New York Harbor

I still have this desire to be able to do boats and seascapes, though it is clearly not where my strengths lay. So what to do? Should I just keep trying? Or should I just pick a particular area, like still lifes, and concentrate on that? I love still lifes, but I feel like I'd get bored if I did nothing else. But if I could do the occasional landscape or seascape as well I'd be happy, or even the occasional bird or animal. I guess I want to do it all! LOL, *except* for portraits or figure studies. I truly don't have any interest in doing more of those.

Still lifes feel like my "comfort zone". Landscapes and seascapes are both a struggle. Water eludes me, as do trees. I guess I really should take the suggestions made to me and try to look at and copy some of the masters, to get a feel for how they did it.

But it's a hot muggy and quiet day here in NJ. I'll be busy this week - work of course, and then out every evening. Monday is the opening reception for the "Partners in Pastel" art show, Tuesday is art class, Wednesday is a birthday dinner for my niece, Thursday is choir rehearsal, and Friday a birthday dinner for my son!

So I took advantage of the afternoon lull and spent about 2 hours on this painting. I used as a reference a photo I took from the Staten Island ferry a few years ago.

Sad Susans

I had a wonderful class at Christina's house on Tuesday night. She has a great studio set-up which can accomodate up to about 9 students I would say. She had several still lifes set up and I chose to do this one. But even though she said it was fresh the poor black-eyed susans had gotten all droopy and dejected looking.

This is not one of my fave paintings but we can't hit a home run every time. It was fun just for the experience of being in Christina's studio and meeting several of her other students. They all seem to be so "tuned in" to the art community and art shows and art events - things I'm pretty much clueless about.

Point Pleasant

I love pics of the ocean, seashore, boats, etc. They just call to my spirit somehow, but it's not something I'm good at producing myself, Water, especially, just terrifies me and seems impossible. But I've been inspired lately by a few paintings posted by Joni from Wetcanvas, and wanted to give it a whirl. I'll never get anywhere with painting water if I never try to paint any, right?

So this is done from a ref. photo I took about a year ago when I was down in Point Pleasant, NJ. I spent a couple hours on it this afternoon. I'm still quite a novice at this sort of painting, but I did have fun doing it, and each time I work on water I hope I'll learn something.

Applegate Farm

I'm just a "paintin' fool" this weekend. I had such fun with my 'Montclair Farmer's Market' painting that I decided I had to do a second one. But not having to work Monday makes me feel more relaxed and less anxious about getting all my chores done.

I've always loved nighttime and twilight paintings and have yearned to try my hand at them. I did one earlier this summer up in Canada of our farmhouse in New Brunswick and had fun with that. But I've wanted to try more.

Last night a friend and I went to Applegate Farm, a local place that makes their own ice cream and is quite a local institution. We had a coupon for 'buy 1 cone, get 1 free" so went to get a cone, along with hundreds of other people, alas.

I had my camera with me, and took a photo of the place which appealed to me, so I decided I had to try to paint it!

This is my usual 12x16 Canson, smooth side, NuPastels, Rembrants and Unisons. I spent a *long* time on this by my standards - two hours non-stop, which is just about an eternity for me - about my limit I think, .

Montclair Farmer's Market

I didn't get to the Farmer's market this weekend, but I've enjoyed going there earlier in the summer. I hope to get apples there too as we head into the fall. But I was there earlier this month when the first of the tomatoes were appearing, and had to take a few pictures of them.

One of my goals for Labor Day weekend was to paint at least one picture - and this juicy tomato reference photo from earlier this month just seemed like something I wanted to try.

Purple Heart

Wednesday night I got back to art class! I did miss it on vacation. Sadly this was the last session for the summer. But it was great to see Christina again and everyone else in the class. I'm hoping to take a class with her at her home studio this fall. But in the meantime she had this wonderful yellow jug and floral arrangement to attempt. I had a great time doing it.

Window Glass

This was my last picture from my farm vacation. We have several interesting glass bottles that line the windowsill in the dining room, so I decided to try to capture a few of them.

Admittedly the bottles look a bit wonky - but we'll just call them hand-blown glass and let it go at that, LOL.

The Hummingbird Feeder

While I was cleaning stuff up at the farm I discovered a little hummingbird feeder that had belonged to my mom years ago, and I could not resist making up a sugar-water solution and hanging it from the front porch. Within a day we had hummers! I was happy to watch them on and off all day long, so finally had to paint them as well.

I did take a little artistic license here, as I only ever saw females and/or juveniles - who don't have the red throat of the male. But I gave this hummer a red throat as I thought it tied in nicely with the red from the feeder.

Beach Treasures

One of the things we love to do at the farm is stroll along the beach at low tide. There are lots of sandbars that appear, rippled in long lines, and lots of shells and driftwood and interesting beach artifacts. We enjoy collecting some of the nice specimens to bring home to the farmhouse.We have so many around that it seemed like a good time to give them a painting of their own!

The Kitchen Desk

The kitchen desk is such a hub at the farm. It's painted bright red so pretty unmistakable, and it's the first thing there by the door as you come in. That's where the phone sits, and where we do all our paperwork. So I finally decided that I needed to try to do a picture of the kitchen desk. No series of farm paintings would be complete without it!

August Wildflowers

One thing I love about the farm is being able to just go out into the fields and pick wonderful bouquets of wildflowers! Usually August is past the height of the best of the wildflowers, but you can still find plenty. I used to have a great book that helped me ID them - but I could not find it this year so was clueless about most of the flowers.

I had a fairly sunny day so decided to pick some flowers to paint. The only ones in this bunch that I could ID were red clover and goldenrod. No idea about the others and this picture does not really give you that great a clue, LOL.

Evening Glow at the farm

I'm on my way home from two weeks up in New Brunswick, Canada at the old farmhouse my family owns. I was there all alone my first week (with three dogs) but my son, daughter-in-law, and her sister came and joined me my second week.

I'd made a vow to do a pastel painting at least every other day, and I managed to do it! Not that they are all masterpieces (LOL, not that *any* of them are). But I did it, and hope to be posting them now that I'm back to the world of broadband. It rained every day my first week there, and so this first painting is more a "wish" - but we did end up having some nice days and evenings the second week.

A Bee and Butterfy feast

I could not think of any imaginative title - not that titles are my strong suit anyway! "Purple Vase"? "Black-eyed Susans"? This is from art class tonight, and the flowers are from Christina's garden. But I have purple coneflowers and black-eyed susans in my own garden, and the bees and butterflies seem to love them.

This was done on my usual Canson, smooth side, a slatey-blue color, 12x16. Mostly NuPastels and Rembrandts and some nameless others.

And a NOTE to update: This painting has now been *sold*. Hope it's happy in its new home, where it will join a previous painting of mine.

White Pitcher - Hugging the Lemon - Sunset

In the workshop today we mostly experimented with different supports, and different assignments, working on color concepts. This one was done on a Richeson support - a fairly roughish sanded sort of surface, and a very thick, hard board. The assignment was to do a white pitcher using*no* whites or grays or blacks in the pitcher (though you could use white for one or two highlights at the very end). And this was my pitcher.

Then just a chance to experiment on a very TINY piece of LaCarte paper. We were supposed to work with complementary colors as underpaintings and then build up layers of color to what you wanted - and I just lined up a few fruit to give it a try.

For the last project she suggested I look in her Best of Pastels book, pick out a landscape I liked, and just try to copy a fraction of it - so this is my version of the top left quarter of one of the landscapes in the book!

Barnegat Light

Well might as well post my other picture from my workshop today. For the last third of our workshop today Christina did a demo with a watercolor underpainting. She did it on a support she called "pastel canvas". Funny, pastel canvas is something I've never heard of before. But she had a book for us to look at called "Best of Pastels 2", with some gorgeous works in it, and at least 2 of them said they were done on pastel canvas.

Hmmm. anyway .... so she then gave us each a small piece to try, so we could do our own watercolor underpainting, and then pastel on top. Mine is from a photo of NJ's Barnegat Light. I've never done a watercolor underpainting before, and the canvas support was quite rough and did not take blending or layering very well, so it was interesting to work with. It did take *some* layers - but I could not achieve the smoothness I like, which I get with Canson. Though as I added more layers it got a bit better. I'm not sure this would be a support of choice though - but good to try new things, and the watercolor underpainting was rather fun.

This is also only about 6x9 inches, far smaller than my comfort zone. Christina also pointed out to me that I apparently was going for the 'leaning tower of Pisa" effect. I didn't even see it until she pointed it out! I did my best to correct it, but there was not much that could be done with this support - so mostly I just had to accept it and move on. But this was a fun experiment

Copper Pot and Fruit

I had signed up for a weekend workshop with Christina Debarry this weekend. There were only 5 enrolled in the class. But 2 dropped out at the last minute, and 1 just never showed up. So there were only 2 of us in the class! Wow, it was like having your own private workshop. The other woman had never done any pastels before. But we started out with a still life - and lo and behold it was my old friend the copper pot from Wednesday night class.

But this time we had some fruit added to the comp. Christina just let me work at my own pace while she went over a lot of pastel basics with the other woman. But it was interesting to listen in as I worked. So this was what I managed for the beginning of the class, though I got interrupted a few times - first with a trip to the dentist for an abcessed tooth and second with a call from work, so I didn't get quite as much time with this as I would have liked.

NOTE: This painting has been sold!

Copper Pot

Christina is working on a little series on "metals" with us, and gave us a demo tonight on doing copper. Then we were on our own to try this copper pot and flowers. I'm not sure it looks "coppery" but it was fun to try it out. She says next week we will try silver!

On the way home I stopped at the Montclair Art Museum to visit Alex Piccirillo's class. Alex has had a rough time, but he's feeling better now and was looking good. The class was busy working on a nude model. LOL, I adore Alex, but all I could think was how happy I was with my pots and flowers rather than doing more nudes.

Getting a Round Tuit

This was done on Canson, and already multiple layers there - so hard to add any more. But I wanted to de-emphasize the background to make the vase more prominent, so I worked on that last night and reached this point. Not a prize-winner, but I'm happier with than I was after class on Wednesday night.

Rushing Around

Art class was a bit of a rush last night. I didn't get there until 7:20 PM which meant I had only a little over an hour to accomplish anything. The luscious still life set up with dozens of flowers of all different colors was *way* too complicated for a mere hour. But this little cute round vase with a single flower in it was set up also, so I decided I could spend my hour on that. It was still not enough though. I'm not very happy with the flower, and the background fabric detracts from the vase - but this is where I got to at the end of my hour. Maybe I'll see if I can mess with the background, and maybe I'll be less disappointed in it.

Pewter Pot

This is from last week's art class, so I figured I'd better get it uploaded before tomorrow! Michelle asked if I really liked fruit better than flowers? Well I like flowers in and of themselves, but I much prefer to *paint* fruit - they are just more fun, sort of senuous and rounded.

But in this case we had a pewter tankard filled with gorgeous hydrangeas - but I just loved the tankard and could not fit both the pot and the flowers in without having to work too small - so I chose the pot and lopped off the flowers at the top!

The flowers were pretty though, and beautifully backlit. But the little bit I did was enough for me. My friend Lynne from Canada liked this picture well enough to want to *buy* it though! Now I just have to get it packaged to ship.

Honeydew

Not much to say about this one - another from a few weeks ago before my crazy trips to NC. It was fun, though, and I do love fruit more than flowers. LOL.

Off Shackleford Banks

This is just a quickie (about 45 minutes) done on a not so great support - a 16x20 piece of mat board, so not much tooth, and a grainy texture I didn't like, like the "bumpy" side of Canson. But I had a little free time and decided to play with my Pan Pastels - which I have tried a little, but not been crazy about them other than as an undercoating medium.

But in this case the whole picture was done with Pan Pastels. I guess I was influenced by all the cloud pix I've seen people posting at Wetcanvas, . This is done from a photo I took a week ago Saturday when I was down in NC, and my sister and BiL took me for a ride in their new boat.

Of course I *still* can't do water, but I yearn to be able to! Not really sure how I feel about the Pan Pastels either, but I'm still trying.

Red Roses

I'm so behind in keeping this blog up to date, but things have been crazy in my life, and I've been having to rush off and make lots of trips to NC to see my dad, and other things have just fallen by the wayside. . I've had to miss a lot of classes too, and not gotten to do anything in my personal time. But there are a few pictures from lessons past that I never got posted, and now that I'm starting a new summer session I hope to have more. This is one from a few weeks ago, as I try to catch up. I still a not crazy about doing flowers, but it's a different challenge from doing the human figure at least. :-)

Last Hurrah

It's my last hurrah for figure studies that is, I hope. Last night was the last class for my "Expressionism" class -which was half still lifes and half figure studies. This last night we had another figure - but I was trying for a bit of an abstract feel to it rather than representational. That makes the figures a bit more of interest to me.

So now I'm moving on, doing more still lifes I hope, and maybe even more landscapes when I grow up. I see my dear teacher Alex Piccirillo is teaching his evening class again this summer, and I love Alex, but just can't take another figure study class, at least not right now. I'll stay with my classes with Christina Debarry, and give figures a rest, a *long* rest I hope! But this is the last one from last night.

A basket of veggies

In art class on Wednesday we had a choice between a vase of peonies or a basket of vegetables. The peonies were utterly gorgeous, but flowers are not usually my first choice. I much prefer veggies. These were much more fun to do. The dark eggplant looks pretty black in the photo, but it's really dark maroons, purples and blues.