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.

Developments in Grandchildren's Artwork

Maddie, age 4, has moved into representational art, as seen by the following works:

The Beach -- you can see palm tree, ocean, sun, and sand

Giraffe

Ryan, age 22 months, continues with abstract expressionism:

He recently made a move towards representation:

"The Aunts" Series

Aunts at a Picnic

Today, for the first time, I tried Ruth Ellen Hoag's method of using india ink to do her drawing onto watercolor paper and then painting over it. I actually had a transparent abstract underpainting already in place when I painted with the india ink, and I left some of the transparent colors when I painted over the ink with mostly opaque watercolors. 


This is part of a series of paintings I have done based on a photograph taken of my five paternal aunts at a picnic in 1945 at Garfield Park in Indianapolis. In this one, Aunt Helen got left out, leaving Margaret, Ruth, Dottie, and Lucile (holding the baby).

Christopher Schink Workshop 2012

Just returned from a three day workshop with my all-time favorite teacher, Christopher Schink, along with some wonderful friends. It was held at Sylvia Megerdichian’s Art Box Studio in Upland. The majority of people in the workshop are accomplished artists, so it was a bit intimidating. However, I had the good fortune to sit next to Ruth Ellen Hoag, whose work I greatly admire. I had already begun to experiment with black lines, so watching her take it farther with india ink was inspiring.

The title of this year’s workshop was “Designing Figures and Shapes.” As artists, Toph says, we need to develop our own graphic language  (form) to convey our intent, ideas, and emotions (content). This workshop focused on using shapes and figures to convey the content. Toph encouraged us to regard the figure as just another shape, as an element to be incorporated into our overall design.

In order to get us to attend to the figure as a designable shape, our first exercise was to do two or three paintings of the same subject with different types of distortion or stylization. Here are my three.

Next Toph taught us about arranging figures in pictorial space as an important part of the design process. One thing to consider is the “background” or “negative space.” The figure always seems so important, but the background must be designed with just as much care as the figure. It should also have interesting shapes, along with the same type of painting treatment as the figure. OR we can make the figure really large, eliminating most of the background as an issue.

Here is my attempt to integrate figure and background into an overall design:

I think I prefer this attempt to make the figure very large:

As Toph kept reminding us, paintings done in workshops are PRACTICE, and when you first try something new, it will probably not be very good. I will try these ideas again and incorporate what I’ve learned. 

Thanks, Toph!

Using My Computer

Artists need to learn to self evaluate. I can look at someone else’s painting and immediately tell what needs to be done to improve it, but it annoys me no end that I cannot do this for my own paintings. It helps to look at them different ways, which is the reason for the advice to evaluate with a mat. Other ways include looking at them upside down, looking at them in a mirror, and looking at them upside down in a mirror. These different perspectives of your own paintings can help you see more clearly what needs to be improved.

For me, taking a photo of my painting and looking at it on my computer makes faults glaringly obvious. I don’t know why, but problems just show up more clearly on the computer. In addition, you can change it to a black and white picture and check the values. By taking a photo, looking at it on the computer, fixing whatever bothers me, and doing this several times, I can end up with an interesting series of photos of the evolution of a painting.

And now I can see something that still bothers me -- that added red blob on the left does not look right. Back to the drawing board (well, painting table).


Actually, a lot of it bothered me, so I changed it to this, a couple of days later:

My "Studio"

Sometimes people are interested in how other artists arrange to paint and work.

Here are photos of where I paint and draw inspiration. My studio is 1/2 of our "great room," with sky lights, and views of the back garden, where we have native plants and a bamboo forest. This room feels airy, light, and spacious. I have several tables and storage units on wheels that can be moved around as needed. My paint supplies and computer are always at hand. My workspace is generally neat.

I also have a little "art room" that serves as grandchildren playroom and guest room as well. It has a closet and cabinets to store more art supplies and books. There are narrow shelves along one wall where I can put paintings I am working on or thinking about. Barbara Nechis says we should put paintings we are working on out where we can see them, so we can get used to them, since we have "never seen them before." Another wall has paintings I have collected over the years by my favorite well known artists, such as Christopher Schink, Skip Lawrence, Barbara Nechis, Tom Fong, and Linda Kemp, and they serve as inspiration.

At last!

FINALLY, I got into a National Watercolor Society show! The NWS Member Show will be April 5 through May 13, with the reception April 15, 2 to 5, at the NWS gallery in San Pedro. The gallery address is 915 S. Pacific Ave, San Pedro. This is what was accepted by Juror Glen Knowles:

"At Last!"

The Heart of a Flower

Trying to apply recently explored concepts, I did a very loose, spontaneous underpainting that looked flowery. With the flower theme in mind, I defined a few petal-like edges (the whiff of reality) and tried to create a color dominance that the underpainting lacked. I actually like the resulting nonobjective painting that feels like flowers, though it depicts no real flower that I've ever seen.

A Whiff of Reality

As noted in “Issues with Shape,” an earlier post, teachers have said that I define or articulate too much, I am too descriptive, I leave no mystery. They urge me to try to define as little as possible. One would think I could do this, given that I was a psychologist and perfectly familiar with Gestalt theory. This theory posits that we are hard-wired to perceive certain shapes and that we will “see” them even if they are not there. For example, what is this?

                                                            *

                                                      *          *

Most people have no trouble seeing this as a triangle, when it fact, it is just three asterisks. We innately try to see shapes, and WE complete the gestalt of the triangle without it being actually completed or articulated. We only need a hint to guess what something is.

I keep trying to paint interesting, nonobjective shapes with soft edges, and then I try to define the subject with as little description as possible, just “a whiff of reality” as Christopher Schink told me. I had some success with “Flamenco!” seen below in the January 18 post.  You can see lost edges throughout this painting, and only the head, arm, hand, hip, and waist are defined.