Off to Vacate - Beaches, Art, Family and sight seeing

See, a lounge chair waiting for me!

 The Gulf Coast off of Florida is the first stop. Looking forward to some beach time.

Then to the Atlantic side with a day trip to St Augustine perhaps...

Flying to NJ/NY to see some Art - imagine that. And John Singer Sargent AGAIN. Gustave Klimt and The Wyeth's might also be in the cards.

Family time in upstate NY and NJ will be a treat. Here is my cousin on my last visit east.

And the Jersey Shore...the repairs should be near completion from that epic storm a few years back. See you when I get back!

Ready When You Are - Tools of the Garden

Ready When You Are, 12x9, oil on linen panel

Monday I was invited to a group day of painting at a friend's house in Conifer. Amazingly, it was a perfect, beautiful spring day in the Colorado High Country. We have had few and far between days in the past several months where we have not had rain, so this was a big deal!  I have not painted plein air since last summer so that was another "big deal."  The place was so green. So naturally Victoria has to be different and paint something so not in keeping with a day painting in the mountains! No aspen trees for this girl. I found that the back wall of Karen and Barney's home had a line up of gardening implements. I mean the whole side of the house had this perfect lineup of tools. I picked these four to concentrate on as I liked the shadows.

The wall was raw wood. I had set myself the task to use as little white as I could possibly get away with. This was a bigger challenge than I thought and definitely took a concerted effort on my part. For instance, to paint the wall I used burnt sienna and a little dab of two yellows (cadmium lemon and Cad yellow medium). Then I grabbed the white! NO! By not adding white to this mixture it meant that the red handles had to be dealt with in a different manner too. They could not read darker than the wall which is in the light. Adding white to red does not make a lighter red, it makes variations of pink. I added a tad of yellow to the red enough to keep the red (and not make orange) and a smidgen of Naples yellow which lightened the mixture but did not weaken the red. It made me realize just how much I rely on white for value shifts. I needed light colors for the other two handles and what is in the light on the metals so I did use white. Keeping white to a minimum makes for a much brighter painting to be sure.

A friend of mine had said my paintings tend to be "chalky" so I took it to heart and am doing my best to address this. That was why I am working on this as my summer project. She is right. I recently added Zinc White to my palette as it is semi-transparent while my normal white, Titanium is opaque. I may try Flake white too. It has lead in it but is also semi-transparent. It helps lighten without deadening the color it is added to. It is my summer project for myself. I rediscovered an artist that I am using for my mentor in this endeavor. Aldro Hibbard. His colors are so vibrant.

It was a fun day. I do like painting outdoors. It was lovely to see some old friends and to meet new ones. It is always a treat to see what others do when you are out with a group of painters.

Lazy River, Floating on the Yampa

Lazy River, 24x18, oil on paper, available

Here is one hot off the easel. It is from a rafting trip I took 10 years ago with some friends of mine. You can almost sense the wonder and silence of the scene. This painting is a bit out of my normal realm of subject. I turned my head to Colorado this year and what makes this state so special.

In the spirit of this painting, I am also working on a second piece from another trip down the Yampa that is quite a bit larger than this one so that the majesty of Tiger Wall is shown in perspective to a 2 man raft. The raft in the next painting is tiny, less than an inch. You will have to look for it. Stay tuned!

The rafting trips I went on were with a friend from work. He and his friend were the trip organizers and then a bunch of others would be invited to go along too. I went three times and each time I went, I was on the barge raft. It was the big slow boat that carried the food and much of the extra things like tables, cook stove etc. I had a high perch as I sat on the food locker - really I had a seat, but the food locker was under the seat. My companion was one of the organizers, not my friend from work but his good buddy. One trip we had his 11 year old daughter with us. We had lots of quiet time but also many philosophical discussions as well. He taught me how to read a river map and I was able to find where we were by reading the map. One time I had to get in the river and get the boat unstuck while he worked the oars. I felt more confident doing the outside work rather than manning the oars. It was in a calm and rather low spot so I was in water only to my waist. In this particular photo the front boat has two ex-marines and their wives.

Book Reviews and Iris

This morning I am going to reflect on books I have just read by Chaim Potok. The book club at my church read a book by Chaim Potok last month; The Chosen. I am not able to participate in this book club as I work during the week, but the book is always listed in our bulletin. Having heard, off and on, over the years of "The Chosen" and needing a book to read, I ordered it from Denver Public Library. It has been a long time since I have been so engrossed or taken in by, good writing. The stories are well told and universal to the human condition. Yes, Potok's books, the three I have completed so far in the last month, are about Judaism in its many facets and factions, but deeper than that. We all face the same challenges in the human condition. Truth is universal and I have found these books full of truths.

"The Chosen" so far has the best beginning that just sucked me immediately into the book. It is an innocent enough beginning of a baseball game between two yeshivas (yeshivas: 1. an Orthodox Jewish school for the religious and secular education of children of elementary school age. 
2. an Orthodox Jewish school of higher instruction in Jewish learning, chiefly for students preparing to enter the rabbinate.) in Brooklyn. The boys are approximately 14-15 years old. It goes from the game, and what a game it is, to a friendship between rivals that has a profound effect on both boys. I know there is a movie that was made of this story but I have not seen it.

Next I read "The Promise." It continues the story between these two boys but they are now in college. A third young Jewish male is introduced who is the age they were when "The Chosen" started. 14 or so. He is a troubled young man but he attaches himself to the narrator. Again, an innocent enough tale, and this one I had a hard time getting into at the beginning, but then it hooked me in. This tale explores how a young mind can become tormented, inadvertently, by their parents choices. A fascinating tale. It explores again traditions vs common sense, truth and someones well-being.


Last night I finished "My Name is Asher Lev." This book the library did not have so I had to download to my Kindle. It begins a bit slow at first as well. About a young Hasidim boy, an only child, who has a gift.  He cannot stop drawing. This is not an acceptable practice for a Hasidim. His is an observant Hasidim family. His father cannot reconcile himself to this gift, of Satan, he believes. His mother, encourages young Asher, but not when the father is present. Young Asher feels his mothers pain as she is torn between the beliefs and traditions of her faith and her husband, with her son, also a faithful observant Hasidim who happens to have a gift of expression via drawing, and later, painting that he cannot give up and remain true to who he is. The son and the father remain at odds throughout this story ending in a climax I will not reveal here. A very universal tale, but told from within the Jewish Hasidim culture. I read a comment last night on a blog post where the man was put off by the Jewish language for customs and traditions he knew not of, but in "The Chosen," Potok's first book, he does give a lot of explanations to some of those words that may not be in the normal lexicon of most people. If you start with one of his later books, not so much is explained although much can be gleaned by context or looking them up. Chaim Potok was a painter as well as a Rabbi and I believe this story is autobiographical, to what extent, I am not sure. The next book, which I am now reading, is "The Gift of Asher Lev." It has begun when Asher is married, with 2 children and is a world-renowned artist living in southern France. He is returning to Brooklyn for his uncles funeral. It is not a warm welcome for Asher.

On another note, but still related to art, I saw an enchanting movie last night. It will be at the Chez Artiste theater in Denver through Tuesday night. "Iris" is a documentary of Iris Apfel. http://www.magpictures.com/iris/ It is amazing and hilarious and I highly recommend it. Especially to any and all who are interested in fabrics, decorating and style. She is an artist in her own right and still going strong at 93. Let that be a lesson to all of us!

Fraser Valley Meadow Revisited - How to...hold shapes together

Original Plein Air, Fraser Valley Meadow, 2006, oil on panel

Fraser Valley Ranch, 9x12, oil on panel

You have to close your eyes on this one! Can you tell I loved color in the original painting on top? (I still do, but I use it differently now.) There is a certain sense of energy to it. BUT, when I got the reference photo out I could not get the proportions of the canvas to make that scene fit as I painted it.  I admit that my recollection of where I was when I painted this "the story" was about the meadow. In this paint over, the story is about the ranch and the setting of the ranch. There is still plenty of meadow and I allowed some of the much loved color to come through.

As I have been going through my box of old  paintings I found that there is a pattern to my painting outdoors. I did not always keep the "big shapes" together. By that I mean, as an example,  in the original meadow, the colors and values are carving too many shapes within the whole so the whole is not sticking together. ie see the difference between the two meadows above. There is a lot of variety of colors within the green but it is holding together as a lawn of grass; in the original you are not sure what it is, although the colors sure are pretty...

As what happens with alot of painters, especially painting outdoors, the values were not strong enough. If you squint at the top painting there are three values, barely.If it weren't for the white house it would be only two, and those two values are very close in range with the exception of the yellow green in the meadow. In the remake you definitely see three values. I carved out the houses with trees. The misty mountains and the meadow are very close in value and they are medium with the sun lit roofs being my lightest value. Even though the trees are technically in the light, they need to be a darker value to group the trees together. The composition still has a nice circular feel to it which was something else I remember drawing me to this scene.

Pears - for the fun of it

Pears in Blue and Green, 6x6, oil on panel

Pears in Red and Green, 6x6, oil on panel

Remember back in January when I signed up to do the 30 paintings in 30 day online challenge? Well, this week I had these two charming pears in the fridge and I painted them on two different days before work. That was one of my goals for doing the challenge; To see if I could paint before or after work during the week. I don't even mind if I don't do it often, but it is nice to see I can get to my easel if only for 30," from time to time during the work week.

Recently, while reorganizing in my basement to find room for some new canvas's I ordered, I came across some very early oil paintings. So early that they are painted on cardboard. We were cautioned to not spend money on high end supplies while doing the basics. It was our first foray into color after using only black and white while learning values. They have been kept all these years because I really liked them at the time, and believe it or not, I still really like them. They are simple in shape and color but they work. Finding those old paintings made me want to paint simple shapes and color for the fun of it and so voila. Here you have it.

Also while cleaning up for above said new canvas's I realized I need to have a studio sale. It is time to clean house. There will be small studies such as these pears as well as plein air pieces and other studio works. I will keep you posted.

Studies in 3 Values - Local Tone

Study for Line at the Louvre, 9x12, oil on canvas panel

Here is a quick study using light, medium and dark. I like how it is working but after seeing this cropped version of the scene, I decided to open it back up to show the scope of the line. It was phenomenal how many people were actually standing in line to get into the Louvre on this rainy, gray day. I believe it took us 35 minutes. By this time we were almost half way there! On second thought, what better place to be on a rainy day in Paris? The Louvre is certainly large enough to take in this crowd without much of a problem.

Back to this little study above. The hard part is deciding what to tie each value to. When using only three values it limits your options in some ways and then there are loads of choices to make at the same time. I originally had the umbrella peaking into the image in the upper left corner as a medium  gray catching the color of the sky. It just seemed too blah. Making it black helped the composition remarkably. The arch was almost as light as the sky so in the photo, the trees in the arch showed up much more. But if the arch is "white" then it blends into the sky and we don't get the nice band of gray we now have in the middle or the play of patterns in the dark and light umbrellas standing in front of the arch.

Line at the Louvre, 30x30, oil on panel

 I decided to see what the square format would look like doing three values before I started to paint. As you can see, I divided up the umbrella of the main figure but it is not as effective as it is in the study. I do think the square format gives more of the depth and breadth of the line snaking into the Louvre so I am glad I opted to change the format. It also added more public art into the scene. There is a sculpture right above the woman with the white umbrella and another to the right of the arch.