Let's Forget About Catch-up

One of the things hanging me up in the blog is all the catch-up I have to do. I have over a year's worth of painting and drawing activity not yet updated. Yet time keeps moving on...art keeps cranking out...and I get more and more behind. Forget the catch-up...the time is now.

Summer 2009 - Farm Animals

I painted all of these on the same day...these animals had me on a roll! They belong to Karen Guy, owner of a farm in Hermitage. Fortunately for me, I also live in Hermitage, and Karen has welcomed me to come paint on her land from time to time. 

Karen loved this painting of her horse Traveller; she thought it looked exactly like him. I gave her this 3x4 inch portrait to keep. I was able to paint Traveller from life by tantalizing him with a bag of pretzels the whole time, and feeding him one if he seemed to start losing interest. Now you know what a hungry horse looks like.

Karen recognized this horse from the painting. He is her other horse, Odie. She said she would know that big ole jughead anywhere! I eventually gave her this painting, too.

Here is a mother-daughter duo. The calf is Mayflower, so named because she was born in May, and the mother is Squirm. Squirm is an undersized cow that Karen had originally feared would not survive to adulthood. Now she's so fond of Squirm, the lucky cow is now a permanent resident of the farm, not to be sold. I'm not sure Mayflower is also a pet...I hope so! I love the way their tails swished as they ate.

These are the "peaboys," also having a meal. I was enchanted by the iridescent (and impossible to paint) neck feathers, which fluctuated between royal blue, turquoise, and sea green.

Summer 2009 - Pets on the Porch

These are all on 3x4 stretched canvas, painted from life on my back porch. I loved going outside in the summer heat, sitting on a lawn chair, and paint sketching my animal friends. Ember is the cat, better known as "Kee," and Capone is the dog, a boxer. You can see on the lattice and board where my boyfriend (at the time) and I ran out of stain while painting the deck.

Summer 2009 Nashville Area Plein Air

I'm posting today not out of any conscientious effort to update. I'm doing this simply to stay awake. I pulled an all-nighter to meet an illustration deadline, and I'm finding it really hard to keep going. I knew that posting some paintings and talking about them would wake me up.

Going back to last summer, I practiced painting outdoors several times a week. So far I have posted paintings from my immediate neighborhood. Now I'm posting pieces from other Nashville areas. I hope I can look back on this later with a new understanding of how to paint better plein air works. 

Here is a 5x7 of Percy Priest Lake. This the only painting in this post that I feel somewhat pleased with. I had a slightly easier time with this one because there's so little green in it...I've mentioned before how the endless variety of greens in Tennessee can be overwhelming.

I painted this 5x7 of a hayfield while out painting with Kevin Menck. Wow, that was one sweltering day, even in the shade. Kevin's feel-no-pain enthusiasm helped me keep my spirits up! During this excursion he told me about Plein Air Nashville, which became a regular part of my painting activities ever since.

Here's a 6x8 of Percy Priest Lake, painted the same day as the 5x7. I hate the dull, muddy grass and trees.

Here's a painting I did on Memorial Day at Natchez Trace at sunset. I like the soft feel and the daring of attempting a sunset, but overall this has some serious value issues. I painted this one on a 3x4 inch stretched canvas.

This is the first painting I did with Plein Air Nashville. We painted the Cumberland River from a bridge near the Opry Mills area. Apparently I was having an epic struggle that day, because almost a year later Kevin remembered how I was so covered with paint that he almost didn't recognize me.

This is Nashville's iconic "Batman Building," or to be more mundane, a Bellsouth building. I painted this with Plein Air Nashville from the downtown walking bridge. 

Now for some meandering about my progress as a painter. As I have mentioned before, plein air is the hardest type of painting I have tried. Out in the sunlight, even with my canvas and palette properly shaded, I feel like I can't truly judge what colors I'm seeing in my paint mixes. My color choices seem to be bright and saturated enough when I view them outside, but when I bring them indoors I'm always alarmed by the dreadful dullness. I haven't painted much plein air since last fall, but I have been reading Schmid's Alla Prima and studying/painting with Kevin Menck and Jason Saunders since then. This continuing education makes me aware that there's a lot more going wrong that just getting befuddled by the glaring sunlight. Even if the sun really is throwing off my absolute sense of color, I still should be aware of whether my relative values and temperature are correct. If I could get this balance correct, at least in a relative sense, I think my paintings will look less muddy when I bring them indoors, even if the absolute colors may not be accurate. With time, I can probably learn to compensate for sun-induced confusion by exaggerating color saturation. But until I learn to do that, I need to be more meticulous about nailing the relative values and temperature. The hardest part about plein air is that I will need to achieve that level of accuracy within 30 minutes to an hour. 

Hey, my plan worked! I feel more awake after racking my brain to comment about painting. Now I can get back to my sleep-deprived illustrating.

Mini Fruit and Vegetable Studies

It's still spring/summer 2009, and the mini routine continued indoors and outdoors. I was painting every day or almost every day, some weeks. The practice of ritualistically cranking out a painting a day was comforting. I didn't have to think too hard ... no worries about wasting a large amount of paint and canvas ... not a huge time commitment ... just shut up and do it. I knew with each one I would gain a little more experience. This sense of decisiveness and hope pulled me out of a painting slump that had gone on for years.

These two oranges sold at an art show in February, 2010. I was sorry to see them go! At least the buyer seemed really delighted with them. The oranges and the banana are my favorites of this series. They seem bright and cheerful ... and tasty. Those three are all on 5x6 stretched canvas.



Here's a tomato/sweet potato duo. I was especially drawn to the subtle tones in the sweet potato skin. One thing that bothers me is how the tomato is in sharper, brighter focus than the potato.
I had the HARDEST time with the temperature changes in the strawberry flesh. In order to get the values I thought I was seeing, I deepened the shadows with probably way too much French ultramarine. But at the time I felt I had no other choice to get the value dark enough. The brighter red areas also seem too cool. I do like the drawing, at least. 

I like how the fuzz created a soft, cool glow on the darker peach. I'm not sure why this painting turned out more dim than the oranges and banana, which I had painted before the peaches. (These peaches were delicious, by the way!)

I included the crude, chunky painting below because this is the first one I painted when I resolved to start painting minis. The tomatoes are outside on a wooden bench; I painted this batch just around sunset. They came from a produce stand on Lebanon Pike in Hermitage. I highly recommend their tomatoes! The delicious peaches shown above also came from this stand.

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!