Vase and Shadows

Spring certainly felt like it was coming today. But just because it was mild and sunny it does not mean things are blooming, mostly just starting to bud. Therefore no real flowers available from Christina's garden, but she brought in very nice silk ones for us to try to paint. They certainly gave a great illusion of spring. :-)

But it this case it was the wonderful cast shadow of the vase that really caught my eye, even more than the flowers themselves, so I just had to made the shadow the star of the show in this painting.

Ruthie's Lobster House

I can't seem to get away from Atlantic Canada, can I? Pretty soon I'll have an entire book's worth of paintings from Atlantic Canada. Tonight in class Christina proposed to talk about perspective, at the request of one of the other students. I sort of listened in with half an ear though most of it was not new to me. But I always enjoy Christina's lectures. 

However I painted as I listened! This is a picture I've long been wanting to paint, one I took of Ruthie's Lobster House in the darling little town of Victoria-by-the-Sea on Canada's Prince Edward Island. I kept putting it off and putting it off though, as I hated fiddling with drawing and painting buildings. But in honor of the class on perspective I decided to just bite the bullet and go for it. 

I took so long on the building I barely got done by the time class ended! However I did manage to finish, so spent about 2 hours on this painting, a long time for me. :-) This is done on my new paper of choice, 9x12 Art Spectrum Colourfix. 

Baie des Chaleurs

Tonight was a slow night for my pifflechat group, with one friend out celebrating Purim, and another running errands, soI decided to paint a picture. I choose this fromt a photo I took during my trip to Quebec's Gaspe Peninsula in 2oo5, I stopped alongside the road in New Brunswick, as I neared the border I pulled over and took a photo of the Bay of Chaleur, looking across to the Gaspe on the far side. I thought it was an awesome view.

Although I don't think this is an awesome painting, LOL. I could not find my Art Spectrum paper, and did this on a sheet of 12x16 orange Canson, all I could find. Gee, I used to love Canson, but after using Art Spectrum most of the time lately the Canson seemed horrible, and I had to really fight with it. I also found I was sadly lacking in greens in the little set of pastels I had here in the house (most of my pastels are already in the car to go to art class tomorrow).

But just doing something, anything, is good - no matter the result. Because I hated the orange paper I had, and had no idea how it would turn out, I took a few photos along the way - so I'll show you some of the stages this picture went through before I called it quits.

1) A very simple and basic drawing, and just filling in some underlayer colors using the Pan Pasels.

2) A very simple Pan Pastel undercoat on the entire painting.
3) Worked on the sky, clouds, and the distance hills of the Gaspe. Some deeper color to the water. 
4) More work on the water, the building roof, and some of the vegetation. 
So there you go. I have more photos of the stages this went through, but this is enough to give you an idea .I don't know if it's truly "done" but it's done for the night at least.  A shame in some ways - I do *love* this size so much more than the smaller 9x12 Art Spectrum. But I don't like using the larger sheets of Art Spectrum as I have so much wastage. And I've never had much luck using the Art Spectrum ground that you can apply to a surface of your own - it never comes out like the "real thing".

Maybe I just need to start working on Canson more again until I get used to it. I don't like the orange color either - but it was all that was left in the multi-color Canson pad - naturally since I left the icky color until last. :-) 

Cape Jourimain

Well, it looks like it's back to Atlantic Canada again for me! This is just a "quickie" done in class last night from a photo of mine. Cape Jourimain is in New Brunswick, Canada, just at the approach to the bridge to Prince Edward Island. It's a nature sanctuary and a major birding hotspot, and also boasts a restaurant that serves wonderful food - mostly all locally produced and organic, and supports its entire visitor's center with "green" technologies. 

The lighthouse there is no longer operational, and in past years ospreys have nested atop it. I have seen at least a couple of my "life birds" at Cape Jourimain.

I finished my onion painting quickly last night. Christina was doing some demos after that, but I have taken her classes before and seen the same demos, so I took advantage of the last 50-60 minutes I had available to work on a quick additional picture, which is this one here - also a 9x12 on Art Spectrum Colourfix.

Onion Basket

It was back to still lifes tonight with a basket of onions. Not too much to say about this one, except that I liked the contrasts of the complementary colors of the onions and basket, and the mostly purples of the background. This one went pretty quickly, about 75 minutes total. Done on a 9x12 sheet of Art Spectrum Colourfix paper.

Crystal Coast

I'm still trying to work on water, so Christina said I could try a water picture in class tonight. I guess the more you do it the easier it gets or something, LOL. But true with many things. I had a lot of water reference photos, but decided to do this one. I took the photo down in Morehead City, NC where my dad lives. He has a lovely house facing Bogue Sound, and there is a nice little public beach just a couple blocks from his house. I took this photo at the public beach, and that was what I used for my reference tonight. This was hard work, and I took the entire class session on it.

But when I find myself thinking how hard it is, it's also nice to reflect on how far I have come since I took up pastels four years ago. In those early days I had no idea what I was doing. In May of 2005, only 2 months after I had first tried using pastels, I went down to visit my dad for a week. I decided to try to work on a couple pictures en plain aire while I was down there. And as it happened I chose this very same setting as one of my pictures to try.

So after I got home from class tonight I managed to track down the photo (and a poorly taken photo at that) of that original painting of this same scene and I'm actually giving a public airing down below! But this is one of the reasons I keep everything I've ever done. It's nice to step back in time to see where you came from sometimes on the days when you don't feel you are making any progress. :-)

Happy Birthday Dear Blog

Wow, hard to believe it was three years ago today I started my blog. I was going to celebrate by spending the day working on a lovely painting of some sort. But my day started shortly after 6 AM with a call from work. By the time I was done it was 8:30 AM and too late to get back to bed. I have to be in the office at 7 AM tomorrow morning for a big system upgrade, so Sunday is mostly shot too. So I decided I was going to do my *taxes* today since the weekend was mostly shot anyway. I thought it would go pretty fast using TaxCut software, but it ended up taking me 12 hours! 

The good news: Well, the taxes are all done. I owe the state of New Jersey a mere $4, and I'll be getting a nice refund from Federal.

The bad news: I finished up so late it left little time for the grand painting I wanted to work on, but I had to do something to mark this blog's occasion. So I did take the time to do this quick little portrait of my house, only about 45 minutes of work on a 9x12 sheet of Art Spectrum, but I just needed to get something done, and my own house seemed like a good way to mark my own blog. 

Canadian Inlet

I guess this one can be included in my Atlantic Canada series of paintings. I finished up my still life in class last night with over an hour to spare before class ended, so I decided to noodle around with one of the photos I had in my bag for potential landscapes. This is from a photo taken up in New Brunswick, Canada  - just down the road from where my dad owns our summer home.  So I spent about an hour on this one - done on 9x12 Art Spectrum, as all my stuff has been recently. I do prefer a slightly larger size, like the 12x16 Canson I have long used. But the wonderful texture of the Art Spectrum is so seductive. I just love it, even though I have achieved nice effects on the Canson as well.

I told Christina that I really yearned to be able to do better with water,  so she suggested I find some nice water pictures to bring to class next week and we could work on that. So I need to start looking through my photo files and see what  I can come up with. 

Fiery Fruit

This is just a still life Christina set up in class tonight. I loved the bright, vibrant red of the fabric that she used, and the wonderful reflections in the shiny black vase. Nothing "heavy" to post about tonight, just a pleasant art class, and fun painting in the company of others.

Gerry Niewood

I've known Gerry Niewood for over 20 years. Not well - he traveled a lot, and seemed to be always on the road, the story of a musician's life. But I knew his family better. His wife Gurly and I sang together as fellow altos in the church choir for many years. She has a lovely voice and I've always hoped she would consider returning to the choir. Son Adam was in high school with my own son. Later on daughter Elizabeth took voice lessons from the same voice teacher I take lessons from. We had a recital at the Niewood's house one time, a lovely old Victorian filled with books and old furniture and worn rugs. That last part may not sound flattering, but I mean it to be! The Niewoods had a *home*, well loved and well lived in, full of charm. It was a real home where real people lived, not a showplace.

So when I heard that Gerry was one of the victims who perished in the dreadful crash of Continental flight 3407 in Buffalo, NY I was overwhelmed with shock and grief. How could such a dreadful thing happen? I saw Gerry just two weeks ago. Our church has an annual antique show every year, and the opening night there is a lovely reception with appetizers and music, and this year the music was provided by Gerry and Gurly. He on flute, she on piano. The whole family is musical, but Gerry was outstanding. As Gerry's MySpace page says "Gerry Niewood is an instrumentalist (soprano, alto, tenor, baritone saxophones; flute, alto flute, bass flute, piccolo, clarinet) who has lent his melodic invention to artists as diverse as: Chuck Mangione, Peggy Lee, Simon and Garfunkel, Sinead O'Connor, Anne Murray, Thad Jones, Mel Lewis, Mark Murphy, Gil Evans, Astrid Gilbeto, Judy Collins, Frank Sinatra and Gerry Mulligan to name only a few. Gerry is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music."

In fact it was a gig with Chuck Mangione what was taking him to Buffalo. If you go to his MySpace page you can also hear some of music. I'm still so sad, and sorry for the whole Niewood family. Today I could not settle after church and choir, and finally decided that painting a picture would be cathartic. I could not follow my usual practice of only painting from life, or using my own photos. I have no photos of Gerry. And if I had they would have been snapshots of Gerry the man, not Gerry the musician.

But I was much taken by the photo posted of him at the nj.com website. Not only did it incorporate Gerry with his sax, but was taken in the town where we both live, in the local train station where I have many times waited for trains when I had job assignments or training that took me into New York. So that was what I felt I needed to use. I would not call this a good likeness of Gerry. I'm not a portrait artist. If you want to see what Gerry really looked like there are plenty of images you can Google, like this one.

But doing this today helped *me*. I'm so sorry for all the lost victims of Flight 3407, but Gerry was the one that I knew.

Meadowlands

I think I've mentioned here before that birding is another of my hobbies. I'm not obsessive about it, and most of my birding is done just watching birds from my own home, counting birds at the feeders in my yard for Cornell University's "Project Feeder Watch". But I do enjoy seeing other birds when I can, and adding to my Life List, such as it is! When I saw that Snowy Owls had been seen wintering in New Jersey's Meadowlands I had a buring desire to go see them. 

So last weekend my sister accompanied me to go on the quest of the Snowy Owls. With the help of other birders we did spot the owl - quite tricky as his camoflage was wonderful, and after watching him a while we decided to go a little further down the road to the marvelous Meadowlands Environment Center to see if we could also spot the rare Eurasian Teal who was said to be wintering there as well. 

With that goal accomplished we strolled back along the waterfront path, and happened to catch sight of a most glorious sunset. I had to snap several photos of it. And then I decided I needed to turn the photos into a painting, so that is the subject of my painting above, done my my new favorite of 9x12 Art Spectrum Colourfix paper, the rose grey color. 

And as a special added bonus, here is a photo below that I took of the Snowy Owl. When I went home to add him to my list I found that he was actually bird number 100 on my Life List, so that made him even more special.

Mac on the Beach

Art class was canceled last night due to bad weather, so I just took it easy instead. But I hate to miss an chance to create something, and going to class makes me get out and do it! But no meetings tonight, so I decided I could paint something right here at home.

Since it's cold and snowy out I decided to paint something warm and inviting. This is from a reference photo of my cousin Amanda's little boy Mac at the beach. Either Amanda or her husband Tom, who is a professional photographer, took the initial photo, so if there is any merit at all in the composition I owe it to them, and not to me at all.

But I loved the photo and when I saw it I asked Amanda if I could have a copy. I knew I wanted to paint it some day. And now, 2 1/2 years later, I'm finally doing it!

Still Life Memories

Tonight in class we didn't actually have a painting setup to work on. Instead we got a lesson in how to create our own painting surface using a mixture of gesso and marble dust, which we applied to watercolor paper. This takes a while to dry fully, so we are supposed to bring them back next week to do a painting on them.

After we finished Christina began some demos that I have already seen her do in past classes. Since this class is my weekly escape, and right now my life seems to be too busy to do artwork except when I have class as an excuse, I didn't want to "waste" the whole class without doing any art, so I decided to paint a picture.

But of course I had no setup to paint! I thought I could pull up my online photo gallery on my Blackberry as I had last week - but I could not get an internet connection, and have been unable to get one all day.

So then I decided to make something up "out of my head". Of course I am absolutely rotten at this and would only dare attempt the simplest of things in this fashion. I am just one of those sorts who needs to see the object in front of me. But I felt I could at least attempt a still life if I kept it simple. This was done on a sheet of blue Canson, 8 1/2 x 11 sheet, smooth side.

Tonight we are expecting another awful winter storm - snow overnight, turning later to sleet, ice, freezing rain ... In other words the nastiest sort of storm there is. It's still January, and I'm sick of winter. So I felt an urge to paint something with a bit of a springy feel, with springy colors. So this is what I came up with out of my head.

I need to be prepared and carry photo references with me or something, as making things up is just not something I'm good at. I'm in awe of people who can create incredible and detailed sorts of painting just straight out of their imagination.

View from the Malbaie Rectory, Gaspe, Quebec

Tonight in class Christina wanted us to try sampling Pan Pastels. I've tried them before, and while they are interesting I don't like them as well as the regular sticks - although the one place I do find them very useful is in underpainting on Canson paper. But I was more than willing to play with them again - and this class was mostly play. 

We had no still life setup tonight, and Christina was suggesting we try landscapes. People had magazine images and things to work from, but I hate to work from copyrighted material. I had forgotten to bring any photos of my own - but had a brainstorm! I pulled up my online Picasaweb photo albums on my Blackberry and selected a photo there to use as a reference.

This photo is from the trip I took to Quebec's incredible Gaspe peninsula in the summer of 2005, to visit with some friends from my 'piffle' internet group. We stayed at a lovely former Anglican rectory in the little village of Saint-Georges-de-Malbaie, and this was the view we saw across the street if you looked off to the right. If you looked straight ahead you saw the famous Perce Rock off in the distance. 

So I worked from a ref on a tiny Blackberry screen to create this one, using Pan Pastels, though I did add some work with the sticks on top to get a tiny bit more detail. I can't do the scene justice. Imagine waking up to that lovely view every morning.

Citrus Study

Yay. I've been waiting for this day! Art class has finally started again, and tonight was the first class with Christina. Life has been so hectic lately, and no time for pastels at all. I have not touched them since the last class ended early in December. Boy, talk about feeling out of practice. Luckily Christina had a fairly simple still life set up for the class to work on. Since it was a new class, and some new students, she wanted something simple for people to try as she had no idea what level they were at in their art.

Good for me as I was not up for anything complicated. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I made it even more simple than her setup. And even this was a struggle. I hated it for most of the evening, and felt like a kindergarten kid again - but by the end of the session was starting to feel back in the groove again. I need to work more and not stay so out of touch.

I also gave Christina a painting for a show that will be at the Whippany Library in February. Opening reception is Feb. 9. That will be fun. I chose "Applegate Farm" to go in the show.

Patty's Winter Barn

My sister Patty has long asked me to do a painting of a red barn for her, and particularly a red barn in the snow.  Of course I have no *photos* of a red barn in the snow. I looked in the Resource Image Library at Wetcanvas but saw nothing that grabbed me. I guess part of the problem was that I had no interest in doing just any old barn. 

In fact if I did a barn I wanted to do our barn in Canada! It's not red, but has red doors and red trim, and I thought that might do. But we only go there in the summertime so I have no photos of it in snow. 

So this is sort of a combined picture taken from three sources: 

1) A photo of the barn and edge of the farmhouse shed - but at high noon, so a flattish light and no shadows.

2) A plein air painting I did of almost identical scene, done in the green of August, but in late afternoon with long shadows.

3) A photo of a cabin in the snow from the Wetcanvas RIL

So I merged those three and used:

1) The vantage point of number one

2)  The long afternoon shadows of two

3) The snow and snow-covered trees of three

And the above is what I wound up with! It's done on Art Spectrum Colourfix, the standard 9x12 sheet, but the picture is just 8x10 as that's the size frame I have for it,  and I'll give it to Patty for Christmas.

Christmas Cardinal

For the last few years, since I took up pastels, I have painted a picture to use for my own Christmas cards, which I have made myself. Choosing a subject is always the first step, of course. Now I happen to love birds, and bird-watching is another hobby of mine. I have feeders in my yard, which is a certified Wilfdlife Habitat, and I count birds every winter for Cornell University's Project Feeder Watch. So my card last year was a bird (a Carolina wren which can be seen here after I had Photoshopped it a bit) and I wanted to do a bird again this year.

This past Sunday was my first day home from my Thanksgiving trip to NC, and I woke early to find it snowing. The snow quickly turned to rain, but it remained raw and rainy all day. The birds were out in force though, since I had topped off my feeders upon my return home. I had at least 6 cardinals. I think even the female cardinals, with their more subtle colors, are lovely, but of course the bright red males really stand out cheerily in the grays of winter. No wonder they feature on so many Christmas cards.

Well now I'll join the pack I guess, LOL. This is from a photo I took on Sunday, where one of the male cardinals posed so perfectly me on the dogwood branch. As soon as I uploaded the photo to my PC and saw how it had turned out I knew I'd found my Christmas card picture, and was finally able to paint it last night after finishing my Amaryllis picture in art class. I'll still need to Photoshop a border, and see if I need anything else for it.

He's done (like most all of my recent pictures) on a 9x12 sheet of rose gray Art Spectrum Colourfix paper. Once you get using Colourfix regularly it's hard to go back to Canson, although I still like the larger Canson size better.

Amaryllis

This is from art class tonight, and the plant is absolutely fake, LOL. But it sure looked pretty real. As Christina said, real flowers are wonderful, but they make fake ones these days that look almost as good as real, and you can take as much time to paint one as you want, without any worries about fading or wilting!

However I'm still speedy Gonzales, so probably would have no worries about painting live flowers. I only spent 90 minutes on this one. But it did look quite real, and the reds in it were lovely. I had a lot of fun trying to get up-close and personal with the blossoms.

Golden afternoon

I'm not sure about this one yet, might need some more work. But I have less time down here in NC than I thought I would, so I squeezed in about 45 minutes last night after Thanksgiving dinner,  and tried one more from a photo. This is from a photo I took at the Ship Inn, in Milford, NJ, where I had gone to have a meal with my son. It's a restaurant we all enjoy, even though it's quite a ride to get there, but the ride is half the fun. We love to get a window table were we can look out at the stream and watch the ducks. 

Quoddy Light

Here I am in North Carolina for Thanksgiving. It would be great to try some plein air painting here, but I'm staying with my dad, and just no time in the day to spare. But if I wake up early I can paint for an hour in my bedroom. So I brought some photos with me and am working on the idea of trying to use less than ideal photos to create my art. This is not *quite* part of my Canadian maritime series, being in Maine, but very close to the Canadian border. This is from a photo I took years ago when I took my son to see Quoddy Light, the easternmost point in the US.

The day was foggy and overcast, with a very flat light, and no shadows - so my photo is flat and faded too, so it left me free to try to imagine how it would have looked on a bright and sunny day. 

Vase and pears

I'm still in the still life mode it seems, but I do love still lifes too. I feel that with still lifes and landscapes I've found the subjects that are giving me the most fun and pleasure. This one was done, as all my latests paintings have been, on a sheet of 9x12 Art Spectrum Colourfix paper. I bought 20 sheets of the rose gray color from Dick Blick, and it showed up at my house two days later. Now that's service! The Colourfix paper I special ordered at Jerry's weeks ago still has not arrived. But these 20 sheets will last a little while. The size is still a bit smaller than I'm happy with, but the large sheets of Colourfix are too big for me, yet also not easily cutable into sizes I like.

Of course one of the key features of size is that it fit into a standard frame, as I can't afford special-order frames for unusual sizes. And the large Colourfix does not seem to cut up to standard sizes without wastage. So in the meantime I'm learning to love the 9x12, though the 12x16 Canson paper is a size I prefer. I still have plenty of Canson - but it's hard to go back when you get used to the Colourfix!

Harvest Fruit

I've been enjoying, in varying degrees, my landscape kick lately, so I meant to brings my photos to class tonight and work on another landscape. But I got gabbing online with my piffle friends and only just raced out in time to get to class, and forgot the photos!

But Christina had set up the same still life we had had last week. Working from life is always so different from working from photos (though I find both valuable learning tools), and I loved this still life so much. So I had no problem doing it again. I didn't want this to be a clone of last week's painting though, so shifted my focus more to the right. I included things I had cropped out last week, and cropped out things that made it into last week's painting, so I felt I wound up with something new.

In was a fun class and I got to hear a lot of "arty" talk between Christina and one of the other students - all such a foreign world to me. I've never even *been* in an art gallery! They seem like such intimidating places, LOL.

This was done on a sheet of 9x12 rose grey Art Spectrum Colourfix paper.

Tidnish Shore (Maritimes 8)

I had some free time this afternoon, so decided to add to my Maritimes series with a second Nova Scotia picture.  I'm not too thrilled with this one. I like the tree pretty well, but I really struggled with the water and the beach. Everything I did seemed to make it worse, not better. But I finally reached a stopping point and this is it. I'll have to look tomorrow and decide if it's hopeless, or beyond me to fix. 

Bras d'Or Lake, Cape Breton (Maritimes 7)

LOL, yesterday I had the day off, and it was back to landscapes for me. I'm still on my Canadian Maritime kick, and had several reference photos I wanted to try - but I kept saying I needed to get a Nova Scotia painting in there, so that limited my choices. In class Christina had had us working with fairly dull photos and seeing what sort of things we could do to turn them into interesting paintings, and that was fun.

So that's how I chose this ref, from a camping trip to Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island some 20+ years ago when my son was only about 5 or so. We camped one night in a campground on a hillside overlooking Bras d'Or Lake. The ref photo is dark, dull and nondescript, so trying to develop colors was a lot of fun, and I'm not unhappy with how it turned out. It makes me yearn to go back to Cape Breton again!

Autumn Harvest

Well I've been having such a wonderful time working on landscapes lately. I was all ready to continue with that in art class last night, but Christina had such a gorgeous still life set up for us that I could not resist doing that instead. Maybe I'll do a landscape today since I have the day off from work.

But this is the still life from last night - it's done on a sheet of very dark brown 9x12 Colourfix. It's my favorite support although 9x12 is smaller than I really like to work, and there is no intermediary size until you get to the big full sheets which are still too big for me, yet also can't seem to be cut into smaller sizes that I like either - which is why I've mostly stuck with Canson. It comes in a useful size.

However I love the feel of Colourfix and had been using more of it lately, even though my paintings are smaller than I would prefer. And I also loved this setup of fruit, and the colors, and the blue cloth - so enjoyed this last night thought I'm still feeling in a "landscapey" mode mentally.