Artist Residency

I just returned from an Artist Residency at Whiskeytown National Recreation Area. Pictured above is the Artist's Cabin, where I stayed. It was a fantastic experience! I did not have internet access there, so I will report retroactively.

First, some background... Whiskeytown was founded back during the gold rush. The story is that some prospectors were crossing a stream, when one of their mules slipped, and the kegs of whiskey spilled into the water. So, they named the stream, Whiskey Creek. Afterwards, they called their town, along the creek, Whiskeytown. By 1959, the town only had about 200 residents. They moved out, and the town was flooded, by the construction of a dam that formed Whiskeytown Lake. This was part of the Central California Water Project.

This is Whiskeytown Lake today.

I arrived on a Saturday evening, and met my roommate, Heidi Marshall, a wonderful pastel artist from Michigan. She had been there 2 1/2 weeks and had seen two bears! I never saw any... (Probably a good thing.) Normally, an artist is alone for their residency, but in our case, we overlapped by three days. Being alone, and without internet, sounds almost monastic, and I did find that I felt differently being there. At first, I slept 10-11 hours at night. I wandered around admiring everything on the first day and was not able to decide on anything to paint. My mind was just blank. Finally, I went down to the marina and started a painting, which was not working out at all. Then, Jim Milestone, the Park Superintendent came over, and introduced himself and took my picture, with the horrible painting! He was so nice, and I was so embarrassed. I was asking myself why I ever applied for this!!! What ever made me think I could do this?

(spoiler-it gets better tomorrow)

A Child's Portrait

Ricker - oil on linen - 14 x 16"

This is the first oil portrait I've done in years! I could not believe how difficult it was, and how long it took. I really was out of practice. I worked from photos that I took myself. It is difficult to get a child this young to hold still for a photograph, let alone a painting. Here he was talking to me, and see how happy and animated he is!

It was worth the effort. I am happy with the end result! And the boy's grandparents love it! That's what's important!

Closing of SFMOMA

 The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will be closed for two years while an addition is added to the present building. There will still be exhibits, but they will be in other venues around the Bay Area. They decided to close with a celebration! Above is one artwork, which hangs over the main hall. It is made of human hair from around the world.

 Here is another artwork, painted on the wall. To see how big it is, notice the size of the stand holding the rope in front of it.

 This is a model of the present museum.

 On the backside of the above model, is a model of the new addition. Lots more space.

 They had things going on all day. One of the last activities was making tin foil hats. They put out tin foil, glue, scissors, pipe cleaners, etc., and invited people to design their own. Unfortunately, there were no mirrors, so I didn't know what mine looked looked like on my head, but I got lots of complements on it!

 The final performance of the day was a group called Soul Motion. My daughter, Shanna, is one of the dancers!

At first the dancers were mixed with the crowd; gradually they formed a circle in the center. At the end of the dance, they proceeded outside, with the museum staff asking everyone to follow and form a line around the building. About half of us were wearing tin foil hats! Some in the crowd started chanting for us to look up. Then, a drone flew over to take our picture! Quite a finale!

John Cosby Workshop

Yellow Truck - oil on canvas panel - 14 x 11"

Painting  is a process of continual learning. Each painting is a learning experience! And, in order to accelerate the process, I try to take a workshop with another artist every now and then. The painting above is one I painted during the John Cosby workshop in Lodi, CA. John is an excellent teacher, and there were some very advanced painters in the class, but he made all of us stretch ourselves!

John teaches a painting process that can be adapted to most painting styles. He starts by mixing four or five color puddles that represent the different values in the scene. Then, he mixes all the rest of the colors from those puddles. Also, he really stressed drawing and composition. I drew the truck in this scene by first drawing a box, which had the same proportions as the truck, then drawing the truck inside the box. And the composition is a three-point, with the three main elements being the truck, the palm tree, and the telephone pole. Can you see it? I really had to subdue the bush, which, in reality, was a bright, bright green! And I used shadows to balance the composition. Just making my own reality... Fun!

Painting at Napa Country Iris Garden

Goddess of the Rainbow - oil on museum-quality panel - 6x8"

The iris is the goddess of the rainbow, according to classical mythology, so I thought that would be a fitting title for this painting. I had gone with a painting group to the Napa Country Iris Garden. We have been having a lot of cool windy weather here by the Bay, but up in the wine country, of Napa, it was warm and beautiful! There were so many wonderful irises, it was hard to choose which to paint. But I liked this one because of the subtle warm/cool color shifts. I had decided beforehand not to rush with the painting, because so often when I get in a hurry, I end up with a painting I don't like. This one I do like!

Irises only bloom for such a short time, which makes them even more precious. All the irises here are ruffled varieties which are newer than the plain irises. Here are some more pictures of the irises for you to enjoy--

 

The iris garden was open for business while I was there, and many people were strolling through, picking out their flowers. Even a bus stopped, and people got out and were enjoying the scent and colors. The owners were very friendly and talking with everyone. They welcome artists, and said classes from some of the art schools come to paint!

I hope you will get out and enjoy the springtime! And if you enjoy reading this, please forward it to your friends. I love to have my work shared!

Remembering Susan Shatter

watercolor by Susan Shatter

I only recently learned of Susan's death, and thought I'd share some memories of her. I met her in 1998, when she had an exhibit of her wonderful watercolor paintings at the Huntington Museum of Art in WV, and I had the opportunity to spend a weekend with her.

watercolor by Susan Shatter

Some of her large watercolors were 12' long! She liked to put the paper on the floor and just go for it! They look pretty abstract up close, but if you step back about 10 feet, they snap into focus. The viewer is just surrounded by them.

She loved painting plein air landscapes because she said it "put her in accord with the vast mystery."
She liked high viewpoints which make the middle ground the foreground, and the background the middle. The high viewpoints also tend to pitch the viewer forward into the painting.
She liked to have the light in her paintings appear to come from the land, and to use a diagonal or serpentine division of space.
She loved the Isabey squirrel quill brushes.
Her small plein air studies were painted on conventional watercolor blocks and were used as a reference for structure and color, along with photos, when she worked on her large studio paintings.
She preferred painting deserts, canyon lands, rocky coasts, the patterns created by water... (no green pastures for this artist!)
Often the local color of the rocks in a scene was gray, so she'd make up her own  colors. In Peru, she used the colors of local native weavings for the rocks.
She said it took about a month (yes, you read that right!) of adding layers of paint on her large watercolor paintings to get colors as rich as hers are!

Charles Le Clair, in his book, Color in Contemporary Painting, says that her work has "a structural quality that takes its cue from the repetitive forms of Cezanne's late landscapes. Thus the rock formations... set up rhythms that read as pure abstraction..."

She was elected as president of the National Academy of Design, and was represented by one of the finest galleries in New York: quite an accomplishment for a woman artist, working in watercolor!

painting by Susan Shatter

After her diagnosis with breast cancer, she said she had been looking a lot at x-rays, that were dark, with a white spinal column in the middle, and it was influencing her work: It was like a dancing white line in the ocean. Bones returning to their source. See the spinal column in the painting above... She spoke quite a bit about the transitory nature of life. She also began experimenting with acrylic inks and monoprints at that time.

For more about Susan Shatter, check these links:
http://www.artcritical.com/2011/09/29/susan-shatter-1943%E2%80%932011/
http://www.askart.com/askart/s/susan_louise_shatter/susan_louise_shatter.aspx
http://www.dfngallery.com/artists/artists_represented/susan_shatter.htm

I hope you enjoyed reading this, and if you are an artist, maybe it gave you some ideas for your own paintings. Please forward this to any of your friends who might be interested.

Eye Highlights

Eye with highlight

Eye without highlight

Other eye with highlight

Here's what I'm working on right now. Almost done! I just put the highlights in the eyes. I love flake white for portraits: it is translucent, just like skin. But for the highlights, I used titanium white. I wanted a white that would be opaque, and stay that way.

I like it when portraits seem to come alive! Then, I can talk to them!