New Show

The University of Minnesota Morris is the setting of the lastest Project Art for Nature (PAN) Show. I'll be exhibiting along with twelve other artists. PAN is a collaboration of artists and illustrators from Minnesota and Wisconsin who work independently and collaboratively to create artwork which promotes stewardship of threatened natural areas.


Dusk, 6 x16 1/2", pastel

The two locations I focus on for the PAN collaborative are the area near our cabin on the north shore of Lake Superior and the large open space between Bald Eagle Lake and Otter Lake, two of the many lakes in the Twin Cities area in Minnesota. The open space is filled with meadows, woods and marshes. The imagery of the marshes is often found in my art.

Evening, 5 x 16 1/2", pastel

The two small pastels above will be in the Morris show along with several other pastels and a set of four monotypes. 20% of the proceeds from sales of the art work are donated to non-profit environmental conservation organizations.

The show opens tomorow, Thursday, Ocotber 22, 7-9 pm at the Humanities Fine Art Gallery, University of Minnesota Morris. 104 Humanities Building, 600 East 4th St., Morris, MN. Gallery hours are Monday-Thursday: 9 am - 8 pm; Friday: 9 am - 6 pm; Sunday: pm - 4 pm.

Please come see the show if you are in the area.

Evening Painting

Evening is my favorite time of the day to be painting. The light is luminous and the shadows are deep. Best of all, I have to put myself on auto pilot and just paint; no second guessing, no overthinking. Why? The light is fading fast forcing me to make decisions and stay with them. Otherwise I can get caught in the plein air landscape painter's trap of chasing the light.

The painting above was done on my recent trip to Utah. The sun was just setting. Cottonwoods were catching the last direct rays and were lit up to a chome yellow and the field in front of them was still sunny. Everything else was in that sort of early evening mountain shadow where they were gently illuminated by the reflected light from the sky.


The painting above was done another day but also in the early evening. (Actually it is the third painting done the day I painted the two from the last post.) As you can see, neither has much blue in the sky. Just a faint bit in the part farthest from the sun. So the yellow light of the sky is present in the rest of the landscape and influenced my choice of pigments. Doing a bit of forensics will help me remember my instinctive, auto-pilot choices since I foolishly did not take good notes. Now that I'm back home and attempting some studio paintings with these as reference I sure wish I know exactly what I used. Another lesson learned.

Here is a lesson I did learn: The advice that one should always lay out one's palette the same way is smart. When you obey this rule you don't have to wonder if you are dipping into cobalt or ultramarine or violet or alizarin in the dark. Believe me, after the sun goes down, they look alike.

Both paintings were done on gessoed board. The two above each had one coat of regular white acrylic gesso and one coat of clear acrylic gesso. I like the bit of tooth given by the clear acrylic gesso but I have wondered if it causes too much of the paint to be absorbed. I use a bit of odorless solvent but no medium. The result are paintings that dry relatively quickly (a day or two) and have a matte finish except where I have laid on really thick layer of paint.

I took a wonderful workshop from Marc Hanson this summer and have been using his suggested palette with the addition of Ultramarine Violet:

Titanium White, Cadmium Yellow Light, Cadmium Yellow Deep, Cadmium Red Light, Permanent Alizarin Crimson, Magenta, Light Red, Transparent Red Oxide, Ultramarine Blue Deep, Cobalt Blue, Viridian, Yellow Ochre.

This a nice palette for landscapes--especially representational ones.

Last week I went to a lecture by a representative of Gamblin Oil Colors which prompted me to drive to Wet Paint to get some new pigments. Stay tuned!

What I Saw

My husband Eric and I just returned from a trip West to get out annual mountain fix. To accommodate all of the paraphernalia that goes with plein air painting and fly fishing, we drove. It was wonderful. We took a relaxed three days to drive to Utah and returned the same non-rushed way. In the middle he fished and I painted for a week using Park City as our base of operation. On the drive to and from Utah I did small paintings of the scenes along the road in my journal. I'll show some of them in a future post.

We had been to Utah to ski and had seen the state in the Summer but we were not prepared for the glory of Utah's Fall. Or the great fishing! The maples had turned a fluorescent red and the aspens were starting to yellow. The color is almost too much for a landscape painter to deal with. Frankly, it just doesn't look real. Painting it risks going down the road of sentimentality or cliche. As it was, most of the spots I found myself oil painting in were in the Provo River Valley near the good fishing waters of the Middle Provo River. No maples or aspen there, just the willows and cottonwoods of the river bottoms and long stretches of meadow. Fall color was obvious but not shouting at me.

I left home with about twenty panels primed with either a rusty red or a medium gray. It was good having the choice of grounds. Evening subjects turned out better on the gray panels. You can see a bit of the red ground showing on the image above. In the image below I used a gray panel. It turned out that not having to deal with the red ground helped me catch the mercury-like color of the water as it looked long after the sun had faded. In fact, I was doing this painting almost in the dark by the time I finished. The red you see around the mountains in the background are bits of the drawing I did on the panel using some thinned down alizarin crimson.

These two images were painted at the same site. The top one looks south toward giant Mt. Timpanogos, the second one, immediately above, looks north along a lower section of the Middle Provo.

I came home with thirteen paintings. I'm still trying to get to 200.

Thompson Lake Again, and More on Grounds

Here is another small painting done the second afternoon I was at Thompson Lake. It is the same scene as the last post but the view is widened to take in more of the shore. Again, it was done on panel primed with clear acrylic gesso tinted with cadmium red.

Since my aim is to do 100 oil paintings as quickly as possible I decided to use up some pieces of bookboard that are about 1/8" thick. Too thick for the books I make but perfect for doing the little paintings. Most are now primed the warm cadmium red. The red is a good ground color since many of the paintings will be landscapes that are predominantly green. Red, the complement of green makes a nice vibration in those spots that are not covered with paint.

Some panels are primed with white acrylic gesso to which I have added a bit of pumice. The white is appealing since a painting can be blocked in with the color (or its complement) of the subject. As a pastel artist I almost always use white Wallis sanded paper. My process is to block in the painting with pastel and then wet it down "melting" the pastel into the paper. You could get the same effect by doing a watercolor underpainting. At any rate, there is something familiar about looking at a fresh, white panel. And the color just seems to sparkle on it. I have been using the same process with the oils by putting down an underpainting of thinned paint.

Other panels have been primed with the clear gesso (untinted), that way I end up with the natural, gray color of the bookboard. Having a medium value gray makes it easy to establish the values in a painting since your eye is not fooled by the stark white of the ground if that is what you are starting with. I tried one painting on this gray panel today. When I get it scanned I'll post it.

Painting and Fishing on Thompson Lake

It was a beautiful day to paint. My husband, Eric, and I spent two afternoons at one of his favorite trout lakes last week. Located off the Gunflint Trail in northern Minnesota, Thompson Lake is one of those catch-and-release lakes that is small enough for me to have several good views to choose from. Today the sun was getting low and I turned my easel toward the west.

The sun was streaming in through the trees. A shaft of light was coming through the bushes near the bottom of this painting and the scene just glowed. Next time, if I try this view again in my studio, I'll jack up the yellow in the sun lit areas.




This painting was done on a panel primed with acrylic gesso tined with cadmium red. Most of the red is obliterated except for a some along the top and a tad near the bottom. It would have been better to leave a bit more. I've done about 25 paintings since my worshop in August. The practice helps!

And yes, my husband really does fish while I paint. I took this shot just before I packed up by easel. That speck near the far shore in Eric in his float tube with fly-rod in hand.

Two More Oranges

Lots of painting and drawing this week. The oils are getting easier and easier to handle. But it was not without many frustrating moments.

When things were not going well and I was getting discouraged I did two things: I went back to what I can do and that is to draw in graphite. Having some successes with a medium I know well gave me the lift I needed to try again with the oils. Second, rather than paint outside and deal with the changing light, I set the orange up in my studio where I had control over the lighting. Same subject as the last post: an orange on orange paper.


Then I had yet another go at the orange:

In each painting there is a lesson learned.

Yesterday I was back painting outside in the park across the street. Now with the added "brush miles," i.e practice, dealing with changing light went better than the last outside session.

The take-away is: keep painting. And, when all else fails, eating a little chocolate doesn't hurt. Or, to celebrate success, have a chocolate. For those who didn't remember--yesterday, September 4, was World Chocolate Day.

Julia Child and an Orange

Back in the '60s I used to watch Julia Child on TV. She made cooking look easy. Each week, in just half an hour, she would effortlessly cook up some complicated dish. After watching her one week I thought, "Hey, I'll make a Salmon Case for my new husband. It won't take too long." After all, I'd just seen Julia do it. Result: I spent hours and hours in my kitchen. The Salmon Case was edible but, with the skills I had at the time, it wasn't easy and it didn't look like Julia's.

I learned the hard way that the pros make things look easy because, after lots and lots and lots of practice, they know what they are doing.

I recently decided to learn to paint in oils. To start I signed up for a workshop with landscape artist Marc Hanson. How hard could it be to transfer my pastel painting experience to oils? All the concepts I preach in my classes about having a firm idea about what you are trying to "say" in the painting, good value structure, a strong composition, etc. were stresssed in the workshop. So far, so good. But when I got to putting the paint on the canvas I felt like I was painting with my elbow.

So, what's with the orange painting below?

It is the first in a series of back-to-basics practice pieces I am painting. Last week I did several little landscapes in black and white--just to keep things simple. Working in black and white I could concentrate on values and forget the issues that crop up when color is introduced.

But the brush handling was still tripping me up. The Hanson workshop was invaluable for the demos he did. Just watching how Marc used the paint was huge. Before the workshop I'd been practicing with the oils but, in retrospect, had been using paint much too thickly.

Ever the font of good advice Roz Stendal suggested I take a look at some YouTube videos of Duane Keiser (the orginal Painting-A-Day guy) painting. Viola! He made it look easy.

Well, like my experience with Julia, it is easier than it looks. My first mistake was to make a thin Ultramarine wash as an underpainting. I wiped off the space for the orange and mixed up the various colors in the fruit, the background and shadow. Had I let the remaining blue dry thoroughlyI would not have muddied the orange background and I would have been able to have bits of the blue show through. Other frustrations came with not being able to paint in the fabulous pinkish purple shadow. Or even get the value of the shadow directly under the orange right. It is so easy with pastel!! The above photo (taken inside) doesn't capture much except to show I did attempt a simple orange. I actually painted the orange outside in the shade. The warm orange fruit against the cool orange construction paper was really interesting. The reflected blue from the sky made that great shadow color.

I'll paint another orange tomorrow.