Van Gogh on the Move, again . . .

My cat, Van Gogh, is traveling almost as much as me.
Where is he going now?

"The Sight of Fish" 8" x 8", Oil on Canvas

"Small Works Show" Bennington Center for the Arts
Bennington, Vermont

Exhibition dates: May 28 - December 18, 2011
Opening weekend: June 11 & 12

All works in this show will be posted online at the above link!

May Day Paintout

"KICK-OFF PAINTOUT" OPAS 10th Year Anniversary Exhibition Location: Short North, Columbus, OH Sunday, May 1, 2011 - 9:00 am - 3:00 pm   In 2012, Ohio Plein Air Society is celebrating it's 10th Year Anniversary with a juried members exhibition at Ohio's Springfield Museum of Art. In preparation for this exhibition, members will be painting for a year at pre-determined locations around the great state of Ohio. Sunday, May 1, 2011, is the kick-off paintout, and I will be painting at the Short North location. If you are in the area, I would love to talk with you. Click on the link below for more information on the OPAS 10th Year Anniversary Exhibition. http://www.ohiopleinairsociety.com/Exhibitions/Springfield/12_10thYear.htm

Snow Queen where have you been?

"Paradox Lake" 6" x 5"
Oil on Museum Board

I've been away in Maryland, working on cleaning out my Mom's house, now MY HOUSE, with my sisters. If any of you have been through this, you know it can be a nightmare! But my reward was selling a painting through my website to a total stranger! I met him and his delightful wife at their home, took a tour of their art collection which included some wonderful Japanese woodcuts, and the artwork of a friend, Mary Spires.

I asked how he'd found my site. "How do I find anything on the Internet?" was his reply. He had no idea. I have to say I was a bit disappointed by that, but hey, the check was written, I said goodbye to the sweet little painting, and smiled all the way back to my house. In fact I smiled for a few days. I am still smiling when I think of that fabulous little gem.

It was painted on location in the Adirondacks. I was fortunate enough to be invited to stay with my friend Edie in her brother's cabin on Schroon Lake. After a day of heavy rain, on which Ed took us on a tour of potential painting sites, the weather cleared and Edie and I did a 9 painting marathon. The plan was to paint a value study followed by a color study. Paradox Lake was the first painting site. Below is the value study for the color painting which I sold.

My goal was to use a loaded brush and make each stoke count.
I was happy with the results of both of these small studies.

Happy Holi !

I've just spent some moments celebrating Happy Holi via YouTube and at this link:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/03/holi_the_festival_of_colors.html

And what about that moon last night? Yahoooo!

Lately I've been in Maryland more than Ohio, working on my Mom's house with my sisters. Actually it's our house now, full equipped with 50 years or more of history and stuff.

Happy Holi!

Eisele Gallery Award & Rejection

Surprise! I just found this tucked in the back of my winning painting.

Back in October I blogged from Nashville, TN that a painting of my cat, Van Gogh, had been accepted into the Viewpoint 2010 exhibition. Viewpoint is a national juried exhibition sponsored each year by the Cincinnati Art Club. While I was in Cuba, this exhibition opened, and I later learned that I'd won the Eisele Gallery Award!

The award is a year's representation at this fine art gallery that features not only the works of contemporary artists from Ohio, but also historic paintings by some of Ohio's past masters.

Yesterday afternoon my thrill was to drop off work that will hang among these past masters. Tonight, I got a small thrill when I found this medal, sort of like I had just received the award in person.

But what happens to us emotionally when we don't get in to a show? Or when we don't get that coveted opportunity that we had hoped for? Recently I found some words of wisdom on this very thing while reading Robert Henri's 'The Art Spirit'. It is really great advice.

"DON'T worry about the rejections. Everybody that's good has gone through it. Don't let it matter if your works are not "accepted" at once. The better or more personal you are the less likely they are of acceptance. Just remember that the object of painting pictures is not simply to get them in exhibitions. It is all very fine to have your pictures hung, but you are painting for yourself, not for the jury. I had many years of rejections.

     Do some great work, Son! Don't try to paint good landscapes. Try to paint canvases that will show how interesting landscape looks to you -- your pleasure in the thing. Wit.

     There are lots of people who can make sweet colors, nice tones, nice shapes of landscape, all done in nice broad and intelligent-looking brushwork.

     Courbet showed in every work what a man he was, what a head and heart he had.

     Every student should put down in some form or other his findings. All any man can hope to do is to add his fragment to the whole. No man can be final, but he can record his progress, and whatever he records is so much done in the thrashing out of the whole thing. What he leaves is so much for others to use as stones to step on or stones to avoid.

    The student is not an isolated force. He belongs to a great brotherhood, bears great kinship to his kind. He takes and he gives. He benefits by taking and he benefits by giving."

Daily 90 3 & 4 - My Way!

Here's the math:

January 20
15 paintings behind - 2 paintings +

1 day of not painting

+ 1 afternoon of life drawing

- one new snow painting

- 1 painting from a live model
= 11 paintings behind on January 24
- haven't painted yet today
= possible 12 paintings behind tonight, January 25.

Whew! I am going to do this daily painting thing My Way.

Any art I do counts, it just might not be a painting, it could be a drawing or a print. BUT, if I can come up with 90 new paintings in less than 90 days, that would be a marvelous thing indeed.

Below the colors I mixed for the start my second new snow painting.

They don't look very exciting do they?

My surface: a panel by SourceTek - Classens landscape linen.

Notice the little pin holes in the surface of the priming!
I only saw noticed that when I downloaded this photo.

I was surprised to see how intense that blue looked against

the transparent iron oxide underpainting.

I decided to apply the other colors I'd pre-mixed since this blue looked pretty good to me on my palette. It did have more chroma than I wanted for the finished color, but I knew that this was the first go round. Next, I mixed titanium white with a touch of lemon yellow and placed it in the snow area to test the value of the sky. These two values had to have the correct relationship.

Below is what I was looking at, a field in Pataskala, Ohio. Most likely it will be gone to development soon. I sat in the back parking lot of a drive through liquor store to paint.

"Flurries, January" - 6" x 8" - Oil on Linen

This painting is just as colorful as it is subtle. It's been a challenge for me to try and get this image to look like the painting. This was the closest I could get, but I feel so far from the real thing, and who knows what it looks like on your screens?

Below: what was left and scrapped together at the end of my painting session.

And some closeups of 'the battlefield' of my painting.

A few hours later, I drove to Westerville to a 3-hour model session. I took my oils and had high hopes. I had a really good painting going, but should have stopped sooner. Yes there are some drawing issues here, but what really bothered me was that I had the masses so much better and stronger about 35 minutes before I decided that I was ruining this with every brush stroke, yet there wasn't time left to try and bring it back.

When will one ever learn?

"Daniel" 10 x 8" Oil on Museum Board

Ohio Art League Drawing Session

Sunday afternoon 1:00 - 4:00 PM - my first time at the open life drawing session sponsored by the Ohio Art League in Columbus, OH. $8.00 = 3 hours of time with a live model. I am out of practice, but I think some progress was made in the 3 hours of study. You can click on the images and enlarge them if you like.

Today's Tools
11 x 14" Strathmore 400 Series Drawing Pad

Bic Retractable Pencil

#4 Charcoal Pencil

Sienna Conte Crayon

Kneeded Eraser

60 second poses - Bic pencil

The model said she'd been doing a lot of Yoga lately,

and she took complex and interesting poses.

2 minute poses - still using the same pencil

2 minute poses continued & one 15 minute pose
Oooh, I am out of practice

40 minute pose? charcoal and conte crayon, eraser as drawing tool

30 minutes - charcoal on white Rives BFK
the prince of printmaking papers!

25 minutes, charcoal and conte, eraser

 on Strathmore 400 series off white paper

What a pleasure to spend an afternoon with a wonderful model.

C'est tout!

Daily 90 1 & 2 - Snow Queen joins the challenge!

Here she is - The Snow Queen!

She brought 6" of snow to my town today.

(In case you didn't know, it's me in disguise.)

The Queen noticed on Facebook that two of her painter friends had challenged each other to paint 90 daily paintings. I've never really been that interested in doing daily paintings, but when I saw Michelle Walker's painting, I invited myself into their challenge -
way back on January 5.

I was already 5 paintings behind at that point!
When I woke up this morning I was 15 paintings behind!
I woke up to falling snow, read an email from my friend Ray who was going out to paint snow in Cincinnati, and with 'the challenge' looming over my head like the sword of Damocles,
I decided to get in the game.

First, breakfast at The Nut.
Second, pay a bill in person, allowing me to do a little driving in the village and see what possibilities were out there. It worked. I found a spot easily, a field of corn stubble with a treeline, and the snow whiting out some of the background.

Here was my studio.

At the right you see my EasyL 12 x 16" easel, poised and itching to get into the game with a 5 x 7" gessoboard panel that has been toned with thinned down Transparent Red Oxide. The snow was falling steadily, and hard, making it impossible to paint outside without the umbrella I'd forgotten. The area behind the steering wheel was too tight to put the easel in front of me, so I sat it on the seat beside me and forced me to paint with my arm extended - just like I should!

I hadn't painted since December 5, 2010 when I did stand outside and paint - in the orchard 5 miles away from my home. Michelle painted that day, as did Jody Hall (the other artist that started the challenge January 1). Ray was there that day, and my friend Edie, and many other painters from Ohio Plein Air Society were sprinkled throughout Lynd's Fruit Farm which was sugared with a light dusting of snow.

Today, I felt a little nervous. You sure do get rusty if you don't paint for even a day, let alone for over a month. So I decided to start by doing my little drawing. Below, you see the two drawings I did for two paintings that I did today. I was parked for the first painting in a safe parking lot looking north across Rt. 16.
For the second painting, I crossed this busy road and
pulled into a farm pulloff heading into the field.

 A policeman stopped by to see if I needed help.
I love it when that happens.
I took further notes to remember this day: here I was painting a great snow storm when suddently I realized that the music coming out of the radio was none other than Gershwin's Summertime! I LOVE that song and used to belt it out in my days as a torch singer.

Okay, I had my drawing. I was nervous. Stalling.
So I decided to mix some colors.
Ray wrote this morning that there were no values out there.
I wrote back saying there were close values,
and now I was faced with them.

I wiped the panel down so that it wasn't so wet.
 And put in some guidelines.

I didn't realize that my shapes were a bit different in the mid-ground. I wish I had, but I was struggling with 'my stuff'. First the panel fell off the easel and into the Thalo Blue!
A good start, the colors were trying to get on the panel.
Next, the brushes were rolling into the paint.

And then, there was paint on the steering column.

Once I concured all of that,

I began laying in the colors that I'd pre-mixed.

 I decided not to second guess myself.
My goal was to see if I could depict falling snow.

This was my palette at the end of the painting.

Eh, Voila!

"Snow Day, January"

#1 - Daily 90

Below is #2 catch up painting - Daily 90

Not what I'd hoped for. The idea was to see if I could depict falling snow with a big brush. The painting was better earlier on. I decided to rework this,
or scrape it and repaint from memory.
If I do, I'll repost it, but not sure I can call it another daily.
Michelle, would that be cheating?

My tools today.

This brush I don't recommend. I bought it years ago on sale,
not very good as the metal part of the brush is loose and wobbely.
And standing in the shadows,
my trusty Lowe-Cornell J-2 palette knife!

Just Another Morning in Cuba

First of all, Happy New Year!
In this photo I am holding up my first cup of seriously strong and delicious Cuban coffee. I'm sitting at the breakfast table at
Nelson's Casa Particular in Habana Vieja.

Breakfast consisted of coffee - but not too many cups, pineapple juice, guava paste, rolls, sliced ham and cheese, and cold butter that was as hard as a rock!
Two women from Amsterdam shared the table that morning.

Below is the "lounge", the room that you step into from off the street. This house is pretty well appointed and decorated, the sign of someone that is running a successful B&B business.

Nelson had hooked us up with another casa owner around the corner. The owner was bringing a car, and a little waiting time was involved, so I decided to just peak my head out the door and see what was shaking in Old Havana.

 Writing this, I am reminded of my first morning view of India in 2005 where a golden light was bathing the cricket fields of the Bombay Cricket Club, where I had trouble wrapping my mind around the fact that I was actually there in India. I had that same feeling of disbelief, maybe call it wonder, that I really was in Cuba.

In the photo above you are looking north.

Below, zoomed in, and you can see that there are some locals!

Below, around the corner to the west.

And to the east was this wonderfully painted pair of balconies.
Had we stayed longer, I'd have eventually painted these balconies.

 Right across the street from Nelson's was this brand new paint job.

Below is what I was most interested in painting, complete with the usual Cuban dog. I did a little sketch in preparation for a painting, and walked over to show these gentlemen, Herman and Miguel. We shared a lot of smiles and laughs, and had as much conversation as we could for ones who don't speak much of the others language. No sooner did I go for my easel -

the car showed up. You can see Nelson himself standing in the door, and Miguel hoisting the first of my fellow traveller's suitcases. My case is already on the top of the Beetle and looking mighty fine with that lime green car. So Cuban! What was not so Cuban was that this was a brand new vehicle. Yet, another sign of a successful businessman.

Back to the Airport

The next morning it was back to the airport.

Above, finally on the tarmac after several hours, a lot of red tape and pesos, and now waiting in line to board Cubana Airlines. Below, a photo of me with Miguel and his lovely wife. He looked severe, but he was the sweetest man, and as curious about me as I was about him and his wonderful hat. He also sported a neatly trimmed moustache that I liked a lot. He was a total package that I would liked to have had the opportunity to paint. I did draw him in the airport,
which was the real the ice breaker.
After that, we were friends.

Here's a shot of Cuba from the air. I loved the look of the fields,
and the color of the earth.

After landing, going through immigration and customs and money change, we walked out of the airport. An American man named Charlie and a driver were loading Charlie's luggage into the van he'd hired to take him to his casa in the Vedado area of Habana. We didn't know Charlie, but we quickly wound up in his van taxi and shared the fee. It was agreed that Charlie would get dropped off first and the 45 minute drive was spent getting Charlie's history with Cuba. He was spending three days in Habana, and by the end of the ride, we had agreed to meet him the next day to work out the details of a catching a ride in his rental car to the far side of the island. We dropped him, and headed for Habana Vieja, the oldest part of the city. It was raining, and we had no fixed destination since we had
no advance reservation. 

Above is the street outside Nelson's Casa Particular. This casa was highly recommended in Lonely Planet with the only negative listed as small windows in the rooms. After much discussion and checking three or four other places in the dark, it was finally decided to take a room at this casa. The room was available for only this one night, so in the AM we would have to move to another casa. No big deal, I was tired and grateful for a nice place to hang my hat for the night.

But I found the best thing about this casa
in the bathroom. A Sorolla shower curtain!

It had been a long day, we'd had nothing to eat since breakfast,
the rain was bucketing down,
and I was in Cuba.

Mexico

 

I'd never been to Mexico before, and never thought I'd set foot on Mexican soil without my traveling companion, but she'd been detained from the very start. As the plane made it's descent towards Cancun, all I could see were acres and acres of trees, jungle. Then all of a sudden, a housing development! It was a far cry from Cancun's expensive resort hotels and beach loving tourists. This view from the plane was the closest thing I got to the real Mexico. It fascinated me in it's simplicity. It was obviously inhabited by people that had very little, and I am sure that on one of these simple dirt courtyards I saw a bed frame with a mattress sitting outside. I was reminded of the palette bed in Orchha, India, that had been carried outside and placed near the source of the community's water pump. Each morning we'd drink our chai up on the roof of our hotel and look down as life's quiet drama unfolded before our very eyes. The first thing that the women did in the morning was to come to the watering hole and fill their pots with the days water. Here, looking down at Mexico, I saw no watering hole, just very straight roads and little hovels.



Once I'd gone through immigration and customs, I spent a long time with the travel agents at the airport. When they were finished with me, I walked outside. I had a five hour wait before the plane bearing my fellow artist would show up. I was a bit angry at her stupidity, but what could I do? There was no way to communicate with her, and we'd not booked a hotel in advance. All I felt I could do was to wait. I decided to sit at Starbucks of all places. I was hot and thirsty, so I ordered an iced green tea slushy thingy. The picture shows how much of this large drink I'd downed before it dawned on me, "STUPID GIRL!" I shouldn't be drinking anything with ice in it! I was kicking myself hard. I wrote it all down in my journal and figured if I was going to get sick, it would most likely happen way before the person I was waiting on would arrive. The good news, I never did get sick, so I suppose that either Cancun is safe to drink the water, or Starbucks used filtered water for their ice. Either way, I'd had more than a few minutes of worry. It just had not been a good day so far. Still, here I was in Mexico, with Spanish spoken all around me, and funny money in my pocket.