figure study

14" x 11", oil on linen.

It's been way too long since I've painted or posted the figure. I tend to get in little, I will call them grooves rather than ruts...all plein air, then all still life, then all peonies. So I thought I'd post something a bit different today, this figure study worked on at one of the Palette & Chisel's open studio sessions.

more peonies!

9" x 12", oil on panel.

More peonies! I was disappointed to learn that peonies won't be around much longer...somehow I thought I'd be painting them all summer...so I've been snapping them up wherever I see them. They've certainly become my favorite flower.

Here I also have to share with you my good friend Barbara's silk-screened note cards, many of which are beautiful flowers, one of which is, to my delight, a peony. Check them out at her company's Etsy shop, Kinaloon.

The other thing in this painting that I've been thinking of and working on more lately is developing the center of interest and then seeing how little else needs to be developed, or painted at all, for that matter.

2 peonies

9" x 12", oil on panel.

When is the last time you've gone 5 days without turning on your computer? For me, it had been a while, and long overdue. We'd gone away for the holiday weekend, and one day just sort of slid into the next, and it actually felt a bit good to (literally) unplug for those few days.
But I do look forward to catching up with everyone. Hope all of your weekends were great! The creativity seems to be thriving, of course!

coverd bridge, cedarburg

8" x 10", oil on linen.

I'm sad to say that this is the last of the Cedarburg paintings. We had such a good, if too short, time participating in the plein air event. I look forward both to returning to Cedarburg, and participating in more of these pleing air events. I had no idea what to expect from this type of competition, and I found it invigorating and challenging and a wonderful way to paint in an area I might not have ever gotten to.
Of course go check out Susan's Covered Bridge Park painting too.

quilt farm, and an award

8" x 10", oil on linen.

On our last day at the Cedarburg Artist's Guild painting competition, we painted on the grounds of the Wisconsin Museum of Quilts and Fiber Arts , which is an Civil War era farmstead that's been preserved and now houses antique fiber arts. Unfortunately the museum was closed the day we were there, but the grounds were an incredibly serene place to kick off my shoes and set up in the middle of a field. Now that's plein air! Susan's painting is here .

I also wanted to share with you all some great news: when Susan returned from collecting our paintings at the end of the exhibition, she informed me that I'd won "Best of Show" at the competition for my Blatz painting. What a surprise, and an honor! The Blatz painting is now part of the Harris Bank collection. Thank you to Susan for pulling me out to paint that night, and for encouraging me to enter this painting in the show, and also to all of you who read and send me your thoughts and encouragement through this blog. It means more to me than I can say.

blatz

8"x 10", oil on panel.

Imagine my delight when, during our plein air excursion to Cedarburg, Susan and I came upon Wisconsin's version of the corner pub! After painting all day in the 100-degree heat (!) for paintings to submit to the Cedarburg Artist's Guild plein air painting competition, we decided to venture out for a (somewhat cooler) night scene, which is great because you can't really see your paints too well so you can't get too fussy, and not so great if you happen to be near the door of a bar when the patrons all roll out, and right by you, after a long night inside.

Check out Susan's night scene here .

bucktown pub crawl: Burke's Web Pub

8" x 10". oil on linen.

Continuing along the pub crawl, you'll arrive at Burke's Web Pub, where if it's nice outside, you can sit at the old picnic table and admire the view of the Kennedy Expressway, or if it's not so nice, you can go inside and sit at the giant wooden bar and check out the dart game that's probably happening or simply admire the random collection of stuff, like the plastic spider web on the wall. While you're drinking your Old Style, you're liable to get into a jukebox battle with someone playing way too much AC/DC or Big & Rich, but that's easy to tune out to watch the Cubs. Same friendly locals. Unfortunately or fortunately Burke's is open into the wee hours.

bucktown pub crawl: The Charleston

8" x 10", oil on linen.

Bring your laptop or peruse the bookshelf and hang out with a cup of coffee and Fred the cat if it's early, or come by a little later for some live music and beer while you sit under the 'stars' (hundreds of those little white lights) that line the ceiling, and you're at The Charleston .

I couldn't put it better than the description from The Charleston's website:

You are traveling through to another dimension,
a dimension not only of sight and sound but of
liquid. It is a dimension as vast as a corner
saloon and timeless as infinity. It is the
middle ground between light and shadow,
between coffee and Cuervo, between
Dickens and Shakespeare.

To some it is the first city of the New World, to
others a frivolous bit of nostalgia left over from
the jazz age. This is a dimension of the
imagination or if you prefer, a tavern.
It is in the area which we call
The Charleston.

bucktown pub crawl: Mickey's

8" x 10", oil on linen.

When Rich's (see previous post) gets too glamorous for us, we wander further down the block to Mickey's, which is truly like drinking in someone's basement. Same black vinyl bar stools, wood paneling, Golden Tee, and cheap beer as Rich's. Same friendly locals, too. This fantastic corner spot also comes complete with beer coasters crocheted by the owner's wife.

Be sure to check out Susan's version of Mickey's, too.

bucktown pub crawl: Terry and Linda's The Corner

8" x 10", oil on linen.

Part of my husband's birthday present this year consists of a collection of paintings of all of our neighborhood pubs, ones like what is now known as The Corner, formerly known by what is possibly one of the best names of a bar anywhere: Rich's First One Today (interesting info. about Rich's quirkiness here), and still affectionately called, simply, Rich's, by all of us locals.

Unfortunately these neighborhood taverns are a dying breed around here, but a number of them like Rich's still thrive, tucked away on their residential streets. To me they're uniquely Chicago (or at least uniquely Midwestern): these old and dusty little places where the hours are unstable, populated with everyone from a few blocks' radius and their dogs, and where you can still pull up a black vinyl stool and get a pitcher for 6 bucks.

Susan has embarked on this project with me, so I'll always link back to her takes on these bars, although she is much more prompt about getting them posted. Check out her Rich's painting here.

3 peonies

11" x 14", oil on panel.

I've come to love peonies the most during my recent flower painting adventures. They are so delicate and yet so vibrant, translucent and yet solid. The one problem I find with them is how quickly they change! I'll set up my still life, turn around to tone my canvas, turn back around and they're all different. Or I'll come running home from the store with these perfect little buds and by the time I get set up--all open. They sure are demanding.

what makes a brushstroke 'good'?

12" x 10", oil on linen.

"More structure, better brushstrokes"...I heard these suggestions many times throughout the workshop with David Leffel, and to me they may even collect the painting practice in its entirety (?).

'More structure' of course refers to all of our issues with creating a good abstract, structurally sound design, as well as creating a convincing solidity and mass, which we can only do by correct use of values, colors, and edges.

And 'better brushstrokes' I have been thinking a lot about lately, and how we can't achieve a good structure without them. I'm thinking that a better brushstroke is one that is decisive, crisp, and clean in its color. It's got to be one that has both a distinctive beginning and a distinctive end. I think those of us who paint at very least can sense in our gut when we've made a poor brushstroke: one of those thinly applied, feeble, and mushy ones that tentatively smears into its neighbor, and we can hear the scratch of the canvas beneath our brush--maybe this will work, we think. But we also can feel the triumph of a good brushstroke, and hopefully we have the sense then to leave it alone.

What do you think makes a brushstroke 'good'?

head study

10" x 12", oil on linen.

I'm discovering that head studies are a really valuable way to work on the idea of building forms from planes that meet rather than building forms from gradually rounded and gradated smoothness. Planes have graphic impact, rounded things don't. Here I painted each of the planes of the head as flat, and then joined each plane to the one next to it by delicately blending their edges together.

cobalt and apricots

6" x 8", oil on linen.

Some days they just don't roll off of the conveyor belt quite so easily, do they? This little piece took me days to paint, of course not due to its complexity...and I was reminded of how much our mental state and our focus affects our work.

During the workshop David spoke of this focus in terms of our energy, and how naturally it will wax and wane over the course of a painting. So what to do when we hit that "painting wall"? I asked him, and he suggested moving on to a new painting, or moving to a part of the painting that requires less of us (perhaps the background) in order to regain our momentum. Or maybe, go home and begin anew the next day.

renunculas

14" x 11", oil on linen.

In this painting my "little somethings" were my impasto and my "debris" strewn around in the front...which is a nice way to fill up that space without having to put something more specific than a spot of color there. I also concentrated a lot on the form, or structure, of the flowers here...to get and keep the form of them before worrying about any specific little petals.

david leffel workshop: figure demo

On the last Friday of the workshop, David painted the figure. An impromptu demo of sorts, although on this day he didn't verbalize what he was doing or why. We could have heard a pin drop as we all watched him work...and it was a good ending, to watch him work in silence, with us having some better idea of what beautiful processes were happening than we did a couple of weeks earlier.
(these photos can be enlarged for detail)

rhododendrons and tulips

11" x 14", oil on panel.

One of the main things I had in mind while painting this was David's advice that a good painting should have 'a whole lot of nothing and a little something'. The whole lot of nothing would of course be the background, the empty space, the dark, the elements that trail into the dark...anything that's not in the light becomes background. The little somethings are the harder edges, the pieces of light paint within the darker areas, or the pieces of dark paint within the lighter areas, or the impasto. I thought a lot about that here: where are those places in the painting where the eye stops and explores more deeply for a moment before traveling on...

david leffel workshop: still life demo

Here are some process shots of David's still life demo. These photos can be enlarged by clicking on them.

When David set up this still life, he talked about how from the beginning he was thinking of the abstract design qualities of what he was putting together, for example, how will the still life be 'read', or what will the center of interest be and where will it be? How fast do I want the eye to move through the still life, so how many objects should I put in it? Are the darks grouped? Is there a flow of light?

He also talked about keeping his painting as abstract for as long as he could, that is, that a part of the the painting is a piece of light that is then made into an apricot. He talked about the painting process as one of decoding (that which we're looking at), understanding/analyzing, then re-coding into a new language (of paint) what it is we want to say about what we're seeing.

He also finished things as he went along, for example, you can see that he added the highlight on the blue vase very early on. He told us start the painting with the finish.

leffel workshop: portrait 2

10" x 12", oil on linen.

This is the painting I did on our second portrait day of the workshop. I was reminded here about how as painters we must remember to see in terms of planes, so, for example, the plane of the forehead and then the plane of the side of the head. And at the meeting of these two planes, we have a "sanded" corner (as David put it) where we must soften that transition edge to create the turn. If we're able to do this instead of thinking in terms of "rounding" things, we'll avoid rendering, blending, and smoothing, and we'll be more likely to let our paint strokes stay where we put them.

And on this day again, we practiced creating stable, warm, solid shadows, and then laying in impasto in the light. David also talked about the light having both a warm and a cool component-- so that fleshier areas like the nose or cheeks would be warmer and bonier areas like the mouth & jaw would be cooler. We used some of the background color in those cooler areas, and we also used it where planes turned away from us (the background represents air, and so it makes sense that planes that turn away from us are surrounded by more air).

Those are a few logical points that opened doors for me on this day...those and of course my delight at the fact that I felt that there really was a point in glopping on paint in certain areas.

david leffel workshop: portrait demo 1

Please excuse the somewhat blurry photos. As you can imagine, at these Leffel demos there were quite a lot of spectators to work around, so we all did the best we could to at least get some type of photographic notes. Most of the next groups of photos are a bit better, but I wanted to show the progression from the beginning of David's first portrait demo.


Here he has found the head's placement within the canvas using really loose side to side strokes-- nothing definite to start, just massing in of big shapes, and then following this, placement of the next biggest shapes and anchor points (the eye sockets, the nose's shadow).



Here he has massed in the hair as one big shape, no specifics, he kept reminding us. He's still mostly using loose side to side strokes here. In this image you can also see that he's indicated where the shadows will be. These shadows will remain quiet and strong, a kind of stability for the light, which then can 'dance' all around. He told us that shadows are definitive shapes, and should never vary in value--that the only thing that should ever modify a shadow is reflected light (whereas the light shapes can vary in value all the way from a highlight down to the darkest light where it meets the shadow [half-tone]).



In this image, after David has finished painting in his shadows, big shapes, and some of the background, he moves into the light shapes. Here in the light is where he piles on the paint-- he lets his impasto in the light make big breaks off of the surface in order to enhance the sense of volume. This is one of the things that I love most about his work, this amazing celebration of oil paint's inherent qualities. Here he also keeps much of his paint to a minimal color, reserving his bright, saturated colors for areas he wishes to take the eye to, and fleshier areas such as the cheeks. He told us to look for the colors of the shadows and of the air, and then to work the local colors into these.



And here is a poor image of the finished demo, but at least you can get some idea of how he finished it.



And finally here is my first portrait of the week, where I feel like I got at the shadow/light part of it, but not at the color part of it (still too much color everywhere...who isn't seduced by color?)