Looking East

8" x 10", Oil on canvas panel

A hazy spring morning in northern Illinois looking east. I went out into the country and found a spot where I could see some terrain shift in the distance. It was good to be outside again after a long winter painting in the corner of my basement!

A Lenten practice

I have been in a painting slump.  The holidays get me every year.  I am so distracted by a huge to-do-list that painting is relegated to the very farthest back burner of my life.  This is never a good thing. I always enter January a little bummed out because it is so hard for me to get back on the saddle after such a hiatus.   Blank canvases and empty sheets of paper glare at me and I panic a bit thinking of how to get the juices flowing again.

Recently a friend posted some lovely photographs of her recent paintings on Facebook...one after the other.  One more beautiful than the next.   It seems that she had been nominated (for lack of a better word) to a painting a day challenge for 5 days.   She fulfilled the challenge beautifully.  Low and behold, I was nominated to also participate in the challenge as well.

But what to do?   Part of my slump has been the fact that I attempted to challenge myself in the fall to small paintings daily but I was doing still life paintings in oil.  It took me a bit of reflection to realize that I don't like painting still lifes.  It does not excite me and I am not particularly good at it.   I would much rather paint faces or people!   Epiphany!  I should be painting what I love to paint!!!  Another epiphany occurred when I considered that since I am newer to oil painting I am still getting stuck in the development of technique.  I have been painting with pastel for years and it is easier for me to handle, so to start my creative juices flowing again, maybe I should pick up the pastels and dive in!

In Carol Marine fashion, I cut up some 6x6 squares and also some 5x7 rectangles of pastel paper to have at the ready.  I also combed through my photo archives of people near and dear to me to paint their faces.  Today, I couldn't help but begin with my brother Ric.  The photograph I used was when he and I were in Wisconsin for a Plein Air workshop in July.  We had such fun and someone caught him laughing his hearty, exuberant laugh.  I just love the picture!!!  So for better or worse, dear Ric,
I have interpreted your laugh in pastel!   That is my arm on your shoulder.   I smiled all day as I worked on it.   It could definitely be better, but for my first day on the challenge, I am fairly pleased.

I figure this will be a good practice to do during Lent.  If I can devote 2 hours a day at least 5 days a week (or 5 paintings a week in what ever way I can)  I will be disciplining myself to better use the gifts I have been given !  It is not plein air - put with 7 feet of snow out there, this is the next best thing!

On the Road Back After Art Atrophe

Because I am a glutton for punishment and self-evaluation, I revisited the site of my first plein air painting today. The first took place on 7/6/2013. Let's be clear: my first attempt was a complete disaster. Complete. Utter failure. Have you ever had a moment when your opinion of your skills hits the hard wall that is reality? Ouch. It is like putting on skis after not skiing for 30 years and expecting to traverse the moguls just like the good old days. My first plein air attempt was a brutal wake up call that 30 years of very little artistic endeavor had taken its toll. So, I decided to give it my all for a year and revisit the site a year later to see if I've been able to breathe any life into my dormant artistic skills.

Here's my painting from today on the easel from the field where I was 'out standing'.

I am fairly happy with the barn and the foreground and think that maybe the concerted effort over the last year have awakened my artistic perceptions. However, I'm not back yet: why I got lazy on the tree and phoned it in I'll never know! You can't see it it in the photo above because the umbrella is in the way, but the tree is gnarled and interesting and would have been a nice if I'd done a better job of rendering it. Next time I'll rough in a more interesting shape with darks and then carve out the lights and sky. In fact, I just may revisit that tree again sometime soon...

All in all, I'm pleased with where I'm at after 15 months, and still having a blast knocking the rust off my painting. I've been trying some 6x6 daily paintings this week too and am finding the small size and focused subject matter very liberating. Here are a couple attempts from this week:

I know you're curious, but I'm not emotionally ready to show you my first plein air attempt. However, I think my delicate phsyche can handle showing you 25% of the whole and let you extrapolate the awesomeness of the complete painting....Ouch.

Barn From Wyngrove Cemetery

It is October and I am starting my "30 Days of Painting" that Jan mentioned in her last post. Like her, I have some travel dates planned but will paint every day I am home. I may not complete a painting but I will paint.

So, I had 90 minutes at lunch yesterday to complete a painting and hopped in my car and drove to an old pioneer cemetery from 1850 with gravestones memorializing some of the first settlers in northern Illinois. Nearby is a barn I've admired every morning driving to work and was glad to have an opportunity to paint it. Since I was strapped for time, I had a plan to be very efficient: 1) Simple drawing. 2) Put in darks first. 3) Put in lightest lights next. 4) Every other value should fall in between.

Here's the barn.

This shot above is looking northwest. Looking directly west (below) is a nice view of what those settlers back in 1850 might have seen and I thought it would be fitting to add it to my painting.

I finished the painting below in about 75 minutes so with set up and clean up I was done in 90 minutes.

Barn from Wyngrove Cemetery, Oil on Canvasboard 8"x10"

I have finally arrived!

Hey there!!!   The long lost sibling has finally joined her brother in this awesome painting blog!

Like Ric, I love to paint.   I like to look at art, think about art and fiddle with a paint brush, pastel stick or pencil when ever possible!  I have for the past 30 years!

I particularly enjoy portraiture.  With a portrait commission, one gets an assignment of sorts, which makes the first question of "what do I paint" answered right off the bat!  It is a very structured process, starting with a drawing and slowing working toward more and more detail.   Accuracy is imperative if you want to acheive a likeness to the subject, so they take some time!  I do portraits in pastel and oil and each one can take between 20 and 30 hours to complete.

To hone this craft, a few years back, I attended the Academy of Realist Art in Boston, an atelier which teaches the French academic method of drawing and painting.  This is the instruction which many of the great 19th century masters received,  Having never gone to art school I was thrilled to fill in my gaps of knowledge with the classical training that I had always wanted.  The figure below is done in carbon pencil and took 16 hours a week for a full semester!

Having studied to tighten up my work to achieve mastery of control and precision, I found an unfortunate side effect ensued.  With all that labored scrutiny and attention to detail,  I had beaten down the passionate and intuitive side of painting which was my end desire!   It actually created a bit of an artistic crisis for me as I realized this.  I am now needing to recapture the freedom to paint with less caution and more intuition.  This is hard to do. My brain was asking me to make up my mind!!!  

Enter brother Ric at a family gathering this summer.  Ric was very excited to be attending a Plein Air workshop  taught by one of his favorite artists, Tim Horn.   He jokingly mentioned that there was still space in the class if I wanted to join him!   Long story short, I went and received just the medicine that I needed to start shifting some mental gears.  Change is good!  And laughter is the best medicine of all.   Boy did we laugh!  We yucked it up together as we stumbled and bumbled along the plein air adventure,  loving every minute!

Here is a short list of how my brain was stretched:  Instead of hours and hours spent in front of a portrait, in the plein air workshop, we spent 2 or 4 hours on a painting.  Instead of the controlled lighting of the studio, we were painting outside in the ever changing sunlight.  Instead of needing to narrow my focus to a face or figure, and the little details therein,  outside I needed to observe the whole horizon in front of me and select large shapes and few details! Instead of my pastel box of 600 colors, I was mixing colors from 7 or  8 tubes.   Instead of working on at least a 16"x 20" surface, we worked on 8x10 or smaller.  Wow!  Talk about a brain shift.

But it was just what the doctor ordered.  I loved the boldness and freedom of painting this way and I want to work at getting more proficient.  Painting often is the only way to improve so I intend to join Ric and attempt to do a painting a day for 30 days. I admit, I will have trouble on weekends when we are away, but every day possible I will do a small painting.  I will start out in my studio with a bit more controlled lighting until I gain more mastery of my materials and technique.  

I decided that I would start by selecting white objects and place them on different colored surfaces to learn better how to identify all the colors that comprise what we see as "white"!  I am trying to stay simple.   I am not worried about the end result  - I just want to do one each day.  Friday I did my first painting of a white cup on a brown table, Today I did my second painting.  I white bird house with slate roof on blue fabric.  I did it and I don't hate it.  That is a win/win for me!  

Bird house reference photo

cup reference photo!

Plein Air Do-Over

Two weeks ago I painted a barn and silos on a beautiful day on a sunny day with great clouds. The scene had everything I look for: nice depth, enough contrast and some good compositional possibilities. Here is the scene,

Here is my first attempt. The color and the contrast are okay, but there is more about the painting that I don't much care for like the drawing (leaning silos) and the over worked clouds that distract from everything else.

 I spent the last two weeks thinking about the painting and couldn't help feeling like I blew a good opportunity on a beautiful day. So today when I woke up to a spectacular sunny morning, I decided to try again and revisit the site. Below is my second attempt.

I simplified the scene by removing the clouds and the little tree on the right, and generally ignored the little voice in my head screaming to add more detail. I also worked hard on the value relationships. Overall, I like my second attempt more than the first, and I think it was a valuable experience to paint a scene again after thinking about the things I wish I had done differently for two weeks.

Red, White and...Blue Smoke.

I had a turkey in the smoker today so I needed to stay around and not paint offsite. So I pulled another couple onions out of the garden, one white and one red, and set up next to the smoker. I sometimes had to squint to see the onions through the blue apple wood smoke, but enjoyed the smell of roasting turkey. The sun was hot and I was not too displeased when it occasionally went behind the clouds.

I like the rich reds and purples of the red onion and the subtle creams of the white onion. Both were throwing long shadows. I got so into painting that I forgot about the turkey...it was a bit dry.