Back to Whistler and Vancouver

Above is a rendition of Inuk Shuk that the Vancouver Olympic
Organizing Committee (know by its acronym VANOC) uses as
its logo. The original statue, we were told, was a gift to the
city of Vancouver by the government of the Northwest Territories.
We took this photo near the base of the ski jumping hill.


With all the Olympic hoop-la (which, I hasten to add, our household is happily participating in) I went to the bookshelf and pulled down my journal from September 2008. It documents our trip to Whistler and Vancouver and my experiments with gouache and the first financial tremors of the Wall Street meltdown.

We love that area of British Columbia. After all, you get mountains and the ocean on the same trip. With all that was happening to our 401k we decided to press on and enjoy the trip. After all it was Fall in B.C. and we were getting to see the venues that would be home to the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Below is a photo of the ski jumps. They appear deceptively small. And, oddly the picnic tables seem to me to be gigantic. Just shows how decieving photos can be. Remember that if you ever use a photo you've taken as reference material for a drawing or painting!

How about this for a view--it's from a parking lot in the Nordic events area:

Ready for snow here is a shot of the cross country ski track:

Below is a page from my journal. The background was prepared before I left White Bear with some acrylic ink. I use that because it makes a permanent layer of color on which I can use a wet medium such as gouache with no concern that it will start disolving the background. Here I just used my black Uniball pen and some colored pencils to extend the design of a sticker celebrating the skeleton races.

The organizers had stickers for many of the coming events. I chose the mascot for the skeleton for sentimental reasons. Eight (oh my gosh, was it twelve??) years ago our daughter watched the skeleton races during the Winter Games and said, "I want to do that." So she contacted the team, trained for the event and was invited to Lake Placid to try out for the Olympic skeleton team. By my good fortune she was not chosen. Somehow knowing your daughter is zooming down hill, head first on a teeny tiny sled and at speeds that would get you a ticket if you were driving your car is unsettling. We have been used to her zipping down ski slopes on skiis and snowboards and flying over jumps on the back of a horse. Those seemed calm by comparison. But, if she'd made the team you can bet we would have been standing by that icy course cheering her on!

Valentines

Overview of my drafting table with some new creations.

Valentine's Day is my favorite holiday. It is just plain fun and it is an opportunity to use two of my favorite colors--red and purple--with abandon.

Last week a group of friends came over to eat chocolate and make Valentines. Roz arrived with a huge box of "scrap" paper and a WWII vintage Sears catalogue. Karen came with felted hearts and a box of more paper, clip art and nifty stuff for embellishment. Rachel brought Valentine motif pressure prints. Jennie supplied more gourmet chocolate covered graham crackers than anyone should have in her house. I brought down rubber stamps, scissors, glue sticks, glass beads, ribbons, Xacto knives, cutting mats, etc., etc. from my studio. Oh, and I threw in an old organza and feather boa with a long history; it has now been remade into lovely Valentines and pins. (You'll see below.)

We had enough supplies to give the artists huge grins and, for the self-proclaimed non-artists, wide eyes. Three of us who are working artists and one art student were told by the others that this card making seemed a daunting task. In the end, they came up with some of the best Valentines of the bunch.

So, what was the inspiration? The old catalogue generated a load of Valentines.

My grandson came up with the idea that you could glue glass "marbles" (they're not really marbles since they have a flat side) on top of little images and magnify the image. Viola! So I tried it (below):

Below are pieces of what was once a gorgeous boa that could be attached to a nightgown...oh well. The colors are gorgeous. Cutting it up and using it for Valentines is surely a higher and better use. Karen got the idea to attach a bunch of the organza to the back of a felted heart
--it made a beautiful pin.

Now here are the silliest Valentines: The purple ones below are inspired by my four-year-old grandson again. I had gotten him a box of foam hearts and monkeys so he and I could make Valentines one day after school. He was exploring the drawers in my studio and found a bag of "jewels" and sparkley pom-poms which he calls "hair balls." He has already given the Valentines away that he had decorated with monkeys (What can I say, they were in the box with all the hearts....) and several pom-pom-hair-balls so I can't show them here. However, one of his less embellished creations is at the end of this post.

I did a variation on the his theme and added some pearls when I saw a piece of purple velour paper:

Supplies for the Goofy Valentines

The inspiration for many of the Valentines:

Made by 4 year old E.W.

So, the Big Day is almost here. You have until the 14th to deliver some cards. Make some, it's fun.

Shiny Objects

What kind of art do I do in December? Answer: Decorate a big Christmas tree. Or, others might change the emphasis to say: Decorate a big Christmas tree.








My husband, who loves a decorated tree but not the decorating, is beginning to think this twelve footer of ours is gigantic. He has been making suggestions that it would be fine if I only hung, say, three hundred decorations and let the rest stay in their boxes.



But that doesn't work for me. I need the tree encrusted with every shiny bauble and ball we have. For one thing, I am attracted to shiny, glittery objects. "Hollywood," I call it. Besides, every ornament on the tree is a meme. "My mother gave me this one." "This one was a birthday present from Jennie." "Christopher made this one in Sunday school." "Eric and I got this one in Germany." "This one is from Denmark." "Oh, this was Aunt Lil's." Boxes and boxes and boxes of memories get hung on the tree.

This year I was hobbled by a new knee and counseled by my physical therapist not to be on a ladder. Going up and down wasn't going to damage the knee, but, apparently the nerve receptors near my knee can't yet send clear messages to my brain that the muscles need to make a correction to keep me balanced. My friend Roz came to the rescue.

Roz came with her artist's eyes and trimmed a part of the tree too high for me. And this was a real gift: Roz is the friend who doesn't even like to go over high bridges let alone stand on a tall ladder. You can read her comments on the tree trimming and photos of our tree on her December 8 and 13 blog entries.

We had lots of laughs. A good one at my expense when we talked about how Eric does not like to trim the tree. "I don't put things in the right places. You always end up moving most of what I hang up anyway," he says. "It's not that he puts things in the wrong places, I just need to tweek things, say, when I have a large ornament and there is no place to put it except where he put a tiny one. Or maybe three pink ones don't look the best hanging in a row. It is just a matter of composition. I move things I hang up constantly," I told Roz. "No wonder he doesn't like to trim the tree!" Hmm, now I see his point. There you have it: Roz, friend, artist and marriage coach. Eric did do the rest of the top and it looks terrific.

All in all, when the tree is all trimmed, the boxes back in the basement and the tree lights turned on, the week of work is worth it. Good thing it doesn't take as long to take it down.

Utah Journal

A few weeks ago my friend Roz Stendahl posted an article about the journal I kept on my recent trip to Utah and a discussion of my renewed interest in painting in oils. Included was a mass photo of all the Utah paintings and lots of photos of my journal. Here's the link to her post.

It seemed worth while to add a few things she did not include--for example a photo of the outside of the journal itself. Like other journals Roz has made this one was a real beauty: the paper was Aquarius watercolor paper, the cover a perfect rusty brown-red and the stiching on the spine looked like tire tracks. How great is that for a fall road trip!



It is my custom to draw and paint what I see out of the car windows as my husband drives along. This works just fine since I use a Niji waterbrush (where the water is self contained in the handle of the brush) and my traveling watercolor palette which sits easily in my lap. With those two pieces of equipment and some paper towels I'm all set. This photos shows the scenes as we crossed from Nebraska into Iowa on our way home.

Below are two pages from the last signature of the journal in which I glued small digital prints of the thirteen paintings I did in Utah.

In the envelope are the thumbnail sketches I did before each of the paintings. I needed some place to keep a record of my thinking process behind each of the paintings. Even with the pocket I made to hold literature from the trip, there was still room in the spine to hold an envelope with the sketches.

Below is a very fast sketch I did after lunch the day we went up to Sundance. When I say fast I mean less than 5 minutes. The fact that the top of Mount Timpanogos does not fit on the page actually reminds me of just how huge it was--so a "mistake" in drawing can be a good thing. The whole tone of this photos is yellow. I am blaming it on my ineptitude with the camera.

In this spread western Wyoming (home of countless antelope) was flying past the window. Later I noticed that the colors I used to paint the scene were identical to photos of the antelope in a brochure we picked up.

A few random things I wanted to remember:

More road paintings:

And, appropriately, the "tire tracks" on the spine:

Keep a journal. It's a great way to record an experience and, there it is to help you relive it later.

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.