, I could never get that lucky again (that was my line of thought). Then I discovered that the reference photo of Boomer was very faded out around his paws—the trickiest, most complicated part of a dachshund's anatomy. None of the other photos showed a paw in a similar enough position for me to use it. I went to the web looking for references and still didn't have any luck. All of my confidence and conviction fell flat, all the (hot) air squeezed from them by my fear. I knew I could never meet their expectations, so why even try?

About that time I fired up my glass kiln for the first time in five years, and for the next two months I didn't want to do anything but glass, so Boomer lay on the shelf, alone and footless, while I pushed down my guilt over not having at least made an attempt to give him some paws. At the beginning of December I ran into my friends at a party, and he remarked again that he thought I had really gotten Boomer's look. That statement somehow gave me the courage I needed to go back to work on the painting. I spent a few hours photoshop-playing with the original photos until I believed I could see what the the missing paw pixels had to look like, until I could construct an image in my head of how that lumpy, amorphous arrangement of bones and skin and fur would appear. I was determined, at that point, that I would just keep reworking it until I got something I was happy with.

As it turned out, I had to rework several areas, and it certainly is not a great painting. But I'm still happy with it, because when I look at it, I see my little friend, Boomer.

December Art Sale On Etsy!

2010-12-01T22:13:00.000-08:00

All the works I have in my Etsy shop are now on sale—25% off!—for the entire month of December. So if you're looking for a really special gift of art for yourself or a loved one, please check out my offerings there. The coupon code to use is DECARTSALE2010, just enter it when you make your purchase to receive the discount. I'll be putting some of my glass pieces up there soon, as well.

I'm sorry to see my friend, mentor and supporter Annie Howden closing up her beautiful gallery down on Washington Street. Not one to be down long, she'll be opening a new framing shop up the hill in upper Oregon City around the first of the year. I'll miss my regular visits to see all the works by other county artists and chat with Annie and with Kim Walton of King's Raven Winery at the tasting room there. But I did manage to trade a couple of my Garden Jewelry pieces for a couple of great bottles of Pinot Gris!

I started working on my Christmas card design yesterday and I found that my glass work is already influencing both my color choices and my design approach when I'm doing paint sketches. The first thing I did was start putting my favorite bright colors together in an abstract arrangement—exactly what I do with the glass—and when it started looking like a landscape, I went with that idea. What I ended up with wasn't exactly a Christmas card, but it was fun to do. When I started with a second sketch, I started with a design first, but again I found myself going to the bright colors, in combinations very familiar to me from the glass work. I've always felt inhibited in my color selections and too concerned with choosing "realistic"ones, so I'm thinking this is a good step. I think anything that helps you break your own self-imposed and unconscious boundaries is not just beneficial, but enlightening.

Here's the first sketch, just for fun:

Yes, it's true—I like to play...

But you know what? Last month I was interrogating my muse again about where new ideas and inventions come from, and the answer I finally got was—from play.

Works for me!

And, I'm taking on a small glass project—when I was in the local Goodwill last week, I came across a great wrought iron candle stand I'm going to convert into a glass-and-wire-and-iron garden art piece! Oh boy—my first sculpture! I'll let you know how that goes.

Stay warm!

There's a Full Moon Out—Do Your Full Moon Dance!

2010-11-20T19:19:00.000-08:00

This time of year, it's all about the weather for me. I'm a compulsive radar-map and thermometer watcher. I just saw that there was a small radar blob on top of my house and I went to the back door to see if it was indeed sprinkling outside—but the sky looked clear and a big full moon is shining brightly, rising behind the tall firs. I will never figure out the weather in Oregon. One of my favorite days was a few years ago, I don't remember if it was late spring or early fall, but all day long from the time I woke up, thick dark clouds rolled overhead from the southwest. Hour after hour it looked like it could rain buckets at any moment, but by mid-afternoon, it was still dry, just wind and clouds. Then while I watched through my living room window, the clouds began to break and quickly they shrank and disappeared, and the brilliant sun came shining beautifully from the west as it headed toward the coast. And that was when it started raining, with no clouds overhead—a soft, steady, light rain that kept falling for a quarter hour. All I could do was laugh in wonder.

I actually went out and dug up a half dozen weeds—well, Labrador violets—this afternoon, out of the mud, it was so nice. Cold, but nice. I think the garden is all ready for the impending freezing nights. I'm sure my geraniums and begonias are going to bite the big one, but that's the circle of Life. The begonia tubers will sleep all winter in my garage, and I'll be ready to buy more baby geraniums next spring. I planted the two new hardy sedums I just bought from Anthony and Susan of Green Gate Nursery in Willamette (old West Linn). It's tough being a plant junkie. You try and try to resist them, but then you get close to one you've never seen before, and it's soooo cute, and then you hear the words, "It's so easy to grow..." and you're sunk.

But the winter weather is here, and it's time to take all that digging energy and put it to work in my studio. My little glass fusing kiln has been helping keep my garage warm, as piece after piece has been coming out. I've been having several thoughts of new designs, some fairly easy and some I'm not ready to try yet.

I wasn't just happy that I finally got a good-looking 8-ray star form, using a square center, I fell in love with the color combination of the amber-gold with the cranberry red. With the orange accents, it looks like a sunset.

I had to try another one, with another color combination I hadn't used for years—lime green opal (translucent) glass with deep turquoise transparent:

Of course I had to add a few more colors, medium and lime green, and green iridescent. The pieces stayed almost square to each other, and I was so excited when I opened the kiln I did my little happy kiln dance.

You can dance if you want to! You can leave your cares behind! And in winter when it's 55 in your garage, it'll help you keep warm!

Happy freezing!

Growing for growing's sake

2010-11-13T20:22:00.000-08:00

I found a tiny miracle in my house this morning when I got up. This summer a friend gave me some prunings from one of my favorite shrubs of hers, an unknown variety of Pieris that has bright pink new growth every winter. I potted up several cuttings from it and they've been living under lights inside my house, along with a hydrangea cutting from my flowers-bigger-than-my-head plant. Although none of them have died, they hadn't shown any signs of growth either—until this morning. One of them has a tiny new branch with several miniscule leaves on it. Sure hope it keeps growing till spring, when I'll be able to put it out in the garden.

A couple days ago I did a piece that reminded me of one of Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series—the blue and green colors and the blockiness of it. Usually the shapes of the pieces don’t add that much to the overall look of the piece, but in this one the color shapes combined to make a real composition. Looking at his work again reminds me of where I got lost in my painting, when it seemed like I stopped getting what I wanted, and I realize that never happened—I just kept changing what I wanted. Learning to paint what’s inside you is exploring the unknown, and exploring the unknown is like going up a staircase and thinking every step is the summit. You spend time at each one, examining every bit of it in detail so you can translate it into your experience. You paint it this way and that until it’s yours, all yours, and suddenly you realize—it’s not the top, it’s not where you’re trying to get to—it’s just another step. You start looking around for the rest of the staircase, the next step. You come upon something that clicks with you—it might be anything—something that stirs you, that makes you want to run and grab your paints and start working again.

Looking at Diebenkorn's work on the web made me feel that way—that I wanted to grab my paints—but I didn't, I made more glass instead.

I made a peppery color scheme, for a fellow gardener, that looks good enough to eat in the sun.

And then I made one that looks rather unfortunately like a really old piece of pizza. It will go to a lonely, dark corner of my garden where no one will ever notice it. I hope. Or maybe I'll bury it, so a hundred years from now a future resident can dig it up, and go "Ewwwww!"

Yesterday I attended a memorial service for a member of our local Hardy Plant group, a wonderful woman whom I clearly did not get to know well enough. The pastor who officiated said something at the end that touched me. "If you want to honor Ann, take a little bit of whatever she gave you, and pass it on to someone else."That is a way of growing that I hadn't thought of—growing a memory into an act of friendship, growing a previous relationship into a future one. By passing on even the tiniest gift, you multiply it far beyond its original size.

Getting a lesson in ZING

2010-11-04T13:20:00.000-07:00

If you're already sick of my garden photos, might as well turn away or grab a baggie...it's a new week and new colors are out. And miracle of miracles, 3 sunny days in a row to enjoy them! Hooray!

My 'Hilleri' Japanese maple is hitting its stride now. You don't usually notice this unless you're right down in the northeast area I call my grotto, but this time of year you can't miss it from the house, even.
It's a very nice little tree with dark green leaves 50 weeks out of the year. Then for a week it slowly shifts to dark burgundy, then dark brick red, and then--POW!

I mentioned before that my Satomi always turns orange red. This year it got more sun than every before, I wonder if it'll go brighter next week?

This was the second 'Forest Pansy' redbud I got, and it gets more sun than the first one, but usually it just goes yellow gold and then immediately sheds. This year it has a lot more red in it than I've ever seen. I wonder if it might be in love?

That's it, except for my 'Bloodgood' Japanese maples and my Cotinus 'Royal Purple', which haven't even started thinking about changing yet. But I do have some new glass pieces. I wanted to try a mixed fusing of opal glass (mostly opaque) on the bottom and colored transparent cathedral glass on top. I think they'll work better than just the transparent in areas where the light may not hit them directly, or there may be a dark area behind them like a dark wall or thick greenery, but the opal still lights up when the sun hits it from behind. It's a different effect, and I like it.

I had taken my last load of pieces down to the Howden Gallery on Tuesday, and my studio looked really empty except for a few "seconds" that exhibited one or more glaring defects or a general lack of appeal. It's good to have some bright stuff back hanging around, at least for a while. I fired my 23rd piece last night. The two below I really cranked out quickly, but now as I'm seeing how they turned out I'm seeing there are a lot of possibilities in mixing the two styles of glass. I'm realizing that each piece really is a painting on its own, and worth spending the time to play with. I noticed on a couple of the recent pieces that I may have all the colors I want in a piece and it still won't look "together", or have that particular—well, hook—that grabs your eye. I would think I was done putting the chips together, but still be wanting to play with it. I'd rearrange a couple pieces a little, or replace one or two with slightly different colors, and suddenly there's a ZING! in my gut, and I knew it had gone to a new level. I look back at all the paintings I've done and finished, and know that sadly, there were a lot of them that didn't have a ZING. ZINGless. I'm thinking this is a good thing to know, when you have ZING vs. when there is no ZING. Some ZING is definitely better than no ZING.

I must have a new brain cell or two (I was SO happy to read that adults can still grow them after all), because I've been realizing a lot of things just lately. One was that I need to add a link to Shari Erickson's webpage. If you've never seen her miniatures, they really are rather jaw-dropping.

A Thank You For My Garden

2010-11-02T20:24:00.000-07:00

I woke up early this morning, in time to catch the first light coming through the fog. Every morning that I do this it reminds me of just how lucky I am to live here in such a beautiful place.

As the good-bye colors come out all over the countryside, I really want to offer my heartfelt gratitude to all the plants that have continued to grow and thrive in my garden. I started planting trees and perennials five years ago, and every year since then they have been growing, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Every month there's a new surprise to see when I walk outside, new growth or new flowers. This fall they're really starting to show their colors.

Two years ago, this Acer circinatum was a pair of four-foot sticks. Now it's starting to look like a real tree. I love the rounded palmate leaves, and the fact that it's a perfectly adapted and adaptable native of Oregon. Shade, sun, heat, cold--it doesn't care. It's just happy to be here.

This Cornus kousa Satomi was the very first tree I planted here, a bare root twig. Now it's 7 feet tall and about to turn the brilliant red-orange it turns every fall. Oh boy!

This Acer palmatum Sango Kaku, coral-bark maple, in the foreground is a young tree I just planted a year ago, and it started turning color almost a month ago. In early morning when the sunlight hits it, this baby lights up like a Las Vegas marquee. I'm already imagining what it's going to look like two years from now when it's a foot bigger in each direction (drool). Behind it is one of the Viburnum plicatums, the snowball viburnum, who is still getting established and couldn't manage to crank out any snowballs this year, but is making up for it with a really lovely fall show.

The aforementioned snowball viburnum. Ahhhhhh.

My extra-super-special scoop of the year, a very hard-to-find Disanthus cercidifolius, in the middle of transforming from green to crimson. It's also covered with tiny flowerbuds the size of ladybugs, that I think will open this winter.

My Sedum 'Brilliant' is still living up to its name this fall, even though the flowers have already dried.

And last on the list but right at the top of my heart, all my beautiful hydrangeas that bloomed so richly this year are in their gentle fall colors. This Sister Theresa has big, pure white heads of flowers, and now they're lovely pink and green. Other ones are blue/green, blue/violet, and blue/pink, I could cut some off for inside the house, but they're still so pretty outside I haven't wanted to.

So thank you, dear plants, for making my garden so beautiful, for being a continuous source of joy and inspiration to me, for making me feel like an artist every time I walk outside. May your roots grow deep and your trunks strong, and may your beauty bless the earth till the end of time.

Will work for FUN!

2010-10-26T13:43:00.000-07:00

I went into the studio yesterday evening hungry for some colors, so I grabbed glass and cut up some blues, greens and browns, cleaned them and dumped them onto a sheet of paper. I looked at the pile and a light went off in my head. When I first started fusing I had had an idea of making an openwork piece, with gaps between the individual pieces. I'd made a couple tries at it but they hadn't looked good enough to fire. Now there was one sitting in front of me. With a little bit of rearranging, they turned into what I took out of my kiln this morning:

If you half-close your eyes, you can see my back yard in here!

I noticed with one of the other pieces I blogged about yesterday that it was the culmination of another idea that I had to iterate on several times before I got one that was recognizable as my original idea. Several other of the pieces that led up to it were interesting in themselves, just not what I had been aiming for. But they spun off other ideas to try to develop. That got me thinking about how often that had happened in my painting where I would have an idea of an image and work it up into a painting, only to have the result not really embody what I had imagined to begin with. But the paintings took so long that I would always figure that it was as close as I would be able to get, and rather than keep working on that idea I would go off in a new direction.

That reminded me very much of watching Pablo Picasso working in the excellent video I believe I have written about before, The Mystery Of Picasso. He reworked everything in the video as he painted it, constantly changing and revamping, wiping out and repainting a dozen times, or painting over, or throwing out and starting all over. I wonder if that was the issue with him, that he was trying to get closer to his starting idea. It might not be. Robert Burridge, if you've ever watched any of his videos (and if you have not, I recommend them highly) seems to pull stuff out of his hat as he goes, with or without an an actual beginning idea. He'll start with a thread of an idea, or hint of a thread of an idea.

I was taking some of these pieces down to Howden Gallery this morning, where they are now for sale, priced from $15 to $30, and started thinking about what I would answer if someone asked me, "Now that you're doing glass, are you going to keep painting?" I wasn't sure what the correct answer would be, but on the way back home I was thinking about the glass colors, and got an idea for another ink painting that I'll be doing soon. So, I guess Art feeds Art, and ideas come from everything you do! Or as Robert Burridge says, "No matter what the question is, the answer is always 'YES!'"

Passion takes a hand

2010-10-25T21:57:00.000-07:00

A 1.5"x5" piece with both transparent and opal glass in garden colors—

blues, lots of greens, and a bit of pink and red.

One of my first rings, also a mix of transparent and opal glass.

A shot of warm color, like orange juice on a cold morning.

I've been having so much fun fusing. I just finished my 14th firing, a different style piece composed of overlapped small rectangles filling in a circular shape. It has to cool in the kiln for 6 more hours, so I won't see it till tomorrow morning—I'm not staying up till 2am! I've tried a couple different shapes and more new color combinations. Yesterday I spent a while making wire loops for them and monofilament hangers, and today, for the first time, I took the two pieces above outside and hung them on a garden pole in between rain showers. I love looking at them outside. The spots of bright color against the cloudy skies and the dark trees are really welcome additions to my garden. I want more out there, more pieces, and larger and more complex. I'm thinking of the single pieces as Garden Jewelry, for poor leafless trees that have to stand there naked all winter. But I have fences too, that can be decorated, and more garden poles, eaves, and low-hanging fir branches that can use some decoration too. The rings have the lovely habit of rotating slowly in the breeze, so the colors change a bit as the light hits from different angles.

Here are a few more pieces:

One of my friends said this one reminds her of that formica countertop

that came out in the 1950's that had little orange and turquoise boomerangs all over it.

A couple of the orange rectangles surprised me by turning dark red during the firing.

I thought that maybe from a distance, the clear might disappear and the blue pieces would look like they were floating in air.

The warmth of earth tones, the forest in summer.

When I was doing a firing a couple days ago, I had a really interesting moment. I was thinking about how playing with the glass was giving me an opportunity to reduce my work from painting to the two simplest and most important elements I had craved in my painting—color and shape. Creating good paintings requires so many more things, unless you go to color fields, which I came close to in my last ink painting. But with these small glass pieces, color and shape are all I'm working with. And as I thought that, it was as if a window opened in my side and I could see and feel a place in my core that didn't want to do anything but make colors and shapes, and it wanted to make piece after piece. No doubt, no thoughts, no emotion even, just this fierce drive—to work, to make, to do this one thing. I've felt the effects of that desire to create before, but I had never seen that core impulse in myself, completely intense and unyielding, as an instinct might be.

So now I know what's making me do this. It's hard-wired into me.

Painting with glass

2010-10-03T16:19:00.000-07:00

Funny how every now and then you get up in the morning and do something different. One morning a couple of weeks ago I drove up to Portland and bought 15 pounds of scrap glass from a couple of professional glass artists, and ended up cranking up my little HotShot kiln that I hadn't plugged in since I moved into this house five years ago. It took me two days to find all my tools and books and firing logs, but eventually I got everything together and started playing with my scraps. Having them already cut into small random pieces made it really easy to get started, I didn't need a plan or pattern, I just had an idea of which colors to start with. I made a pile I liked:

Now I had an arrangement I liked, but it was too big to fire in my little kiln, so I cut the pieces down to this:

It was late night by that time so I went to sleep thinking of colors and shapes and different designs I could try, and right after breakfast the next morning I set up a chair and table in the garage so I could babysit my first firing in over five years. My brave little kiln fired right up and worked perfectly, and later that afternoon I was able to take out my piece and enjoy it:

I love glass! I love the colors, I love how it melts and flows together, I love the technical aspects and the need for focus and attention, and I really love how it adds light and beauty to a space. The transparency or translucency gives you another parameter to play with. It's also really fun to have something you can hold in your hands, and hang indoors or out.

I had so much fun I did four more firings in the next 6 days!

Here's another piece in the kiln, ready for firing:

And here's my latest piece, which I fired yesterday:

Having all these colors of glass, not to mention iridescence and dichroism and surface textures as well to play with is just like being a sugar junkie in a candy store. I think it might be addictive. One thing it's great for is playing with color in a free and fun way. But like the ink paintings, there's a need for precise control during the process and there's waiting involved, so it's no instant gratification thing. Patience is good, and it's something I find myself working on all the time.

Another great benefit to living in NW Oregon is that Portland is home to two premier manufacturers of glass for fusing, Uroboros and Bullseye, and probably hundreds of glass artists, many of whom are constantly pushing the boundaries of glassworking.

So I've got me another fascinating indoor hobby to work on through the winter. I hope to have a garden full of glass goodies by spring!

Painting What You Love

2010-08-01T00:32:00.000-07:00

The Sentinel
Acrylics on canvas $950

I've just finished another new painting, one I've been working on, off and on, for the last three months. The design evolved from a simple graphic I saw as a painting in a dream. The tenor of the piece, however, came from my discovery of the works of Emily Carr, a Canadian painter who lived and painted from the end of the 19th century to the mid-20th. I had never heard of her until I happened on one of her works in a book of "modern" painters I thumbed through in a Goodwill store in Portland. I googled her when I got home and got more excited seeing her art than I'd been about any painting in a long time. I absolutely love the mountains, trees, and waters of the Pacific northwest, so much that it's hard for me to say in words, and I've never seen any art that captures the feel of a forest the way her work does. The emotional quality and depth I see in it had an immense effect on me. I really never imagined so much could be expressed in a painting of trees. I really wished I had discovered her twenty years ago. Better late than never.

In reading about her, I learned also of the Group of Seven, more Canadians, mostly from eastern Canada, who painted very powerful, very dynamic and colorful landscapes as well as other subjects, in different styles but all very new and innovative in their time. If like me, you never imagined there were great Canadian painters in the early modern era who created a huge and magnificent body of art, I think you'll enjoy discovering them all.

My love for mountains and forests has been with me since I was a child, and the first time I visited this region in 1964, I knew someday I would live here. And as long as I have lived here—not nearly long enough—I have wanted to paint this land, the waters, and the skies. I feel extremely grateful to be able to be here now, doing just that.

Like my last painting, Mystery of Water, The Sentinel can be seen at the Howden Art Gallery in Oregon City, for the next three months as part of the "Wines and Vines" show. Also in this show I have The Grotto (see previous post, The Reference And The Subject), an abstract of Portland called Hill City which I don't have a photo of, and several matted reproductions and small originals. It's another brilliantly hung collection and I'm very pleased to be in it with so many other great artists. I hope you can make it by to see it, meet Annie Howden, and maybe sample some great King's Raven wines with Kim!

Red Sky, Blue Planet

2010-07-18T16:41:00.000-07:00

Mystery Of Water

Ink & Colored Pencil 22x30 $550

At last—a new painting! It feels good to finish one again. It's an ink painting, one I saw an image of in my mind before I started planning it. I let the idea settle for a couple of days, before I laid down the first layer of color on paper. After the first layer dried, I did a second layer to create the dark blue textures. It took several days for that layer to dry, before I could do the finishing work with colored pencils.

I had a new challenge in this one. I wanted to develop the foreground textures enough to be interesting, but I didn't want them to distract from the drama of the simplified background. It took me a few days to decide how much interest was enough. It's a personal choice, and at first I wasn't happy with having to make a choice at all, between doing what I've been doing lately—making the most of every possible detail—and directing all the strength to the main theme—the contrast between the landscape and the sky.

I used to joke about paintings that depend on having a spectrum of colors for their impact, and now I've made one that has little else. That's what comes of poking fun, I guess; the turkey comes home to roost.

What does it mean, The Mystery Of Water? Water connects us to every life form on the Earth. The storm in the sky is water, the lake and the river are water. Trees, grass, birds, bugs, humans—we are all made of water.

Time Spent Fishing

2010-04-30T20:20:00.000-07:00

Afternoon Dream
Acrylic 30x15 $225

Fishing is a symbolic act. Artists are constantly fishing, first for ideas and then for the way to bring them to fruition. We bait our hooks with a need, a desire, to make a new painting or drawing or whatever. We throw that hook into the waters of consciousness, of memory and imagination, the great Cosmic Ocean. Sometimes we wait for days or weeks for a nibble, sometimes the fish is there waiting for us as if it knows our name. We reel in our catch and begin to see it for the first time. Then the magic—and the work—begin.

Depths Of Time 3: Honor The Earth

2010-04-30T19:11:00.000-07:00

Depths Of Time 3: Honor The Earth
Ink & Colored Pencil 22x30 $550

The third painting in my Depths Of Time series is complete. This new one has a greater richness of color and texture than I've been able to achieve before. I'm not sure why it worked better, but I think it has to do with the particular sequence of colors in the inking and pencil layering. The inking is unpredictable as to density and exact pattern, and what I get each time is still a surprise. That doesn't keep me from trying new things each time to have more control over the result, but it's still a gamble. With the colored pencils, the sequence of layering and the time in between applying the layers also produces differing results. The translucence of the wax in the pencil pigments actually makes every layer visible as long as they're not too dark, so up close you see not just the color impression of the mix of hues, but at the same time, each separate hue.

The title actually comes from the theme of Annie Howden's next show starting in May at Howden Gallery, "Celebration Of Honor". My central theme of this series is to make visible the complexity of the invisible Earth beneath our feet, the Earth we seldom see and rarely notice. The roughly 4.5 billion years the Earth has existed are all there, written in that stone and dirt that our green world grows upon. It feels right to me to honor that time, and all the change that has taken place in that time.

Are Inktense pigments really permanent? Not so much...

2010-03-10T16:39:00.000-08:00

I sure hate to have to eat my words, but after doing a couple more sketches with my new Derwent Inktense pencils, I'm having a little word snack, you could say. I was working on a 5x7 sunset painting with really deep blue-grey clouds and a dark foreground. I had put down a rich layer of blue and wanted to tint it fuschia, and was surprised to have lots of blue pigment come up as I tried to lightly wash over it. I hadn't noticed that happening with my first sketches on absorbent paper, and it wasn't obvious when I was building up the dark greens on the garden sketch in my last entry, perhaps because I was adding thick pigment over a thin wash. This time, however, I had hoped to do a pale thin wash over an already heavily pigmented area on the gessoed paper, and ka-BOOM! Up came the pigment.

The documentation all says the pigment has to be completely dissolved to become permanent, so I thought maybe I just hadn't dissolved it all, in my eagerness to make the color rich and dark. Today I decided it was important to find out just how dissolved they have to be, so I took a few wet tissues and wiped all the color I could off my dark, rich sunset. All I had left was a pale, water-color-ish ghost of what was there before. If you can envision a value scale, the darkest areas went from an 8 to about a 3. Sorry I didn't take a picture of it to show you. After the paper dried again to the touch I put on a medium wash of blue, taking the value back up to a 6 or 7. I used lots of water, and brushed the pigment around for a minute, making sure there were no visible particles of pencil left. I let that dry again for over an hour, till it was completely dry to the touch, and I took the same soft round brush I had used to make the wash and lightly rubbed it over a small area, using ample water. The color came up immediately, going back to almost as light as it was before this last wash.

Okay, so now I'm unhappy. I take my wet brush and go attacking all the other sketching I'd done—except the garden sketch—and find that the only color that doesn't come up is the amount that gets absorbed into the surface. On my watercolor paper, very little of the color comes up. On the gesso, almost all of it comes up.

Now why is that? What do you suppose I'm doing wrong? Is my water the wrong pH? Do I live in an area where the pigment won't ever really dissolve? Do I need to give the pigment another day to really dry?

So much for my dream of having a pencil behave like acrylic paint. Sigh. Of course whether this really bothers you is probably going to depend on how you paint. If you're used to working in watercolor, it's no big deal, and it does mean you'll be able to intentionally (as well as unintentionally) lift out pigment to lighten an area, and the less absorbent your surface is, the more you'll be able to lift. And if you want to put more color on an already dark area, just expect that the pigment will come up, and you'll be literally blending the new into the old.

But I wish I hadn't rushed to such a favorable judgment on them, and not believed what others wrote without testing it myself. Bad blogger! (Sorry.)

I think I'll go back to plain sized watercolor paper and keep playing with them. Also, I ordered 14 more colors that should be here soon!

Playing with Derwent Inktense Pencils

2010-03-06T17:42:00.000-08:00

Robert Burridge's February edition of his Artsy Fartsy Newsletter came out a couple days ago and he showed some sketches he'd done with Derwent's Inktense water soluble colored pencils. The richness of color and value contrast he got went way beyond anything I'd ever guessed you could get with a watercolor pencil, and when he said the wetted pigment dried waterproof, a big flashing lightbulb went off in my head and I really wanted to get a few to try them with the other mediums I use. So after going to see the "Celebration of Creativity" art show in Beaverton where Jackie McIntyre has several pieces showing, I drove to the nearby Art Media and coughed up for a packaged set of 12, plus a white and a medium blue. I did some sketching on some old Liberte paper last night and this morning, and found out why they're called Inktense—the colors really are intense, as intense as I would ever want them to be. Handling them dry is just like using any soft colored pencil, but the magic happens when you get them wet—the color pops out like something from a fantasy dream and handles just like water color. You can contain it, wash it, blend it, lift it, or carry it to other areas. It takes an amazingly small amount of pigment to make a nice light wash.

On the wetted paper, you can draw more, and if there's enough water the pigment will feather out into it. Let it dry a little more and you can lightly or somewhat more heavily work in more of the same or different colors. Another drop of water will further enrich the colors. As long as it's damp, you can lift all or some of it. The literature says that only the pigment that's fully dissolved will become waterproof; I found this to be true.

This afternoon I did a sketch on gessoed paper. I wanted to make a sketch of the patio furniture I planned to put on my patio background (in the previous post) because I wanted to try making it red. Here's what I got:

Patio sketch with Derwent Inktense pencils

I laid in most of the color and then went in with a wet brush (suggestion: Don't use a brush you really love—I couldn't get the pigment out with my regular brush soap), starting with the lightest colors first, and trying to manipulate the water flow and blending. I did the furniture last and then let it dry for a few minutes. I darkened the shadow greens and let it dry a few minutes more. Then I took a sharply pointed deep indigo pencil and lightly sketched in the shadow pattern. When I wet it, the red was still wet enough to be picked up, but I really liked the way the shadow looks sort of brushed and sort of drawn.

And that, in fact, is the thing I love most about these pencils—you're just drawing, not painting. Pencils were my first art medium and even though I don't draw that much any more, it's still easier for me, particularly when working with line work, to use a pencil. Much, much easier.

So, it's a pencil first, but you get to play with water, plain water, and the color pops like magic—it's just fun! I really like them! Now I want all the colors...all 71 of them. But first I'll have to see how I can mix them with acrylic paint.

I will mention that on the plain sized paper, the colors seemed to lighten on drying. But when I made them as intense as I could, they stayed intense. And on the gessoed paper, they seem to not be lightening as they dry. And my perennial complaint—I really wish someone could make a decently opaque white pencil. With this one I'm able to lighten colors once they dry, and it works better than my Prismacolor white pencil for that, but I would really, really like an opaque one. I presume at this point that it's not possible to make one. Sure wish it were. You have to think like a watercolor painter, and save your whites.

I keep thinking of how quick and easy they would be to use when sketching outside. A pad, a cup full of pencils, and one of those water-reservoir brushes.

There's quite a bit of information about them and some nice examples on the Derwent website, http://www.pencils.co.uk.

Forsythia and Pussy Willows

2010-02-26T14:32:00.000-08:00

Want to beat the winter doldrums? Painting a bright bouquet really helps.

Spring Colors 8x10
Acrylic on paper

I've been finding that trying to change my approach to painting, even just to try approaching painting in a different way, is more complicated than I ever thought it would be. After spending many hours admiring the abstract compositions of Claire Harrigan, I was very curious to see if I could come up with a loose, colorful background that would complement the foreground subject and add design elements that contribute to the overall composition. To make a long story short, even after I had arrived at a color scheme I liked, it took me four different passes to come up with an arrangement I was happy with. It went through stages of randomness for the first two passes, and then I observed a bit of a pattern emerging and I began trying to develop it. As the pattern of lights and darks moved around, I noticed the different effects it was having on the flowers and vase, which I had already largely painted in. I also realized that I wanted to not worry at all whether the background shapes actually looked like anything, as long as they made a pleasing design. The fourth pass gave me a background that I felt supported the design of the bouquet and added some interest on its own.

But it wasn't fun painting around the blossoms on all four of the passes, so I thought the next time I would at least try to develop a background I liked before I started work on the subject. Here's the first pass:

Ultimately it's going to be a patio in a garden. I'll be developing it over the next few days, and will add the new versions to this post. I don't know what will happen, but I hope it will be interesting.

Cultivating the Unexpected

2010-02-06T08:33:00.000-08:00

I'm snuggled in under my heated plush throw and following links on Ruth Armitage's blog, and just found a wonderful example of a series. It happens to be on a theme I really love—rivers. It's the River Series by Casey Klahn. The individual works are all deliciously unique in composition, and a great lesson on how much variety you can achieve within a constricted framework.

I suspect there is no end to creativity. If you try to squeeze it from one direction, it just spills out in different ways to the other. The more you try to focus it down to one idea, the more variety you find popping up within that smaller idea. If you think about just the obvious elements of a painting, it's not hard to see how by varying just one or two things, you could get dozens of variations:

1. Subject idea
2. Overall design
3. Dominant colors
4. Emotional content
5. Painting style

You could also use a series to try on different styles. Pick a favorite photo or painting of yours and try painting it as say, five of your favorite artists. Pick artists with styles very different from yours, and different from each other.

Something I'm doing right now with my sketches is playing with other styles, incorporating lines by drawing with the brush on top of my painting, copying the color schemes others use, and incorporating abstract blocks of color in otherwise representational paintings. So far, they haven't been successful enough to share, but they are stretching my brain and I find myself thinking of approaching my compositions in ways I never have before. They're making me focus more on the painting as a whole, and less on the subject. I touched on this idea in "The reference and the subject", on my desire to do less copying and more innovating. It's tough to innovate when you don't know how to come up with different ideas. When I feel like I'm stuck in a rut, I want to be able to remember that there are different languages of visual expression, and that I know a few words in some of them. The other thing I want to always remember is that I can combine those words in any way I want, as long as it makes something I like.

Depths Of Time 2: A Green Earth

2010-01-25T15:28:00.000-08:00

It's officially a series now—there are two. Or does it take three? Then that will take another month or so. I do have more ideas in this theme.

Depths Of Time 2: A Green Earth
Ink & colored pencil 22x30 $550

My biggest concern with this one was that it would end up looking just like two different paintings, stuck together. I did a few things to try to keep that from happening. The first was to make the first row of trees with strong contrasting colors. The second was to have a steady progression from warm at the bottom to cool at the top, with the addition of some aerial perspective. The third was to use very dark blue violet as a common color on both halves as well as the center. The last was the repetition of the curved shapes of the hills in the details of the rock strata. When I made the initial print, I was hoping that the pair of diagonal cracks in the strata would add an interesting element. I think instead they're too much of a distraction, so I tried to minimize them. Not everything you can think of makes for a better composition. That is one problem with this technique that makes better planning a great idea.

Well, on to the next one—happy painting!

Painting Other People's Gardens

2010-01-24T11:08:00.000-08:00

I had the great good fortune to paint the beautiful garden of a friend of mine last fall. Her garden has a fantastic collection of conifers, both dwarf and standard sized, well-established perennials, and Japanese maples. I loved it! Of course I wanted to paint it! (I wanted to own it!) My second visit I spent half an hour just hanging out in it, taking lots of photos from different directions, with close-ups of the smaller plants. From those my friend chose her favorite view. My first effort was to make a sketch to test the color range and the overall design:

Study for Jayne's Garden
Acrylic on Paper

I felt like the overall design and the red-violets and blue-greens worked well together so I went forward with the painting. This was the first time I'd ever done a full color study as preparation, but it really made a difference to have it while I was working on it. It was much easier for me to visualize being in the real garden and remember how the plants stood in relation to each other. In the end, I still struggled for some time to capture the different textures and the rich color palette of the many different plants. Since my friend and her husband own a nursery—the wonderful Meadowcroft Farm in Oregon City—I felt duty-bound to render the foliage at least semi-recognizeably. After a couple weeks of concerted reworking, I eventually arrived at a final version:

Jayne's Garden
Acrylic on Canvas 18x24 SOLD

The painting went to its new home and I have a great experience and wonderful memories, forever. How lucky I am to have friends with such beautiful gardens.

Painting A Series: The Depths of Time

2010-01-24T09:44:00.000-08:00

Depths Of Time 1: The First Shelter
Ink & Colored Pencil on Paper 22x30 $550

For some time I've been wanting to attempt a series, and I finally got an idea for a series of mixed media paintings. The theme is to show two aspects of landscapes—the beautiful scenery we see around us, and the secret, hidden structures that lie beneath them. The Earth is every bit as complex and dynamic a construction as the more visible organic forms that inhabit it. In an environment as profusely alive with carbon-based life forms as here in the Willamette Valley, it's hard to remember the beauty that we don't see. A few days' stay in any desert should open a new window for you into this world.

I have been interested in rocks and stones since my childhood, living in the desert at Davis Monthan Air Base by Tucson, Arizona, and after a summertime visit in the Petrified Forest National Park. But I never felt a real sense of the earth by itself until I spend a four-day Thanksgiving weekend in Death Valley, camping out with friends. I'm a tree and plant lover, primarily, and it took me two days of seeing rocks, rocks, and more rocks with almost no plants whatsoever to stop wishing there was more greenery around. On the third day there, I suddenly began to notice the colors and forms of the stone around me. I could for the first time feel the deep strength, the quiet but definitely alive energies that could only have been coming from the Earth. I came away from that trip knowing that I had had to slow down my mind and my body for a long enough period of time to be able to feel the life energy in that great stillness, to sense it in a separate way, as the foundation of all the more active beings that live and grow upon it. I've never lost that connection which was forged there, and for me, the Earth is as alive as I am.

I am calling the series "Depths of Time", in recognition of how this Earth of ours has changed over time, and how its history is written so clearly in the thick and thin layers of rocks and soil that we get to see where the processes of creation and destruction reveal them. I'd like to dedicate this series to the thousands of inquiring minds, professional and amateur scientists alike, who have over the preceding centuries been given the grace to see and understand the clues that have lain around us for aeons—in the depths of time.

Old Friends and New Connections

2010-01-24T08:54:00.000-08:00

I've found some great new links to share! My good friend—and great painter—Pam Flanders has started a blog where she's posting some of her new still lifes. Ruth Armitage is an accomplished watercolorist new to Oregon City whom I just met yesterday at a Hardy Plant Society lecture. Marilyn Woods is a truly amazing ceramic artist of Oregon City, a gallery mate at Howden Art, and someone I love to talk with about the divine mysteries of making art. Ben Dye is a very talented sculptor and like Marilyn, a member of our local Hardy Plant chapter. You can visit both Ben's and Marilyn's studios on the Beavercreek Open Studios Tours. The next tour is this summer (ah! what a lovely word!) June 11-13 this year. You can see some really great art on this tour and it's a wonderful way to spend a weekend. I started going last year and Jude Welter's and Jill Montgomery's were two other studios I really enjoyed.

The links are all in my sidebar, 'Friends and Teachers' I hope you enjoy their work as much as I do.

Painting: New Year's Resolutions for 2010

2009-12-14T19:35:00.000-08:00

I'm working on my painting resolutions for next year. The first one is something I've been thinking about for a couple of months. I want to sit down with my paints and brushes and just practice brush strokes until I find every kind of stroke I can make with each of my favorite brushes--wide strokes, skinny ones, curvy, loopy, wiggly ones, straight, horizontal, vertical, angled. With thin paint, thick paint, dry brush, wet-in-wet, and any other way I can think of that's different. The only excuse I have for not having done it the first time it occurred to me, is that I'm very lazy and a professional procrastinator.

Second is to keep working against a habit that I've almost broken. Even though I've always felt that my goal is to capture the feel of a place, the essence of it, I've always been a slave to copying what I see. Even though that copying is counter to my goal, I do see a reason for trying to doing it: it's a way of testing your ability to produce a particular image. I feel like it's the first stage of creation, training your skills, and using the way your results look to tell how well you succeeded. The problem with that is that I always feel obligated to not get creative with the image, but to represent it faithfully so its viewers will see what I saw. I don't want to feel that way any more. I don't plan on doing any documentaries, and I really do want to evoke a feeling with a painting. If that happens now, it's purely by accident. I wouldn't begin to know how to do that, or how to tell if I succeed. I want the viewer to feel what I feel.

It's too cold not to (stay in and) paint

2009-12-14T13:41:00.000-08:00

Welcome to winter! Plenty of time to paint now, with the temps outside too cold to garden--at least for me. Last week was actually pretty much frozen, at least it's back to "normal" this week, back in the 40's--which feels pretty warm after the mid-teens and 20's.

Actually I've been pretty busy painting since October, first for the change-over at Howden Art gallery, then on one commission and then on a potential. Now I'm back to doing color sketches, working on my brushwork and color practice. I happened to get yet another technique book from the library, Landscape Painting Inside & Out by Kevin Macpherson, which as most of the other books and videos I've studied lately, talks about working in large blocks of flat color when you're first laying out your painting. I first noticed this in Carolyn Lewis' video, as I mentioned earlier this year. I've been trying to follow that practice since then, with varying degrees of success. Even though I had switched over mentally, my brushes and paints didn't seem as ready to stop my old habits. I'm not really sure why it was so hard to get there, but it definitely didn't happen overnight. Between canvas paintings and quick paper sketches, it took about ten paintings to get here.

Something must have clicked lately though, just in the last two weeks, because I'm finally getting the look I want in these sketches. I had a couple photos from a nearby city park that I took right at the height of the fall colors that I really wanted to try. I set up my sheet of paper to put two 8x10's right next to each other, thinking I would try the same composition with two different color schemes. However, when I finished the first one:

Wilsonville Park Path 8x10 $40
Acrylic Paint on Paper

I decided to use my second color scheme for the other composition I wanted to do:

Wilsonville Fall color 8x10 $40
Acrylic Paint on Paper

I let them stay rough--that's the kindest way to describe the brushwork on them--but the colors I got were a pleasant surprise. I finally started to get the hang of making believeable branches, with the long edge of my flat brush, and got good service this time from my new-ish red-handled Windsor Newton flats for acrylics and oils. They're still new enough that the ends aren't splayed out from my scrubbing. I was using the thinned out Golden regular paints that I've used for all my "burridges", the ones that let me work fast and loose, getting some wet-in-wet effect before it dries.

Yesterday I started another one, from a photo of an old garage with some dahlias in front of it that was discovered on a plant-buying trip with three other committed plant addicts during the first major storm this fall. Sidelight: At Sebright Gardens near Salem, where we went to snag some prime hostas, the wind blew a big fir branch down, which downed the nursery power line and trapped our car in the parking lot until PGE came and put it back up. We heard the snap and thud but stayed oblivious, touring their really beautiful garden, and we got a little extra time to choose the 30 or so plants we left with (addicts, for sure). So it goes. Anyway, here's the old garage:

Garage On The 99E 8x10 $40
Acrylic Paint on Paper

I'll probably tone down the blue wall on the left a little bit, but not too much. I'm not usually much for painting buildings, but this garage was so old, leany, and mossy it was about as close to being compost as anything. It looked one good wind gust away from becoming a lumber pile. Maybe the dahlias were holding it up.

I had taken 2 photos of the garage, one pretty much as shown here, and another showing the whole length of the garage, including the front and door that were sloping about 15 degrees off vertical, giving it even more whimsey. I decided no one would believe it really was that crooked, and couldn't figure out how to balance the length. When I initially blocked in the dark shapes in dark blue, I saw that the half-garage really did make a nicely balanced composition. That's what you always want to have happen, but this time it actually did.

I was so happy with these I spent a few hours last night sifting through my photos for more things to paint. I found a few more from the Rhododendron Garden that I'm eager to try, maybe even on canvas. More trees! More flowers! (And hopefully, more days in the 40's and 50's.)

The Reference And The Subject

2009-08-08T21:16:00.000-07:00

I took a couple new mixed media paintings down to the gallery this last week. One of them turned out to be kind of a sequel to one I finished last winter. The first painting is called The Grotto, and was based on a small cave in the Santa Monica mountains west of Malibu:

The Grotto 22x30 $600
Ink & Colored Pencil on Paper

And this is the new painting:

The Journey 22x30 SOLD
Ink & Colored Pencil on Paper

It's funny, all the things that go through my mind when I'm painting. Sometimes I'm wondering if I'm going to muck it up in the next minute, to make some mistake I won't be able to correct. Other times I'll be wondering what people will think of it. But the more I paint, the less time I'm spending worrying about it. In fact every now and then I'll be patting myself on my back for any part of it that's going well. I figure it's safe to compliment myself once in a while; reality always wins in the end. As a work gets close to being done, I'll start wondering how it fits into my small body of work, whether it's going to be a failed experiment, where my ambition overreached my skills, or whether it might turn out to be a high spot, a piece where everything works and the whole thing comes alive with its own energy. Not that I have anything against failed experiments, I consider them to be the most important work I'm doing right now, trying to do things I don't know how to do yet. In every one of them I learn new things, both things to do and things not to do. And when you know you're working on a piece that "isn't going anywhere", you have so much more freedom to play with new ways of holding the brush, or putting the color down. In fact, I'm strongly feeling the need to sit down and do nothing but make brush marks.

What I really enjoy, however, is when I'm not thinking about anything but the marks that the brush or pencil is making, the colors that I'm mixing and putting down, the wetness and texture of the paint and how it's going onto the surface—smoothly, or with effort.

I used to spend too much of my painting time focusing on the reference photo or object I was painting from; I actually thought that if my entire focus was on the subject, if I was absorbing it through all my senses, that a perfect copy of it would magically appear on the painting surface. Sort of like the Think Method from "The Music Man". I was blurring the line between the reference and the subject—the reference being outside the painting and the subject being in it. I notice that I seem to be shifting more of my attention to the painting instead. I'm beginning to think more of the design that's appearing, what the overall pattern is, and if there's anything I can change or add—or remove—to make the pattern stronger. I'm looking for opportunities for visual texture with either stroke marks or color changes. I'm looking at the colors already on the surface, how they relate to each other, and if additional colors would make the painting richer, or just more complicated. I'm looking for where the pure hues are, and where the neutrals are. I'm thinking less of what the colors were in the original subject, and more of what they need to be in the painting, in order for it to work. These are all things that I've read about for years, from the many sources that say how important they are. But more and more, I'm feeling them as I'm painting.

I got another great painting video from the library, one by Stephen Quiller. He shows several examples of combining watercolor and gouache, in small studies and in a plein air color study and the studio painting done from it. He mentions as he begins the studio work that he doesn't want to copy the color study, he wants to create something new, based on it. Those words are really sticking with me.

It's A Party and You're Invited!

2009-07-08T08:55:00.000-07:00

It's Party Time at Howden Gallery in Oregon City this Friday, July 10th, from 6 to 9 pm. Come down and see Annie's beautiful gallery and the hundreds of great works from Clackamas County artists in paintings, photography, sculpture & glass! Many of the artists will be there (I will) and we'd love to meet you. The address is 1512 Washington Street, just a few minutes off the I-205, with parking behind the gallery.

Open, at last!

2009-07-05T14:21:00.000-07:00

I finally had a reason—well, two reasons—to try Golden's Open (slower-drying) acrylic paints, and I'm hooked already. Decent-sized blobs of paint will stay moist and un-skinned overnight, and some have lasted through a second night, without any help or covering from me! Hooray! I've been putting off buying them as long as I could, but I finally got to a point where I wanted a good yellow-orange, and I happened to have a 25% coupon for Art Media, so I splurged. I bought their two little intro sets, a couple other colors I wanted, and some medium and thinner, and I've started one big painting and am finishing up a previously stalled work:

I haven't really made a lot of use of the paint staying moist longer on the canvas, but it's obvious that it does stay moist longer, so I hope to be doing some wet-in-wet on the other painting I'm working on. So, I won't have to rely exclusively on glazing for "mixing" colors on the canvas. I expect it to take me back to a bit of oil paint technique, which is exactly what I'd like to be able to do. But glazing with the medium does work just as well as it does with the Atelier paints I've been using for several years.

So thank you, Golden, for bringing out this unique capability in these paints. I would like it if you'd add a few more violet hues and a good yellow-green.

This painting had to sit for a long time after I had done the first 90% of it। I had started it with only the vaguest feeling of where I wanted to go with the colors, and it took me a long time—weeks—of ignoring it to reach some level of comfort with where it ended up going. When I picked it up this morning I made just a couple corrections, muting some of the violet and adding some yellow-green and gold touches. I still have it in my mind to do another version of this composition with completely different colors, but that won't happen anytime soon—too many other things on the list.

I got another lesson in color harmony doing this. The predominant colors are violet, blue, blue-green and yellow-green. So it's one of those analogous schemes with holes in it, but a very cool one. I wanted to add a warm color accent, and my first thought was yellow orange, the "resolving" complement of violet and blue. I painted that on the tree trunks but it was not the solution I was looking for. It added warmth and brought the tree forward, but it looked out of place with the rest of the painting. I didn't know where to go next with it so I played with the image in photoshop, and found that dark red was the accent color I was looking for. I painted the highlights as dark red and enriched the shadows on the trunks with dark, slightly neutralized blue. It had the same effect of warming and bringing up the tree silhouette, but it fits in much better with the overall color scheme. I think the dark blue shadows helped integrate the tree into the rest of the painting.

The sensation I was looking for, that "click" inside you that says that the colors are working together, is the same feeling I get when I hear a pleasant-sounding musical chord, where there's a richness and variety, but all the parts are working together. It might be a sparse chord with just 3 notes in it, or it might be one with 7 or 9 or more notes. The key is that together, no one stands out, but each one needs and fulfills the others, and the result is a pleasant, energizing sensation.

Harmony, Shmarmony

2009-06-22T21:25:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a lot about color harmonies and trying to learn "What all great artists know". But once again, after a period of focused research, the main thing I've come up with is that I don't agree completely, with anyone. I bought a couple of books because I found information and color schemes in them that I really like: Color Is Everything by Dan Bartges introduced me to the idea of a tetrad color scheme, which I had never heard of. I ordered a copy of Dan Quiller's Painter's Guide To Color so I could get a copy of his Quiller Wheel, which shows most of the manufactured water color pigments where they would actually show up on a color wheel. I have a few other older books that have really good information on color. The first one that really opened my eyes on color mixing was Jeanne Dobie's Making Color Sing. Another book from which I learned about the importance of greys from was Ted Goerschner's Oil Painting: The Workshop Experience. Even though he doesn't talk about color theory as such, I ended up studying his use of color, and of greys, a great deal because of how much his paintings appealed to me. The idea of mixing up greys ahead of time to use along with pure hues was revolutionary to me. Robert Burridge is another painter whose very original approach to color really made me stop and rethink my habitual approaches to color. He has invented his own, unique and non-standard color wheel, and uses it to make beautiful paintings that really don't look like anyone else's.

After spending a fair amount of time really reading and studying these books, I took out my standard color wheel and went through several online archives of my favorite world-famous artists and tried to analyze their paintings to see what were at least the 4 or 5 significant colors in each painting, and to figure out which, if any, color scheme they were following. What I found is that almost none of the paintings and artists I really like follow someone else's, or even the standard color harmonies. There are some works that have recognizable triads, or complements, or split complements, but the exceptions--even what I could find on the web--so outnumber them as to leave me with a strong conviction that I just need to make my own rules. Take my new painting:

I was so enamoured of a tetrad painting in Color Is Everything which used blue, orange, yellow-green and red-violet, that I wanted to try a similar one of red, green, yellow-orange and blue-violet. With just those four colors, though, even adding neutrals and sub-neutrals of them and providing enough dark and light values to give me the depth and contrast I wanted, I still wasn't happy with the results. Eventually I ended up adding blue for the sky and several yellow-green tones to the trees and other foliage. So technically, I end up with what amounts to a combination of the original tetrad plus an analogous scheme with holes in it. I'm willing to bet that no book or teacher you ever come across will propose that you use an "analogous scheme with holes in it".

But I think starting with the tetrad was a good idea, because I got the rich range of colors I was looking for. The red really wakes up the green, and the pale yellow orange of the clouds plays very well of the blue-violet of the shadows and distant hills. Visually, it feels like a full meal, and that's what I wanted.

I think that ultimately, my subject combined with the time of day dictated my color scheme. Perhaps with a more abstract subject, or a more controlled background like an interior, I can get satisfactory paintings that follow standard color schemes. I do plan to do a lot more experiments with color combinations I've never tried. If there's an ounce of nurd in you, I think you'll really enjoy conducting a color analysis of your favorite artists and paintings. And I think at this point that copying color schemes from other paintings you like is just as good a way to experiment as starting with a color wheel.

But, anything you can learn about color is useful. A couple years ago I was amazed to find I could make nice tree colors by mixing sap green and red-violet. Now it's really nice to be finding so many more colors I can use for shadows and highlights—blues, violets, reds, browns and golds. I want them all! I want all the colors!

Attempting the Rhododendron Garden

2009-05-26T16:19:00.000-07:00

The Rhododendron Garden in East Moreland, southeast Portland, is one of my favorite gardens to visit and photograph. There are hundreds of rhodies and azaleas that bloom from mid-winter through early summer, and the fall color is equally spectacular. And in between the color shows it's still a beautiful, mostly tranquil space with an abundance of quiet paths, rippling streams and ponds, sporting several flocks of ducks and geese, some wild and some escaped captives.

I've even painted en plein air there, and might again, as there are lots of places you can park an easel and a chair without attracting too much attention. But this painting is from a photo I took in May 2007. The rhodies were in mid-bloom and it was a perfect spring day.

It's the most ambitious foliage painting I've attempted. I'm happy with the way the path turned out, and I'm surprised at the sense of depth in it. Now that I've finished it, I'd kind of like to paint the same scene again and see if it comes out any different. I'd like to try making a looser version, and see what happens.

However, I'm not ready to make good on that because I already have another panel on the easel, getting its preliminary drawing done! So more rhodie paintings will have to wait.

Experimental, without the mental

2009-05-04T15:27:00.000-07:00

It's really hard not to think when you're painting. It's also hard not to worry, especially if there's a deadline or a specific goal or client or a shrinking budget or basically, *ANYTHING* to worry about. No one suffers like worriers, because we get so incredibly professional about it.

I've spent a lot of effort for several years to lose as many worries as I could, and I have to say, I enjoy my life a lot more than I used to. Practicing meditation made the biggest difference, and finding out that thinking, and therefore worrying, can be shut off. You do have to learn how, and you do have to work at it, but it can be done.

Painting abstracts turned out to be a major training ground for me, for learning to not think. Robert Burridge is a great teacher for not thinking. It turned out that my creativity did not depend at all on thinking, any more than it depends on brushes. The thought process is just another tool you can pick up and use, or put down and go forward without. It turned out that "things come to me" as soon as I start working. I can stand over a piece of paper waiting for an idea for hours, or I can start moving. As soon as I reach for a color, the right color "comes to me". As soon as I start cutting or shaping a mask, the right shape "comes to me". Without thinking. I don't have to think "There's yellow and red and blue, and green and purple and orange...", I just grab for one or two or three, and there they are.

Some ink, some wet paper and masks, and pretty soon I have a background, like this:

So now I've got a recognizable shape on a background, what next? I know, I'll worry about it for a while. Hmm, pretty nice colors, how many different ways can I ruin this? What if it doesn't turn out any good? Can I turn it into mud? It's a multi-colored horse—who's going to be interested in this? What was I thinking? What is this hang-up on horses? Why did he turn out green? Who ever thinks of green horses? Was there ever a My Little Pony who's green? I doubt it.

Okay, let's be bold. Let's try something I haven't tried before. I'll import the photo into Photoshop and play with it. I like to scribble, I'll just scribble on it. I can do that without thinking, and I might even stop worrying. For a little while, at least.

Oooooo, look what happens when I throw some red & yellow lines on there, ooooo I like that. Suddenly he doesn't look like a My Little Pony any more, he looks like a dream or a phantom, or something electric. I like scribbling. Let me try it with the other background I made:

becomes this:

Ahhhh, that felt good, those pinks and reds and blues and greens. Lots of energy going on there, lots of play. Energies in the people, activity and life. Thoughts and feelings, pulses and emotions. Visual imaginings, not anything I ever saw, but something I could feel, something inside me. Did I think it up? Nope. Did I do it anyway? Yep.

And so the little old painter translated her computer scribbles into pastel drawing on the ink backgrounds, matted them and took them to the gallery (without taking photos of them, duh), and went back to her studio where she worried happily ever after. THE END.

Breaking a composition into shapes (with help from Carolyn Lewis)

2009-05-04T14:25:00.000-07:00

If a painting has been inspired by a scene or photograph or visual memory, most of the work is likely to be focused on arranging the shapes and colors to mimic the vision you began with. Like this one, for instance:

Early last winter I was driving toward town one evening when I looked to the west and saw an unusually brilliant sunset. For the most part where I live there are almost no places to pull off the road, and much too much traffic to stop in the middle of it, but I was fortunate to be right close to a small dirt area on the edge of a Christmas tree farm, so I was able to park my car, walk a few yards and take photos of the beautiful evening light. I had to change very little from the photo to the painting. Looking at this now, the two small tree clumps on the left look too dark. Oh well, always something to fix.

I enjoy trying to make good landscapes from photos I take. It gives me a chance to work on my color mixing and brush skills. Copying from reality has a built-in feedback mechanism—if the painting looks like (or better than) the photo, then you did a good job, and if it doesn't, then you get to see where you need work. If the painting works as a whole, then you made a good composition as well, either in the photo or when you translated it into the painting. If you're lucky, you get a lovely record of a scene that means something to you, and a way to share something you love with others.

At my stage, this kind of work is mostly about building skills. I am sooooo learning the basics right now, but this painting felt like a major advancement for me because of the way I approached it. I recently borrowed a painting dvd from the local library called "Painting Mood and Atmosphere in Oils" by Carolyn Lewis. In it, she took a plein air sketch and a reference photo and created a studio painting from them of a sunset beach scene. I am still trying to develop a consistent and efficient approach to painting, and the guidelines she gave made a lot of sense to me. I really liked the way she worked and the colors she chose. I decided to take my sunset photo and use her steps to turn it into a painting. For me the biggest change was to mark off the large shapes and masses in the sketch, and start by blocking each one in with a single color, on a peach-tinted canvas. When you've completed that important step, then you know whether your composition is going to work or not. Only then did she go through one section at a time, working in the secondary hues and rough shaping. The last step was to apply the fine details and to correct any problems in one section at a time. Even though her demo was in oils and she was working constantly into wet paint, her basic approach worked just as well for me in acrylics.

I kept replaying her dvd over the three days it took me to finish the painting. I still didn't feel like I'd seen it enough times, so I ended up ordering a copy from Amazon. I look forward to seeing it again. They also have her companion book by the same title, and it's on special right now. The book goes over the same principles with many more example landscapes, but I really recommend the dvd. Maybe your library will have it.

The color comes from...?

2009-03-17T19:29:00.000-07:00

Color is most of the reason I paint. Some days, it's the only reason. Although one of my goals is to learn how to capture and reproduce the colors I see around me, another one of my goals is to make paintings with glorious disregard for the "normal" colors of things. On one hand, I really want to become skilled in recreating what I see. On the other, I have a growing urge to for my work to result in what can be recognized as existing only in the imagination. I want to get off the train before it gets too far into cartoonville. But I do want to ride it past the "that's exactly what it looks like" to where "that's exactly what it feels like". I think color has a lot to do with creating that sensation.

I want my imagination to have ultimate control over what ends up in the painting. I'm thinking now that including imagination in the process is what makes the difference between a painting that just sits there on the surface, and one that lives and breathes on its own—a painting that looks back at you—and says something to you.

Here's another quick color sketch, this one from a photo I took last fall in North Clackamas Park. the actual colors were just shades of green and pale gold, but I wanted to try out a color scheme I found and liked in a John Holland painting. That color combination was really an effect in itself, something that you would never see in real life. The other special thing about this painting was that the value scale created an enhanced sense of airiness and light that particularly coordinated with the colors he used. The end result was an unreal image that came across as an extremely real feeling.

I painted the background and foreground above in separate sessions, and did a bit of correcting in the second session. I have a few more touches I want to add, and I see some correcting I want to do, so I will be working on this one a bit more.

I've also done more work on my ferns, and it may be finished now:

The illusion of water completed itself, and a distant shore and evening sky with clouds developed to add the final touches. It's very rare that these ink paintings turn themselves into landscapes with any illusion of depth, so this one was a pleasant surprise. And in this one I got to explore a wonderful relationship between hues of turquoise and rich red-browns. Mmmmmmm.

Getting (maybe) too technical...but I am a nerd, after all

2009-03-13T14:27:00.000-07:00

So, my friend Jackie left me a comment a post ago about composition being an important feature in a non-objective painting, that a good composition can "draw you in".

Okay, I'm tossing that around in my brain, and the same question keeps coming back—what would it be about the composition that would bring about a reaction of feeling? What exactly do you mean by composition? Simply the arrangement of elements, or are you considering the elements themselves? Do the colors play a part, and if so, how important are they? How does a set of meaningless forms, with no connotations or denotations of their own, "work"? Or "draw you in"? If the most descriptive thing we can say is "it works", then do we really know why it works, even for us as individuals? Okay, it draws you in. Then what happens?

If you, in making a painting,manage to arrange the lines and forms so that the seer's eyes keep bouncing around in the painting, is that enough to make it interesting? Or is a painting like a box of cookies, where if there aren't any cookies in the box, the box itself ceases to hold any interest. I want paintings I look at to have cookies in them, something that makes me keep wanting to look.

So that's one question I can ask—is composition a cookie? Will a black and white pattern that causes your eyes to focus on some particular point within the confines of the canvas make you feel good?

What about the shapes and lines in the painting? Is there anything there that makes you feel good to look at it? I think the answer to this might be yes. I have fond associations with colored blocks. I don't know if it's because I still like looking at any jumble of primary and secondary colors, or if it's because I really loved playing with colored blocks when I was a baby. I feel like I've always been attracted to color, but I was also really attracted to Lincoln Logs, partly because my parents didn't ever let us get any. We had to get by with cold, colorless erector sets. Well, we had tinker toys too. Boring beige.

Color is definitely a cookie to me. Interesting lines are cookies. To some extent, repetition is a cookie, especially repetition combined with variarion. Three red rectangles is interesting. Three red rectangles and one red circle is a subtle morphological statement.

I'm not like Kandinsky, I don't have synesthesia—I don't see music, or hear colors. But I do feel like patterns in visual objects affect me the same way patterns in music affect me. Maybe those stimuli are just moving chemicals around in my brain in a way that creates a physiological response.

Or does a non-objective painting stimulate your emotions because it fools your brain into thinking you're looking at something else? Does it see a puzzle that it can't solve, and that's what interests it?

I think what I'm trying to do here—besides just arguing—is look for the underlying reasons that exist within us, not within the paintings, why some nonobjective paintings appeal to us and some don't. When you see something that "works", why does it work? Does it remind you of something else that you like? Does it make your mind feel like it's getting a massage? Does it trick your eye somehow? Or am I just responding to the colors, because I looooove that color, or those colors together?

For The Sun-Drenched Afternoon (2 posts ago) I think part of its appeal to me is the sheer randomness of the elements. It seems to de-focus my mind when I look at it, perhaps inducing a more meditative state. Each little element can be taken individually, or I can look at the painting as a whole and feel as if it's much more than two by four feet. It creates an illusion of space in my mind, and that feels comfortable to me.

Cheers.

Out of hibernation

2009-03-12T15:12:00.000-07:00

I know it's not officially spring yet, but I think we've had our last freezing night. At least I hope so, because I'm ready to get out and garden! I have lots of plants on my patio that I've gotten since the warm days last fall that want to get in the ground and start growing. And that's just where I want them. I'm always so happy to see March come because things are starting to grow and the thermometer keeps climbing toward 60, but I always forget that March is burning month—smoke everywhere—that it's still cold and rains a lot, the wind still comes out of the northeast, and only the toughest flowers are ready to show their faces in Beavercreek. But even though spring here doesn't really come until late April and the month of May, when the whole universe seems to be in flower, I can still jump up and down this bright sunny day and wave my arms, and yell, "It's SPRING!!!!"

So what have I been working on all this winter? For starters, it really took some effort to wrap my head around the idea that I'm now really, truly, completely retired. For someone who's worked full time for thirty years, there are some major mental adjustments that have to be made. I also made the decision that I was no longer going to put the idea of sales ahead of my desire to become the best painter I can be. I decided, after working really hard and long hours all summer and fall to complete as many paintings as I could, it was more important to me to say, I'm going to pretend I'm back in art school, and I'm going to work on building the basic painting skills I have not acquired before. I want to be able to make solid compositions that are as interesting in black & white as they are in color. I want to really learn how to "draw" with my paint brush. I want to learn how to make quick sketches, either in the studio or outside, so I could become more competent (and confident) in experimenting. I want to get really good at capturing the colors I see. In summary, I want to become skillful enough to be able to paint completely intuitively, to basically improvise paintings at will—and have them turn out to be really good paintings.

In other words, I want to change my fundamental painting goal from one of completing paintings, to one of acquiring skills.

So my activities have changed a little. I'm reading more. I got a library card. I'm recording the useful painting shows off PBS and watching them very closely, looking at how they handle their brushes, how they actually put the paint on the canvas, how they go about creating a painting. I'm getting more videos on artists I don't know enough about, listening to them talk about their art (that is, the ones who are alive, like David Hockney). I'm doing sketches—a one or two-pass painting that isn't intended to look like a finished work, but gives me a chance to try out a color combination I've never tried, or make a composition from one of my favorite photos. For instance:

This is a two-pass sketch from a photo I took at the top of Council Crest Park in Portland. It was one of those beautiful late winter days in-between storms and I got lots of pictures. My ultimate goal is to paint a panorama (inspired by Hockney), but before I do that, I want to do several sketches to get the feel of the place, and just get some practice. This feels like retirement thinking to me, not get it done now because you're running out of time. This is saying, play with your ideas, play with the picture, try whatever you want to try. Work on paper. Work small, work fast, work slow, work however you feel like working.

I like that.

At the same time, I am working on a couple of paintings that I started late last fall and early this winter. One of them I'm enjoying is an ink print of ferns. It's not finished yet, but here's what it looks like now:

It started with a contact print of the ferns in acrylic inks, and now I'm adding colored pencils. I'll post more pictures of it as I wrap it up.

A Secret, Unknown Visual Language

2008-09-30T16:24:00.000-07:00

Apartments Acrylic on paper, 30"x22"

This painting is based on an exercise set I did that reminded me of apartments in a building. I've had a devil of a time getting a good photo of it because it's on paper and not really very flat, and the acrylic is fairly reflective so it's hard not to get bright spots. Anyway, I've got it entered in the North Clackamas Arts Guild show in Milwaukie, OR on Oct. 10-12, if you're in the neighborhood and happen to drop by.

On Robert Genn's art discussion website, http://clicks.robertgenn.com/, a couple of subjects keep coming up that I really want to say more about, one is abstraction vs. realism. As far as abstraction vs. realism, I don't care as long as the painting is interesting to me. If it's realistic, it's not enough for it to be photo-realistic, no matter how technically perfect it is. I am really awed by the skill it takes to create that effect, but the colors, content, composition and what feelings it evokes in me are what make me want to look at it. I think I need paintings to leave room for my imagination for me to like them. When I do an objective painting, the better it turns out and the more realistic it looks, the less interested I am in it when it's done. Some part of my mind screams "BO-RING!" and I have to go look at something else.

On the other hand, I can look at two abstracts done by the same artist, in the same style, alike in many ways, and one of them will speak to me, attract me—and the other will not. One will feel like I know it intimately, and the other will have no meaning or interest for me all.

This phenomenon is something I've noticed time and again, and I've spent a lot of time wondering why it happens. But it is one of the reasons that I am intrigued with abstract art. When you take away recognizeable content, you can still be left with a painting that has emotional impact. I have developed this idea that the forms and colors of a painting actually stimulate various different areas of the brain when you look at it. It also happens that when memories are stored, they appear to be broken up into pieces and stored in different areas of the brain (at least if I understand the shows I watch on the Science Channel). So I'm thinking, if a painting happens to impact the same set of areas in the brain as where you have an important memory stored, maybe you get a mimic effect—without actually stimulating the memory, it evokes a phantom emotional response. Okay, it's a stretch, but it's one hypothesis.

The only other reason I can think of is that there is some mysterious capacity for non-verbal communication that is built into our mind and brains that we have not discovered yet and sometimes, without knowing they did it, an artist actually says something in that secret, unknown visual language. On one hand, that sounds fantastic and imaginary, but how different is that from the way that instrumental music can convey feelings and emotions?

The Sun-Drenched Afternoon Oil on canvas 24"x48"

I have this painting that was one of my first abstracts after I started painting seriously. It evolved from a really terrible painting that was part cheesy Kandinsky and part—well, I really don't know where it came from. But in repainting it, the new part of the painting built on that disaster and turned it into something completely different—and I love it. I named it The Sun-Drenched Afternoon because whenever I looked at it made me feel like I was driving through a sun-baked California valley with clear blue skies above, good music playing and no time pressure to do anything or be anywhere. It's been hanging on my wall for three years now, over my left shoulder right now, and it's like a member of my family. My art teacher at the time really liked it, but few others do, so it'll probably never sell. After living with it for so long, it's acquired its own personality, each shade of yellow and each little rectangle says something to me. I wish I "knew" what it's saying, but it doesn't communicate to me verbally, and I haven't figured out how to describe or convey that. It just feels good.

The funny part about this painting for me was that if I hadn't painted the crappy disaster first, I wouldn't have this painting that I really love now. Go figure.

Plein hot air

2008-09-14T17:00:00.001-07:00

I went out and did some plein air this afternoon, in the beautiful garden at Wild Ginger Farm. It's the first time I've tried plein air in two years, and it was nice to be out. I took my clip-on umbrella and I'm really glad I did, as it was close to 90 degrees. I took oil pastels to have as little gear as possible (there is a puppy on the grounds), and at times it seemed like they were melting on the paper.

I really want to go back and try taking some acrylics. Maybe with my french easel I can keep the paints and the puppy separate. I'm happy that I was able to finish in the three hours I was there, and I'm glad I tried the things I did—the colors of the purple cotinus (smoke bush) on the right, and my attempt on the texture of the blue-green pine branches. Of course it's not a very good painting, but I was relatively successful getting the colors. I hope I might do better a second time.

Quick-paint setup

2008-09-10T14:07:00.001-07:00

I wanted to share the work setup I use in my studio for my warm-ups and acrylics on paper, with a sheet of 5x7 composition studies I'm working on. This is as close as I can easily come to Robert Burridge's setup. The purple barn bucket is my water container—I have the level low enough so it doesn't splash too much, but I can get a good hour's continuous painting in before I need a change. The masonite-looking board on the right below the paint jars is the 1/2" piece of masonite I bought to cover the jars so I don't have to mess with the lids every session. It's worth it to have all the jars be the same size so you can do this. The board I have is 14x18" and it more than covers the 19 jars I currently use. The paints are mostly the heavy body colors thinned with Golden flow release to a "soft" consistency, thicker than the fluid colors. I've tried the fluid colors and they're not thick enough for me. There's a lot of transparency in almost all the colors, so I use gesso to create a white spot if I need to put in light over a previously dark area.

The convenience of having colors ready to use, and in a consistency that's easy to mix either on a palette or on the painting is a big win for me. It seems to get all the prep work out of the way so once you start painting you don't have to stop for anything.

Catching Oopses

2008-09-10T13:31:00.001-07:00

Voice of Autumn is an acrylic work I finished the other day. The idea originated a couple of years ago while I was playing in Photoshop with an image of an abstract fountain design I was contemplating and a picture I had taken in a grove of trees. When I composited the two together and applied some filters, the head of a woman appeared! I've wanted to do something with it all this time, and finally decided to see if I could make a painting out of it. This one is on paper, 12"x 20". It's entered in the North Clackamas Arts Guild show Oct. 10-12 in Milwaukie.

The funny thing with this one was that when I first viewed the small photo I'd taken of it, it looked like a woman's head with a giant white blobby hat on top of it. I hadn't seen that at all looking at the painting full-sized, and neither had my painting group. I had to do a little editing of the river form to make it look more like a river and less like a hat blob. That was a good reminder to me of the necessity of checking different views of a painting—from a distance, reversed in a mirror—before it gets released to the public. I've caught many imbalances, distortions and funny shapes looking at mirror images, especially on human figures. For some reason things will read fine in the orientation in which we created them, yet look totally goofy when the image is flipped. I think it's especially important that a viewer can make out the content of a painting even when it appears small or distant. Looking at your painting at different sizes can help you see weaknesses in composition that might be camouflaged by the details. Lately I've taken to looking at my work in very dim light, where I can only see the values. That tells me if I'm getting the dark-light contrasts, and range of values I want from it. And if I like the pattern of darks, the shapes and arrangement, I know I'll like the painting.

Wake up the rocks!

2008-09-07T10:12:00.000-07:00

When I'm painting, I feel like painting reveals the keys to the universe. When I'm gardening, I feel like gardening tells me everything I need to know about living. Good teachers, they are.

I was out pulling weeds in my garden this morning, and this came to me:

Make of yourself a garden, where the trees grow strong to shade you from the glares of your critics. Hound the weeds till they respect you, and go back to their homes where they are not weeds, but honored citizens. Wake up the rocks!—make them ring with the sounds of your tools, and sing to the wide earth that you are here, that you claim this space as your own. Plant here your dreams and desires, to nurture and develop them as no one else can. Harvest your flowers and fruits in their season, with all the joy under Heaven, for you have taken a wild, rough thing, and brought it to beauty.

Eight-at-a-time

2008-09-06T14:05:00.000-07:00

Here's one of the exercises I did, mostly in an hour. It's a 14x20" watercolor paper sheet from a block, gessoed and painted with thinned acrylics. I had the basic idea of a tall range of violet mountains, with hills and meadows in the foreground. The idea is to work as fast as possible, and develop all the paintings at the same time, and I did all the mountains first, then all the skies, then all the foregrounds, one color at a time. After I got the foregrounds roughed in, I let it dry completely, then came back and tweaked them individually till I felt like stopping.

Funny things happen when you're working quickly on so many things at once. For one thing, it's a lot easier to keep from getting emotionally attached to any one of them, so you're not so afraid to try something you've never done before. In fact, you have to get more inventive, to keep them from all looking alike. And with all that quick action, things happen that you didn't plan, and you start getting comfortable with that. You don't worry about every stroke. You don't worry that no one will like it, or that it's not going to win any ribbons. As long as you keep working quickly, you don't have time to worry about anything. That's how I want to be all the time—painting and not worrying about it.

Friends and the search for knowledge

2008-09-06T10:42:00.000-07:00

Always looking, always searching for things and people you can learn from, is one thing you can do to help you grow as an artist. Of course the other thing, the main thing, is to make art. To make more and more and more, because every one teaches you something you didn't know before. I was used to working on one painting at a time, pursuing it continuously from start to finish, when I realized I really wasn't ever going to be productive enough to be able to make a living as an artist. So when I got to a sticky point with a painting where I needed to think about how to go forward, I began starting a second painting, or even a third, so I didn't have to stop painting just because one had to dry, or sort itself out in my mind.

Last month, my friend and painting buddy Jackie McIntyre told me about the website of Robert Burridge, a California painter whose figurative abstracts had really captured her attention. Since becoming looser and more inventive is something I'm constantly working at, I decided to order his 'Loosen Up Painting Series' DVD, a real bargain with 3 different programs for $50. Nothing I ever watched has changed the way I work so much. I set up a table in my studio so I could copy his warm-up technique, and now three or four times a week, if I'm lucky, I find myself working on as many as 9 paintings at once! Of course they're all small—5x7"—but painting this way frees up my mind in a way I've never been able to before. More on this to come!