Clouds I

I plan to do more clouds so this is clouds #1!  It is inspired by an actual place...the sky over Lake Monona from the Olrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, WI.  But really, it is about the clouds. We had a sky very similar to this one today so I studied it and wrote out a plan for painting it....and I have to say, I really love the results!  It is more impressionistic than usually do, and I softened a lot of edges which I seldom do, but I love how it turned out.  You can see the texture of the painting in this photo, which in person, really works!  I hope you like it too!

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Companions

7"x7" oil

The top one was inspired by the bottom one!

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Friendly Conversation

8"x10" oil

Finally I got into a few hours of oil painting again.  I finished this piece and tweaked several others I was never happy with.  All in all, it was a good session and this piece worked out alright. I am feeling the need for a painting sabbatical....paid leave away to just paint.  Ah, that would be lovely.  In the meantime I will have to just carve out some time and do it here with all the distractions.  Well...off to the next thing....

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A Good Place to Live 3"x5" watercolor

It has been over 2 weeks since I last posted!  I am feeling very negligent about my blog, but I have been busy traveling, and teaching, and as a result, doing little watercolor paintings and drawings instead of oil paintings.  I will get those going again, but I have really had fun with these.  This one is a house portrait.  I couldn't decide which angle to get all the fun things in and have it look like the house.  They spend a lot of time in the evenings drinking wine pool side, they have some lovely colors in their gardens out front, and the mountain sticks up behind, but each of those features can only be seen at different locations, so I combined the suggestion of them all with an entry-way view.  I have a bunch of little watercolors to photograph so I think I will do that while I warm up to oils again tomorrow.  I am teaching a painting (acrylic) class tonight.  I really am enjoying the teaching, but it takes a lot of preparation.  I am also getting ready for my first art fair.

SOLD

Not a Whisper

5"x7" oil

This is not a new painting but one that really speaks to today.  We have had a really long bout of rainy weather, with a small break yesterday.  It was cool and there was a slight breeze this morning, with hope that it would dry a bit, but alas, the air is still and there is the promise of coming thunderstorms which could be quite severe.  They tell us that Friday, Saturday and Sunday will be sunny, and of course hope springs eternal.  The flooding is pervasive and our crystal clear rivers are muddied with silt...still, it is a gorgeous landscape.  I am working on an artist's journal for my class this Friday.  It is really fun!  I have kept sketchbooks and journals over the years, but I never actually planned one out the way I am doing this one.  I will post photos as I complete pages.  Today is Wednesday; something tells me I won't be done by Friday!  But, I love new projects!

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Negative Space10"x12"

10"x12" charcoal

Camping....I used to love it.  That is all I have to say.  I have been teaching drawing at the Middlebury Studio School and this was my demo for drawing using just negative spaces to define the shape.  It is a challenging exercise and one of those that is really good to do occasionally.

Fireworks

6"x6" acrylic

Happy Fourth of July! I am camping and won't post again until next week.  This was a fun experiment that didn't work out exactly as I had planned, but it still looks cool!

He's Home

7"x9" oil

My nephew is home from his tour in Afghanistan and we are thrilled as you can imagine.  I decided to hang the flag everyday he was gone to remind me to think of him and the other young men in danger for our country.  Then I planned to paint it when he got home, so I am really happy to post this one.  This is the side of our house where we have a little porch, bench and wood pile with a lovely crab apple tree to host lots of birds.  Today is also my husbands birthday so he is going to celebrate by taking off work and golfing with one of our sons.

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A Savory Day

5"x5" oil

More garlic.  I love these carnival squash.  They are really fun to paint.  Onions offer a unique challenge too, even though they are perfectly round, their skins reflect so many beautiful and warm hues.  It is very easy to make an onion look like an orange.  This still life makes me feel sunny and warm, which is not what the weather has been bringing.  We are surrounded in every shade of gray that exists and loads of water to-boot.  Generally the weather doesn't get me down.  Days like this remind me of school days when it seemed like the sun never quite got up.  I would be lulled into day dreams by the patterns made by water dripping down the huge old windows of Madison Elementary School.  We had really old desks with initials etched into them and places for ink wells. Even though we didn't get to go outside on days like this because the mud puddles were just too tempting, I liked them because we would frequently get to paint!

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Reflections

Reflections 5"x5" oil

I think I have finally come up with a pretty good method for photographing my work...yeah!  I am currently in love with garlic.  I have always loved garlic for its culinary deliciousness and medicinal uses, but now I am studying it for its aesthetic contributions.  Although this looks like 2 bulbs, it actually is one with a reflection in a mirror.  I decided to leave out the mirror reference and just go with the two bulbs.  I worked hard on creating interesting grays in this, something I struggle with.  It is also a different size.  Sometimes it is so soothing to paint a very simple but beautiful piece of our world!  Funny thing is, right after I finished this we went out to eat at a new (for us) restaurant and there were 2 framed watercolors above our table of garlic...very lovely.  I couldn't read the name f the artist.

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The Winds Went Singing By

16"x20"  acrylic

The poetic title of this piece is from an Emily Dickinson poem about the clover blossom.  I painted this with my fellow artists Mary Crowley and Rae Newell.  We were all inspired by the same image, and Rae and I had very similar compositions, but each of our styles are quite different.  Mary's ended up being beautiful pastel colors in a swirling, Van Gogh-like background and Rae's had a soft brownish background with her signature "out of focus" background.  I thought the literary reference of them dancing in the wind was appropriate, hence, my title.  Can you hear the bee buzzing over them?

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Crossings

This painting is mostly in mid-values.  High contrast paintings have more drama so this was a challenge.  It was a bright, cloud filled day, so the shadows are almost non-existent. My darks are kind of scattered, and I am not sure it works very well.  What do you think?

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Quintessetial

6"x6" oil

I felt like this landscape saved me!  I haven't painted a new painting in a while because I have been framing, making new panels and getting ready for a show.  I have revised a few and touched up several, but after a bit, I always feel insecure about whether I still can do this.  I think this image is more yellow than the painting.  It was dark and raining out so I photographed it in artificial light.  Maybe I will rephotograph it tomorrow.  Landscapes are pretty stress free as paintings go so this was a good warm up for me.  I tried to do a floral painting but it was awful and I wiped it off.  I have been doing a lot of drawing lately as I am teaching a few drawing classes in July.  Now I need to transition back into painting.

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Johar

5"x7" oil

This is Johar.  I met her at a coffee shop where she worked in Washington DC.  I was on my own visiting galleries and taking photos like a crazed tourist when I decided I needed a sit-down and cup of coffee.  Johar was my server and I was not only captivated by her beauty and interesting hair, but by her presence...her genuine sweetness.  This was a quick portrait, but I really wanted to capture her spirit, and her image.  It worked and I got to mix some of my new brilliant blue paint into the skin tones.  New paint....it really is like having a new color crayon!  I am going to email this to Johar, because she was gracious enough to let me photograph her.  I am trying really hard to understand the differences between what you actually see and what a photograph offers.  It is a hard thing to get, but it is worth it for me because I really like painting from images I capture, especially when I am traveling.

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Hand Study

6"x6" oil

This was a great exercise to get me back in to painting.  It was offered as a DPW challenge by Claudia Hammer. I chose three values in different colors and a background color.  I painted on a panel that I had previously painted on and sanded down.  The colors were pretty dark originally so even with the sanding, it showed through and gave variation to the background which I blocked in first, thus removing the distraction.  I started with the lightest light (Jaune Brilliant) then the darkest color in the hands (Alizarian Crimson) and then used Cadmium Orange for the mid-value.  I mixed a bit to come up with the suggestion of the sleeve.  I deliberately tried to keep it loose and simple.

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Attitude

16"x20" acrylic

I am back from traveling and ready to paint!  This is a demo for a beginners class at the Chaffee Art Center.   Everyone had a good time and some really nice paintings came out of it.  I focused on creating the design using geometric shapes and how to create varying brushwork.  When I do these demos I don't feel like I am painting subject matter that is most exciting to me, rather I try and choose a few things that offer teachable moments and subjects that are interesting and simple enough to not be intimidating.  I am still refining how I do this; the learning curve for me seems to be infinite!  On another note, I went to Washington, D.C., a city of abundant free museums and excellent artwork!

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Rooster

16"x20" acrylic

This is a painting I did in planning for the class I am teaching June 12 at the Chaffee Art Center.  I went pretty abstract with the front lower and right sides, with the suggestion of foliage.  I planned it out mathematically first which was different and fun.  Click here for the demo slideshow.

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Patterned Pears

8"x8" acrylic

This painting was inspired by Nancy Colella's patterned painting exercises.  I am not sure I got it right, but it was fun to try and I do like the graphic effect.  The idea is to flatten the colors and values so that they are represented by a specific shape and then use lines to add compositional interest.  I think I will try this again tomorrow.

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Lobster Buoys

8"x8" oil

I have not painted as much as I would like but I have been artistically busy.  I went to the Vermont Arts Council retreat for 2 days this week on the invitation of the Director, Carol Driscoll, of The Carving Studio and Sculpture Center and not only got to stay the very cool Grand Isle Lake House, but also got to meet and see how the minds of some very smart and creative people work.  I did a demo for the Chaffee Art Center Open Studio event this past weekend.  So my question is:  how loose is too loose?  In the above painting, I kept it very loose because I wanted to pack up and go home.  The environment was challenging for me because there were some significant distractions,  I thought about working on it some more in my studio, but the more I looked at it the more I liked it as is.  I know what I painted (lobster buoys hanging from a rack which also holds an inverted row boat).  At first I was really interested in the shadows and light falling across the rowboat, but then the dancing shapes of the buoys just looked so cool to me that cut loose of the highlights on the boat.  I also thought that more detail would only confuse the composition.  Anyway, I would love to know what you think!

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Memorial Day

As I promised on my blog and Facebook page I am giving away 3 abstract paintings this month. I printed up the names of folks who signed up for my newsletter and put those in one pile. Another pile was for those of you who liked my Facebook Fanpage or Friended me, and finally if you made a comment on my blog, or subscribed to it, you were entered for the third give-away.  I took all of the names and randomly drew one for each painting.  Unbelievably when I drew the name for the newsletter, it was ME! Seriously, I forgot I was the first person to sign up for my own newsletter and I won!  Well obviously that won't work, so I disqualified myself, and all my relatives (sorry).  Next time I am going to use one of those services that chooses names randomly! So, here are the winners:  Scott Garren,  the next one is Celia Blanco, and finally, the last painting goes to Linda McBain.  Thanks you for participating and I hope you enjoyed my newsletter!

I am auctioning a painting to aid Oklahoma tornado recovery efforts.  Go here to see painting or to bid.