A Winter’s Creek

We have had rain – yay! – and thunderstorms, and threats of tornadoes (which never came) – and puddles of water, and a back yard lake. More to come, perhaps, but gentle and warmer, with a promise of a relatively sunny Christmas. I love the briskness this weather brings, but am also very happy not to have to shovel snow or drive in it. In fact, I was flying through water at intersections the other day, but luckily I am in an area without low lying ground which floods, unlike other areas of the county where people woke up to flooded bedrooms.

So, winter! Winter solstice is come and gone, and in many ways I wish we marked it more with bonfires and merriment, as in the olden days. I paint winter, partly from photos, partly from memory and imagination. 

Probably most of my memories come from upstate New York. No place that I have visited does winter quite like the mixed hardwood and pine forests. Bright green, dark green, barren branches, tall trees. Skies can be sunny and fierce, dull and overcast, and everything in between. Water, whether lake or stream, takes on its own life when frozen, thawed or in between. It still amazes me that fish swim under the ice and amphibians bury themselves in the mud until spring comes.

Happy Solstice!

Carrots

I watched a few videos by Jane Slivka, an acrylic painter out of Florida. She tones her canvas with a reddish orange color, paints in the major shapes in Hooker’s green, adds white for highlights, then proceeds to build her painting. Her paints are heavy body while I have been using fluid acrylics. I thought her process was quite interesting as it is seemingly spontaneous, but not without structure. Her steps give it structure, but she is not a slave to her subject – she sort of moves along with a game plan and no game plan, if that makes sense. 

What really fascinated me was how she actually creates values by working in the lights and darks before adding colors. Additionally, the red tone beneath the brushwork pops through, and adds a bit of sparkle to her paintings. Negative and positive space and shapes are worked back and forth. 

I tried to follow this approach, and found it really quite interesting. In many ways it simplified what I wanted – lights, darks, values, contrast. Carrots are not especially exciting things to paint, but they are quite cheery with their bright colors of orange and green.

Painting the carrots and their tops was really fun. I didn’t take this painting seriously, and sort of slapped around colors, working to see what might be successful, might not be. Never before have I toned a painting surface with cadmium red, but I think it could become a favorite thing to do. Yellow ochre is a wonderful color, but it is not especially dramatic. The little bits of red poking through the greenery is quite pleasing to my eye. I expect I will try more paintings like this.

Golden Fluid Acrylics, Strathmore 300 watercolor paper, 10×14.

Play with Oil Pastels

Ages ago when people thought the world was flat, I tried out oil pastels. I hated them. Messy, unresponsive, and just unpleasant to work with. I threw them away. 

Ignorance, though, and a lack of the internet, can make art materials mysterious and frustrating. Today, now that the world is round, YouTube and other media outlets show me what can potentially be done with oil pastels. Choices of paper, solvents, blending methods, brands and qualities of the oil pastels themselves has changed considerably. I bought some – Caran D’Ache, Sennelier, and Mungyo. I also bought some PastelMat paper and board, and I also have different papers here at home to try. And YouTube and oil pastel artists on Instagram.

‘Tis tangerine and mandarin season, so here we go with some locally grown. I used the Caran d’Ache as underpainting after outlining with a graphite pencil. The pencil blurred and created a bit of a fuss. To get the colors blended, I used tortillons and mineral oil, gentle touches and pressure. All play. I was rather pleased with them.

Then I decided to see how it would be to work with a very pale subject, namely a pale white and beige tiger cat. The green eyes are a combination of white, green, and blue, blurred together with a tortillon. The sharp edge of a black pastel crayon made the dark eye and nose lines, and even some colored pencil at the end to provide further sharpness in detail. Eye highlights were sort of a gamble with the white pastel – which one to use, softer, harder? And placement, too. The cat’s white whiskers wouldn’t show up no matter what I did, so I opted for a beige-y color and then some white over the lines.

Neither of these is spectacular – the poor cat is suffering a lopsided face – but the point was to play with the colors and work with blending. I did use some mineral oil on the tangerines, but everything dissolved into a gooey mess, so after the first scan, I scanned no more.

Now, on to my knitting! The acrylic painting is still vegging and that is fine for now.

Evolution

Several weeks ago I started an acrylic painting of a building at the end of a road. It was sort of painted in a traditional manner, meaning I was trying to represent reality. Truthfully, it bored the hell out of me, but I kept it as it was fairly decent in my opinion, but it did put me to sleep. 

Working with brighter colors of late has really been exciting for me as I feel much more of a connection to the colors I use than I do to subject matter. Subject matter can be anything – but colors express more to me and are more true to who I am (a magpie reincarnated as an old bat) than subject matter in general. So, I took the painting and painted over it. Below is the original.

This is a photograph I took and it is pretty crap (above) as there is a lot of weird stuff going on. I didn’t think it scanning it because of its size. This morning I scanned my current iteration of this painting.

I like this much better, but it is not quite done. I need to work on the road in the foreground as well as details of the building. More windows, fix windows, fewer windows? Create some focus at the end of the road? Fix the road? Cast some shadows – creating light and dark – across the road?

Many things to consider here. I am going to let it sit and ignore it awhile. If you have any ideas, let me know!

Acrylic, canvas, 18×24, scanned on an Epson V600.

A Late Winter Afternoon

When I lived in upstate New York, the winters were marvelous! Hardwood forests and pine trees all worked together to create a magical land of light and shadow, rolling snow banks, and winter streams frozen and thawed and frozen again. The skies, too, were amazing in their coldness of light that could reflect so brilliantly on the snowy landscape.

As an adult, snow as a place to live, work, and travel in no longer holds much allure – great to visit, but don’t ask me to wade through it, chisel ice off my windshield, or shovel it just to get out of my house. Still, the memories of those magical winter days in deep winter always hold a spot in my heart for their crisp and intense beauty.

10×14″ Arches Rough, watercolor limited palette of umbers, quin gold, ultramarine blue, and a touch of titanium white gouache.