A spot of color

Real Cool Blue

I wanted to share this photo a friend of mine just sent me. She got a fused glass hanging ornament a couple years ago and said she was really enjoying having that spot of color in her back yard this winter, especially after this snowfall.

I know exactly what she means because except for my early hellebores, some primroses I just bought, and my witchazels, my glass pieces are the only color in my garden right now. I'm loving all the rain we're getting—that's one of the reasons I moved to the Northwest—especially since the trees really need it, but my garden does look pretty dreary.

I'm cutting a lot of glass for ornaments this week, and as soon as the weather calms down a little, I'll start firing pieces (we've had a lot of little power outages with all the wind). I'm getting a body of work together for this year's Spring Garden Fair, the first weekend in May, at the County Fairgrounds in Canby. It will just be glass art for the garden, no paintings. I just drove down to Bullseye this morning to get more glass. It's time-consuming cutting it, so it's a good way to spend cold, windy, winter days, and plus, having a pile of brilliant iridescent color in front of me is always a treat. I'm such a color junkie.

Cheers!

The Elmore Leonard approach to painting

Late Afternoon Light, Mid-December

Last year I got a truly essential book for any fiction writer: Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing. Today while I was trying to finish this painting, this book came into my head and stayed there for quite a while. The wording of the rules doesn't really fit painting, but the point of them certainly does: Get rid of anything and everything that comes between the painting and the viewer.

In other words, anything the viewer notices, instead of seeing the whole painting, detracts from the viewer's experience of the painting.

One of Leonard's statements in the book, although it's not one of the rules, sums up his approach: "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." I kept thinking about how much I'm trying to get better with my brush, to learn to make beautiful brushstrokes. I reworded the rule to fit: If it looks like painting, repaint it. It should look like the subject, or the reason you chose to paint this subject—not like painting.

Another one of his rules kept recurring to me: "Keep your exclamation marks under control." I figure a detail is just like an exclamation point; it begs for the viewer's attention. I want just enough detail to suck the viewer into the scene as if it were his own memory, his own imagination creating the colors and shapes of the image. You need something sharp and clear for the viewer's eye to lock onto, but it doesn't need to be much.

I was very tempted to paint more detail in the tall firs behind the deciduous trees in the front, but then I remembered, they're not the subject; the subject is the brilliant sunset light of early winter reflecting off the branches of the trees in front. I was out with a friend visiting local wineries the week before Christmas, and we were driving home just as the sun was ready to set. The light came through a gap in the clouds and lit up a bank of deciduous trees and their thousands of tiny branches, all bare now. I yelled "Kodak! Kodak!" and she quickly pulled to the side of the road and I jumped out with my camera. The light lasted for a few more minutes and I couldn't believe our luck.

Of course if you are a master of brushstrokes, like Joan Mitchell or Emily Carr, or a master of detail like Salvador Dali or Norman Rockwell, these rules don't apply. Sadly, I'm not a master of anything, but happily, I know that already.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Wishing You

A warm and happy

Holiday Season

and a

Wonderful 2014! 

When the weather outside is frightful

The studio's delightful. So as long as I've plenty of paint, goin' out in the rain I ain't.

Farmhouse, second pass

I was able to get enough good photos of fall color to keep me busy for a while. One that I got last month was this old farmhouse a few miles away that happens to be a great u-pick farm and regional produce store. This is the second painting I did from the photo, because the first was just way too dull for my taste. I guess I'm just going to be doing at least two paintings of everything from now on: if you want it nice, paint it twice! The first (below) for exploring colors, and the second to loosen up and see what happens. Maybe I'm just better at painting on paper.

Farmhouse, first pass

I also tried the smallest canvas landscape I've ever done. I really don't see how people do 6x6's and 6x8's. I don't know why an 8x10 canvas seems so much smaller than an 8x10 piece of paper, but it does. Unfortunately I have a lot of these tiny canvases, so I'll be getting more practice.

Afternoon Trees

I am finding that I really do like painting trees, and of course, clouds.

Love my Oregon—even in the wet season.

Busy collecting photos to paint this winter

Every artist needs a crappy old barn to paint. :-)

Grape arch on the barn gate

I had to stop painting (except for a couple little ones I don't have photos of yet) to get caught up on my garden chores for the fall. Got to do the first fall pass of weeding because they're about to bloom. Yes, weeds bloom in the fall and winter, even when it's freezing. That's how they get the jump on you in the spring. Must. Destroy. Weeds. Anyway, I've also been collecting photos in and out of my garden to paint in the studio, when the thermometer goes South and I'm stuck inside.

Afternoon sunbreak

Last Sunday after showers all morning, the sun came out for this fantastic display of why I love living in Oregon. Wow.

I've made a couple local trips to shoot fall color and old barns and landscapes, which will be showing up on here in the next few months, I hope.

Two more cloud paintings, this time with landscapes

Afternoon Light

Hooray! The good weather came back for a really nice fall spell. The good news is that I got outside to paint again. The bad news is that I have to take time now to do as much work in my garden as I can, because when this good weather ends, that's most likely the end of it for this year. But I did get out for a few more plein air sessions, and chose to spend them in the northeast corner, looking at a bigger view. (I gave up on the ligularias for now. I'll play with them more in the studio this winter and see if I can make anything out of it. I did get good photos of the leaves while they and the flowers were still looking good, but I know when I'm in over my head.)

I set up in the new spot three days in a row at the same time each afternoon, and the clouds I painted were there on the first day. The first day I came away with what looked like an unfinished underpainting sketch. The second day I turned it into the ultimate in banal mediocrity, truly awful, laden with superfluous detail; it fairly screamed "Bleah!" The third day I attacked it with a larger brush and the intent to loosen it up, make more of the larger shapes, and force myself to go faster so I didn't overwork any of it. Ta-da! Success! It came back to life with a sigh of relief.

But when I looked at it again in the studio, there was a problem—the sky and the ground looked like two separate, unconnected paintings. It took me a couple days to figure out that it was a color issue. I had painted the clouds pure white because that's how they'd looked early in the afternoon when I started on the first day. But by the time I got around to painting the house and trees, I was seeing warmer, late afternoon light on the house, and trying to get the fall colors in the trees. So the sky looked cool, but everything else looked warm. In the studio, I painted over the clouds with the same pale yellow of the house, and that pulled the two parts of the painting together like a good zipper—it was one image now. But the next day I wasn't quite happy with the yellow; I was unable to recall ever having seen pure yellow clouds. So I tried pale yellow orange, and after I did the clouds, I used the same color to warm up the house a little bit. And that seemed to finally do it.

Clouds #12

I tried one more little cloud painting that week, this time on an 8x10 canvas panel. It was an exceptionally beautiful bunch of clouds—for about 3 minutes—then a huge gray mass blew in from the north to cover the whole sky, and it began drizzling. I took shelter under my woodshed overhang and kept trying to paint what I thought I had seen. Fortunately, I had my camera with me and had taken a shot right before I started painting. When I got back in the studio and looked at the photo, I hadn't even come close to getting the cloud shapes, so on the next day while it was raining, I tried doing a studio painting over the same panel from the photo. Like the other plain air painting above, it was awful. I tried two different color schemes for the clouds, and they were even worse. So I decided (a) it was too detailed, and (b) I'm no good (at least not yet) at making up cloud color schemes. I searched through my photos for an authentic color source for the clouds and, again, took a larger brush and worked over the painting as fast as I could, not worrying about the brushstrokes but just trying to get the colors and values right. Again, that approach gave me a much better painting. Not great, but not awful, either.

A Big Sunset

Winter Sunset

Last week I was working inside for a few stormy days. I've had a big figure study sitting on my easel for about a year that I finally gave up on, and decided to see if I could have fun painting a big cloud painting on it instead. The reference was a photograph I got early last winter of a particularly colorful sunset, taken from here in my yard.

I did have a lot of fun painting it, because thanks to my back-yard cloud painting this summer I was able to keep it loose and relaxed. I worked on it for three days and spent a fair part of that time working out the landscape at the bottom. I wanted to have it create a setting for the view without competing or conflicting with it. This was the most vibrantly colored sunset I've ever painted, and it was fun working out how to get the right colors. When looking at the darks of the clouds in the photograph, I at first thought they had violet in them, but when I carefully analyzed them, I found out I could most closely match them with a mix of Napthol red and medium gray. That was a surprise. I never used grays much before I started doing clouds this year. Turns out they're pretty useful.

I spent most of this last weekend expanding and improving my Etsy shop. I've put up almost all my available works, from my small matted landscapes to my big ink abstracts. For now I'm focusing on my paintings, and I'll be adding more as I complete more works and figure out how I want to ship the large stretched canvases that I have. I'm not doing much with glass for now, but as I do more of the mobiles this winter, those will go up there too.