The New Year is nearly upon us. I'm crazy busy getting ready for Christmas and Hanukkah (we're an equal religious opportunity family) my annual New Year's Day Brunch and cleaning up all the old details of the previous year that needed tidying. As I run back and forth between the house and the studio carrying things that have migrated to the distant corners of the house, I realize how fortunate I am to have all this space. A few years ago I built my studio large enough to hold myself and my students. Despite being over 400 square feet though, it still feels crowded. But that's part of my good fortune. The clutter, I mean. It's loaded with easels, paintings and supplies that keep me busy seven days a week and fills my home once a week with several wonderful students. Anna is a young student in my class and she gifted me earlier this year with a lovely branch of hand crafted white flowers on a branch. It's in the painting above. My days are filled with work and painting (OK...that's work too), good friends and students and lots of laughter. How lucky I am. Then there's my husband. He's patient (he needs to be) and good humored and sometimes I don't think I deserve him. My cats are wonderful too. They snuggle with me when I read in the evening and follow me around talking to me all day. I have a lot of wonderful artist friends and non-artist friends and family and life is generally pretty damn good.
So what I'm trying to say is that although this post started as a gripe about how busy I am, I have turned it into a letter of gratitude. I know I don't hear from many of you in terms of comments, but I know you're out there and occasionally stop on by to see what's new. So you're part of my total gratitude picture. Thank you for being a part of my crazy life.
I wish you a wonderful holiday and a magnificent New Year. Be healthy, be happy and be safe!
Journal Entry, Thursday, March 26th. Done. I've been on a mission to finish this piece so that I could get started on a landscape commission. I brought the piece to a finish over the last three studio days and let it rest between to see what it needed. Overall, I'm happy with the painting although my vision for it was a bit different, the end result was satisfying. I'm pleased with the fabric and the vase design came out well. The last change I made was to the vase where I darkened it with a glaze a bit on the right side.
Journal Entry, March 2, 2015 I spent the better part of the morning contemplating this possible disaster and trying to decide where to go next. The plant itself didn't take long to get a first pass in a few days ago but I can see that the fabric will be more of a challenge. The light in the studio is best now around 2:00 PM. It wafts softly onto the setup and the shadows are deeper and warmer at that hour. But the light soon fades after that and I'm back to artificial light. I can't wait half a day for one hour's easel time. I can see that I'll have to work on this problem before my next piece. It's never been this much of an issue before. Why am I so focused on it now?
In tackling the tapestry, I considered painting it alla prima or working flatly and then describing the lights and shadows with glazes and scumbles. I decided on a combination of the latter. It's a challenge because the shadows are rather shallow and poorly described in the morning hours. By working it in glazes, I have the option of darkening and brightening selective passages when the light is right. (An apology to my readers about the easel light which blows out the plant.) I worked the darks and lights on the areas of cloth that didn't have design on them and left the design relatively flat. Much of that will have to be described later.
My container looks sick and lopsided. I can hardly stand to look at it. Definitely a lesson in getting the drawing right before starting work. I covered a lot of canvas today, but the real meat of the work still lies ahead.
I usually reserve step by step explanations of paintings for my teaching blog (www.musensbysusan.blogspot.com), however I haven't been working that blog in some time and I thought this blog would be a better platform because this is a not so much a step by step lesson but more an insight into the mind and heart of what this artist is thinking from the inspiration and inception of a painting, through its stages of growth and into its final and painful birth. So join me for awhile as I share with you entries from my journal as the painting emerges. As I'm already quite a ways into the piece, I'll be putting down here the first few stages and corresponding entries in one shot. I'll break it into two separate blog entries bringing it to where it is today and then further developments will be shared as they take place. Journal Entry, February 24, 2015 The inspiration for this piece came as a whispered prayer from the Jade plant itself which has been growing patiently in the foyer of my home under the soft, filtered light from my northern skylight. The plant loves it there I think. I can tell by the way the stems reach straight up toward the light. I fear that the painting may be taking too long and that the poor thing regrets its request and wishes to return to the sanctity of that quiet false rain forest atmosphere where it has been for a very long time. It is, after all, rather gloomy in my studio. I turn the set up directly to the light of my over large studio window when I'm not at work. The race is on now to finish before the plant suffers for its vanity. I thought for a long time about how I wanted to do this painting. Should I work in pastels or Oils? I decided on oils and then I took another month to consider my concept. After all, I have always taught and been taught to have a concept. How else will I know when I'm done? When I have fulfilled my concept, the work is done. Or so I've come to believe. Though I do have a concept in mind, I've decided to honor the request of the Jade and ask the painting what it requires instead. It seems to call for a background that would speak of it's ancestry or at the very least lend some viability to its name. Hence, the Asian wallpaper in the background. Now, mind you, I don't know that Jade plants are at all descended from Asian ancestry. But who am I to question a plant after all? While I wanted to honor this request, I had to consider the how of it all. I'm really not very good at calligraphy and, for that matter, my own handwriting is terrible. I settled on some paper that had Korean writing on it and scanned that into my computer, printing it out through the magic of Photoshop onto archival paper. This was affixed to canvas - which had some problems of its own. Won't go into that here, but I've learned a lot about this kind of application since. Being a classical painter and having had the importance of archival materials beat into my head, I struggled with this whole idea of mixed media for another couple of weeks. A call to Golden relieved my anxiety and I moved forward. (Please comment on the blog if you have any questions about how I proceeded here.) Journal Entry, February 26, 2015
I transferred the drawing this past Sunday and spent the better part that day just getting some glazing down. I used combinations of burnt sienna, burnt umber and permanent alizarin crimson to lay in the color. Today, I felt that I could start in on the container or is it a vase? It doesn't seem quite the right word. I was a bit stymied by the light. The cool light coming in from my north facing window just doesn't seem to set it off right. I was definitely frustrated over this unexpected conundrum. I changed the temperature of an additional light bulb several times. I'm still not happy. The plant wants natural light. I can hear that and obviously it needs it to survive this process as well. I can easily see this painting taking a month or more. Just artificial light won't do and besides, I dislike working from it. I settled on a combination but can see that I'll need to use my internal vision more than my physical sight to get the quality of light I envision. But the whole trial and error thing took the better part of the day. Sigh. I didn't get far, but at least I made a start.
Journal Entry, February 27, 2015
Well, things are moving ahead although I can't say I'm completely satisfied. I struggle to integrate the background with the foreground. The leaves of the plant are trickier than I thought, and as is the manner of plants, it keeps changing as it endeavors to turn toward the light. Still, the plant is dictating this painting. It thinks it's the client and has commissioned the work. So I have to deal. The under painting could have been done better but the ground on which I'm working has its own challenges and so I made do with a very basic wash in and allowed myself to forego the usual detailed grissaille. I hope none of my fellow graduates from Georgetown Atelier see this once I post it. The container is off a bit and this first pass is not what I was aiming for. But the Jade is taking shape. I've experimented a bit with some broken yellow/green in the background and think I'll keep it. So much still to do.
I finished this piece some time ago and it is hanging in Gallery 9. Somehow, though, it never got posted here. It's a small but unassuming piece and yet I like it because of the strong shapes and the bright red vase which pops the piece.
Time for a little alla prima piece. While polished realist pieces offer a challenge in terms of bringing a painting to convincing finish, alla prima painting (painting in one sitting), offers a freshness and immediacy that's hard to accomplish over several sittings. I try to keep my hand in alla prima painting because I learn more about color and paint handling by doing them. It also allows me to complete more paintings in a given amount of time, thereby increasing my practice. While viewing my two kinds of work may be sometimes confusing to a patron, I think that my personal handwriting manages to show through in both. What can I say. I have Gemini on my midhaven.
It's been a beautiful summer up here in the great Northwest. And though I haven't posted (my bad), I've been busy. Although I'm noted among my friends for having a black thumb and I have trouble growing them, I still love to paint flowers.This one took a while between family visits and other things - among them plumbing woes.
I'm proud to announce that I am a new artist at Gallery 9 in Port Townsend, WA. I showed for the first time this past Saturday for the Port Townsend Gallery Walk. If you get out that way, come and visit. It's a beautiful gallery with a great stable of fine artists.
I love painting these guys. No matter how you display them, they're always lovely. I plunked a bunch into a cut glass vase for this painting. There's tons of thick paint on these. It's so thick, as a matter of fact, the paint actually helps to create shadows on the canvas. Take a look at the detail.
