Intense I know. I might paint the pair to this, from photos I took while the rain was falling. On a mountainous island, when you’re up high, you can see the rain coming. When you have no-where to go, and can just look out at the rain, it’s quite beautiful.
My favourite thing as a child was to read on a rainy day. Actually, I read every spare moment I got, but my idea of bliss was to curl up in bed and read my weekend away. I loved to sit up and look out the window next to my bed at the water falling on the croton leaves. Or down the hill where the rain made puddles in the dirt road. And who doesn’t like the soothing sound of rain? Especially on a galvanized rooftop.
The rain can come on suddenly in the Caribbean, big fat drops that soak through your clothes and cool you down. Then just as suddenly it stops, and the sun shines down and dries you up. I never wore a raincoat as a child, very seldom used an umbrella. We weren’t worried about things like “acid rain”, it was just a part of nature, a fact of life.
If you were in town when the rain fell, you’d huddle under the nearest storefront with a bunch of strangers and exchange smiles and maybe some conversation. It never lasted long. And maybe we welcomed it too, after the long dry season … the same way North Americans welcome the spring after a long winter.
I’ve wanted to try a monochromatic painting for a long time, and I really had fun with this. Some artists do something similar to this as an underpainting and then glaze on other colours. I sketch in the basic composition with my paintbrush to start off, but I usually can’t resist jumping in with colour soon after. This time I planned to keep the painting somewhat monochromatic, but I added a few extra colours to keep it interesting to me. I used burnt umber, raw sienna, titanium white and dioxazine purple.
I found that working on the 6″x6″ paintings I was using smaller & smaller brushes to get the detail I wanted, so I decided to work on a little bigger canvas so that I can loosen up. It really helped. Although I still painted on two days (last night & this morning), I wasn’t feeling as rushed because I was enjoying myself more.
I have a lot of great reference photos from this photo shoot, I’d like to try a much larger canvas some time. If that sounds interesting to you …e-mail me about a commission! We can work out payment terms to suit your budget. Also, please share this post to let your friends know about my work … maybe they’d like to follow my progress through the challenge as well.
Today’s painting marks the half-way point, two more weeks to go!
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.
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!
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!
BLUE ROOTS ART STUDIO – acrylic paintings of Caribbean & Canadian landscape, flowers & foliage. Burlington, ON, Canada. 905-639-3419
