Winter time is imagination time

It's January, and the perfect time for playing in the studio. I'm back to working with abstraction and lots of color. Outside it's gray, gray-green, gray-brown, and gray-blue, but in here it's all about rich, bright, and stimulating colors.

Still playing with textured surfaces, having fun with that. And I'm planning on making the most of my imagination in my painting, too. Imagination is the best kind of bank account—the more you take out, the bigger and better it gets. Turn on your idea machine and start using it, and you won't believe how great it works. All it needs is for you to not be afraid to use it.

Farewell Moonbeam, 2001-2014

On October 20, 2001, I joined up with Moonbeam, my first van since years before, when I'd given up my super-annuated, oil-leaking, 1964 VW Camper Bus. I've never had any car who could do as many things as Moonbeam could, or who had so many neat electric and electronic gadgets, big windows, and so much room.

For 13 wonderful years he was my courier, my carrier, my boon companion, my portable space, and at times, my refuge. We went up and down the western mountains and the coast, from the bottom of the Sierras up to Mount Hood, through the central valleys from LA to Seattle, and most of Highway 101. We even went to Zion.

He moved me to Oregon in 2005 and lived outside in the cold, rain, and snow for almost a year until I could get a garage built for him, enduring muddy kitty prints and enough fir needles to choke a regular-size car. He was the most obedient, most versatile, most dependable car I ever had. He schlepped paintings, canopies, rocks, bags of leaves, tubs of mulch, trees, shrubs the size of trees, flowers, rebar, lumber, pipes, furniture, food, friends, camping stuff, and me, over, and over, and over.

A few days ago he passed on to his next life, and my love and best wishes go with him.

Farewell, dear friend, I shall never forget you, or all the good times we had together. I could ask for no better.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

I heard this quote a few days ago in a UK murder mystery, and I've been thinking about it ever since:

Let all bitterness, and wrath,

and anger, and clamour,

and evil-speaking,

be put away from you,

with all malice,

and become one to another

kind,

tender-hearted,

forgiving one another.

Warmest Best Wishes from my house to yours in this holiday season.

See you next year!!

Ardenwald Holiday Bazaar Tomorrow!

I'll be at the Ardenwald Holiday Bazaar tomorrow, Saturday, November 22nd, from 9am to 3pm. That's at Ardenwald Elementary School in Milwaukie, SE of Portland. I'll have my latest paintings from this summer and fall, two dozen glass flowers and and over a dozen hanging garden ornaments. I'll also have dozens of 5x7 greeting cards of my paintings and photo art. I don't know where I'll be in the fair, but look for glowing buckets of glass jewels!

I'll also be ready and eager to talk about both my books for sale on Amazon, "First Aid For Your Menopause Emotions," and my new animal adventure story for kids 5th grade and up and anyone who loves animal stories, "Take The Wind Up With You."

If you get there, please say "Hi" and let me know you saw this on my blog. Thanks!

Priming with texture

Firs at Hoyt Arboretum

I tried something different for a forest scene I've been wanting to paint. It's a photo of a douglas fir grove at Hoyt Arboretum, and I was looking for a new approach because I'm not very satisfied with the paintings I've been getting recently. It happened that a couple years ago I accidentally ordered a 5oz tube of red oxide acrylic, which is twice the size of a standard sized tube. I really want to use it up, so I primed a panel with it, but instead of brushing it on I used my knife, and for no reason in particular used the knife to draw the significant outline of the scene in the wet paint. I put so much paint on it that it took overnight to dry. When I started painting on it the next day I quickly realized I could use a lot less paint because of that priming, and I worked fairly quickly just blocking in some general colors, and using sweeping strokes that were vaguely suggestive of typical fir branches. I had several different colors of green already mixed from my other leaf paintings, it all went pretty quickly.

When I stopped to take a look at it, it looked more than half done. I got lucky with the highlight brush strokes on the ground, but wasn't so lucky with the ones on the tree trunks, so I had to go in today and paint over them. Clearly, there's a lot to getting those lucky strokes to happen, instead of the unlucky ones. But I'm thinking that's what I should really be working on.

I have to admit that I really liked painting on the knife texture of the primer. It reminded me a lot of the texture I get with the ink on paper paintings. I think the texture marks and what they do to the paint on top of them is as useful an element as any paint stroke. They can add energy and visual depth to a work. And they're an encouragement not to add a lot of unnecessary detail.

I like the idea of combining painting with three-dimensional effects; I don't have a problem with combining different forms and techniques of art. It's all art, after all. Like any other technique, physical texture can either support the impact of the painting, or completely overwhelm it and turn the whole thing into a bad joke. Sort of like my famous chocolate covered tortilla strips. Fortunately, most bad paintings are small enough to be safely and legally disposed of, unlike bad architecture.

On the other side of things, I finally finished the third Villa Catalana painting. I didn't do any of this on site, it was all studio work. There is at least one more image from there that I want to paint, but later.

Young Vineyard And Pond

Fun with fall leaves

Twin Leaves

A great way to spend a cloudy, wet day in early fall is to paint something you love in the brightest colors you can find. I love leaves, and now, while my garden is starting to turn fall colors, is a great time to paint them.

Turning Leaf

I used an old maple leaf from my yard to do these. The first one was in watercolor, and in the second I wanted to duplicate the same brightness and intensity with acrylics.

Lots of fun!

Inspired by Autumn

Fall Fantasy

I was playing more with watercolors, try out my new hake brushes, and decided to use them (but not the hakes) on an inspiration I got this last weekend. I wanted to do an abstract of leaf shapes, but then as I was drawing it out I decided to make one of them more realistic. I stole its coloring from one of my O Isami leaves, so it's all pretty made up. But it does represent how excited I am to see the fall colors, especially in the local maples, and the leaves coming down in the wind. I love leaves, but I'm a sucker for the bightly colored ones. I really love them.

As long as I'm posting, I'll put up a poster for the next art fair I'll be at, in SE Portland at Ardenwald Elementary School on Nov. 22, and a couple of other things I've been working on lately.

I'm not sure if this painting of the grape arbor at Villa Catalana is finished, but I'm done working on it. It's as good as I can make it now.

Grape arbor in summer

I wanted to share my first painting with the hake brushes, not because it's any good (it isn't) but to give you an idea of what your first experiment might look like. It is possible, and fun, to use them to get something that looks like tree foliage. I think I can get better with them in time. At least I've still got the back side of this that I can use for another painting.

First try with hake brushes

I used to do watercolors before I retired, and I do like not having to throw the dry paint away. But, when you screw up something on an acrylic painting, you can always just keep painting on top of it. So they're both fun, in their own way.