Rapt Romance, 24x18. sold

Rapt Romance, which was selected to show in the 85th Grand National Exhibition in NYC by the American Artists' Professional League and just won the Dianne Rudy Memorial Award, is also the 7th painting from the Power & Peace show that has sold. 
When I met the new owners of the work, I was deeply touched by how the painting affected them, especially the woman, Julie.  She felt a kinship with the girl in the painting, curled up with a book.  The painting officially became hers today and I wrote the poem below to go with the painting, into her life. 
Rapt Romance:

Rapt Romance

On her stone bench, face aglow
What she's thinking, who can know?
Within thin pages lives the beau
Who stole her heart away.

The rapt romance developed so
Her heart beat fast, time seemed to slow
All earthly loves she would forgo
To spend her life with him.

But creeping o'er her shoulder lo!
The sun's alarm, like a cock's crow
The worldly hour its light doth throw
A shadow o'er her dream.

But in her heart, love's seed did sow
A romance that would ever grow
Like sunflowers painted by Van Gogh
Are Julie's books to her.

Call to Muster, 20x16

Westward Vision

This is a detail of Westward Vision, an older painting that I posted when I first started blogging.

There has been a natural evolution of style that even I can see when I look at all my paintings together.  When I painted Esther, I was very new to oil painting but very experienced with drawing.  I entered two portraits in the Richeson 75 competition and they were both selected for the show, which was judged by Everett Raymond Kinstler.  I asked him to help me understand how I could grow as a painter; he revealed to me the fact that I was drawing with paint, not painting.  Painting is a way of seeing and thinking that I did not completely understand yet, but he actually helped my mind learn how to think differently.  That's amazing to me.

I am going to have a few older paintings in the Power & Peace show that opens this Friday and there will be two of this model, Esther.  Here is Esther's story, taken from the original post:

One day, I was at the grocery store and I met a vision that took my breath away. Literally. Her name was Esther and she was behind the deli counter. Her mysterious hair was hidden in a paper wrap and her lilting accent mesmerized me. I wanted to paint her immediately but did not have the courage to freak her out by asking, so I asked for some baby Swiss instead. Our paths would serendipitously cross again, giving me another chance.  She would become the subject of more than one painting and a friend for life. In this one, I am depicting her story, which she told me during a long sitting. She said that when she was a preschooler in Nigeria, she told her mother that she would one day go to America. She could not recall how she knew of America, but she looked westward from Africa from her earliest memory. I'm so thankful that she came all the way to Texas. Westward Vision was in the Richeson's first Top 75 Portraits international competition.

Fill Your Hand, 16x20

Cowgirl and Child, 16x12

 

This is one of the paintings that will be in the Power & Peace show in a couple of weeks.  It's also featured in the "Small-Scale Masterpieces" article in this month's issue of American Art Collector magazine, along with the landscape from the last post and a still life from another post.
Mother and Child, the universal and iconic image, does not lose its power with a Texas accent!  The women who came out west were of such strong stuff, but still so gentle.  I think mothers exemplify Power & Peace.  This tiny prairie girl is wearing a bonnet and boots with her flour sack dress, which her mother has bent down to adjust.  The tender moment is made strong for me by the clothing that the two are wearing.  The mother is dressed for riding, not darning, but you know she made the clothes that little girl is wearing.  The mothers of our own generation are equally able and versatile, strong and gentle: powerful purveyors of peace. 

Outdoor Painter Magazine

I wish there were a way to just give you the Outdoor Painter Magazine so you could see what the wonderful writer/editor Bob Bahr wrote up about my favorite place to paint.  I don't know how I would do that though so instead, I will post a link to his article along with a painting that was not actually included in the article but is linked to it in geography and spirit. 

 http://www.outdoorpainter.com/news/my-favorite-place-to-paint-kim-carlton.html


And here is the painting; it was one of three featured recently in a small works article in American Art Collector magazine (current issue, on the stands at this very moment!) called San Luis Pass, oil on linen, 9x12.  It will be available at the opening of my solo show at Cloisters Gallery in downtown Houston on 6 December from 6-8 pm on a special Small Works table:

Something Found

I made stuff up in my imagination about this woman as I painted her and when I was finished with the painting, I thought that it would be fun to write a story to go with her. 
My challenge was to fit the story into the little space beside the image that pops up on the website when you click on it: not a great deal of room!  So instead of a whole long story written out, I tried to allow a story to be created in your mind as you read a poem that gives some context to her and the tents and the thing she's picking up, while leaving much to your own imagination to fill in.  Here it is: 

Something Found

A Spanish lady, beauty so,
About her throat a cameo,
One sunny day the fairground went
She, looking for her beau.

Her treasure bound up in the sack
She’d sewn to hold all she could pack:
Her jewels and money, every cent,
So she could bring him back.

She thought she spied him over there,
His towering form and golden hair,
Yonder near the merchant’s tent,
Her lover oh so fair.

Her heart did throb, her breath abate;
She prayed that it was not too late.
Of everything she did repent;
Beloved, oh please wait!

But as she neared, it was not he
Her heart believed the man to be.
And now her fears and passions rent:
Her purse she could not see!

Retracing steps across the ground,
Her heart now raced and leapt and bound;
Could all be lost with nothing spent?
Ah praise! T’was lost, now found!

http://kimcarlton.blogspot.com/

Footlit Flapper

My model from Monday became a flapper on Friday.
Tesa did a marvelous job this week posing for artists.  Modeling for artists is much different than modeling for photographers.  Much harder, would be my guess.  The model and artist work together to find a pose that is a good design and also is thought to be natural and comfortable enough to hold without moving for long periods of time.  In real life, no pose is really that comfortable if the person is conscious.  Tesa was perched high on a hard chair with a bright light shining right into her eyes.  As the morning wore on, the artists found out that she had been quietly enduring a constant pressure on her ribcage from the position of the chair; she never let on.  In our group, every artist member has served as a model for the group in order to feel what the model feels.  That experience makes this particular group very empathetic toward its models. 
I don't know if you will ever see a finished painting of Tesa the Footlit Flapper.  I am so very busy right now trying to finish the paintings for the show: painting, varnishing, framing, and even writing about each painting.  We are going to try to have a book to go along with the show. 
Don't forget, 6 December from 6-8 will be our opening in Houston!  Here's your invitation:
 
www.kimcarlton.blogspot.com
www.kimcarlton.com

An Invitation to Power & Peace

This is the ad in American Art Collector magazine, the November issue, which just came out.  They also included our show in a section called "The Savvy Collector's Guide to Upcoming Shows," under Texas (link below) and wrote about it in "Small-Scale Masterpieces," with three more paintings!  We're having invitations made but if you want to come, please come!  Don't wait for an invitation; we will have the reception on 6 December from 6-8 pm and would love to see you there.

The link to the Savvy Collector's Guide is:
 http://www.americanartcollector.com/collectors-guide.php?issue=upcoming

Come and let your soul be recharged by an evening of wine and cheese and original oil paintings. There should be something for everyone: figurative, landscape and still life paintings, all united under the common light of “Power and Peace.” The paintings in this show reflect a high idea of action and energy within calm and peace. The changing light, the ephemeral quality of nature, the transitory yet purposeful presence of man: the subjects that have drawn artists and art lovers throughout all of history can draw us together this December in downtown Houston. Be there or be square!

Cloister Gallery is a downtown institution and one of the city’s most cherished lunchtime destinations. Jamie Mize and Dan Tidwell have been feeding Houstonians out of Reynolds Hall (the Great Hall, the Cloister) since 1981, and the famous Treebeard’s fare brings hundreds to their campus every weekday. Be one of them!

North Shore Nymph

The weather is perfect right now.  In Houston, the weather is always a little on the perfect side for some people: never too cold in the winter and a friendly, "close" kind of humid heat in the summer that makes your skin stay young.  But in the spring and autumn, the weather is absolutely perfect, no matter who you are.  It was very hard to stay in the studio and teach today, with the cool air and the flirty sun calling from outside!  But I did already get to paint out this week, with my new model, Tesa.

I met Tesa when I was registering students for the fall semester.  She was interested in being an artist's model and had already read three books on modeling!  She did an outstanding job as a plein air model for me.  She will model again on Friday in the studio for our Market Street Painters group, only then she will be a flapper from the 1920's.  For our day though, at a nearby lake, she dressed as a water nymph.
Here she is, taking a picture of the painting of herself:

 The fun and challenge of painting at a park like this is all that goes on around you while you are working.  The in-and-out clouds, the busy ducks and geese, the bugs and boaters and children (and parents) all conspire to pull your focus away from your job.  Tesa stayed focused on my face and I tried to stay focused on her face and my canvas. 
This painting was done with four colors (plus white): transparent oxide brown, ultramarine blue deep, cadmium red and cadmium yellow pale; the same palette we are using in Oil Painting 101 this semester.  The wonderful thing about a limited palette is the automatic harmony that you have.  No matter what you paint, you are drawing from such a limited source, all your resulting choices are related and so go well together.  My mind is always a little blown that so much can be done with so little.  Yet our printers only have a few colors and our television sets only have a few colors so it shouldn't be quite so surprising. 
Well, here is the sketch of Tesa, the North Shore Nymph:

Scout Arriving, 24x30

 

Some works call for reverie, others invite revelry.  This painting was the latter sort.  It was large for me and required standing and sometimes a little dancing to execute.  The subject matter also was the opposite of quiet and even my brush found a new dance step on this one.  Here's a close up of the scout's accoutrements, which I was hoping would catch the movement and action: 

 

I am doing several paintings in response to a Civil War reenactment that I got to see recently.  This scout, sword at the ready and pistol drawn, came bounding into my view right as the participants were preparing for battle in the background:

   

The attitude of the horse and rider together created such a beautiful mark against the smoke and sky, an abstract movement of forward momentum and back-straining to stop, only one foot touching the ground… it had to be painted.  My hat’s off to the Third Texas Cavalry Regiment of Civil War Reenactors!  An inspiration on so many levels. 

Little Gypsy Girl, 14x11

Maybe you recognize this little girl from Follies & Foibles, published in July. She suffered some insult but was not permanently injured in the process.I wish you could see the painting in real life instead of seeing the digital image of it. Digitizing these soft and subtle passages makes them so harsh and vivid, adjusting the temperature and values just enough to remove the romance, it seems. The joy of this painting is in the very delicate cool tones in her face, juxtaposed against the bright warm sparkling bangles of her headband. The bedecked little gypsy composes her look and is set for the day, having just been dropped off by the wagon that is disappearing in the distance. 

This silhouetting with only the rim lighting of the figure reminds me of calligraphy, the old-fashioned kind with the large Chinese characters done with big round brushes in black ink on white parchment. I have a couple of those and even though I don’t know what they mean, I appreciate their stark beauty. Maybe from across the room the abstract character of the little gypsy girl reads, Freedom.   

Oil Painting 101-The Foundations, fall 2013

Oil Painting 101, The Foundations has just begun. This class will cover materials and procedures, drawing and design, the practice and philosophy of oil painting. During the class, there will be presentations and demonstrations, actual painting time with personal instruction and critique, designed to bring the student from their present level to the next level.  In short, it’s the class that I tried to find when I was starting out in oils but could not find. We have a great group again this time and I am really looking forward to the fall semester. 

For our first day, I brought all the supplies that members will need to paint with oils, plus lots and lots of optional things (canvas choices, many palettes, every kind of brush, even easels!) that they might want, to make their life easier as they paint in and out of the studio.  Here they are, all packed into 10 easy-to-fit-into-the-Mini Cooper pieces!

I like this show-and-tell day because it allows everyone to see and touch and ask about things that they may have only heard about or seen in pictures. There aren’t many artists who don’t have a collection of things they thought they needed but didn’t. How much better to use someone else’s experience and save some time and money!

So, as we begin, our palette will be the most limited in history: one color + white. Starting like this will allow us to understand value as the most important foundational element in painting. Do you know that the human eye has 120 million rods, which interpret value, and only 6 million cones, which interpret color? Well it’s true and that is one of the reasons that it’s critical to be able to express a visual idea with value.

Our color is Transparent Oxide Brown, which is a very deep transparent partner for the opaque white. We will study why these characteristics are even important. In addition to value and temperature, we will explore line and edges using this pair and, when the time is right, we’ll add the three primaries: red, yellow and blue. By the end of the semester, we will have at least an understanding of the infinite capabilities of these few colors. Each class could easily be expanded into years of training, as it has been in the ateliers throughout art history. But we only have 4 months so I promise: we will only just scratch the surface!

Real Life

I am just emerging from the studio and seeing that it is going on 2 in the morning.

One of the things that I'm trying to do in my life right now is go to bed at "a reasonable hour." This goal has eluded me for my entire life but I will not give up because I keep reading about how good it is for you to have regular sleep habits and to let the sun wake you up. As a painter, I should be highly motivated to be up with the sun, but as a modern woman with really great studio lighting and really bad habits, I burn the midnight oil; I simply lose track of time. My theory/excuse is that, when you are doing the thing that God designed you to do, you have one foot on earth, one foot in heaven. Well, in heaven, as everyone knows, there are no clocks. Time is irrelevant. One is never late in heaven.
So I have a very lofty excuse for not being in bed at this time.
Now, to blog.

Someone recently said in my hearing that still lifes were boring. I asked him why he thought so and he replied that they always look staged, fake. Well, as a genre I suppose still lifes are long on still, short on life, but one of the fabulous things about still life painting is: YOU CAN CHANGE THAT. You are the master of everything when you paint still lifes. Clayton Beck once told me that if you don't like what you see in a still life, change your set up, change your position, or change your lighting. That is not possible for the landscape painter and it has only limited application for the portrait painter. (I might also add, when comparing still lifes as a subject to a model as a subject, that still lifes are free, you don't have to give them breaks every 20 minutes, and they stay up all night if you need them to. But I digress...)

These conversations were floating around in my head and my thinking was, just observe real things. Boring still lifes are just overly-orchestrated. Do what the landscape painters do and capture something from REAL LIFE and make a work of art out of it. Then BAM! I had the opportunity to practice what my mind was beginning to preach. My husband and I came home the other evening and when we turned on the kitchen light, he said, "Wow, that's a painting!" Looking at the produce on the counter I said, "Yeah, that would be a good painting!" Then he said, "Paint it! Now! I'll help you set up your gear."
Ha! Bluff called! My mind was saying, "But I'm tired! I'll take a picture of it and paint it later. It needs better lighting than the stove hood light anyway..." Immediately I was thwarting myself, but before anyone knew what was going on in my head, I said, "Okay, I will!"
So here you have my set up, my gear, my block-in:

And here you have a zoom of the produce because I'm not sure I like the composition, after all the work of painting it "as is." But the experience was very liberating; it was fun to explore something so close, so spontaneously. Perhaps I have a painting from it... we'll see: 

 

http://kimcarlton.blogspot.com/

Lone Star Color Guard

One of my favorite painter peeps and I went to a Civil War reenactment by the 3^rd Texas Cavalry Regiment last fall. What an exciting and wonderful experience! All the reenactors were required to be true to the time period. Even the children had their Ozarka water in authentic period bottles. Nary a cell phone nor digital camera was to be seen and I was beside myself with glee!

I have been working on paintings from the experience ever since then and many of them will be in the show coming up. I will shuffle them into the blog line-up but will save some until the opening, too.

This is a painting of the Texas Color Guard. I don't know why he was alone but the image was poignant: The Lone Guard of the Lone Star. One of my friends said the painting makes him feel sad but it makes me feel very proud.