Blog

It was a great holiday season, but I'm always happy to get back to a normal schedule. Decided to enter a couple of paintings into the Milford Arts Council Figurative Exhibition at the Firehouse Gallery, the place where I organize and coordinate sessions to work from the model a couple of times every other week. I entered two paintings, one of a clothed model and one of a nude that was painted at a Firehouse Gallery model session.

And I was thrilled to get the 1st place award for my nude figure! Thanks to Milford Arts Council

for putting on this show, to Dean Fisher for judging it, and to all the artists who participated.

It's been a wonderful summer for painting outdoors. So much fun to head out of the studio and make work while feeling the breeze, listening to the birds, and painting alongside friends.

Midsummer Evening

Shakespeare Garden

Tracie & Cathy (It's not our painting uniform, just a fluke!)

Beaching It

When I first began painting again after a long time away from it, I did a lot of still life paintings, trying to put myself into some sort of groove and aiming to produce some of the 200 (or is it 500?) bad paintings necessary for radical improvement. I have improved my painting a lot, but I'm always hungry for more progress and I suppose I always will be.

Recently, in weekly painting sessions at my own studio and at a friend's studio I have jumped back into still life work and really enjoyed it! Here are some of my efforts, although not the bad ones - I'm keeping those to myself!

It was so rewarding for my sister Eileen and me to hold an open studio event for all our friends and family in December - that is, once the days and days and hours and hours of preparatory work was done! Not to say that we didn't enjoy putting it together, but it took longer than we thought it would (as is often - or should I say always? - the case).

We had a great turnout and the studio, which looked remarkably like a gallery, was filled with lovely people who enjoyed the prosecco and the snacks as well as looking at our work.

Michelangelo Exhibit

My sister Eileen and I went to the Metropolitan Museum last week and were overwhelmed by the beauty of the sculptures and drawings. So much fun to see the sculpture Young Archer, and Michelangelo's charcoal drawing of Zenobia, an ancient queen of Palmyra.

Neither of us had a mental image of Michelangelo’s face, so we really enjoyed seeing this unfinished portrait of him by Jacopino Del Conte. Interesting to see the head and hand so highly  finished with the rest of the painting a mere suggestion of shapes and colors.

We couldn’t leave the museum without seeing some of our favorite 19th century paintings; the two below caught my eye, so I pulled out the iPhone to take a shot of them (hey, at least I’m not showing you a selfie with the paintings). We did take a selfie with the Young Archer sculpture, but I won’t inflict it on you.

Berthe Morisot - Young Woman Seated on a Sofa

Adolphe-William Bouguereau - Young Mother Gazing at her Child

Demolition in the studio continues.  Pat and Lorenzo are starting to load the debris into their truck, and I'm trying to figure out what to use to replace the old sink, counters and cabinets. I'm inclined to use open shelves instead of closed cabinets.

I've learned a bit about lighting, which is going to be an important part of  the new set-up, especially because I plan to invite other artists to come here to work from the model.

Based on my graphite drawing and photographs I took of Weir Farm in Wilton, CT last October, I painted a June garden and placed Dorothy Weir in the center, which seemed appropriate given her love of gardens and my interest in Connecticut historic gardens.

As I was painting Dorothy Weir's Daydream I took photos of each stage to use in this blogpost.  The first shows the canvas toned with burnt sienna and the drawing sketched in with burnt sienna and ultramarine blue.

The next step was to block in the colors of the largest shapes in the painting.

After the block-in, I concentrated on adding more color and detail to the existing larger shapes. Some of the flowers made an appearance, and so did Dorothy Weir, but she looked a little beaten down and depressed, so I had to redo her.

Here Dorothy looks a bit more upbeat, and I continued planting flowers all over the painting.

Finished planting the flowers and forcing the wisteria into bloom, then painted the gate and called it done.

It turns out that if you start out with a pottery studio and make pots and sculptures and teach classes, then get interested in batik and create beautiful designs with wax and dye, you tend to accumulate a lot of stuff.  If you then add to that mix an obsession with oil painting, you can end up with things getting a little bit out of control.

 Time to let go of some of it. We're planning a week or two in January of finishing old clay projects and making some new things, firing, and then getting rid of all the pottery equipment and supplies.  That will go a long way toward reducing the endless stuff.

 Then, I hope to turn it into my dream painting studio (although it won't have either north light or high ceilings, but I'm still excited).  I'll keep you posted!