Contrabando

I have been gone for a week of fabulous plein air painting with the Outdoor Painters Society at Big Bend.
On our first day there, it was in the 80's and we set up on the Rio Grande, right outside of Lajitas in the Texas State Park.
Our subject was Contrabando, a 25 year old movie set that's been featured in 9 movies, and that was under water last year during a flood! There was a building about where we were set up that was washed away and the remaining structures were very damaged, adding to their authenticity.
The Rio Grande is just feet behind us, 6 feet higher than normal level because Mexico was releasing water. It made the river milky green and ferocious; scared my doggie!
The buildings that I chose to paint were the church and a small casa that was half buried in sand. Right behind them was an odd hill of the brightest red. The satellite view shows a red streak coming right through town, like someone painted it! We had to catch that local color by painting Terlingua red later that evening.

Catey

You are not going to believe this.

This is not a model. Our M2P2 model didn't show up on Monday; this is one of the artists I paint with! Not bad for a last minute stand-in, huh?

I still want to add a couple of touches to this to tie it together some more. I hate to tell you what because then, that's all you'll see when you look at it. I want you to look at Catey instead!

I have been wonderfully busy with commission work, preparing for some really neat shows, and a little plein air on the side.

I didn't want you to think I was slacking just because I wasn't posting.

Chanel No 1

This is the sketch from our Monday portrait group. I did finish it on Monday but didn't photograph it till today.

This beauty works behind a cosmetics counter in a department store. Her job is to see the beauty in people and pick a strategy for capitalizing on it to their advantage. When she finishes, they are more able to see their own loveliness.

This is the job of an artist, I believe.

Chanel said that often, her clients do not feel beautiful, comparing themselves to her. She confessed that when she looks in the mirror, she doesn't always see the beauty that they see. Tall, willowy, lithe, with flaxen hair down to there... it would be easy to argue with her, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

When you have a mix of Scandinavian and American Indian blood, beauty would be almost impossible to escape, methinks.

Little Lone Ranger

This is a painting that I started more than a year ago, of a ranch where we paint in Wyoming. It's a beautiful place and on this day, the clouds were rolling over us, creating killer shadow patterns.

I quit painting on it because I was bored with it; it's 16x20, so I'd invested a lot in it but the scene wasn't enough.

Then, the other night, got the idea of putting a pathway down the mid-ground and placing a figure on it, to add a narrative element to it and a focal point.

The fellow on the path is a little cowboy in red, white and blue. He's on his way home for supper.

I'll tell you how he knew it was suppertime in another painting, coming soon to a blog near you.

A Start

My plan today was to go to my Monday portrait group, stop by the post office afterward and ship some paintings, then finish this one in time to photograph and post it for you.

Alas, I didn't finish crating last night so I had to do that as soon as I finished painting this afternoon. Then, alack, the Post Office was closed today!

Long story short: paintings still not shipped, The Start still not finished.

The good news: I DID blog today!

Whiskey Basin

Just to the left of these trees was Whiskey Creek, which I've already posted, and this is one of the paintings I promised in that post.
There was not a bad view anywhere in this canyon and a lucky painter could have spent the whole week there and never been bored painting it.

Stone Maiden

The Stone Maiden is a 20x16" painting, still wet, done for a Black and White show at the Salmagundi Club in New York.

For so many years, I was a pencil artist and saw the world in terms of its values. Since becoming a painter, I have employed that knowledge but added hue and chroma. I still draw a lot but it's not often that I paint in black and white. It was a lesson in restraint. The stone statue that I was painting was white, but the color in the pits and moss shadows was so enticing, it was all I could do to keep myself from dipping my brush into the colors, just to tell you how beautiful it was!

Anyway, Black and White, by definition, restricted such indulgence.

Still, both my black and my white have colors in them.

Still Life with Winchester

Honorable Mention, Salon International 2010
This still life was orchestrated by my husband and also included a cigar box with 7 red and green shotgun shells, which (shockingly!) I could not fit into the 16x20"canvas. He set it up in our kitchen and set the easel up for me in the breakfast room. We had to squeeze around it for the duration of the painting process. By the time it was finished, the concord grapes were concord raisins, the rose petals had gone from wilty to crispy, and the squash was growing something greenish blue. The really fun thing though, was that I had to drink that wine every night while I was cleaning up.
Never waste a good glass of wine.

Fred Shed

I am so proud of this painting. It was started very late in the afternoon during the OPA paint out, really too late for a sane person to start a painting and expect to catch anything worthwhile. For that reason, I grabbed a tiny panel and a large brush, thinking about how prominently math figures into art.
I had begun to paint it a certain way while the sun was a little higher, and then deviated from the sage teaching, "Never chase the light!" because the shadows that were stretching out before me were just too irresistible.
I was the very, very last painter to finish that day, so I guess that makes me the winner!

Mike

Our Monday Model.

I am working on three things right now: brevity, color-value planes, and light. Actually, I'm always working on light; seeing it, understanding it, painting it. But as it hits an object, it bounces a certain way into the eye based on the planes of the object, the color of the object and, of course, the color of the light.

When one is working to record something like this, the mind is processing massive amounts of information but the artist has to simplify it, organize it and reproduce it in such a way as to render it recognizable using spots of color, brushed onto a piece of cloth with some hair on a stick! In that process, I think the beauty and the power are unleashed by brevity.

OPA Paint Out

Welcome to the new year!

2009 was full of travel and adventure, the last trip being this one: the Oil Painters of America regional paint out in Fredericksburg.

This coming year, the Artist in Residence will be in residence a lot more, which should make blogging easier.

Happy New Year!

Gourd

"Coming and Going" or "Hello Good-Bye" were both titles considered for this painting. The gourd reminds of a wingless bird, maybe saying, "You talking to ME?"
It just about drove me out of my gourd, so to speak :-), trying to paint all these odd shapes, bumps, stripes and reflected lights. I usually do these small paintings in one sitting but this one took two.

White Pumpkin

The pumpkin: the October-November Cross-Over Fruit.
The thing I liked about this scene was the ribbon of shadow across the top of the pumpkin and the ribbon of light on the table behind it.
I painted the pomegranate and the pumpkin for an on-line challenge, calling artists to enter paintings done entirely during the month of October. My plan was to enter a plein air work of changing leaves and a still life made up of Autumn Harvest but when October started running out, I hurried and did these two small works using my still life props.
The pomegranate is 5x7, the pumpkin is 6x6 and was selected for the first 6-Inch Squared show at the Randy Higbee Gallery in California.

October Pom

To paint this pomegranate, I set it on a box and put the box on a table so that it was nearly eye-level. I rigged a backdrop using a cigar box and a pashmina, then I tacked a black fan to the right side of the box to block all ambient light. Lastly, I turned on a nice, bright light and moved it around until I was happy with the play. The thing that I liked was the way the top was peeling down toward me, casting a shadow barely caught.

Pomegranate and Company

I have repainted it, renamed it, cropped it and framed it.

It's still the same painting underneath.