On A Street In The Town

On A Street In The Town (7x7 soft pastel)

This is a second painting I did for the January Virtual Paintout hosted by Bill Guffey. This month he sent us all to Boston, Mass.

I just watched the movie The Town a couple of days ago so I went to The Town, Charlestown, in Boston and was blown away by the houses there. The architecture is so simple and old fashioned and the colours of the houses were delightful.

I chose this house in Charlestown as my subject. What first caught my eye was the blue colour of the house and the bright yellow flowers in the window boxes. And the flowers on the steps were such a sweet touch. The way the light played in the stoop and along the siding of the house and on the sidewalk clinched it for me. This was the scene I wanted to paint.

I struggle with the city scapes in the Virtual Paintout. I struggle with landscapes too. I want to include too much it seems. The odd angles of the streets themselves bother me as well as the inability to get back and see the entire buidling. Which isn't how you see in real life anyways but I realised that this was my problem and I needed to learn to choose what I was going to paint more critically. To think more critically about my composition.

What got me going on this composition was an article in The Pastel Journal about James Kimak who loves to paint scenes of New York. He embraces the streets and odd angles and in some of his paintings he focuses on just one door and step or only a part of a building. It was like a light went off for me.

I went back and found my chosen address and drew a line drawing sketch of it being very cognisant of where I wanted the edges of the painting to be.

Then I just painted! I focused on trying to keep it simple and stepping back to look at what I'd done so I didn't overwork it, trying to get the lights and darks right. I wish it was a bit lighter between the two houses but...

I've also been trying to focus on having crisp edges in the focal area and being a bit freer and looser with the edges in the rest of the painting. That is the trick with working from a photo... everything is in sharp focus most of the time and it means you lose depth and if you paint everything with that much detail it seems to look wrong. I want to paint painterly and not photrealistically.

I have been paying attention lately to what makes depth when I look at things and that slightly out of focus look of everything except what is the center of your attention makes the world 3D. For me anyways. There was an excellent article/demo in the month's issue of American Drawing that really brings that out. So I have been trying to focus on painting that way as well. I hope I managed that with this paining and the one I did before it.

Autunm Lake Near Boston

Autumn Lake Near Boston(9x7 soft pastel)

This was done for the January Virtual Paintout hosted by Bill Guffey. This month he chose to send us to Boston and the surrounding areas. Thanks for another great challenge Bill!

I chose this location for my painting, a lake on Forest Grove near Boston. The fall colours and light and reflections caught my eye.

I am not a landscape painter but want to try and get better at this type of painting and so I am trying to practice. This is version 2. The colours are richer in real life and it looks better if you stand back from it at least 5 feet. The black squares are the texture of the mi tentes paper.

Ouch!

Who really likes to do house work? And who really likes to have their picture taken?

I will confess that I do not. Never have, probably never will. I consider it a necessary evil.

Tonight the bedroom needed to be worked on and I found a creative solution to not having my picture taken this Christmas.

People with facial injuries aren't popular subjects for the Christmas photo shoot.

So I worked away at the bedroom clutter and I was making good head way when...

Whamo!

Face meet the top of a clear acrylic water glass.

The glass was tall because I live with 3 cats that steal bedside water if you don't used a tall skinny glass that they can't get their thieving mugs into.

I knew the glass was there on some level. I was aware of it and had made a mental note to take it to the kitchen on my next trip there. But I guess I was close enough to it that when I bent over I just never saw it. That and the fact that the glass was so much taller than your average glass that I probably thought I had at least 4 inches more space before my face was going to connect with a hard object.

At first I was shocked and quiet.

And then...

I cried. I will confess that I cried.

Alot.

Like a small child.

It hurt.

Alot.

And it bled.

Actually quite alot.

More than I thought it would and I've always heard that facial cuts bleed like a son-of-a-gun.

It suprised me how much it bled.

But I don't think I broke my nose.

However I think it's gonna leave a mark.

I'm hoping it's only going to be a temporary mark.

Hidden By Gortglas Lough

Hidden By Gortglas Lough (5x5 pen and graphitint pencil)

I finally was able to do something for the Virtual Paintout hosted by Bill Guffney. This month Bill has sent us to County Clare in Ireland. It was really wonderful to walk around this area of Ireland. But frustrating in a way because I was looking for sheep and never did see any. I saw some cattle but... I didn't want to paint those, or the horses I saw. I did find a border collie but the dog was from Galway as were most of the cattle and horses so they were out as subjects.

On a whim I plopped myself down on a road by Gortglas Lough and saw this. I was so happy and surprised! I took one step to the right and turned back to the left and found the view I wanted to use. And from there it was pretty easy. I did a sketch and then inked it with a micron pen. I decided that I wanted colour and used my graphitint pencils washed with water to add the tinted colour.

I'm happy with the results and was even happier when I showed it to a friend who immediately said, "It's a canoe!"

If only I was there and could find that canoe and go for a paddle in the lovely Irish sunshine.

Fleabitten Gray (11x14 graphite pencil) sold

Portrait of a horse in graphite pencil.

Ditch Racers

I was driving to town the other day and I had to smile.

Two children were playing in the ditch. How close to the road they were was a little scary I'll admit but it was what they were doing that made me smile. And remember some happy times my brother and I had as kids.

We have a little snow here right now. A very little bit of snow. There is enough that you need to wear boots because it's deep enough to spill into your shoes if you walk through it but not enough to be doing any serious winter stuff. Not enough for me to build a snowman... Which is what the barely below zero temperatures told me I wanted to be doing.

I saw movement at the far side of the road and looked over to see what was up.

There was a child with a snow racer and he plopped it down at the road side and then jumped on it and swooped it down the "hill" of the ditch into the bottom of it. There was another youngster at the bottom with his snow racer too. It made me smile... These two kids were obviously having a great time, putting alot of energy into the game, and I wonder what they were imagining as they played in the snow covered ditch which was only about 4 feet deep at the most and not that steep. Was it some sort of cliff they were taking their machines off the edge of? Were they on a steep mountainside trekking across some wilderness? Were they on snowmobiles jumping over drifts and flying across the snow?

Who knows?

When we were kids my brother and I used to build forts in the bushes, and of the bushes. We would remove all the dead branches from the center of a willow thicket and haul stones inside and other flat pieces of wood and that would be our fort. We imagined we were part of the Wind in the Willows book or some other adventure we had dreamed up. In the summer with all the thick leaves around us it was an excellent fort. No one could see us hiding there. We would spend hours there after we crawled through the hole in the leaves and branches to get to the center. At least that's what we believed. Now I'm not so sure how good the cover really was. And I can't go back and look anymore because that bunch of trees died when the water decided to invade that area. But the point was that we were doing something, we were using our imaginations and we were having fun.

In the winter we dug caves in the hard packed snow that drifted up against the willows on the slough near the yard. We would jump from the tops of the drifts and swim through the snow at the base of these cliffs. And in our mind they were cliffs, there was no doubting it, and there was deep water at the base. Now I'm not sure how tall those drifts were or how deep the snow really was. It seems like now there isn't as much snow as there was back then. I'm not sure if that's a climate thing or the fact that I'm just taller now and my perspective has changed.

It doesn't really matter. We were having a blast in those chilly rooms we carved out with a spade in our artic igloos each winter.

Those kids in the ditch brought back to my mind something I'd forgotten about. Made me smile to remember.

They made be feel both young and old at the same time....

A Watermelon and Some Dairy Cows

There is a farm on my way to and from work that I drool over almost every time I pass it.

From and artistic perspective.

There are dairy cows and calves in a lovely little rolling pasture with a greying wooden hip-roofed barn and hay and straw bales surrounding it. The pasture is bordered on 3 of the 4 sides by large maple trees and has 2 or 3 large maple trees in it. The pasture backs up to a lovely old clapboard house with a small bunch of flowers behind it and between it and the pasture. There are a couple of old pieces of machinery that the hens wander through. The little calves are just so sweet and darling.

It all begs to be photographed and painted in some way. I want to take photos of everything and hoard them until I can figure out the best way to make that place come to life in some artistic way.

The light is perfect in that pasture at every time of day. In the morning it comes from the front but at an angle. All through the middle of the day it is overhead but still at a slight angle and in the late after noon it comes from the back and a bit off to the side. It hits those black and white cows and highlights every dip and bulge on them. The blacks have blues in them and the whites are golden. The light bounces off of the small rolling bumps in the closely cropped pasture and there are always shadows that show the depth of the land. The trees in the pasture cast lovely shadows on the ground and on the cattle. There is always side lighting. Even the back lighting in the evening is side lighting.

It is a golden place to me.

I have never stopped to take photos until this past Wednesday on the way home from work.

The cattle were all grouped up under a tree near the page wire fence line and were lying down to chew their cuds. There were Canada geese spread all out across the rest of the pasture right back to the treelines. The ground was this living moving mass of green and golden mouse brown with little white bums. I had to stop. I stayed back so I didn't alarm anyone and snapped away.

A hay wagon pulled in across the road and a fellow came over to talk to me. He told me to pull my truck in their driveway so that I didn't get it hit on the shoulder of the road and to take as many photos as I wanted. He told me to go in with them if I wanted to. They were quiet and wouldn't mind me. He gave me permission to sit and sketch there anytime I liked. He offered me a pumpkin and when I declined, saying I had some at home, he offered me a watermelon. Which I took him up on completely unable to believe my luck.

I found out he is milking 6 head right now. The rest are pregnant and dry. He just milks them to feed the calves. And then I realised they are veal calves... I was sad for a minute, they are so young and they will have such short lives. And then it hit me. Although they will have short lives they will be good lives. They are living out doors with each other and their mothers and they have freedom and space.

It drove home to me that quality is more important than quantity.