Category: Blitherings

Sunday Morning

This morning I had one goal in mind:  paint.  With a gloomy sky here on the California coast, the damp and cold penetrate you to the bone.  Once it leaves, it’s a great big sunny day ahead!  So, while waiting for the fog to dissipate, I took a few pictures of a bouquet I put together of chamomile flowers and small, red carnations in a rectangular glass base.  I didn’t do a value study because I wanted to look at the colors – light, dark, and so on – to see what I could produce.

I penciled in the basic drawing, took some notes of the colors and mixed this and that, testing them on a scrap of paper.  Looking at the vase, I saw the different shades of color through the glass with water and without water, as well as the water line and edges of the vase.  Chamomile leaves are multi-lobed and floppy; carnation leaves are rather spiky.  Chamomile flowers are happy, daisy-like flowers, and quite small.  Carnations are upright.  Both are really lovely!

Process was like my last two flower paintings – start with the large areas of color and move into details.  Overall, it worked here, until I started getting into the hodge-podge of leaves.  I think I should have simplified their masses of color, but I didn’t.  I like the negative painting I accomplished for the chamomile flowers, as well as the edges along the bouquet where the white flowers have to merge into something.  The carnations were far more difficult than I thought, and once more, I made something more complicated and tight than I would like to see as “my” style.

Nonetheless, I feel that this painting is a moderate success.  I was patient and let the washes dry, working from lighter to more dark, thinking about white space and negative painting.  And I still have a bouquet of flowers to enjoy!

Time Rolling By

I don’t know if you experience this, but it seems to be a common theme.  Once you know that you have vacation ahead, you realize just how tired you are!  Tired of work, tired of the people you work with, and just plain tired!  With retirement coming up, I am even more frustrated by my job and its hours, some of the silly things that occur.  I am also tired of some of the people and looking forward to not being around them.  That’s life, and change is good, as are the constants in daily life.  Look for your blessings every day – I really believe this, and try to do it, without losing perspective, either.

Last weekend 11 trees were trimmed and pruned; 5 were completely removed.  For the first time in years, the back half of the house has daylight, not artificial, as a main light source.  I bought a plant to see how it will do, between the dogs and the poor soil.  (Poor plant!)  It’s a penstemon, which is drought-tolerant.  It’s a lovely, cheerful flower.  I put it under the dogs’ noses to let them smell it, and then told them “bad”.  Let’s see how it survives!

In addition to dealing with tree removal and pruning, I have been in a real funk about my painting.  After a disastrous series of watercolors, I just put everything aside for about a week.  Still, I did other things, like go for walks and continue to recover from the house renovation by moving things here and there and unpacking more boxes.  All this upheaval!  It’s a slow process, but it’s getting done.  Of course, there are still a million other things I could delude myself into doing as “necessary” – which really are, but not vital to my existence!

So, after a week of blithering and dithering and feeling like a lost soul, I sat down, once more, in the studio.  I took out a large palette of colors (the key to which is still missing), and decided to do some flowers in vases.  I like flowers, so it seemed a perfect subject.  I worked in the main color areas first – after doing a line drawing, but no value study (a habit I need to establish) – top to bottom.  After that, I looked some more.  And some more.  Then I began to add details, all the while working very hard to think ahead and in the present at the same time.  I produced two paintings I liked.

And finally, I had a Friday afternoon.  Watercolor class or just do what I wanted?  I chose the latter.  Doing what I wanted was more interesting and more challenging and more needed than anything else.  Into the car, down to an art store, down to the nursery, and finally the bookstore.  I bought 4 paint brushes, 1 penstemon, 2 watercolor magazines and 3 books.  I drank a cup of coffee.  Finally, some time of my own, some time to think, and some time to recover from this sense of ennui that has been my companion for many days.  Yay!

Making, Doing, Being

We take our everyday lives for granted, which is pretty much what we are used to on a daily basis.

Some people are always worried about where the next meal is going to come from – people who live in poverty or war-torn areas probably experience this far more than I can imagine.  If I skip a meal, no biggie – lots of stuff in the fridge or down at the market.  When a student tells you that in his former country, as a child, what he remembers most is always being hungry, it makes you think.  To live like this is beyond my imagination.

And what about people who go from being very active, to suddenly being limited on a physical level?  From walking to not walking?  To using both hands to using one?  The physicality of everyday life is not something most of us remark upon, unless it is suddenly gone!  A stroke?  A fall?  Some crazy American with a gun?  A nerve-wasting disease?  How do we handle this?

If you think about, everyday life is normal as long as it doesn’t change.  When it changes, how do we handle it?  What do we do?  Do we fall down and pity ourselves?  Do we get up and move forward with whatever is in front of us?  Certainly a level of self-pity and horror exist when something bad happens which changes our daily lives, but it also can lead to creativity and a philosophical or spiritual awakening.  How we choose to adapt – and the key word is adapt – often determines our outcome.  It may be minimal in the eyes of others, but it can be major within the person affected.

I really believe we need to look at our lives on a daily basis, to appreciate and be grateful for what we have, not focusing on what we don’t have.  If our lives can be better, how?  If we want to change things, what do we want to change?  This is not an ever-moving forward process.  Like the frog in the well, three feet forward, two feet back.  The road is bumpy and challenging.  At times the goal is obscured or lost, but movement continues.  We choose in many ways how to adapt to our lives, however horrific we may find them.

Those who adapt, survive, even if the survival is not to their liking.  Those who give up are also adapting, but probably not successfully.  What we want, too, changes.  We need to adapt to those changes.  We need to think about them, to consider them on multiple levels.

When we stop making, stop doing, we stop being.

Freedom!

Sounds grand, doesn’t it?  It’s a heady feeling.  Instead of ending my work day at 6:30, it now ends at 4:30 for the next 2 days, then next week at 3:30, and then after that, 5 weeks off (maybe 4, I haven’t really counted) until I return to work for 2 mornings a week to do a short summer school session of ESL (English as a Second Language) before another 2 off  and then begin my last year of work.  Retirement looms closer and closer, and what is a girl to do?

Practice!

Yeah, I mean that.  Practicing for retirement means finding a meaning and a purpose and a general “raison d’etre” so that life is not a series of TV and aimlessness.  It doesn’t mean finding a second job or a new vocation, it means simply doing things which have value and meaning to me.  Volunteer work?  Maybe.  What kind?  Where?  Why?

I have all sorts of ideas about what I want to do, and this summer, with my free time, I really want to explore things.  LIke a lot of old folks free from the traces of work, travel sounds really good.  Of course, photography and painting and reading.  Exercise – going to the gym – long walks – hiking – socializing – thinking – making – sewing – painting – egads!  My head is exploding!

It Gets Overwhelming

Returning to watercolor is becoming an obsession, and the more I look at the work of various watercolorists, the more I become mentally deluged with images and colors and styles and painters.  It is a seriously crazy-making experience!  Like photography, most of what I do is really not good at all – from downright awful to meh – but it also becomes rather distressing.  That’s when a break is necessary, like making chocolate gelato or going out for a hike or looking for a new pair of shoes.  Just do something different to break out of the ruts of daily life.Focusing on “direct watercolor” – painting without any preliminary drawings or value studies – is sort of what I am trying to do on a daily basis.  This is from a photo, and the study was windows and reds and buildings.  The proportions are off, and that feels like failure big time.  The colors were all the dregs on the palette, so most were muddy and not interesting, but determined not to waste paint, why not?  I also used a water brush, and that can make colors even murkier if you don’t squeeze out excess water.

Another direct watercolor painting, this time limited to a 1/2 inch flat brush for everything.  The colors are cleaner, for sure, but the contrast of light and shadow are off.  The fun part was learning that yes, you can paint with only a flat brush.

I admit, I rather like this one, because I like its brightness.  However, after I finished it, I got a good laugh over my totally unrealistic chimney (or whatever that thing is) on the top of the building in the upper right.  What dimension is that in?!

I think I am going to return to this one again, as it is from a photo I took a couple of years ago along the coast.  The bluffs are really intense.  The problem lies in rendering the ocean and beach below them – lack of depth and overworking.

This is a WIP – from a black and white photo to consider light and dark.  I am going to try to work on this one today, or the one below, which is from a macro photo of a dahlia or similar flower.   I started this one in my Friday afternoon watercolor class.

Lastly, sometimes just a quick interpretation can give a lot of satisfaction.  There is something about light-colored walls on a brilliant day, colorful flowers – here, a rambler rose – and dancing shadows.  I would like to do this one again, too, on a bigger piece of paper and a more formal and finished work.