one solid month of painting…and painting…and painting,
I offer you…
well, I don’t have a title yet…but here is the final apple series painting…
( remember these are just iphone photos so we’ll all have to wait for it to be varnished and professionally shot…but you’ve been waiting much more patiently than I have…so….)
And here are a couple detail shots with the parts I’ve been hiding…
I usually reserve the treat of sushi for after I’ve sold a painting…but in this case Pat is willing to indulge me.
We are welcoming 2012 here in the studio by painting apples.
Yes I’m still….painting….apples !
Try as I might, this final work – the seminal, keystone, massively fundamental focus of the apple themed series – is just simply spanking my artistic self. And it’s all Chris’s fault. Back in 2010, when picking apples at the Tiasquin Orchard on the island of Martha’s Vineyard and visiting with it’s farmers, the Magnusens, my beloved gallery owner Mr. Morse had a vision. Wouldn’t it be sorta fun for someone to do a painting from the bottom of the hill looking up through the trees at a person picking apples ?
Simple idea, lovely idea…who better to do this painting than the woman whom Patricia Neal dubbed, “the artist who paints people without their heads “… Heather Neill.
OK she says and rounds up her favorite Vineyard model, Mr. Theodore Meinelt who happens to live just down the road from the orchard, and off we trot to pose among the heavily laden limbs. Now viewing this photo you will see one of the biggest challenges I faced in composition. These are ancient trees and, like so many of the island specimens which are battered by ocean storms, they are small. Wonderful for picking, and probably pruned to their diminutive height for just that reason…but when you put a human next to them he ends up looking like a giant.
One other challenge was that, good for Debbie tough for me…it was a bumper crop. Thousands and thousands of apples. I knew that in order to do this idea justice, again Mr. Morse must be thanked, it would need to be a panel large enough to let the viewer have the same panoramic feel that originally inspired my muse. And I knew that my ridiculously high standards would not let me take a pass on rendering every one of those apples (forgive me) right down to their core.
I debated, fussed, dripped with procrastinating angst…(Pat has been driven to longer and longer walks with Finn as each stressful day of whining passed) … and finally decided to use the 60″ panel thereby committing to what I knew would be weeks of work.
I started out taking daily shots of the progress with the idea of sharing the journey with you all. But I was so frustrated with the slow pace and the overwhelming amount of detail that I bagged on that early on. But now, as I am nearing the end…she says oh so hopefully… I have decided to show you the abbreviated “process” shots. I’ve been putting detail shots up on facebook as I complete small sections and now seem to have a small but dedicated group of followers with whom I have been teasingly withholding the ” big reveal” of seeing the whole finished work.
There was a great amount of artistic license in play in an effort to wrangle the tree and background, concept and balance, in the pursuit of the “essence” of the orchard. Here is one of the dozens of photos that I used as reference…the closest to the finished comp…
The initial sketch…
First pass… Some sky…
Needs to say more about the island… so how about a water view ?
Flash forward…weeks forward…to the first detail shots…
And now…I’m off to the easel to finish this baby. Have about two square feet of apples, leaves and branches to tighten up and one long branch to snap into shape. Might be two days of work since I have squandered this morning writing this entry…and allowing the tylenol to take effect…since the steady hours of resting my pinky on the panel to work the tiny brushes is taking a toll on my own limbs.
But I’ll get back to you just as soon as it’s done. I promise you will be able to hear the huge sigh of relief in the furthermost corners of your own apple orchards.
From the depths of my creative hibernation… I thank you John.
Here’s the extended snippet of the comments I sent to John with my thoughts about the work…
I’ve got this friend Ted who just turned 95 and lives on Martha’s Vineyard.
Ted was a high school art teacher and artist and has spent almost a whole century now inspiring and encouraging artists. I met Ted about 10 years ago and he has been “schooling me” ever since. (I’m working right now on a painting of him in an apple orchard which he posed for last fall.)
We talk often over the phone as he lives alone now but when we are on the Vineyard we spend a lot of time with Ted.
His house is chock-a-block full of antiques and stories to go with each one.
I noticed a tin can in his kitchen one day that had a bunch of those old pencils in it.
Wonderful chunky thick lead Dixon pencils that he used to introduce younger students to drawing.
I got up the nerve on our last visit to ask him if I could have one and he said, “Oh, those old things…here take the lot”.
When I got them home to the Pennsylvania studio and took a closer look I saw that they have the word “Beginners” embossed on them. And, since I’ve recently been hammering home the importance of a strong foundation in drawing skills to a couple of our grandsons who have brought their art questions to my studio… the idea of pencil as prop began to congeal.
The pile of rocks which are from the beach in Chilmark brought it full circle back to Ted and the tiny swiss army knife was one of the few items I brought home from Florida where I had to take my father off of life support earlier this year. That experience and it’s wake have been slowly filtering into my work in some quite unexpected ways. So, while I wasn’t aware of this until I just wrote this out for you, I guess it weaves a thread through three generations… with the iconic pencil as talisman.
Our little studio workshop has been buzzing with print orders this week and Pat has been making daily runs to Fedex in the sleigh…
I’ve just updated the website but if you don’t see the painting that you want a print of…or if you have other questions about the ordering process…please don’t hesitate to contact us… hnartisan@comcast.net
Here’s a response to the last blog post about the painting Finding Abstraction which I got from Cori, the daughter of my friend Saren and someone who does that noblest of professions for a living…she teaches children about art !
(Cori is the hard working woman at the right, alongside her mom, on the day that the entire Zink family showed up to help us clean up after the flood.)
Hi
Heather,
Love Finding Abstraction! My 4th graders just read Jackson
in Action in their new reading series. I just finished a lesson with them
using the children’s book Action Jackson and then let them do their own
Pollock (sometimes I’m down right nuts). I did not manage the consistency very
well and most of the paintings look like a mess but they had a blast. I think
they had almost as much fun crawling around with a sponge to clean the floor and
chairs as they did making the mess. And somehow I managed to not lose one pair
of pants to paint splatters!!! Their reading about Romare Bearden now – collage
is next. I’m loving this new reading series.
C. 🙂
I just love Cori’s creative way of putting lessons into action. My brushes are raised to her !
PS – today she sent along a couple examples of the student’s artwork.
They both have nailed the strength of the linear gestures and the resonance of vivid color. Wicked cool as they say where I’m from. These guys are from the Paxtang Elementary School.
The Current show at Gallery 1261 features this little play on the theme… Finding Abstraction
The set up for this was crazy. I wanted to use a real Jackson Pollock painting as reference and found one in my old college Art History text book which I scanned and printed out so I could enlarge it and make it look like a postcard with torn edges. Then Pat found me an old paint can from the stash in the garage and after I rigged them up I taped a canvas to an old fedex box and started to drip.
I remembered the scene in the movie Pollock where Ed Harris takes house paint and starts to drip it on the floor. Turns out there is a learning curve which involves refining the dilution of the paint and the movement of the brushwork. More of a slow dripline than a splatter. I was aiming for verisimilitude but my need for immediate gratification left me impatient with the process. Yes, I could fake it… but I eventually found the right consistency and made up four jars of color and then I dribbled one layer at a time with the panel flat on the floor and walked away while it dried (that was the hard part). Since I was using oil paint instead of acrylic, it had to dry completely between colors or else I ended up with an oily blooming mess.
Then there was the fun of trying to get the magnifying glass to stay on that teacup.
I was just about finished with the painting when, sitting at my easel, I felt everything start to shake. When you work with a Bernese Mt. Dog at your feet this occasionally happens so I yelled at Finn to stop. It kept on shaking so I turned around and yelled at her again…but she was asleep. Then my phone beeped and I read the breaking news that there was an earthquake in DC. Yep, that felt about right.
I looked around the studio and a couple of the paintings were hanging off kilter but the only real damage was to this still life… the postcard had fallen off of the brush that I had rigged to hold it up (I did fake that nail and tile background).
So there’s the rest of the story as they say… stop by if you’re in Denver and check it out.
Last year I started a series of …well series paintings.
I wanted to work on themes and explore them across several different compositions. There were more ideas than I had time to create and I’ve learned that there is a time, and a season as it were, for each painting. So, as the crisp fall air brings the colors alive, I have been studying apples… anew.
The October before last I spent a day with our friend Ted in the Tiasquam orchards in West Tisbury…
There are dozens of good painting ideas from that modeling session and I decided to elaborate on the “theme” of apple picking. Though I started the series last year with some sketches …
and then this painting from my studio yard…
Like I said earlier… last year life took some wicked wild turns … but life ebbs and marches on…and I’m now reaching back and pulling on the thread that started the theme.
I don’t usually put photos of unvarnished paintings up on the web but the new iphone has a good enough camera to give you a decent representation of what is fresh off the easel.
This painting was inspired by a quote from NC Wyeth, “I have all this and more, yet how I would like to relax; to be content with a wheelbarrow, a rake, an apple basket, a pipe.” He wrote that in a letter dated September 19, 1910. A hundred years later and that sentiment still resonates.
And what to do with all those apples ?
Well that’s the next painting in the series… Skillet Apple Pie.
You won’t be able to get much out of this shot of the still life set up…because I decided to change it up a bit after moving to the easel…but here’s a peak into the early stages of the creative process…
that’s what we’ve had for a whole week and it is healing the souls of flood weary citizens of the commonwealth.
So this morning I harnessed the power of those first rays as they blast through the foggy forest.
Yes, that’s a panel…a blank canvas as it were… which means that YES I am going to be painting again…any minute now. And yes, that’s an apple basket and a Stayman I think on the panel. Last night I took a previousely prepared panel and slathered on a final coat of the primo gesso ( Artboards Panel Gesso ) and this morning it was ready for the gentle wet-sanding which leaves that ultra smooth finish that I crave. You need to find a source of strong raking light to dance across the panel so the otherwise invisible imperfections can be spotted and sanded out. Today I let mother nature be the lightbulb as well as the drying source.
I have come to understand, though not always appreciate, that each painting has its own agenda, its own time to be rendered. I tried several times last fall, and then again in the spring, to work on the apple picking series which I had sketched out and planned to include in this year’s Granary show. But it wasn’t in the cards. Not its time… until now. It made me wait until the crisp autumn air sent me running for the first sweatshirt of the season…and the local orchard was announcing that it was time for pick-your-own…and the saigon cinnamon jar tumbled off the shelf and into my great grandmother’s dough bowl.
OK got it. I dug out the NC Wyeth quote which inspired the series when I read it in his letters last winter, ” I have all this and more, yet how I would like to relax; to be content with a wheelbarrow, a rake, an apple basket, a pipe.” And I sent Pat to her favorite farm stand to beg for a basket and Finnegan and I drove over to the orchard and picked a bushel of the finest looking apples…which, she reports, tasted pretty good too. Then we took a trip to Saren’s house to put the pieces of her old wooden wheelbarrow in the truck and bring it back to the studio for the setup.
With a bit of repair work it was strong enough to hold the apple basket and the rake and the pipe. So here’s a rare look at the first stage of the composition…
I say rare because, like any good magician, you risk letting down your audience if they see what goes on behind the curtain. I’m just so excited to be working at my day job again that I’m throwing open all the windows and doors.
Starting off the day with panel making at dawn… I can’t wait to see what other wonders await…
Awash in flood recovery our family, our neighbors, our community and our state have been blessed with a dry sunny October week. Wherever we go now there are weary faces and stories to match. Everyone around us has been affected and so there is a sort of commaraderie that has swelled and landed us all on higher common ground.
And those random acts of kindness you occasionally hear about…you know those little gestures from someone who doesn’t even know you…that catch you off guard and that take your breath away…as we go about our days wobbling with our tired backs and heavy hearts… we seem to keep bumping into them.
Like when Pat climbed out of her muddy boots and wanted to do something normal and went to get her haircut and her gal Marianne (at Salon Oxygen in York )made a space in her schedule… and listened to Pat’s story (as she always does because Pat tells the best stories) and when it came time to pay she told her Pat’s money was no good. “You’ve been through a rough time Pat, this one’s on me. Don’t you worry. You’ve been supportive or me for all these years. Let me give something back.”
And then today… when after weeks of having the industrial dehumidifier drying us out in the basement (you’ll remember the photo of Pete kindly delivering it to us right after the flood)…and worrying all along how much this was going to cost as the days dragged into weeks. Well Pat and I managed to haul it up one step at a time and got it in the station wagon and off she went to return it. Only to have Mike, and RSC Equipment Rentals in Lancaster, say to her, ” there’s no charge”. What ? “We know you’ve had a hard time. There’s another family who rented one from us too. It’s the least we can do to help out our flooded neighbors.”
Both times we wept.
And there have been so many other small gestures that add up to some very big sighs of relief on top of the huge out pouring of friends who showed up with gloves and smiles on.
We are making great progress. They were here today to measure for the furnace which they will install next week. Here’s a pic of the garage and shed finished with reclaimed flood wood and as you can see I’ve had time to plant the fall crop and Pat helped me get the greenhouse back up around it so our little garden can begin to grow again.
Here’s hoping that your neck of the woods is drying out too and that your October days are full of crisp apples and the kindness of strangers.
