Finishing up Apricots, Mangos and Cherries

Almost done….
Acrylic on Canvas Paper
Apricots, Mangos and Cherries

Our cool rainy-ish day cleared off around 4 and we got some bright warm sunshine down our pier/deck.

So after getting a little work done on this painting, AND playing with my Gelli plate doing some mono printing on oriental papers, I strolled on down and washed all the deck chairs that had some heavy duty mildew on them.  MUCH improved.  It also felt good to be in a T-shirt and sandals again!  Wow. Sure hope this is harbinger of weather to come!

I have my book club tomorrow afternoon and a few in town errands to run. Tuesday I will be getting everything ready for the Zentangle class in Minocqua on Wed morning.  I have 8 signed up which I think is a perfect group size.  Thursday we have a pot luck at church.  Sizing up to be a nice week ahead.  

A Few Subtle Changes

My hubby is always my first critic. He liked this painting very much. Words like "bright", "cheerful", "eye catching", "fun" and "hey, there's your apple peeler" were his first words! But he had some trouble "reading" the bag of flour which appeared to have too many disjoined shapes to be a single object. He's often right about these things!

So, I have simplified the flour bag shape (you can scroll down to yesterday's post to see the difference). I darkened some shadows on the bag a little and added a tiny bit more printing on it. I did glaze that apple again but in the photo it does still read pretty orange. So I think I will do a few more glazes on it and see if I can "red" it up a little more.

Now It's Time to Wait

There's always that time...when you wonder if you are done. And of course, as Judi Betts always says, "No painting is ever done. You just find an interesting place to stop."

So I'll prop it up now for a week or so and look at it when I go by. No matter what, it was entertaining and fun to paint. It will be a good illustration for the Apple Cake recipe and I will print the recipe and put it on the back of the painting! A bonus!

I see it as a nice painting for a kitchen or entry way. A sort of "welcome to my kitchen" or something. I think I may re-glaze the apple in the left foreground with more red...it appears a little too orange. Otherwise, right now...I am feeling happy about it. Someone commented on the painting being "almost an abstract". I feel that way too. More about shapes than anything.

Letting the Still Life Emerge

There are some fun styles I like to work with on black gesso. There is NO problem getting things to "pop" out. Color just has a "boing" to it.

If you scroll down you'll see the initial sketch and the first blocking on this still life.

I have a lot of fun decisions to make on this now...nothing like a rainy day to help you concentrate on "play". This kind of painting is just totally fun "play".

Working title: "Apple Cake"

It is acrylic 16 x 20 on stretched canvas.

Blocking In

Today is a good day to do a little work in the studio so I pulled out that image I did of the Apple Cake ingredients.

I did the preliminary sketch in pastel pencil on 16 x 20 canvas over black gesso. Next I will go back and see about light/dark, how to indicate the light source and what details I want to put in. Here I am just looking at composition and a little work with how I want to arrange the colors. Just fun! All girls want to do is have fun!

It is POURING rain in the north woods today. We are under a flood warning! But it cozy in the studio with music on and the sounds of the rain on the roof.

Setting up for a Still Life Painting

One of the things we did in my class last Wednesday was to talk about "themes" or painting in a "series" and how powerful that can be.

One theme I enjoy is cooking. Although I do not do a lot of baking or gourmet cooking which I am sure some of you do...I still find the ingredients to be wonderful and beautiful and there is surely an element to food that applies and touches us all.

I was thinking of that today while I made my apple cake. I shall have to post this again when it turns into a painting!

Recipe for Ginny's Fresh Apple Cake

3 eggs

1-3/4 cups sugar

1 cup oil

2 cups flour

1/2 tsp salt

1 Tbsp cinnamon

1 tsp baking soda

5-6 apples peeled and cut thick

1 cup halved walnuts

Do not use a mixer for this cake. Blend eggs, sugar, oil. Add flour, salt, cinnamon and baking soda. Add apples and nuts. Baked in greased 9 x 13 pan at 350 for l hour.

I top this with a dollop of cool whip or whipped cream. Good warm with vanilla ice cream.

Smells like fall when baking!

Playing with Charles Reid Style

I am having a lot of fun watching Rhonda Carpenter work with her Charles Reid DVDs. I am brought back immediately to how much I enjoy his style and use of color and brush work. I have his floral VCR tape (it's that long ago) and I have been enjoying having her remind of his drawing techniques and his drippy and loose style. Here is a painting I did after watching that floral VCR a few years ago.

Just for fun you can watch a few previews that give you a "feel" for Charles and how he works. One is here and one is here.

And of course he has a website you can view here.

Van Gogh

I've been a Van Gogh fan forever.

Here's painting of his I had never seen before.

The title is "Still Life With Open Bible".

In an article by Tom Lubbock from The Independent (in Great Britain) I found this fascinating review of this painting. (written Jan 1, 2010) The Royal Academy of Arts in London has a Van Gogh exhibit ongoing now through mid April.

.....there are also those paintings that depict words – whose subject matter includes a piece of verbiage, whether written or printed. This is done in two ways. In one, the words are depicted literally, legibly, transcribed letter by letter. If the subject is handwriting, for example, the painter is almost recapitulating the action of the writer.

The other way is tonally. Here the words are no longer readable. The letters have retreated out of visibility. They've been reduced to areas of indecipherable grey. Paintings of newspapers often use both ways of depiction. The headlines are big and letter-by-letter legible. The smaller print of the stories becomes blocks of blur.

Van Gogh's Still Life with "Open Bible" is a picture that does text in both ways. Two books lie on a table, at a slant to one another. One is heavy and huge. It's a family bible, with brass clasps, open in the middle, and you can read at the head of the page where we are: Isaiah, 53. These pages hold a famous passage ....... "He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief..."

The other book is lighter reading. It's a small and well-thumbed paperback of a contemporary novel. The volume is closed, and we can read on its cover the author and the title fairly clearly. It's Emile Zola's Joie de Vivre. The man of sorrow. The joy of life. Some kind of drama is being staged between these two books – both between their very different physical presences and between their legible verbal content.

But now turn to the actual words of the Bible, and consider how they're painted. They're obviously not legible. You may know what the Isaiah says, but you certainly can't read it in this rendering. The text is depicted in the tonal manner. Columns of print are made into panels of blur. The paint breaks up into brush strokes here and there. You have a vague sense of chapter and verse.

It's very vague, though. This tonal version is beyond mere dark and light. This blur goes further than any loss of focus. There is no suggestion that a readable page only just eludes us – that with a little magnification, with slightly higher resolution, the viewer might become a reader. The body of the text has been transformed into rough, dense, opaque blocks of paint.

This Bible is open. We're confronted with its pages. But that only emphasises how there's no way through Van Gogh's paint to Isaiah's prophecy. His voice has been translated into thickly pasted pigment, into fat streaks and slabs, closely packed gestures going both up and across. The gap between what we see, and what's meant to be there, is wrenching.

Is the effect sceptical, telling us that the old message is beyond us, that its preaching is only dead matter? Or is it expressive, giving this passage a more than linguistic power, filling it with a physical force? The painted word is the word made flesh?

Form, shape, shadow

Tomorrow I am subbing for my friend, Lou, as teacher in her Adult Beginner Watercolor Class.

It's been awhile since I've taught beginners! The lesson plan she gave me talks about demonstrating how to make 3-dimentional objects come alive on a 2-dimentional surface.

The handout for the students suggests copying a line drawing for an onion and a pepper and then discusses cast and form shadows. The discussion is good, but I hardly think drawing the actual vegetables will be beyond them. They've been in class for several months now. (3 Monday mornings a month.) Surely we can all freehand an onion and a pepper!!!! I hope to have a little display of the drawings afterwards. Wish me luck.

Little graphite sketch

Today my hubby and I attended a seminar for retired folks who are interested in avoiding a lot of taxes, protecting their assets and planning wills and trusts. VERY interesting. But a little long. I do think we have found a good attorney, however, for re-upping our long-overdue wills. That was a good thing. She did talk about how many people are out there to defraud seniors and to give advice that are not always in the best interests of their client.

Redirecting

It seems to me, while I am on the road and unable to post photos from this computer, that I feel the need to re-direct people to the exciting blogs I am reading. This time Stan Fellows is posting some of his journal pages from a class he is teaching. OH MY GOSH. You must have a look-see. His work is so spendid and so amazing. And he reminds us of the beauty in the everyday things you might find in your pocket or on the kitchen table. Love it!

Fa La La La La, La La La La

So here I am back to the studio on a very dark and very rainy northern Wisconsin morning.  No place better than in your studio, right?  You can see how dark it is out the window and it was about 10 a.m! AND it actually got quiet around here as my hubby had a conference to go to and went off for the morning! Love him dearly, but these quiet mornings are a treasure! Got sort of dragged back into looking at Christmas card ideas again.  So this is my second attempt at one.  So much for a "tropical holiday card".  (I could paint a palm tree in the background!)  But I saw an idea for this in a Christmas holiday book (cookie recipe) and I thought, hey, I am into cookbooks for a theme right now and I could include my Best-Ever Cut Out Cookie recipe in the inside cover of the card.  I also like the idea that the card sort of has the theme of "quiet contemplation".  (Yes I set the camera and took a photo of myself!)  This little card idea was on Arches Rough 140# paper with Winsor Newton watercolors.