I’d like to thank all of you who have been following me during this challenge and giving encouragement. It’s so cool when I hear from someone else who is excited to see what I’ll post next, a growing number of you are waiting for a piece that speaks to you … and I’m amazed at how fast some of the paintings have sold. In a situation like this, not every painting is going to be a home run, but when it is, you just know.
And those paintings have sold within 2 minutes of me posting on Facebook! I’ve been posting all different times though, depending on when I’m done, so if you don’t want to miss out on a painting you love, you can sign up to receive my blog posts by e-mail, that way you’ll be seeing it even before I post the link to Facebook.
The painting above, is on the same size gessoboard as Red Ixora, I was thinking of starting a small series. I’m out of that type & size board though – and I really prefer to work on canvas – I have to make time to go to the art supply store soon, to see what strikes my fancy. I had a really hard time packaging up Red Ixora & shipping it off to its new home in England … I’ve grown quite fond of it. There are beautiful areas in the painting that I never could have planned, that’s the pay-off for painting the spontaneous way I do, letting the work evolve through layers of paint.
I’m spending more time on each painting than I’d thought I would, so I’ve had to let go of some of my regular chores & activities. I looked up from the easel today, past the pile of paperwork & art supplies that I’m growing on my desk, to my potted plants in front the window … and I’ve lost the poinsettia! It hasn’t had red leaves for the last 2 years, but now I’ve lost track of when last I’ve watered it, & what leaves it does have left are curling up & falling off! I don’t have a green thumb … unless you count green paint!
I really appreciate the feedback from those of you who are enjoying reading my thoughts. If you have any questions, topics you’d like me to talk about, please comment on the post or e-mail & I’ll reply.
This is a pastel study for the painting I’m going to work on today. I did it on watercolour paper, primed with clear gesso. It was prepared by Clarence Porter for the pastel class I took from him at the Art Gallery of Hamilton last Spring. One of the reasons I signed up for the class was that he provided a wide variety of materials for us to work with, so that we could find out what we liked best, before investing.
I already had a small collection of pastels from taking figure drawing classes at University, but usually we just sketched with them, using a couple of colours. I was interested in trying them out for painting plein air (outdoors), especially in the summer because although acrylics is my preferred medium, they dry up in the heat very fast. Clarence went over some pastel basics, demonstrating a few techniques. One thing that I learned is that when you’re doing a painting rather than just a sketch, it is important to start with your darkest darks, and then get progressively lighter. It also helps to work on a support (paper etc) that has a lot of tooth (deep dips) because as you blend in more colours the dips get filled up with pastel and you just can’t grind any more in without making a mess. .
The other thing that was so different to acrylics was I couldn’t just mix to get the colour I wanted. That was a bit frustrating and if I were regularly painting from life with pastels, I would want a much larger selection of colours to capture what I saw. On the flip side, that frustration actually highlights one of my biggest strengths as an artist – developed over more than 20 years of looking at the world through the eyes of an artist and creating artwork – my sense of colour.
I’m exhausted, my eyes keep closing as I write this, I went down the rabbit hole on this painting. I knew yesterday before I started on it that I was already drained & and I should rest first, but I had several things to do first, and then I had a second wave of energy. I think now it must be some sort of adrenaline that kicks in, because I went till 5am on this painting, slept till 10 am and still put in another 2 hrs this morning.
My older boy tried to remind me, “Mom it is supposed to be a fast painting, not your best painting”. But there’s this thing that grips me, an obsession I guess, this thought that maybe I’ll get it in the next few strokes. So much can change in a few strokes. Changing the colour or the shape of something can make everything click into place & redeem the time spent.
The way I paint by blocking in colour and then pushing & pulling to build up the forms, then refining – as opposed to doing a drawing and then adding paint to it – means that I need to think through the paint, I can’t just dial it in. Or else the painting will be overworked, instead of fresh & loose. The key is to work smarter, not harder.
The problem is that when you’re overtired, your brain is impaired & it’s harder to see your way out of the spiral. Not that I was actually feeling tired at the time, but I was on autopilot. I had my headphones on, watching some series on Netflicks while I painted. It’s a bad habit I’ve picked up from my weekly sessions at a friend’s studio where she plays movies for background noise. Usually it works well for us, but I’ve been cheating & watching movies & shows I haven’t seen before, which means I’m not concentrating enough on my work. Confession time.
I have family stuff to do today, so I am going to post an older work tomorrow so that I can try and get back on track. I need to recharge my batteries so that I can start tomorrow’s painting full of energy and excitement.
Ixora is the name of a tropical flowering bush, the flowers come in many hues but I think red is the most common. I really enjoyed painting this one, I was very much in my comfort zone. On the other hand, I did spend way too long (about 10 hrs) … adjusting & adjusting! And to be honest I could keep going a little longer. So in that sense, the “daily painting experiment” is not really working out for me, I cannot keep up this pace indefinitely. My usual ideal painting schedule is to alternate long painting days with non-painting/recovery days. I will have to try setting a time limit on the next painting.
There were three arts events (in three different cities locally) that I really would have liked to attend last night, but I chose to stay in and paint. Each year as I meet more people and get more involved in the arts community, there are more events that I have to miss & although it may be a relief to make the decision when the drive is long or the weather is bad, the guilt and feeling of missing out lingers on for too long. Still, carving out the time to paint – something that many artists struggle with – is a necessity for a professional artist. Actually it’s easy to keep working at the easel & neglect everything else, though the marketing has to be done because making an income from our art allows us to continue doing the work we love, the hard part is in also prioritizing health and relationships.
How are you doing with this balancing act? Artist or not, I think this is something we all struggle with … the holy grail of life … trying to have it all.
There is just something about a random rooster crowing at any old time of the day that reminds me of growing up in the Caribbean. Watching a mother hen crossing the road followed by a long string of chicks. I’ve photographed several “wild” chickens spontaneously – while out on a photoshoot or just running errands – just pecking away in a garden or in all sorts of unexpected places. It is such a common sight, the soundtrack to everyday life in certain parts of the world … completely alien in others.
This painting is based on a snapshot I took of a rooster in the courtyard of the Pink Plantation House Restaurant in St. Lucia, owned by some good friends of mine, and a favourite place to hang out with a camera. Honestly, I could probably live there for three months and paint something new & beautiful on the grounds each day!
I don’t think I’ve painted in oils for about fifteen years, and the experience has confirmed that acrylic paint is best suited to my personality and way of working. The worst thing about oils for me, is the best thing about it for oil painters, it takes forever to dry! Oil paint somehow gets EVERYWHERE … I’ve had to wipe it off my laptop, my camera, my headphones, my chair, not to mention my face, hair & hands, the paint on the easel & rug are standard and at least it’ll wash out of the clothes. Several times I’d rub the board by accident and smudge the painting, once it actually fell on the floor and I ended up repainting much of it, which is why I spent so long on it. Time to donate my oil paints I think.
Anyway this snapshot just entrigues me, a moment frozen in time, there’s a narrative here that I keep coming back to. As you’ll see in the photo below, I have painted it before in acrylics … 11″x14″ … but it was at a time when I was doing a series of more detailed, more realistic close-ups of flowers, and it didn’t make sense. I tried to push it further by painting the subject larger & looser, but stopped at the point you see here because I realized I was on the wrong track. If I had had the outlet of selling daily paintings online, I would have known that the initial painting was enough.
Chicken challenge, Donna Grandin studio 2011
At the time, I hadn’t embraced the fact that along with my more serious “gallery” work, I could also follow my own creative sidetracks, even if I knew they were going to be dead ends (single paintings, slightly off my artistic path). I looked at it as a waste of resources, instead of seeing it as full-filling my own artistic needs, and I didn’t know how to live with it lying around as a reminder of my foolishness, so I destroyed it. Now I look back & I have a folder of “experiments” that only exist as digital images.
And I realize that following that kernel of curiosity about a subject, and living a life where I am open to – and actively seek – inspiration from my day, is more important to me as an artist than boxing my artistic self/production into a single grandiose theme.
Authenticity is often its own reward. But the image below is a painting I did in 2000 (under my maiden name, Gomez), of another rooster … I see I called it Lonely Rooster, but it probably should just have been Lone Rooster. It was from another – similar – snapshot, and I followed my gut, even when my Dad called from St. Lucia to say the package had arrived, and “is the painting of the grass finished?”. Despite his misgivings, he took it in to the gallery for me … two days later a visitor from New York bought it. I’m not sure it comes across in this photo due to the glare, but the green grass was seductive, and I think the painting says a little something about carving out a little bit of space for oneself. Space to breathe deep in the fresh air, lazy days punctuated by the crowing of a random rooster .
Lonely Rooster, 11″x14″, acrylic on canvas, Donna Gomez (Grandin), 2000. Sold
Today I got carried away working on the painting I started yesterday, and I prefer to photograph it in natural light tomorrow morning. So, I’m posting this little painting I did in June 2011. It is currently in St. Lucia, but can be shipped internationally. E-mail me if you have questions.
Recently, people have referred to me as a flower painter, or a floral painter and it doesn’t sit well with me. Sure, there are lots of flowers in my portfolio, certainly in the last five years, but the flower (or even the foliage, which I favour) itself isn’t the point of the painting. If it were, I would regularly go to the florist & buy the most beautiful version of the flower I wanted to paint, and paint from life.
For me , painting – like writing down my thoughts – is a way of observing life, in the pursuit of insight. An important theme underlying most of my art is the search for identity through landscape painting. Some artists value imagination & innovation above all else … their aim is to create something that has never been seen or done before, others view art as a tool for persuasion … social commentary & opinion. Those are very important aspects of art, and why art is so important to cultures all over the world, through time.
My drive as an artist though, has more to do with the desire for discovery than anything else. This is evident through all stages of my creative process … the first tug comes when I see something that moves/excites me. In our world of excess, desensitization and stress, the moments of true joy are rare, so I pay attention to those moments. For me, they most often occur in nature, but I don’t have to be alone in a woods next to a babbling brook, or even in a garden, it could be under the skylight in the floral department of my local grocery store, where the light is so magical that it highlights whatever potted plant they place on the little ledge and I always have to stop for a few moments & stare.
Those are the simple things that inspire me – shadows creating interesting patterns, back-lit leaves and petals, coming across a new plant or flower with unique shapes. I love exploring new locations with my camera. I wonder around, shutter happy as I make discoveries. It’s not that I’m a very good photographer – I have a lot to learn about how adjust my camera to get the shot I want in the available light – but I love composing through the lens. For me to capture the true colours though, I’d have to paint plein air.
Which bring me back to this painting, which I did from observation (flower in hand), on a canvas I’d previously textured. Passion flowers are so exotic to me. And I remember taking pictures in the greenhouse in the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, and coming across the vine near the koi pond. There were just a couple flowers, but the vines were so tantalizing, so Art Nouveau, discovering them was the highlight of my day. Every time I go back there I look to see if there are flowers on the vine so I can get a few more pictures. It’s like I said, it’s not about one perfect specimen that’s going to represent all other flowers of its type … it’s about the unique qualities of each individual flower. The combination of the flower itself & the leaves, or vines next to it, and whatever else is in the background. The environment tells the story of that flower, the same way it would in any traditional portrait painting.
For every painting I do in a year, there’s a thousand more digital photos waiting patiently on my computer. When I’m about to start a painting/series of paintings, it can be a daunting task to look through and choose reference photos that are both appropriate and intriguing. I would never dream of painting from someone else’s photos (unless it was a commission, because work is work), because each photo has memories for me … each photo is a story waiting to be told with my paintbrush.
When you paint something, you find things about it that you never knew before … like when I spend 2 months on a croton painting and discovered for the first time that there were flowers! My whole life in St. Lucia I grew up with croton bushes in our garden, in our daily lives, and I had never noticed the tiny flowers before!
Finally, reference photo(s) in hand, when I stand before the blank canvas, my adventure is just beginning, and that’s the way I like it. The photos I paint from are usually not my best, because there is nothing left to be said about them. The ones I choose have something elusive about them, and often it’s the background where I get to invent, to use emotive colour, to push & pull forms & create rhythms. I teeter on the edge of needing to find control (the perimeters of reality form a nice, safe box), and needing to break free, be spontaneous and wild. Roots and wings, another theme.
Well this post, like today’s painting, has rambled on. And I’m going to pull a Mark Twain & say, sorry, I don’t have enough time to write the short version!
A tropical landscape this time. I’ve been holding on to a few photos I took of flowering Royal Poinciana trees at Pigeon Island National Park in St. Lucia for some time now, so I was excited to finally get a chance to work on one. I have of course painted the flowers before en masse (see some at www.bluerootsartstudio.com/portfolio), but this is the first landscape which features the trees.
I was trying to listen to some meditation sounds & music while painting, but for some reason the kids were just so loud last night, I kept getting interrupted. Still, I think I’m on to something… that zen feeling was so close I could taste it! When my little guy came by to ask for his 12th snack of the day (he’s part hobbit), I put the headphones on him & he tried to run off with them, he didn’t want to give them back!
I enjoyed taking a much looser, painterly approach to this painting, though I did get caught up in the trap of noodling around with it too much, and only really stopped because it was 1:30am! That could be due to the size (another 11″x14″), or because my flow was disrupted so often. I really do need to start earlier in the day for this to really work for me, but it’s tricky because I prefer to photograph the painting by natural light in the morning, then I write the blog post, and put the link in several places, answer some e-mails etc. Have lunch, do errands, get started on a new painting, get kids from school … madness ensues … paint some more … dinner, activities … paint some more … what the kids are still up?
Then I either put them to bed & go to bed myself, or in the case of a larger painting, I try to get back to noodle a little more. One thing that I hoped to get out of this challenge of daily painting … of finishing a small painting every day … was that I could paint while the kids were at school. Usually I spend a couple weeks on a painting, and I can get obsessive, painting an area over & over (noodling), until I’m relatively happy with it. I’m hoping to find more balance, not be such a perfectionist. Not that it isn’t a valuable trait for a painter, and not that great paintings don’t need time to evolve, but I want to be more decisive with my strokes. Economical but effective brushstrokes … that’s something to aim for.
My first snow painting … I think I did ok. Though I did noodle away at it a little longer than I wanted to for a daily painting & I’m tired this morning. We’ve been having a lot of snow lately, and it’s very cold … I wish I could stay in & hibernate & paint the winter away!
The painting is also larger than I’d planned for a daily, but I felt it needed to be a little bigger. The location is very close to the swing set in “Five more minutes” from day 3, and the palette is very similar, but that was taken later in the day, in the summer.
Thank you to those of you who have left comments, liked and shared my posts through your social networks. This is one of the reasons I’m doing this challenge, to increase the eyeballs on my art! If you haven’t yet, please like my Fb page, and sign up for my mailing list!
Today is a cheat day … this piece is from Spring ’13, so if you’re on my newsletter mailing list you will have seen it already.
That’s not to say I didn’t do something new yesterday, just that I’m not going to show it.
Yesterday was a day for catching up on errands for many of us doing Leslie Saeta’s 30 in 30 challenge, so I know I’m not the only one not submitting something new.
I even took the groceries for a drive in search of something exciting, but all I found was snow & more snow, which doesn’t bring joy to my heart!
In the evening, I took supplies to the event I had to attend, and did a small pen sketch of a little still-life I set up & added some watercolour paint. I was rushing, and I’m not happy with it, so I took a long hard look up my sleeve to see if I had any tricks, and I found this one!
Last Spring I took a class on pastels at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, with Clarence Porter and I really enjoyed it. I’d used pastels for years, on & off, for figure drawing or portraiture, but I don’t remember ever using it for landscape. And I really liked one technique he showed, I think it’s called visual vibration, where you just add strokes of colour, and when you stand back they seem to blend together to describe the form. It’s similar in concept to Seurat’s pointillism. For some reason, it just seemed right for me when using pastels.
The reference picture I used was from my HUGE collection of reference photos from my island home of St. Lucia. I am shutter-happy when in a tropical setting, so my collection should be able to see me through many winters!
Choosing what to paint next is starting to get difficult, but not because I don’t have lots of ideas I’d like to try out. There are sooo many things I could paint – from life or photos, or even just a concept, but it can take a while to find a subject I can connect to at that very moment. The other ideas that come up may eventually get painted, but for now they just don’t have that spark that excites/motivates me, even though they could well make a great painting. I guess I’m more concerned right now with personal development, than painting something I think people might want to buy (shh, don’t tell my husband)! I’m enjoying journalling here even though I don’t have a clue if anyone’s actually reading this.
With this painting I retreated back to my comfort zone … plant life/landscape, but it’s still new territory. I’ve never painted this type of plant before, I’m ashamed to say I don’t even know what it’s called. That surprises some people, they think somehow I should be an encyclopedia on the plants I paint, but really I’m just in it for the eye candy. The shapes & colours & patterns that light creates when it falls on or through the leaves and petals. That, and the connection to Nature, that feeling you get when you’re alone in a wooded area or garden and you can breathe deeper, think clearer.
If you can just be in the moment, push aside thoughts of to do lists and listen … you’ll hear the sound of your own inner voice. And in my life, that’s reason enough to choose to paint Nature, to have to go outside to seek inspiration, to gather reference material. I have to admit, I do wish I wasn’t doing this challenge in the middle of winter, because it would be fun to paint outside. I think I will carry on after the 30 days, and maybe I will devote one day a week to painting something small.
I would never give up my large paintings though, there is something cathartic about throwing your whole body into it, and many of my fans/collectors say it’s the big works they love. However, as an artist it can be useful to try out ideas on a much smaller scale. I’ve never been a doodler, my sketchbooks turn into journals, and I am more of an alla prima painter, thinking through the paint, so the ritual of daily paintings has always appealed to me. Taking it the next step and putting it out there on the internet – instead of just a censored collection of my best work – takes some courage.
BLUE ROOTS ART STUDIO – acrylic paintings of Caribbean & Canadian landscape, flowers & foliage. Burlington, ON, Canada. 905-639-3419
