Friday, January 31, 2014

The first Day after the Challenge

To sum up a collage of all the paintings.   Assembling it led me to remember where I was each day of the month, and to decide which paintings I liked the best, and of course the least.


Thirty Paintings (well 26) in Thirty Days



As they used to say,  it's been real.

Laurel

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Day Thirty - The Last Day

This morning I listened to Leslie Saeta's web radio show which were many of the artists' stories from the past thirty days.  Listening gave a human dimension to the paintings that have been posted on Leslie's site.

After yesterday's really bad "plein window" painting, I decided that I just had to do another.  Some painters from North Carolina Plein Air Painters posted snow paintings that they had done outside.  Just too cold for me.  Yesterday's painting was so embarrassing, I posted some other plein air work that I had done previously.  Today I will be happy to post on Leslie's site and on the plein air site as well.


Tree Line 2
5 x 7 oil on canvas board
  

 

Tomorrow I will visit Leslie's website again to see the collages of everyone's work. 
I was excited to get an e-mail from Meredith Adler I met thru the Thirty Day event and is thinking about  joining our local painting group, the Blue Ridge Fine Arts Guild.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Day Twenty Nine - Snow Day

Last night I received an e-mail from the my plein air group to go out and paint snow today.  Since it was 11 degrees this morning I elected to stay and paint the view from my studio window. 

Having not done plein air since October it was good to be reminded that before I can mix the right color on the palette it is already changed. 

This image looks more like a Hawaiian volcano than a Appalachian mountain, perhaps a not so unconscious desire.


Mt Celo Volcano
5 x 7 oil on canvas board


 




Tomorow is the last day of the challange.  I hope to hear Leslie's web radio program.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Day Twenty Eight - Rocks and Water

On Day Sixteeen I painted underwater rocks and wrote about not being ready to paint the sun dapples on the rocks.

The next day I took photos of some rocks with the sunlight ripple patterns.  I was amazed at what I saw; captured the digital the patterns were rather schizophrenic.  Not what I had expected.

Today I attempted to paint from one of these photos.  Getting the rocks to look as if they are underwater is a real challenge, which I haven't mastered.  There is a very complex relationship between the rippled surface of the water, the angle of the sun and the uneven surface of the rocks.  After looking at it for some hours I understand it better, but still not well enough paint convincingly. In some areas the sunlight on the rocks seems to reflect back to the water surface creating yet another phenomenon.  Yikes!!!

Here is first try:

Almost Touching
5 x 7 Oil on Canvas Panel


 




Just got a e-mail from my plein air group to post snow paintings tomorrow.  I was thankful I made it back from the mailbox.  Talk about extreme sports.


Monday, January 27, 2014

Day Twenty Seven - Winter Whitewater

I've spent a lot of time looking at whitewater but never understood its structure so well until I painted from a reference photo.  Ocean waves on the beach seem so simple now.

Since I've been having lots of trouble with values I went back to the monochrome underpainting technique.  It does take longer, but until I learn values better it's something that's needed.  I tried a black and white reference photo, but apparently I need to spend time painting the values, not just looking at them.

Winter Whitewater
6 x 6 oil on gessoed paper
    



Only three more painting days left!!

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Day Twenty Six - EarthSea

If you can get to the top of the highest of the mountains in the Blue Ridge early in the morning, the mists still remain in the valleys, the peaks rising through them as if from the ocean.  The clear part of the atmosphere between the mists and the clouds above is revealed.



EarthSea
5 x7 oil on canvas panel

 
  



See you all tomorrow.  Only a few days left.

Saturday, January 25, 2014

Day Twenty Five - Clear and Blue

After a lengthy medical screening yesterday, I set about to do a landscape as quickly as possible.  Wasn't the fastest time ever, but it wasn't incredibly long.

I tried to keep the island the focus while making the overall painting more colorful than usual, still the center still needs more color.  Not sure how to do that and keep the rest of the painting from looking washed out.  Or the center from looking like a summer garden.

This is the only panel with an oil primed surface.  I was having trouble getting a bright enough color earlier this month, using only gesso, but I seem to have figured out how without the oil primer.  It makes for a smoother surface.

Clear and Blue
5 x 7 Oil on Gessoed Panel.




I keep looking out the window at the sky late this afternoon, very windy and changeable.  Maybe a painting there tomorrow.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Day Twenty Three - An Experiment

Yesterday's painting lacked graphic punch, so this attempt is to use simple forms and strong contrast to create a landscape.

As the paints were mixed even though they looked right on the palette, they were  too dark for the painting and had to be remixed.   This happened with every color but one.  Usually the paints I mix are too light,  don't understand the difference today.  Some of the original background darks needed to be further grayed once the painting surface was totally covered. The background greens need further graying as well, but time has run out.

This was a good color study for me, not only did I see how much the adjacencies matter, but the amount of the color already on the painting influencing the next color to be placed.

It could use further simplification, it would be interesting to see how far that could be pushed.


Poster Landscape
6 x 6 oil on gessoed paper



Tomorrow it's off to the medical appointments once more, so no painting. Be back on Saturday.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Day Twenty Two - Feels like the Home Stretch

After yesterday's mistreatment of the trees, I thought that would be today's painting.  I used the same reference photo, just enlarged the tree area.

They are better today.  I thought about attempting the smudgy clouds again for the twigs ala John Carlson but thought I should quit while I was ahead. 

Tree Line
5 x 7 oil on canvas panel
    

  
 

All the paintings from the challenge are tacked to the wall.  This morning it didn't look like a body of work, now it looks like more.  Odd.

More tomorrow. 

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Day Twenty One - The Great Old Hovel

Buildings of this sort are more a natural feature than a manmade object.  I've been wanting to paint this for awhile, so I finally satisfied that longing.

After looking a the painting and the photo for a long time I think the sky is backward, it should be darker on the shadow side of the building.  The reference photo is deceptive, probably because the trees on the right darken the sky.

Speaking of trees, there's another subject for practice.  These look like they are about to release spores.

Tomorrow's agenda starts with hunting for tree photos.  It's snowed here so going out to photo isn't an option.


Monday, January 20, 2014

Day Twenty - El Giganto

Today is another fragment of a larger landscape, a nearly frozen waterfall.  The spray has created an enormous icicle on the overhanging rhododendron.

Today it became very clear how hard it is to carve out time to paint daily, despite the best of intentions.  Phone calls and discussions that couldn't postponed, a very enjoyable meeting of the art guild, nevertheless it all cuts into painting time. 

Over the course of these twenty days the quality of the paintings very greatly, some are good, some are real dogs.  The result is totally unpredictable when I start out.   A microcosm of life.


El Giganto
5 x7 Oil on Canvas Panel


Sunday, January 19, 2014

Day Nineteen of Leslie Saeta's Thirty Day Challenge - Winter's Tale

Today I tried to do a simple fast painting.  I couldn't.

I read or heard that starting with broad flat swaths of color was a good way to begin this kind of painting.  So that's how I started.  Sometime later when confronted by a painting that really wanted to be an abstract, I realized the the flat swaths totally lost the form.  So I tried to get that into the painting.

Wow or maybe Good Grief!

I wanted to do this scene because the snow on the ground as seen through the trees interests me. 

Also showing cloud shadow is difficult, and something to work on.




Tomorrow is day twenty!  I have been looking at three or four artists each night, as I post.  Getting to see lots of different work.  Sometimes I see work of an artist whose blog I've visited before and seeing new work is great.


Saturday, January 18, 2014

Day Eighteen - Top of the World

After a marathon session yesterday,  I wanted to do something simpler today.  I thought I would work on getting a sense of depth in receding mountains.  After looking at the colors for a while I realized that the problem was value again.  So I did decided to use black and white.

I pulled out the gray scale and starting looking at the reference photo. The painting nazi took over and mixed nine shades.  She even made a painted scale, since the printed gray scale is violety

and driving her crazy.

I am still having difficulty making the foreground mountains as dark as they should be, but this study is an improvement.

In addition to depth, the forms of mountains are difficult to paint, just when you think the you've got the it, it turns into something else.  And this isn't even plein air. 


Top of the World
5 x 7 Oil on Canvas Panel
  


Good night all, see you tomorrow,

Friday, January 17, 2014

Day Seventeen - Rocks and Water Redux

Still working on images of the mountain stream.   The autumn leaves and the heartbreaking blue October sky made fabulous reflections on the water when I went out for a plein air session.  I took lots of photos. There's not much color exaggeration in this painting. 

Still being overwhelmed by the improbable colors I started doing a pointillist technique so I wouldn't have swathes of color to change.  Putting widely spaced dots over the canvas helped me judge the colors.  I was amazed at the sensitivity of the eye, and how long it would take to do an entire painting this way. 

Autumn Whitewater
5 x 7 Oil on Canvas Panel




When I first moved to the mountains I didn't understand that, unlike oceans and the great lakes, the breaking waves in whitewater are opposite to the water flow.

The photo is below,  proof that magic mushrooms were not used in the production of this painting.



I wish I could do an easy painting.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Day Sixteen - Painting Rocks

In the past my rocks have looked like lumpy potatoes.  Since I decided to work on parts of the landscape that give me trouble as part of this challenge, rocks are part of the exercise.  I have avoided doing this painting as long as possible. Today was the day. 

I wished I had a photo of fewer rocks.

There are also water ripples and dappled shadows on the rocks from the sunlight passing through the ripples.   The ripples are passable, but when it came to the dappled shadows I definitely need fewer rocks.  Maybe one.

This painting took a long time today. But I am glad that I did it, the rocks are less potatoey ( take that Dan Quayle)  and the colors better than in previous paintings.



See you tomorrow.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Day Fifteen - Galax

I never heard of this plant until I moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains.  The galax turns maroon in winter, lending color to the mostly brown and green landscape.   I've been told it's valued as a florists' greenery, there's a business nearby that buys the leaves.  Since I'm surrounded by national forest, a permit is probably needed for harvest.

This painting is based on a fragment of a larger photo, which was cropped and enlarged.  The living leaf is smaller than a hand.

This painting was done by leaving the veins of the leaf white and painting in between.  Something like a watercolor.  I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to paint the pink into the wet greens.  Next time I will try painting the whole leaf and then scraping away the pattern of the veins to be able to add the pink.

Galax
6 x 6 Oil on Gessoed Paper

I am fond of this leaf shape which is comprised of half circles.  A big one on the bottom and two smaller ones on top.  It's really very geometric.


Today is the half way point, and I'm finding how much of a  commitment the daily painting really is.

See you all tomorrow. 

Monday, January 13, 2014

Day Thirteen -

Apparently I can no longer count because I've got two day elevens.  

Today is definitely the thirteenth.  I decided to try another rendition of the painting I did yesterday because I wasn't that pleased with the clouds.  I wanted to make them much whiter than the rays.

Now that is over, I think I like yesterday's painting better.  For sure the rays and the darker sky. 

Sky Fragment II
5 x 7 Oil on Canvas Panel





Tomorrow is another medical appointment in Asheville, which is 100 miles round trip.  I will be getting some groceries too, since the shopping is better there, and who can waste the gas money.
See you on Wednesday, although the local arts council is running a workshop on the new county tax form that is due the end of the month, so I need to go to that too.

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Day Eleven - Changing the Focus

It occurred to me today that the portions of the landscapes I've been painting could even be smaller.  Just the tiniest fragment of a scene, that focuses on the part I am really interested in, or the part that has given me difficulty in past paintings.

So the photo of a sunset over the mountains which features crespecular rays was mercilessly cropped.
I noticed that when enlarged, the clouds which were so white they were hard to look at, had a darker halo around them, as they thinned out and the sky show through.  It wasn't light blue, but a warmer color.  I don't have it right, but at least the clouds don't look like lethal dumplings, as mine often do.


Sunset Fragment
5 x 7 Oil on Canvas Panel



I took some photos today while on my walk of small things, either that caught my eye, or have been difficult to capture in previous landscapes, such as the shadow of ripples on the rocks in the river bottom.  So tomorrow there will be something new to paint!




Saturday, January 11, 2014

Day Eleven of the Challenge - Black and White

Today I worked from a photo.  Although it was taken in color, the winter scene is really black and white.

I decided to do a charcoal drawing before I began painting, rather than the acrylic underpainting.  Drawing is easier for me than painting.  I've spent more time at it.

Once again I drastically cropped the photo so there would be a relatively simple image.  Next year folks, it's apples and oranges.


Charcoal Dwg 5 x 7     


I decided to save the drawing as a reference and paint on a fresh canvas panel.


Winter River

More painting tomorrow.  See you then.

Friday, January 10, 2014

Day Ten of the Painting Challenge - Going with the Flow

Painting and exercising both are difficult to accomplish in a day.  Yesterday I tried to combine going for a walk and painting.   The walk accomplished I started to sketch, but time ran out and I left with with a reference photo, or so I thought.  My camera which has been to the beach too many times, has a grain of sand in its eye, and doesn't always cooperate.  So I had several photos of the frozen river, but not the frame of the scene I had sketched.  I thought about doing something else, but I've been studying Richard Crozier's "Inventing the Landscape", so I decided to go with the charcoal sketch and the photos of the surrounding area.

The good features of this approach is that it is easier to pay attention to the composition and to simplify.  The harder part was getting satisfactory values and colors.

The Thaw
6 x 6 Oil on Gessoed Paper
  






See you all tomorrow.

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Day Nine of the Challenge

It's 11PM, the painting is just finished.  I could say that I've been challenged.

This is the late afternoon view from my studio window.  The mountains become really ominous and brooding with the sun behind them. 

Some new things were attempted with this painting.  For starters I did an acrylic tonal underpainting, something I learned in John MacDonald's workshop this summer, but haven't used so far on the challenge.  Master of rationilization that I am, I thought that I didn't need to do it on these small paintings, but it became apparent as I kept changing the values that indeed it was needed.  I had hoped that the acrylic would stop the gesso from absorbing the colors, but that didn't happen.  An oil ground is needed on these gessoed canvas panels, I would like the colors to be stronger.

Then the rest of life intervened.

Later I added cold wax medium to the painting gel hoping it would matte the paint, so the photo wouldn't have so much glare.  It works for the light colors but not the darks.  This may add to the lack of brilliance in the light colors as well.  But I did enjoy mixing all those pinks and lavenders.

Day Three is out of order, more of my Blog learning curve.  Sorry for the confusion.


Western Sky
5x 7 Oil on Canvas Panel
     
 
 


                      
Off to clean the brushes.  See you all tomorrow.

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Day Three of the 30 Day Challenge



This is a scene from my favorite walk along the Toe River.  I am there frequently since my spinal surgery this spring.  Unlike most of the mountain trails, this one is relatively flat.  I miss being near the water after a life near the shore of the ocean and the great lakes.  So being next to the river is most welcome.

The first painting in this series was on gessoed paper, which was brushier than I would have liked.  I switched mediums to Gamblin solvent free gel to see if it would lend substance to oil on gessoed masonite.  I was pleased with the result.





Day Eight - June on Roan Mountain

Painted today after a trip yesterday.  The pink flowers appealed after the intense cold.   Every June these Catawba rhododendron bloom on the mountain ridge on the North Carolina/Tennesee state line.
Unlike the other white rhododendron common to lower elevations of the Blue Ridge Mountains, these are pink and can be seen in extensive groves changing the color of the high peaks.

This painting is more about pattern than spatial depth, although I am experimenting with texture to indicate recession.  The simple color scheme was very manageable.

Painting everyday (almost) has encouraged me to make improvements to the studio.  I added another fixture today over the palette and a permanent paper towel rack to the side of paint stand.  I'm still struggle with the photography using only artificial light.  After seeing on You Tube, a video of a flameworked glass bead, which the artist made by duct taping her brand new Ipad to a frame behind her torch,  I was inspired to move my lighting into several absurd configurations.  The photo is an improvement, nevertheless I need to buy a SLR camera and a polaroid lens, which I hope will cut down on the glare from the oil paint.  I've been using Gamblin cold wax medium on dry oil paintings to minimize reflections.


Wild Rhododendrons
5 x 7 Oil on Canvas Panel









See you tomorrow.  Glad the Artic Vortex is no longer here.

Monday, January 6, 2014

Thirty Paintings in Thirty Days - Day 6 Ridge Line 6000 Feet

Since the weather is difficult enough, is six degrees right now, I decided to do something simpler today.

The painting is of the ridge line near Mt Mitchell which is the highest peak east of the Mississippi.  Surprisingly it's not that much colder there, minus one.   I live 3000 feet lower.   Up there the winds and the altitude stunt the trees.

This painting is the fastest yet, a bit over three hours with a hiatus for errands.

Tomorrow, weather permitting, I drive to Asheville for a medical appointment.  It's about one hundred miles round trip so I doubt that I will paint.

I admire those of you who can do more than one painting a day,  maybe I'll get there yet. 


Ridge Line at 6000 feet
6 x 6 Oil on Gessoed Paper
   
 

 





Day Five of the Thirty Painting each Day Challenge - Autumn Sumac

I'm back to composing the post in the evening after I finish painting and attempting to publishing in the morning, when the light for painting photography is much better.  

Today I wanted to try a painting that used form and color, rather than drawing, as organization.  I worked from a photo of sumac and cropped it so there wouldn't be too much.  It still took twice as long as I thought, the most time since I started.  However I had fun, and didn't struggle, so that was great.

The first painting in this series was on gessoed paper, which was brushier than I would have liked.  I switched mediums to Gamblin solvent free gel to see if it would lend substance to oil on gessoed masonite for this painting.  I was pleased with the result.

Gamblin sent me a sample of this product when I wrote to them complaining of a mangled tube of cadmium yellow sent to me by Jerry's.  Not only did Gamblin replace the yellow but sent three more samples of various products.  Talk about customer service.  I am now devoted.

It's been great looking through Leslie Saeta's blog to see all the paintings that have been posted.




Saturday, January 4, 2014

Thiry Day Challenge Day Four - Lost in the Blog

In an attempt to get this painting posted on Leslie Saeta's Thirty Paintings in as many Days, I am publishing this not great photo.  I waited to post yesterday's painting until this morning when the light was better for photography and found that I had posted Day 2 to Day 3. 

I also lost two of the blogs I had written only to find them in some unknown section of the Blogger.

Light through the Clouds
5 x7 Oil on Canvas Panel
 
 
      
 
   








So this is much more of a challenge then just painting. 

Friday, January 3, 2014

Day Two of the 30 Day Challenge

Day Two of the Challenge

This is a study of very colorful fall trees reflected in a stream.  It is based on a detail from a  photograph of a mountain river taken during a plein air session last October.

I had a fabulous day painting the scene last fall, but the resulting painting was more an impression that factual.  I couldn't really understand what colors comprised the
glowing, almost iridescent stream surface. 

I was looking forward to this study but beware painterly expectations. 


Autumn Reflections
6 x 8 Oil on Canvas Panel





Thursday, January 2, 2014

Day One New Year

This is day one of the thirty paintings in thirty day event.

I decided to work from photos I've collected.  The challenge is to keep it fresh.

It's winter in the mountains so I decided to start with a snow scene.  This are huge rocks in a nearby stream.

This work is on gessoed paper so it's a bit brushy.

SNOW on ROCKS
8 X 8 oil on gessoed  paper