Adventures with Adhesives

I decided I didn't like the painting in the last post. It looked too much like a Halloween witch and not enough like an anxious Grandma. So I took another painting I didn't care for ("Vessels of Memory 2") and made a watercolor collage out of them. I tore them into vague mountain shapes. I had a seascape in mind, and I had to paint some pieces I ended up needing. One of the really fun things about collage is that you can tear or cut out a shape you think you need and then lay it on the painting and see how it looks and move it somewhere else and see how it looks there and even change the shape.

One of the really awful things about collage (at least for me, the neatnik) is the stuff you have to use to stick the pieces together or onto the mount. My pal Jessie and I went to Staples and investigated all the possibilities for adhesion they had. I bought a bunch and tried them all, but rejected most for being too messy (got all over me and all over my stuff) or too smelly (rubber cement) or too expensive (it required $7 worth of permanent glue tape to affix just a few pieces, though it adhered really well).  I ended up sticking with good old glue stick. We will see if it really can permanently hold the big heavy pieces on.

Green Flash

Can  you see the old painting in there? (Hint -- look at the right side of the old painting and then at the top of the collage.)

Carrying the Baby Downstairs

This may not be a great painting, but it really captures how I feel when I carry the baby downstairs, clutching baby and bannister with all my strength.

Taking the Baby Downstairs

Tight and Loose

Today I saw a photo of a group of actors that caught my attention, and I decided to paint three of them. The painting turned out too tight, because I cared too much about my drawing. To loosen up, I used one of my granddaughter's creations as inspiration and just put paint to paper. If the goal of painting is to have fun, both did the trick.

The Stage Director

Painting Like a Four-Year-Old

Another Aunts Painting

The show is down, so I feel a little sad. I sold a dozen paintings, so I guess it was a success. The best pick-me-up is to paint, so I did another painting of my aunts at their 1945 picnic. I used masque pen to create some white lines, though I ended up covering most of them up. With this painting I learned that masque pen takes practice, especially to get different widths of line, and that the lines are more successful if they do not surround a shape, but emphasize it in some other way.

Aunts at a Picnic 2

The Judy and Carrol Show

For the last year, artist Carrol Wolf and I have been planning and preparing for our two woman show at the Corner Gallery in the Huntington Beach Central Library for the month of September 2012. Here are some photos, taken by Dan Kee, of the day we hung the show.

The Show Postcard

Loading the Car

Unloading

Beginning to Hang

Extra Paintings

Self Portraits of Self Portraits

The "Owie"

My two-year-old grandson fell and cut his head, and of course he had to have a bandaid. He looked so sad that I had to take a photo and then make a painting. I tried to capture how he looked so hurt, physically hurt but also psychologically hurt, even betrayed, from learning that painful things can happen to good little boys like him.

Grandchildren Art

Got to paint with my granddaughter and grandson (separately) in the last couple of weeks. It is clear that Ryan, age 27 months, has a concept when he paints. He makes a shape and tries to color it all in, and if I ask him if he is ready for a new color, he says, "Not yet." He also has definite color preferences and did not like yellow ochre ("I not like"). Here is one of his creations:

Maddie, who will be 5 in late November, paints more like a typical 4-year-old. The following painting shows her in front of her new school. She starts transitional kindergarten at a public school next week, and the dark cloud above her head suggests that she is a little anxious about it.

And here is a charming mixed media piece depicting her family by their house:

Trying Another One

The painting I did called "Dancing in My Red Dress" was published in a magazine and sold almost the day I painted it, so I thought I'd try another one. I used the same pouring technique with similar colors, then brought out the dancer with negative painting. It looked a little dull, and I recalled advice (from Steve Fleming) recently published in The Palette Magazine to "put in something that doesn't belong." To this warm, intense, orange, red, and turquoise painting of a dancer in a swirling dress I put in a cool, pale, violet, opaque high heel. Naturally the painting is called, "Kicking Up Your Heels." There are still some things about it that bother me, so it isn't quite done, but here it is:

And in case you can't remember the earlier one, here it is:

Finished My Other Blog

Today I completed my "Painting a Day NOT" blog, which you can see by clicking here.  Posted there are the half dozen paintings that I like from the 50-plus I have painted so far in 2012.


We just got back from two weeks in Alaska, and you can see some photos by clicking here. My mind is now full of beautiful images that may lead to a painting in future.


There will probably be little painting done in the near future, since it is time to begin preparing for the show that Carrol Wolf and I will have in the Corner Gallery in Huntington Beach during the month of September. There is a great deal of work to be done, from designing postcards to matting and framing, and posts about the WORK of art are all I am likely to do. It was certainly fun making the paintings for the show!

Having Fun (The Main Reason to Paint)

Though I have been painting a lot (over 35 paintings since this year began), I haven't really liked most of them. Yesterday I decided just to have fun by starting with one of my old style, impulsive, throw-paint-all-over underpaintings on an 18 x 24 piece of 300 pound cold press paper. After it dried, I did a self-portrait on top in less than an hour. I had fun and I like the result. You can see it on my other blog by clicking here. (At the June meeting of the Huntington Beach Art League, it won Best of Show.)

It is EASY to change watercolor paintings!

It is often said that watercolor is a difficult medium, because once it's down, it's down and impossible to change. That is simply not true. Many corrections can be made with transparent paints, and many more can be be made with opaque watercolors. Often people ask me if I use gouache, but I don't. The main difference between gouache and watercolor paint is the size of the color particles in the paint, with the particles in gouache being ground to a larger size than those of watercolor. I use opaque watercolors, but they are still watercolors and they can be made transparent with the addition of lots of water. 


I have been experimenting with the use of India ink lines in my paintings, and I did one recently that I finally decided I didn't like. Today I tried to remove most of the India ink lines, something I used to think was impossible. I have at least reduced their impact in the overall painting, and I now like it better. 

Our Hope with lines

Our Hope with lines reduced

Shapes

It seems that I have learned to make interesting shapes. Now I need to learn to make them beautiful as well.

At the NWS Show

Dan took a photo of me by my painting at the National Watercolor Society All Members Show.

The Palette Magazine

Just received my recent issue (#41) of  The Palette Magazine and there I am on page 23! The article includes Fecundity and Dancing in My Red Dress and describes the best advice and lessons I have received from fellow artists over the years.

From Underpainting to Grand Canyon

Inspired by our recent trip to the incredible Grand Canyon, I decided to paint my impressions of the trillions of years of layers that made that amazing place onto the underpainting I recently posted. It already had many wet-on-wet layers, and I added many more wet-on-wet and some wet-on-dry layers. I am fairly satisfied that it expresses my intention. It has an ancient, layered Grand Canyon feeling to it.

While I felt OK about this painting, I knew it was inadequate, because as Milford Zornes once said, "You can't paint the Grand Canyon." Then I found out that he DID paint the Grand Canyon, and so I tried to copy one of his paintings to see how he did it.  You can see how that turned out  by clicking here.

Layering Wet-on-Wet

While painting with Maddie, I decided to experiment with layering washes wet-on-wet. In the first one, I started with green, then blue, then violet, then orange, back to blue, etc, for many layers, and then I dropped pink and orange in over and over to watch them crawl. The second one has only five layers, and because it was painted vertically on Strathmore Aquarius II paper, a lot of the paint slid off. Still, you can get some beautiful, subtle, glowing, deep colors this way. I have been thinking a lot about what to make of this underpainting.

Vessels of Memory 2

Today I felt like doing a nonobjective painting, based on a new distorted grid. I worked on the grid quite a while and was fairly pleased with it. Then I painted it with earth colors and some orange and purple and green. I was not pleased with it. I tried to analyze what I didn't like about it, and I decided that it was too busy, with too many small, broken up shapes, that the colors were rather garish, and finally, it did not seem to express anything. Skip Lawrence says that when paintings fail, the most common reason is because the artist forgot his or her expressive intent, and I think that's happened here. I was intending to do something peaceful, and I got so involved in the painting that I even quit following the grid and just threw paint on. It was fun at the time, but the results were not thrilling. So I looked at some paintings by Katherine Chang Liu for inspiration and got some opaque watercolors and started covering things up, trying to create bigger shapes, with more variety of size. Now I think  it expresses peacefulness; I like how the colors of the underpainting show through and create variation of color within shapes; and I like the India ink line.  

Distorted grid

This became the underpainting.

The Resulting Painting

The Aunts Photo

This is the photograph that inspired my series of paintings of "The Aunts." It was taken at a big family picnic in Garfield Park in Indianapolis in 1945. Since I wish someone had written the names of the people on the back, I am going to try to identify everyone according to my best guess. Left to right, Hope (Brown) Todd, my mother; hidden behind her, Helen (Todd) Huehls, holding Mark Huehls; behind the man on the ground, me and my dad, William Ross Todd; the man on the ground is either Lloyd Huehls or Marshall Todd, and the children in front of him may be Bobby McColgin and David Ford; next to him, also on the ground, Margaret Todd, Marshall's wife; woman hidden behind her, unknown; woman in white dress, Ruth (Todd) McColgin; Dottie Todd, who was named Gertrude, I think, and later married a man with the last name of Edwards; and last, Lucile (Todd) Ford, holding Bill Ford.

Re-Doing an Old Painting

Today I took a not very thrilling old painting from my Krumpers series and added india ink and tons of paint. This time, I think the second painting is much better. 

I think I am done with this series. I have said all I have to say about krumpers.

First Place, Hooray!

The painting from "The Aunts Series" that I posted on March 2, won first place in mixed media at the Huntington Beach Art League meeting last night.