Friday, November 27, 2009
Thursday, September 03, 2009
Yellowstone Falls 1
Ah underpainting, thy sweet bliss is upon me.
Friday, August 28, 2009
WILDerness ...
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Trees Evolved ...
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Snake River Painting, Still Evolving
This is poorly lit. The left side is more true to the values than the right. It is very different to me, but to most people it may seem like subtle changes. I darkened the sky in some places, added red-violet tree trunks and lighter yellow-green for the foliage, and softened and smoothed out the violent but exciting oranges.
Who knows what the critique class would say, but I have to please myself first (this is an important change in attitude for me).
Monday, July 13, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Aspens Better Image Color
This was shot using the new digital camera, which has an adjustment to compensate for using my tungsten floodlight bulbs. It had to be reduced in size to post on the blog, so it is less detailed than it will be on the website, but that is where it is going next.
I fiddled around with the camera, the tripod and so on, and though I still ended up with a bit of distortion (the bottoms of the paintings keep being narrower than the tops, so I end up cutting off a tiny bit of the sides at the tops), I have mostly learned the new method.
I thought I had ruined the quick release camera mount on the tripod, then later saw that I had the mount on backwards on the camera. Fixed that, and bingo! it snapped right in.
Now I can ship this baby to a gallery!
Sunday, July 05, 2009
OK That's Enough Already!
Aspens Again?
I was fooling around with the aspen trunks and then I had unify them with a pale green wash on the trunks. Now the interest is where it was for me at the time, on the distinctive white slender trunks (all one organism, by the way, not individual trees, botanically), and the yellow green of the leaves.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Snake River Sky
I wWent in there with big brushes and swirled in some sky and cloud stuff. Now the sky is as active as the mountain and trees. The contrast between the quiet flat sky and the moving writhing trees and mountain was unbearable to me.
This is what I mean about changing one part and then having to change everything.
IS IT SOUP YET?
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Paint It As It Lies
I did tweak it a bit, adding some orange back in and hardening the tree shapes. The blue-violet sky is a bit darkened as well.
It gave it life again, and movement. This is a familiar process to me, and I guess to other painters. There is a push-pull of process, as well as shapes and colors. Once you change one part, the other areas have to adjust to it. In the middle the painting is neither fish nor fowl (or is it neither calf nor turtle?).
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Snake River Painting
This is finished I think. I have to tighten the canvas (spray the back with water and let it dry), sign it and have a slide made.
Last night I attended a critique class, presided over by Francesca Fuchs, at the Glassell School. They thought this painting was finished and I even became convinced it was. Then I began working on a little bit of it and voila! I could not stop until it was this version.
One of the decisions an artist makes is (though it may sound obvious, it is not at all easy), "what is this painting about?" In this case, it is about the mountain itself, its rocky prominence, the softness of the trees and insubstantiality of the clouds reinforcing its muscularity. In the version just before this, I had the trees forming a low frieze across the bottom to push attention upward, but they were too hard-edged and insistent, so I went into that area and softened them considerably.
One of Francesca's comments was that the red edging on the green treetops was irritating to her. Red and green are the most difficult of the complementaries to work with, and both hues were at saturation. The red and orange are mostly hidden now, only affecting the colors on top of them, not peeking through any more. There is a sort of reddish cast to this photo, which distorts how it actually looked in daylight, but you get the idea.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Friday, May 29, 2009
iPhone Sneakers Painting
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Portrait of Osprey
iPhone Sketching
Osprey posted on David Hockney's iPhone paintings and a site in SL where they are displayed. I am SO happy to see this, because, though I had not really searched for "paint" in the app store, I did so after viewing this post, and I found "Finger Paint", a 99 cent app, which is really great for sketching on site in color.
Historically, I have always had trouble carrying loads of sketching materials on vacation, and I have tried a lot of different materials to sketch outdoors, including pencil, colored pencils, watercolors, acrylics, and pen and ink.
The versatility of this medium makes it ideal for me. The user can change the size of the brush and the opacity; there is a palette of colors which are very nicely chosen, plus one can create new colors and add them. The paintings can be saved to the photos camera roll, or deleted, or sent via email. I always carry the iPhone anyway, so next week, I can sketch the Grand Canyon electronically! (I will surely take photos as well, and I found another app, ArtistsTouch ($2.99), which works from photos in the photo library, creating a faint outline of the main areas so that one may paint on top of them.
Another of Osprey's glorious finds!
Monday, May 25, 2009
Mezla III
In terms of alchemy, mezla is the First Matter in its downward motion. It is the downflowing energy of the Universe, which moves in a spiral manner. The spiral energies are related to Akasha, the Fifth Element, and they spiral from the Center of the Universe down / outward to create the entire manifest universe.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Friday, May 15, 2009
Adolescence in a Painting
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Path Painting
Blogging my paintings at each stage is very useful to me; I can look back and re-experience the combinations of colors, the shaping of the painting. Not only that, I can see the painting at a smaller size. That is very much like moving way back and squinting. I can see flaws that I may not spot close up.
I have the iPhone to thank for that. It takes pretty darn good photos, and though the color is not perfect, it is good enough.
Blogs are fab for this!
Color scheme: blue-green and red-orange (no kidding! LOL).
The Path to Armand Bayou
The path painting, second layer. Osprey, once again, try not to look at the violet! I am not going to worry about the occult point in this image, just paint by the seat of my pants, so to speak (and the seat of my pants are full of it ... paint, that is).
The greens are a little more yellowish but I cannot get the violet and the greens to show in the photo drat it all.
*I have a strong aversion to pink, by the way*
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Omnomnomnom ... Today's Underpaintings
As always, I find underpaintings nearly edible, and I eat them with my eyes. MMMM Omnomnomnom! As always I am tempted to leave them this way, but my painting experiences would be drastically limited, and I like more in a painting, so on I will go. The photo references are on the wall to the right, the upper the blue painting and the lower, the purple. EGADS I love red with purple (Osprey avert your tender eyeballs)!
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Hotcha!
Cropping Options
Monday, April 20, 2009
Older Work
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
Hop on the Table, Would You?
I literally threw everything off this table and painted the edges of the canvas with a black-blue violet. It is signed, the edges are finished. Now for the varnish, and then to have slides shot. I will take it to a photo place where they will make slides and load the images onto a disc so that I can upload it. Last time, the disc images were way too light, but I can manipulate them back to a semblance of the real colors, in Photoshop.
I will take several paintings when I go to the photo place; it is less expensive that way, per painting. Mezla I is finished, but I am still working on the Grand Tetons painting, so I will wait a couple of days. Plus that allows the varnish to dry (I hope ... it is very humid here at the moment).
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Better and Worse
In the midst of painting, changing anything changes the whole. In this case, I like the sky changes, and the less regimented trunks (they were all in a horizontal row at their bases), but I need to make more changes; now other problematic aspects have appeared. The mass of aspen leaves does not have enough variation in value; the little trees at left are too much alike in height, the thickness of the aspen trunks needs variation. These are the thoughts of a painter at her craft. Not lofty, but workmanlike.
Side by Side
Ah, the joys of Photoshop. I worked on this drawing so that it looks more like it does to my eye. Then I inverted it in both senses of the word, turning it upside down and making it a negative of the original image.
Funny thing, I finally saw something incongruous about it. The most compelling part is the highest contrast, which is the fangs or waves at the lower left (upper right in the negative), because that is where I put the ONLY true black area, contrasted with a very bright white.
Visually speaking, the left is the past, or the direction from which one is moving, in this culture. On the grid of understanding visual images, according to some sources, the toothy part of the positive image is on the thinking side of things, rather than feeling, and it is in the lower half, so low emotional involvement.
What I get out of all this is that my fears are not all that important to me, and I am moving from them into the upper right quadrant, my goals and dreams. Yet, the high contrast contradicts that, making me focus on past fears.
*mumbles to self, "let go, just let go and soar*
Monday, April 13, 2009
Visual Thought
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Mezla 2 and 3
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Mezla 2
Once again I am representing the spiral energy of the Universe, this time as it flows between two spheres.
Following the method I found in the earlier drawings, I took the components of the first mezla painting and rearranged them and changed their relationships. Two hemispheres with spiralling energy flowing between them, and a universal grid formed by the radiations from the spheres (hemispheres but spheres are implied).
The underpainting showing the drawing faintly.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Drawings from 2000
In August of 2000, my father had died that Valentine's Day, and my mother-in-law had died the July before. We had had to put my mother into the county mental hospital geriatric ward; I felt my heart was a stone inside me and all the warmth of the sun could not get at it. I read some book about getting over artistic blocks, and it suggested I draw my problem. This is the drawing.
then it suggested I make variations ... this one is the stone heart radiating, like the sun.
the vesica pisces now encloses the radiating stone heart, the eye of the stone.
the stone sheds light