A New Approach: Mini Paintings

After the workshop with Jason Saunders was over, one of the biggest lessons I learned was how much I did NOT know about plein air painting. This was my weakest area, so I felt that if I focused on the weakness, I would improve in all areas. Plein air painting requires finely tuned vision and rapid, accurate judgment; just the effort of trying to paint something at all exercises those skills. So I think I can make the biggest jumps in my overall painting ability by focusing on what requires the most from me.

That means there will be a lot of minis along the way. (Minis are canvases smaller than 8x10; I work anywhere from 3x5 to 6x8.) Painting mini is a great learning tool, because it gives you less area to cover, and therefore more time to actually accomplish something in a single sitting. They're small enough to discourage noodling around with details, while plenty big enough to capture the "effect" of the scene in front of you. Technically, the effect is the overall pattern of value and temperature (light/dark and color), with attention to differences in edges. On a less technical note, capturing an effect means when you step back and look at the little rectangle of paint shapes, you feel a similar psychological reaction to this landscape that you would toward the real thing. You feel the arid, sunniness of the day, or the magical sensation of reflections in a pond, or the moodiness of storm clouds over a lush pasture.

I didn't expect to get anywhere near that accurate with my mini's; I just knew I needed a way to get a large number of attempts under my belt. I hoped that with repetition and occasional mentoring I could make improvements on this daunting subject.

From May to September I painted too many mini's to post without drowning the viewers in repetitive greenscapes, often multiple views of the base of the same tree. I'll start of by posting selections from paintings carried out in my yard at home.

This is a view of my next door neighbor's yard. I love backlighting!!

Also this neighbor's yard. He said he was about to mow down some "weeds," but decided to spare them, and they ended up producing these cute, pink flowers.

Now we're seeing my yard. In this painting, I struggled to capture the essence of dappled light on grass. I found it very difficult to keep the contrast pumped up without 1) bleaching out the highlights, or 2) desaturating the darks. Pure blue and yellow wouldn't get the shadows deep enough to contrast against green highlights, and I couldn't add white to the highlights without creating a bleachy look. So I would add red to the greens, and then I would lose the green vibrancy. My grass highlights appear very yellow, but if I made them greener, they wouldn't stand out against the shadows. Such is my constant dilemma in landscape painting!

Here's this confounded tree that I painted over and over...

Uh-oh, I'm getting bleachy highlights at the base of the tree.
This one actually has a nice effect when viewed at a distance.
Here's a view of the back of the house. The odd structure resembling a cross between an Ent and a telephone pole is my boyfriend's wooden dummy (a martial arts training tool).

I call this one "Wet Friday" because I painted it on a Friday after a refreshing rain, just before time to watch my favorite show, Dog Whisperer. The wetness brought out the colors of the different trees across the street, and the setting sun put a rusty glow on the cedar trunks and fallen pine needles.
Here's the front yard, with my boyfriend's car adding a mechanical element.
Here's my attempt at painting the roses in our front yard. This was about my last chance, since they were starting to wither and fall. I just couldn't capture their blooming, red-pink brilliance. You can see how I tried from the piled-up paint!

More paintings of the bases of trees. These are two trees I love in the back yard. They seem like door posts on a fairy portal. (Did I write that out loud?) The grass–well, weeds–that grow between them in spring in early summer are always very frilly and dense. Evidently it's late summer, because it looks like they're starting to dry out and become patchy.

This is my other next door neighbor's yard. I always love the way the sun hits his yard as it sets.

Jason Saunders' workshop last spring

Well, time to seriously catch up, so I can bring this blog to the present tense sometime before blogs go out of style. Here's a flashback to Jason Saunders' workshop. This workshop helped get me motivated to do more outdoor paintings–and paintings period. Some of my motivation came from the sheer beauty of the places we visited. 

And now for a few paintings. This farm scene along Natchez Trace is my favorite.

I "cheated" when painting the scene below–I tried to copy Jason's every move as he painted the same scene. "Tried" is the key word! My efforts did make a difference; the colors are sharper and more sunny in this painting than in most of the others I painted at this workshop.

I painted the field below on a day when the sun was in and out. For a fleeting moment the sun and clouds created a distant focal point. The magical effect lasted less than a minute, but that was what I wanted to paint ... so here's my attempt.

I painted the scene below on the last day of the workshop. We were on an incredible tract of farmland with endless views of distant hills and other farms, such as the one in this painting. (Scroll down for a photo of me at this location.)

Here are some photos from the workshop. The first photo is along the road through Natchez Trace.

We're at someone's private property, an area with woods, bridges, and little waterfalls.

This is the farmland surrounded by hazy, rolling vistas.

Here's a random, chaotic video of my drive down the dirt road, leaving the farm.

So the workshop ended!

Snippets

I'm a terrible procrastinator. I was supposed to paint mini-paintings all spring and summer, and update my blog as I scanned in new paintings. I did the painting part, but very little of the scanning and uploading. For now I'm going to upload just a single photo with a few snippets from the last few months. These paintings range in size from 3x4 to 8x10. All of them were painted from life. (Click to enlarge so you can view individual paintings.) If you're curious about a painting, or just can't make out what it is, just post a question for me.

Figure Art, and a contest

As promised, I will post highlights from this past year's figure art. (Click on an image for a large view.) I'll start with one of my favorites. This 24x18 vine charcoal drawing creates, at least for me, the effect of intense reverie.

I intended to enter the above drawing in a contest for "people and figures" in International Artist magazine. However, I couldn't get a print that looked right in the short amount of time I had before leaving on vacation, so I didn't enter it.

I did enter three others in the contest, however. Here is another vine charcoal drawing, at 18x24 inches.

I also entered these two paintings:

The pregnant model is about 1 week away from delivery in that painting. The focal point is her tightly distended belly...I decided not to detail her face, which adds more emphasis to her fertile appearance. The other model's pose creates a unique perspective, considering that she is six feet tall and dramatically foreshortened.

Although I'm happy with the mood, contrast, and colors of these pieces, I hope my figure art eventually will show a more accurate understanding of anatomy and a stronger feeling of structure. I'm not quite sure how to achieve this...I'll update when I "figure" something out!

Cowboy Museum

I thought I had better do some catching up in my blog before my viewers think I have disappeared forever into some Tennessee "holler." I'm visiting my family in Kansas, and I'm about to leave in the morning for Colorado. I plan to do much plein air painting.

As part of my visit, we went to the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City. We spent about four hours looking at mostly paintings, and barely got out before closing time. I saw my first original Bettina Steinke, and I tried to learn as much as I could from the large, luscious strokes that defined the glowing skin and sparkling eyes of her subject. I also had my first viewings of many original landscape artists: Scott Christiansen, Matt Smith (be jealous, Kevin!), Aspervig, and Bill Anton. Scott Christiansen's waterway scenes glowed in a soft, natural light at a distance, and up close the "offhand," blocky brushstrokes were amazing in their accuracy. I loved Kuhn's scratchy-textured, well-structured paintings of cougars; I had never seen acrylics look that way before. I was mesmerized by "Shoofly's" incredible pencil drawings. He uses swaths of pencil scribbles as single brush strokes, often with no apparent layering or touch-up, and always nailing the value. By the end of my visit, I was completely exhausted, with a headache and sore neck. My mom and I are in this picture, and even the cowboy looks tired.



For the most part, we weren't allowed to photograph paintings, but here is an exception...a "huge" exception! My dad and I are the two little heads in the lower left. These particular paintings are part of a permanent collection at the museum, and I will edit this post when I remember the artist's name. They really are stunning to see in person.

Winter 2008-09 Still Life

There are two still life paintings from this period. Below is a painting from December 2008. I had a murky, multi-textured, detailed David Leffel-inpsired scene in mind before I started. I picked out all the inorganic items from an antique store, except for the backdrop, which is just an old bedsheet. I just happened to have oranges and tangerines on hand, which to my surprise looked decent against the brassy tinted background. The arrangement occurred accidentally, almost as soon as I had placed everything on the table. As for lighting, I wanted the moodiness of a dark background with a single, directional light. To get that effect, I had to paint only at night, with the overhead light off, and with a lamp positioned next to the table. I painted in the hallway, looking in through the door. The canvas is 16x20, as my intent was a finished painting, rather than a study.

After four one-hour sittings with the painting, I was still at a rough stage, but I decided to stop. I felt that I had learned enough from the rough study I had completed, and I didn't want to belabor the freshness of the strokes with details that–given my tendencies–would probably throw off the balance of light and dark. 

The light-dark balance had been an ongoing struggle. Below is the original monochromatic underpainting. I had used this image as a reference for keeping my values correct after adding color.

I painted another still life early this, probably in February. Nearly everything about the painting is accidental; I was actually painting the adjacent couch, when my eye was suddenly caught by the beauty of sunlight pouring through the window and onto the coffee table. I wiped off the canvas and began painting that scene instead. I removed one or two bits of clutter from the foreground, but other than that, the arrangement is purely "candid." 

This painting is on 8x10 canvas and took about three one or two-hour sittings. I hope to do more still life paintings that capture spilling light this way. The reflections, refraction, translucence, backlighting, and undulating colors all make this painting interesting for me.

Plein Air Paintings from May 2008 - April 2009

Before I start posting the "mini series" I am working on, I'm going to recap the last year, dating back to late May 2008. Here is one painting from that month. This is my boyfriend Ronnie posing next to a river at a park in Ashland City, Tennessee.

In June of that year, I visited Colorado with my family for a couple of weeks. I painted about 10 plein air paintings, and a few of them are posted below. For more details on these paintings, you can visit this link and click the individual thumbnails.

I didn't do any plein air paintings I was happy with until the following spring 2009. After painting in Colorado, Tennessee seemed nearly impossible. I felt that I could "cheat" in Colorado, since there were obvious color differences to deal with, such as the white of  snow peaks and aspen trunks, the soft pastels of extreme distance, vivid blue lakes, and stark bare rock. In Tennessee, I struggled with the subtleties of a green spectrum that was beautiful before my eyes, but muddy and caked up with effort on my canvas. Even the water was green with algae and reflected foliage. I couldn't easily get the vantage points that gave me the soft palette of extreme distance. I relied on sunset lighting to get some rust-colored relief to the sea of green, but even then I seemed to only get harsh, glaring images. When spring came around again, I had my chance to "cheat" again. In mid-March, the pastel flowers and faint, forgiving greens rescued me from my monochrome miasma. 

Here are two of those early spring plein air paintings. They captured the hazy feel of afternoon rays glowing through the spring growth. I painted both of them in my front yard. They're both 8x10 canvases that were painted in about 2 hours.

The colors of early spring are fleeting. Once the season passed, I could have reverted back to my struggle with green overload–but in late April I had the opportunity to study with Jason Saunders. That point in time marks a break with my previous landscape efforts, so I will now end my recap of 2008-2009 plein air. If I'm brave, or in need of some public scorn, I might post some of the more grim-looking paintings from that time period. But for now I will move on with the recap of the last year's highlights.

My next post will be still life from 2008-2009, and after that one of my favorite subjects, figure and portrait. Following the people pictures will be another landscape series: plein air studies from the April workshop. Then I will move on to the process that got me started on this blog: my near-daily series of mini paintings (aka the mini-series).