Way back in February

 

We had so little snow this past winter. One Saturday morning I woke up to a foot of it plus sun. I spent the day running from window to window painting little 8"x 8" canvases of all the shadows, shrubs and trees. Of the ten paintings I did only this one looked good the next day. 

This is my process: paint a lot, look and respond, and then weed. I've been disappointed in previous attempts to take a painting further and make it more finished after a plein air session. So I started a new canvas with the one above as the study.

Above is the result.
I see merits in both. Drawing and painting directly from nature has a spontaneity that I like, but often the brush work looks less polished and the paint doesn't cover all of the canvas. The colors in the second painting are bright, I've thought more of composition and there's paint from corner to corner. It is a different painting, though.

Santa Monica

Three sketches from a 2000 sketchbook. I watercolored right into the book, even though the paper is thin and meant for pencil or pen. I redrew the sketches on watercolor paper, but they didn't come out as well as the originals. I find that often - that the spontaneity of a sketch is more interesting than a careful, planned drawing. It seems especially true if I'm using sketches for a more finished work.

One Pear

A pencil sketch on printmaking paper. 2008?

Life, Still

Oranges. Pears. Pears. Pears. Pears.
The table color was a hard decision, because in real life it's a little darker than the color of my easel.
Acrylic on linen and on cotton canvas. Feb. 2012

Taking photos of a painting as it progresses reminds me later how indirect the route to a finished work is, and it's a relief to remember when I'm struggling through a different painting. In this painting I am finally seeing, thinking in and interpreting three dimensions. It's a whole new world.
Winter Landscape 2012 Acrylic on canvas 24" x 36"

Winter ? Landscapes

We never had much snow this past winter. Snow makes such interesting shadows and such high contrast color and light. But I did find that there were still shadows visible on the grass and that they had color.
These are smaller landscapes. 9" x 12" and 11" x 14"

Trees/ Branches

The three pencil sketches are older. I switched to sketching in ink a few years ago for several reasons. It doesn't smear in a sketchbook. It scans in well. The contrast is higher, and I'm always excited when I see other people's work with really dark darks.
But I like my pencil results so much more - I feel I have more control and get more sensitive drawings.
I'm going back.

Sideways

January without snow left me learning about painting light, but not the shadows as I'd expected. It felt like there were weeks of struggle, painting and few results.
Usually I paint 3-4 paintings and like only one... painting over the others later. These are three such paintings.

Forsythia

Last spring the forsythia was beautiful. I painted three paintings of it before it faded, and I listened to Glen Gould playing Schoenberg over and over while I painted.

This winter I'm listening to John Adams while I paint - usually just once or twice a day. (There are two parts to The Dharma at Big Sur, but I've only linked to Part 1.)
In December I got out the third painting shown above, and I decided it was very green. I repainted it listening to The Dharma. So much texture in painting is new to me. The whole painting seems more decided by the music than by me.

Three Trees

The results of this painting kind of take me by surprise - the style is looser than anything I've ever done for a landscape.
I've listed it on etsy. Cat not included.

Elephants - New Listings

I've listed three new elephant paintings in my etsy shop. The two above I showed here as I was working on them; I painted further on the second painting after that post.



This painting is based on this 2010 sketch of the elephants at the Toledo Zoo.

Bianca

Happy New Year!
This morning I felt like I'd finally arrived in 2012 ... I guess I'm on a different, slower schedule...maybe aiming for the Chinese New Year...eventually.




This past week I had an idea that doing life drawings in charcoal hadn't served me very well. Charcoal pencils make much darker life drawings than graphite, but I didn't feel like I had as much control, or could take the time to get all the gradations in values that would make them beautiful. I found a bunch of examples that confirmed these thoughts and had planned to post them last week, but I couldn't bring myself to.
Then today I dug through stacks of pastels and I found these. Maybe September 2010 was a good month for life drawing or maybe it's the paper or maybe I was getting in lots of sessions (the most probable reason), but I ended up thinking that charcoal was o.k.

Revisited

Once my orangutan painting was stretched on bars and hanging over the sofa I didn't like the colors as much. I went back in with orange and got rid of all of the burnt sienna.

I also added more dark browns in the lower half and golds at the top of the gorilla painting - before it was stretched and on the wall and too high to reach.

Euonymus

I have been doing lots of sketches of the branching patterns of trees and shrubs. This - in micron pen - is a burning bush.

I painted this of the same shrub. I didn't reference my sketch; I painted from life. Sketching helps me understand what I'm seeing and reduce the number of lines I feel I need to convey what I see.