New, cool colors

I was wanting to get away from the blues and oranges I've been working with for many weeks. I started out with a triad of red-violet, blue-green, and yellow-orange, but when I had developed the rough composition, that combination looked too intense and unrealistic. I took one color at a time and began graying them and lightening them. In the process I added violet flowers and more greens to the bouquet, and created a green-dominant background, with just a few touches of the original red-violet. I ended up with an unbalanced color harmony, from pale yellow-orange through yellow, greens, grayed teal, and all the violets. No blue, orange, or red.

I also started out with a clearly defined table top, but wasn't happy with the starkness of that composition. On a whim I turned that into what could be an unfocused garden scene, backlit and pushing into the foreground, with just enough level surface to anchor the vase and its shadow.

In the end, all the layers of colors first tried and then rejected remain in small bits within and around the edges of the color masses, where I think they add depth and a kaleidoscope of small relationships with the colors that replaced them—violet over blue-green in the bouquet, and blue-green over red-violet in the lower half of the surround.

I did have fun with the vase. Part of me would have liked to do more work in pottery at some point, and I colored it with the metallic red-violet and turquoise of raku, like a vase I used to own before it was broken. I really indulged my imagination in this painting, and had a great time doing it.

Playing with color as energy

Floral #9

My goal as I began this floral was a painting that was as much an explosion as a floral. I'm not sure I achieved explosion, but I think I at least got to "Pop!" with this one. If the colors look familiar, they should, because I'm still working the same palette sheet as I have been for the last couple weeks. I just hate throwing away paint until it's unusable. I keep a plastic cover over my palette and spritz it every morning, and once more at night if I don't do any painting that day. I do end up with small puddles, but those pull off easily with a brush, and I usually want my paint slightly wet anyway.

On this one, I wanted to work from dark to light so I didn't have to end up painting dark spaces around my flowers, and I wanted to paint as loosely as I could possibly make myself. But more than anything else, I wanted to COMPLETELY PAINT OVER Floral #1, "Blue and Orange", as I stopped liking it several months ago and took it off my Etsy site, but hated to waste a good panel. You may recognize the vase, slightly updated. One of Robert Burridge's sayings, "Don't worry about painting things that don't make sense," played in my mind several times whenever I hesitated while painting. As long as the blobs looked like they were supposed to be flowers, that was going to be good enough for me.

The background is just layered scribbling, and only one of the flowers got any detail at all, the rest are just shaded to suggest petal shapes and three-dimensionality. About halfway into it, I discovered I was making lost edges around the bouquet by going back and forth between the flowers and the background scribble-glazing, and I liked that. I had discovered on a previous unpublishable sketch that if you decide your foreground subject shape isn't quite balanced—or too balanced—you can offset that with your background shapes and colors. I had fun making the bouquet look bigger with blurry colors around the outside, extending the color range and adding more color energy to the painting. It also transitions from the semi-defined flower shapes to the completely ambiguous background. It's sort of like a halo or aura of light around the subject. A bit romantic, but fun.

ANNOUNCEMENT! I'll be at the Local Author Fair tomorrow from Noon till 3PM at the Oregon City Library, signing copies of my first book, "First Aid For Your Menopause Emotions". Thirty-five other local authors will be there with me. Come on down!

UPDATE: I've finally created a facebook page for this book, where I'll be blogging about menopause and anything related to it, including living a best-possible post-menopausal life. You can find it HERE.

A return to loose color

Wild Iris

One of my friends who saw my May Garden painting last year commented that she'd like to see it without the trees in the composition, and I've been thinking about trying that since then. I really didn't think I could make an interesting composition without the tree trunks framing the flowers, but after quitting work on the abstract, I pulled out a 16x20 panel and just started blocking it in. I switched from brights and flats to filberts for the rounded flowers and leaves. At some point in the second day I discovered how much adding stem-like strokes did to add both form and energy to the seriously overgrown foliage in the foreground.

From then on I just kept layering on subtle variations of hues over the whole painting. When I added the darkest greens I began to feel like I was channeling Vincent van Gogh and started really paying attention to my brushstrokes and how I was weaving the darker tones into the middle and lighter values.

When I thought it was finished this morning I started taking photos of it and immediately noticed little problems with it—mostly in places where I had unintentionally created the appearance of a straight vertical or horizontal line—just fixed two more of those. I've done about seven cycles of that and now I think I've fixed them all!

But other than than that, this has been a joy to work on. The scene is how I imagine a hillock and ditch overflowing with wild iris and other moisture-loving plants, with March-wind-blown fir trees in the background.

This year I switched from sitting down to standing while painting, and I recommend one particular item—an anti-fatigue mat to stand on. I had to trim it a tiny bit to slide it up into my easel base, but it was worth it. My palette stand is about 4-6" too short, but that's the only real problem. It took me a few days to get used to standing up for hours at a time, but I'm glad I did.

Get your scribble on

Floral 6

This is starting to feel like a whole new ball game. I started with color blobs again, yellow, blue, and red, aiming for an off-center floral with a lighter background. My goal was to get a more open bouquet with fewer, more interestingly-arranged flowers, not the symmetrical bundles I seem to be locked into, and to attempt a glass vase, all very loose and energetic.

While I was working up the background, I rediscovered the joy of scribbling. Some people are doodlers, but I was never a doodler, I was always a scribbler. Sometimes I think I'd be perfectly happy just piling one layer of color over another, completely covering the one before, just scribbling with the brush, but I've never believed that that would actually produce anything one would call Art. Maybe I'll try it someday, but in the meantime, I did find it very satisfying to abandon all discipline and just scribble the background in.

When I started painting the flower blobs, I still couldn't stop myself from painting a big round bundle that looked heavy and solid, and had no air in it at all. So I left it to dry and came back later with the light blue background and painted out about a third of the flowers, and that improved it greatly. But I didn't like the pale yellow and peach in the background and table so I darkened them to where they are now and worked up the vase. When I stopped at that point last night, it was clearly the best floral I'd done so far, but it still looked like it had a little headache or ate too much the night before—just a little off color.

I didn't figure out what the problem was till I'd looked at it on the computer. I had used a pthalo blue in the top background, and cobalt on the flowers. I decided to try switching the pthalo to a cobalt wash, and bingo! That was the problem. I've combined those two colors in a lot of paintings and they've worked well together, but they really didn't in this mix, at least not the way I was using them. I also darkened the tone of the top blue, which popped out the flowers more.

Sketch painting for practice

Zion Sketch 1

Once again with a full palette after the two florals, I decided yesterday it was time to tackle some of the 1" thick stack of my photos that I've thought about trying to paint, and picked one from Zion National Park. I wanted to do as quick a sketch as I could, just enough to work out if the image would translate to a painting both composition- and color-wise, plus be as interesting as I thought it was as a photo. I already had the colors I needed on the palette, so I grabbed a scraggly brush and started brushing in the shapes, and filling them in with what I already had mixed. Since there were a lot of dark and shadowy areas, I brushed those in as well to locate all the shrubbery and rock contours.

I loosely followed the colors from the photo, inadvertently intensifying them. This composition seems to play the light orange off the fairly-pure yellow of the central tree, but with plenty of support from blue, greens, and the grayed violet. So once again, the same basic combination—yellow & violet, and orange & blue, but this time with a lot more of the yellow-greens. I really can't believe how versatile this set of colors is.

I was thinking as I started that doing sketches would give me both a lot of practice, and a low-pressure place to figure out how to handle the more challenging areas, which in this case were the shadows, the large rock mass behind the front one, and the tree in the foreground. The rock mass I had to repaint a few times, and it took a few tries to get the hue and value of the shadowy areas on the orange rock, but the yellowish tree in front was a lucky break. I like the way the simple shape and bright colors attract attention to the foreground while they're playing off the more distant orange. I had thought I would want to refine the whole painting more, but was happy to find it had a lively rough look that suited it.

I see lots more sketching in my future.

Same colors different balance

Floral 4

I still can't get the paint to run out the same time the painting is done, so I ended up with a palette full of all the same colors after the last one. I flipped the emphasis to blue flowers though, with only bits of darker lime green around them. I finally managed to make an unsymmetrical arrangement, and added the geometric design in the background to set the whole thing off.

My brushstrokes look better in this one, more like the shapes of the flowers. Competely imaginary flowers, sort of salvia-like. It started out with a much more placid orange; this one is more like candy orange slices at sunset.

This one was fun.

Trusting the chaos

Floral 3

I've started doing quick (for me, that is—one or two days) studies and improvisations. I started with an owl I copied from some photos on the web that appealed to me and that went well enough, after having to re-draw it after I blocked it in, that I decided to try another floral, totally from my imagination. I had a lot of paint left over from the owl, mostly purple, blue, and yellows, so I settled on blue & orange plus purple & yellow. That is not an official color scheme, but I started with it anyway. Along the way I added in some dark yellow green, which seems to have added to the harmony.

I've been wanting to give myself a little more freedom in choosing colors, based on how all the different ways there are to harmonize notes in melodies. Different harmonies convey different emotions, along with implied familiarity, or its opposite, exoticity. This harmony leans toward the exotic, but they're also very common spring colors, and my mind is pretty focused on Spring at this point, hoping to hurry it in a bit.

I collaged a couple paper pattern bits on it, like I did on Hum Day, then tried painting on top of them and made a quick, ugly mess. I let that dry, decided I did want to do a floral, and started again. In the process, I completely covered up the collage, which was fine. I was making shortish, broad strokes, trying to create a nice composition, and that got scary too, as it looked to be turning into another   amateurish mess, when I suddenly thought of Joan Mitchell's flowerscapes. I laughed at myself and decided it was okay to keep playing, just to see what happened. I think about playing at painting a lot,  and I write about it a lot, but I was so afraid of making schlock that I failed to recognize that I was playing. I let go and kept up with the completely non-thinking paint application, and in another couple minutes it started looking like an interesting blocking-in. It's like running down a hill where you can't see what's at the bottom, but it's so fun to run downhill you want to keep going.

So that was the creative part of painting—the scary part where you can't see anything good and you have to trust. Four, five minutes tops, was all it took to see that I had a nice color composition. Then I had to make it look finished. I went through about ten cycles of analyze, paint, analyze, paint over it again—fixing the bad parts, then adding new parts which were also part bad, and fixing those. I was 98% done with it last night, and added a couple tiny bits this morning.

The green strip in the corner was one of those happy accidents. I just wanted to add some more green to the background, and when I held a mat over it, I thought it added immensely to the composition. Without it there, there's just a vase of flowers, but suddenly it's more interesting with that green there as some unknown element in the room. It seems to anchor the flowers into the room, more than the purples in the bouquet do, and throws the darker blue-purple farther back.

You don't have to stop working on it until you like it

I've had a floral I started many months ago that no matter what I tried, it never got better, so this morning I picked a new color scheme of greens and reds and started painting over it. I blocked in the main colors and the focal point, and then started defining the shapes. After getting that far, I was right back into my old bad habit—thinking about what would make it best instead of just painting! Arggh! So I mixed up more hues and just kept going, minding the color balance and overall balance as best I could until it seemed pretty pleasing and was still nice and loose. I took a photo of it and thought, wow, that was quick! I even posted it on my blog. But the more I looked at it, the more unbalanced it looked, so I deleted the post and the next morning went back to work on it. When it looked better I stopped again, but knew that I'd better let it sit, and before long I realized I wasn't happy with the shape of the green vase. So today—the third day of working on it—I repainted the vase and the area around it—this looser style really makes it easier to repaint areas.

All the over-painting I did gave it a nice texture. My only complaint was that I seemed to be wasting more paint as I almost always mixed too much for the few brushstrokes I made. But I'm way happier with this than any other floral I've ever done and hoping I can keep loosening up.

Friends and the search for knowledge

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!