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.