New Paintings, the Folding Hills of California

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art, California, inspiration, Nature, oil pastel, painting, watercolor

I’ve long loved the way the rolling hills along the coast of California fold together and overlap, the sensuality of that “hot rise and cool dip.”  I’ve tried to capture a bit of that fascination in some of my poetry: Hot Hills in Summer Heat, and Playing with Light, loving the way the light falls upon those folds so that “the hills unwind, one at a time, to dance before us all.”

Lately I’ve been trying to capture some of that in a few paintings, some inspired by the work of other artists and some from my own photographs. I’m not wholly satisfied with any of them, but something of what I’m trying to capture comes through.

This first is watercolor and oil pastel, and even a brush of soft chalk pastel in the sea and highlighting the closest hill. This was inspired by a Dale Laitinen painting of the coastline along Highway 1 near our home called.

The one above and below were inspired by a local and much-loved artist Erin Hanson who works mostly in oil. My painting above is again oil pastel and watercolor on Arches cold press paper, which has much more texture than the smoother hot press Fabriano paper used in the other oil pastel paintings in this post.

This one was also inspired by Hanson which I painted some time ago in acrylic. I’ve only created three works in acrylic so far, but for some reason I feel intimidated by it. I’m not sure why.  The three I painted out came out well enough. Of course, none of these inspired by other artists come even close to the quality of the original works. But I learn so much each time I try.

This one and the one below are from my own photographs taken of the hillsides on my walks around our neighborhood. They come closer to those “folding hills” I wrote about earlier, “the hot rise and cool dip” in my poems. Both are oil pastel and watercolor on hot press paper.

In this last one I wanted to see what the hills would look like stripped down and closer. I’m not sure which version I like best. The mattings help a lot to set off the works. Someday I will learn to photograph my paintings better. That might help too (smile.)

Thank you for bearing with me as I try to learn this craft and share my efforts. It’s a fascinating pastime.

[Note: I created this post before the latest round of fires set these hills ablaze north and south of where we live. My heart goes out to all who have lost their lives and homes, and seen their communities destroyed, including the wildlife that inhabits these hills and forests.]

 

 

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New Paintings, Trees and More Trees

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art, creative process, Mixed Media, oil pastel, painting, trees, watercolor

Three new paintings, part of my forest series, I suppose, but really just playing with styles and possibilities. All three were inspired by paintings from artists I admire. All using watercolor and oil pastel on hot pressed paper.

The first two are both very dense, but the style quite distinct. My husband wasn’t too fond of these. He wants a place to let the eye in, or at least a place to rest away from all that color. The one above has a lighter, feathery feel. I enjoyed painting this and I felt quite light and feathery painting it.  It was done quickly. The one below has a heavier, slicker feel.

It took more time. It feels more surreal, more fauvist (an orgy of color), and I think that’s what I was aiming for. I say “I think” because I’m drawn toward the fauvists, the unruly works of Derain, Matisse, Manguin, etc, during that early period, and I was painting more by feel than thought.

This last didn’t turn out at all like I had planned. It was supposed to be more abstract, and the background filled with forest, not sky. But I think I was unconsciously influenced by my husband’s remarks about the first two, and so I let the sky in. A place to dip into and out of the scene.

I hope readers of this blog understand that I am just playing with paint, trying to learn a craft for my own enjoyment and amusement.

But as an art lover, I also see this past-time as art exploration. I’m teaching myself to see as an artist might, to explore what different mediums can do, to get a feel for different styles, different ways to compose a scene, to improvise on nature, to abstract from reality a sense of its feel or flavor.

But mostly I do this just to immerse myself in pure color, and to get lost in “no words.”

Painting Again, Forest Series

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abstract, art, forest, Mixed Media, Nature, oil pastel, painting, Paintings, trees, watercolor

I’ve started painting again, keeping toward the abstract, still experimenting with water-color and oil pastel, letting them show me how well they play together.

I’d been inspired by some of Rick Steven’s paintings, his intense close-ups of trees and barks. I love the colors, the texture, the shapes.

The painting above was my initial attempt. At first it seemed too vertical, too placid, so I began to build up the horizontal elements, the “foliage,” and finally came to the place where it seemed “done.”

Next I wanted to do a close-up of a shapely tree trunk, and again I was dissatisfied. Too vertical, no clear focus. So I began to add areas of “lichen,” I suppose you could call it, at the lower right and upper left. Something to attract the eye and allow it to move up or down the trunk. At some point it too seemed “complete.” This one may be my favorite of the three. I like the richness of the colors, the texture.

I’m not sure where the last one came from. I wanted to add a human element into the natural, something partially hidden, peeking out, more figurative than figure. The blue sprite appeared. But further down the tree trunk another face emerged, unbidden. With that addition, the painting took on a more ominous than playful feel. Not what I had intended at all. I’m not sure I like this one.  But it haunts me.

 

Musee d’Orsay, Eye-Candy for Art Lovers

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art, art museum, artists, Impressionism, Musee d'Orsay, painting, sculpture, travel

I could have spent weeks savoring up all this museum has to offer, instead I had five hours. Still I was in heaven. The structure itself is a masterpiece, a renovated train station with a magnificent clock tower set on the Left Bank of the Seine River across from the Louvre.

This was the most visitor-friendly art museum I visited in Europe. An enormous hall was surrounded by various rooms on several floors all flowing into one another. I was forever lost in the Louvre and the Prado, but here I always felt gently guided as I roamed from one room to another in my exploration of all the artwork.

While the Louvre features art created before 1850, d’Orsay picks up from there, featuring an impressive array of Impressionists, both pre and post, including Van Gogh and Gauguin, Monet and Manet, Derain and Degas, Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and Cezanne, among others, along with a powerful selection of sculpture, and artwork less familiar to me.

Below is a random sampling of some of the work I loved seeing.

What I loved too was being able to get so close I could see the individual brush strokes. See if you can guess whose paintings these came from.

These are just a fraction of the photos I took, which are a small fraction of all the wonderful artwork on display at the d’Orsay.

I leave you with a painting by only American I can remember seeing, although there may have been others. I was bewitched by this Winslow Homer I’d never seen before. It captures something of the enchantment I felt dancing in the arms of the masters on that magical day.

Recipe for a Painting: Durrell on Venice at Dawn

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art, inspiration, Lawrence Durrell, painting, travel, Venice, writing

Twilight Venice, 1908, Claude Monet

Quote of the Week

“These thoughts belong to Venice at dawn, seen from the deck of the ship which is to carry me down through the islands to Cyprus; a Venice wobbling in a thousand fresh-water reflections cool as a jelly. It was as if some great master, stricken by dementia, had burst his whole color-box against the sky to deafen the inner eye of the world. Cloud and water mixed into each other, dripping with colors, merging, overlapping, liquefying, with steeples and balconies and roofs floating in space, like the fragments of some stained-glass window seen through a dozen veils of rice paper. Fragments of history touched with the colors of wine, tar, ochre, blood, fire-opal and ripening grain. The whole at the same time being rinsed softly back at the edges into a dawn sky as softly as circumspectly blue as a pigeon’s egg.”

Excerpt From: Lawrence Durrell. “Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island.”

I found this exquisite quote on another favorite blog, The Depth of Now, by the lovely Martina Korkmaz. Immediately I was seized with the urge to paint his words, to capture in paint all the shimmering color and effusive joy.

Instead I found this painting of Venice by Monet that captures some, but not all of what I would paint.

More and more I find myself wanting to paint the things I read that move me, like the poem Love After Love that I blogged about earlier this week. Paint a woman greeting herself in a garden on an island home.

I suppose it’s an urge to put into tangible form what I feel swirling around me when I read, what I see splashing against the walls of my mind. Something that will remain long after the words fall silent.

 

More Feeling Than Memory: Flowing Leaves, A Swirl of Fish

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abstact, abstract art, art, creative process, inspiration, Mixed Media, painting, watercolor

Lately I’ve been leaning toward the abstract in my painting, but it’s hard to resist that representational pull. Especially when trying to capture a feeling grounded in memory, like a swirl of fish, or flowing leaves.

I came closer to the abstract with the flowing leaves. Here I was trying to capture what I felt when watching the wind streaming through the birch trees during my morning meditation. It was mesmerizing, the way the wind played with those strands of leaves. Like fingers gently parting,  lifting, letting go. All that light filtering through. I couldn’t get enough of it. I’ve caught something of that here, I think, but not enough.

This was done with oil pastel and watercolor, with a touch of gold acrylic to add sparkle.

 

For the swirling fish, I was looking for a mosaic effect.  Like what I saw on the walls and floors of ancient ruins when sailing through the Med in Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, and Malta. Like what I saw beneath the surface of the sea when I was snorkeling, swirls of color fractured by light.

The oil pastel-watercolor combo lends itself to that effect, although I didn’t quite accomplish what I had set out to do. Still I like it well enough.

I’m at the place now where I think I need to work in series, painting one after another of the same theme or subject, playing, practicing, seeing how close I can get to what I hold, not so much in my mind’s eye, but in some deeper more inarticulate place. That scattering of light through leaves. That swirl of sea and fish, broken into tiny bits of brilliant color.

More feeling than memory drives the urge to capture what I experienced then. What I experience still when I close my eyes and allow that felt-sense to rise up deep within.

 

New Paintings – Tangled Limbs, Roots & Rocks

Tags

art, Nature, painting, trees, watercolor

I haven’t been painting this year as much as last. But I wanted to share a few that will probably find a place on my wall. All of them are a mix of watercolor and oil pastel, which I’ve been playing with a lot lately.

I’ve included two paintings in this post, both proof of my love affair with trees. The one above, Roots and Rocks, is from a nearby creek bed. I love the way the roots of the old oak hug the rocks around it. The reference photo is below.

Paintings always look better when matted.

The second painting, Tangled Limbs, and its reference photo are below.

This is one of the rare paintings which I think looks better the closer you get to it, where you can see the texture and marks better.

You can’t see it in the reference photo, but the light streaming through those limbs was dazzling. I tried to capture a bit of that by dripping on yellow paint from the top.

I’ll have a couple more paintings to share soon.

 

Recognition for “Slow Swirl at the Edge of Time”

Tags

abstract art, art, Mixed Media, painting, watercolor

I entered a local art show for the first time this month and was surprised and pleased to get recognition for my work, one of my personal favorites. I wrote about this work a few months ago, my first abstract painting, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Later I wrote about how I came to name it, although I “renamed” it for this show. The theme was “Light” so I called it “Light Swirl at the Edge of Time,” still fitting, I think (smile).

I used watercolor and oil pastel. so it was entered under a broad category of 3D, glass, and mixed media. During my turn as docent for the show one rainy day last week, I shot a few photos.

I’ve been doing more writing than painting these last few months. But the few I’ve worked on have all been watercolor and oil pastel. I love the texture it creates in combination, the way the watercolor washes over and puddles between the oil marks, the way the pastel adds sparkle, and how the two together sometimes gives the work an almost mosaic quality.

I’ll share some of these later, but for now my little “Swirl” gets center stage.

Perfect Pairings – Klee and cummings

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abstract art, art, creativity, e.e. cummings, inspiration, painting, Paul Klee, poems, poetry

I’ve long been a huge fan of Paul Klee’s paintings and e.e. cummings’ poetry, and for similar reasons: their playfulness and sense of excitement, as if “bursting with something very important and precise to say.,” as one critic writes of cummings’ work.

They dared to take their art in new and often jarring directions, playing with syntax and form, with color and composition. The reader/viewer is forced to see things in a new way. To question old ways of looking at the world.

Beneath the playfulness, something deeper is going on. Each bends toward the light.

“Everything passes, and what remains of former times, what remains of life, is the spiritual. In everything we do, the claim of the Absolute is unchanging.” – Paul Klee

“Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star.” – e.e. cummings

A few favorites of each follows.

[in Just-]

BY E. E. CUMMINGS

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and

the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

By E. E. Cummings, 1894 – 1962

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

Ta-Da! My New Home Studio

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art, art studio, creativity, inspiration, office space, painting, personal, writing

After having pumped it up, I hope it isn’t a let-down to those who have been waiting to see it, as promised.

Ir’s certainly not as exciting or whimsical as so many of the studios posted on these pages that have inspired me. But it’s mine. And it does say something about me, I think, being practical, inexpensive, yet filled with color and things I love that inspire me.

My husband made me this long wall-to-wall desk top out of pine planks stained a red oak. It sits on inexpensive Ikea knock-offs, purchased online through Office Depot that are surprisingly solid and well-made.

My studio features two work stations, one for writing and one for painting. I bought inexpensive cubes on Amazon to keep my desktop organized and to keep photos of ;my loved ones near. An odd assortment of cups and jars and baskets keep my paints and brushes tidy and handy.

I re-purposed this portable laptop table as a way to extend my painting work space. It slips under the desk when not in use.

The focal point of the room is this large blue wall hanging featuring two colorful molas from the San Blas islands when we were sailing through the Panama Canal.

The many layers of fabric cut and sewn together with such  tiny stitches amazes me.

Another fabric favorite hangs next to this old blue couch that I bought at Pier One Import years ago. It folds out into a single bed, not very comfortable, but well used over the years.

I bought the fabric hanging at a county fair years ago. Again, the tiny details amaze me.

The room also features the flags we saved from our around-the-world sailing adventure. They’ve been stored rolled up in a box till now.

When entering a new port it was protocol to fly the flag of the host county as well as our own. My daughter made several of these on an old portable foot-pumped sewing machine that fellow yachties gave her.

I’d planned on buying a counter-height craft table full of fun cubby holes for storing stuff that I found on Amazon. I wanted a place where I could stand to work when I wanted and extra space to create collage paper and spread out the pages of my novel-in-progess when in the process of reorganizing and revising pages.

But I couldn’t bear parting with the super-handy lateral filing cabinet that had been part of my old office. So my husband used that as  base for an island, putting it on wheels and using the old desk-top perched on extenders to create a large island that I could roll out of the way when not in use.

In this photo it’s holding the two thick binders with drafts of the novel I’m currently working on. In the cubbyhole beneath I store old paintings, magazines, etcetera.

When we bought this home in foreclosure all the closet doors were missing for some reason. So I put up a curtain instead and decided that I like it, and so it remains.

There’s my bookcase, of course, one of several throughout our home, more books than I’ll ever finish I’m sure, especially now since my Kindle is put to such good use too.

And then there’s my own artwork, scattered through-out the room. I have to hang it somewhere, and it does inspire me to want to create more.

I hope you enjoyed this little tour. The room is still a work in progress. I need new window coverings and a new desk chair. And I’m eager to shop through some flea markets and antique stores for more fun and inspiring containers and curiosities to add to my shelves and desktop. But essentially it’s done, and I’m happy with it.