Zinnias on Turquoise

Here is my study, arduous, and a little painting, fun, mostly.

Bowl Study

For the past couple of days I have been doing lots of small studies of forms inside a bowl. This was the best one today, but I wiped everything and will start again tomorrow. It's kind of nice wiping everything....liberating, nothing to lose.

Plums and Pear Paper

So....this is ever so slightly under exposed, but I am making progress with the Dslr camera. I have figured how to navigate within the vast menu but have to be completely calm to do it. Have mastered white balance, aperture and shutter speed, but am stalled on metering a mid tone. I do have a book on the way, DSLR for Dummies, isn't that the most infuriating title, but whatever, I have to have it to move ahead. I used to think that one should acquire a doctor and a lawyer as a life partner but I was way wrong. It should be a carpenter and a photographer.

In the painting, I tried to keep it all dark and close valued and saturated.

Geranium and Pear Paper

Another one of the old medicine bottle, blacklit.

Horned Hat

This is my late entry( hat theme) for the June challenge for Some Texas Artists Like to Paint. To see other people's entries, click here.

Geranium and Tangerine

I got a painting done today AND I used the SLR camera and this shot is reasonably like the painting. I am not sure what I did right with the camera yet and don't know if I can do it again,

but I am encouraged.

Egyptian Clay Mask, Study

This is a study for another mask painting. The mask is made of Egyptian clay mixed with organic vinegar and is just a horrible color. Grey green. When dry it looks like spackle, so I have to figure my color strategy beforehand to compensate for such a large portion of dour color. However, when you wash this off your face, you are radiant.

P.V. Study

More ellipses today, plus a few heads. One fun exercise for the dreaded ellipse: take a 6 inch length of string and push pin it to cardboard, the pins 4 inches apart. Put the pencil point inside the string and draw the string taught. (You get the string tangled up a couple of times, must reposition after first half of ellipse.) You can see from experience how the shape has to be, no matter what you think you are seeing! I found this very helpful.

Nude Sitting

Today I drew bottles, pitchers and jars for the ellipses, also did some reading in a pretty good perspective book that explains and demonstrates foci and tangents, etc., hoping all this will somehow pass into my brain. I think it so strange that the brain really does lie to you about perspective, and that you must unlearn the old way of seeing. I want to think it doesn't matter about perspective, however when I see work in which it is perfect (Kehoe for instance) I am knocked out. So I suppose there's nothing for it but to learn it, DULL as it is.

Above is one of the 15 minute drawings from this week. I particularly like this model. She is very small and comfortable in her skin. She takes good poses and wears her hair flat to her head so it's easy to see everything. Sometimes models have long hair that is draped all over everything, or 5 inch ear rings they have to be argued out of.

Study for Dew Rag

I had to take a little break from painting because I suddenly couldn't painting anything. I just hit 500 posts (beginning Feb. 2010) so I figure maybe a little shift is due, and maybe drawing is a good way to decompress. I have been attending a couple of life drawing sessions a week for a while and loving it, just beginning to use decent paper now and be relaxed about it. The best class I have found so far has 2 hours of 15 minute poses, which gives me enough time to get it down but not enough to overwork. And oh, the psychological freedom of doing something for only 15 minutes and tearing it out and tossing it over your shoulder! But there is always a moment in the drawing when I find myself irritated at having to make marks to cover a space that would be better done with a brush. I guess that is progress really, that I have moved to thinking of mass and form first rather than line. So yay for that one, that was hard come by.

No matter how good drawing is, and it can be good, it is never as good as painting. For moi.

Zinnias Two

Still wrestling with camera, but hopeful, I can see that the camera will do what I want it to do, just a matter of learning how to set it up. This is not it yet....

Fat Radishes

First, these are the fattest radishes I have ever seen. Practically the size of eggs. And they have lots of pink in them, however, I am using for the first time an SLR camera and the color and contrast is strangely off and I don't have a clue how to fix it. Off to the manual.

Ok now the first one is the old camera. Worlds apart, neither correct. AAAUGH!

Zinnias

Peonies gone, so I cut the first zinnias from my little garden. They are all a little stunted but still brave.

Peonies and Paper Bag

Playing.

Peonies with Three Blacks

I'm pretty relaxed about this because I'm in the pilgrim mode. This is what I have decided about the flower part: it should be figured out before you load up your brush with paint, and then established quickly with the fewest possible strokes. Not that I did that, but I can see the necessity of it, so maybe next time... One of the most fun parts in this painting was setting up the dark background and foreground and then distinguishing the temperature of the blacks. I looked at Stanley Bielen and Celia Reisen for instruction.

Peony Study

I sprang for some peonies. They are my most favorite flower, raggedly beautiful and the fragrance has not been bred out of them. However, I have never painted them before because they are so full of shredded petals and I don't know what to do with all that. This is the second try, but I figure if I stick at it, I will get it eventually. I am looking at everybody else's peonies on line for help, and also I have a little book of Manet's Last Flowers, which has them. Manet's peonies are so minimal they are like puffs of steam, but essentially a peony. I think some types might be easier to paint than others.... some have larger petals and some have lots of shred. I tried to take the easy way out but only the shredded ones were in my grocery store.

Geranium Cutting for Lucien Freud

Today was a quiet day after the melee of the pet painting group, I have to collect my wits.

Humane Society Animals

We had another pet painting class this afternoon at the Humane Society of Williamson County in Leander, Texas. I'm so proud of them! They jumped right in without hesitation and made these charming paintings.

Little Zinnia

Fleurs from my garden. We have no rain, so they are all scraggly.

Still Life with Envelope

I was playing with the tying to the edge idea again. Also, I wanted to make the back part of the painting tip forward by using white in the background -- to flatten the picture plane, flatness and depth together. It's much more clean edged than I intended, what was I thinking....

The turquoise painting was the first one, and that bright strip at the bottom was one diagonal too many. In the top painting, I used a gray purple in that space and the composition has enough of a vertical now so that it works better. I wonder what I learned here.

Still Life a la Howard Hodgkin

Howard Hodgkin is so much more brutal than this little still life, but this is his direction. His paint does not describe anything either. Oh but the life of his paintings! And we are both completely committed to the polka dot.

Bird and Light Socket

A quickie painting. My first one, which was an attempt at Hodgkin inspired abstract realism, went the way of all flesh.

Purifying Mask on Blue

OK, now I'm sick of the whole thing, but before I left this subject I wanted to use the wrought iron work that was in the background of one of the photos. I wanted to tie something into the painting that came out to the edge. I'd really like to tie something completely arbitrary from the figure to the edge, but I thought I should start with something real to get used to this idea.

Purifying Mask On Green

First, thank you everyone for such funny and kind comments on the last painting. I had this brainstorm that if I whited up my face it might be easier to see the planes of values, which it was, except I couldn't or didn't get the mask stuff on evenly enough to keep my skin from showing through in some places, which made for warm ruddy areas next to cool whites -aaaugh! In this one (I was out on the back porch trying to keep the neighbors from seeing me in whiteface and my underwear) there was an interesting slice of bright light that made it around the porch post and hit the side of the face, so there was an opportunity to find the brightest white possible. A good exercise in whites.

Purifying Mask

And it does, too.

Striped Still life

Well, I was selected for the jury as I expected and we had the whole thing finished by lunch, which left the afternoon, so I had some time to play. I have a new book on Howard Hodgkin, fabulous British abstract painter, and he concerns himself with the question of placement which is interesting to me and also the biggest most delicious element of all, color. So I moved some forms around in the manner of H.H. and went at it. Exhilarating actually, not to be so confined to realism, and to keep the forms very basic, looking for the tension in the mix.

Red and Green

A little study. Tomorrow - jury duty.

Macy Poolside

This is another one of the lucky medical rehab dogs, my favorite of all nine of them.

Nasturtium and Eggplant

Hooray, good to be posting again. I have been working on a larger painting, lots of scraping down and re-doing, but I think I'm out of the woods today. So I painted this for fun and to reward myself for sticking at things. This actually is my one and only nasturtium blossom from a big pot I planted from seed. I have lots of leaves and I love the round shapes of them. These are Empress of India and are supposed to be deep red, but this orange is good enough.

Grapefruit and White Napkin

Big brush, harsh light, simple forms in this one, the object was to find a way to knit the forms together into a painting. I like the word knit for this process, Catherine Kehoe used it in a lecture she gave recently at Mass Art. I wish I had been there to hear it! It is posted on her website catherinekehoe.com.