It’s my birthday and I thought I’d show you the bouquet that the gardens have offered up…
And there’s also a look at the newest addition to the studio garden…
Last week we took great advantage of the gift of Jon’s visit and used his muscles and brawn and creative stonework to help extend the very first bed we planted here. He and my nurse forbade me from lifting …anything…so all you can see of me in these shots is my shadow.
We’re going to take a picnic up to the lake in a bit …and the local ice cream shack opens today…and then some mussels, asparagus and a pinot grigiot to top off the day…
may your day be as bright and full of spring flowers… HN
Busy week but I managed to get some easel time in and am almost finished with the main shack and all those shingles !
Got another layer on the left hand window…
And then the hard part…flipping the panel over…
Again…had to wait for my nurse’s assistance…but this easel is such a wonder that once a panel this size is on it I can move it with one finger. A full tour of the easel coming soon… meanwhile…
I learned, after much experimentation, that once I have the foundation layers in place for the shingles it is much easier to add the highlights by working upside down and taking a flat brush and pulling from what would be the bottom of the shingle downward. This gives the clean edge but you can adjust for the degree of “weathering” desired by choosing a correspondingly worn brush. So a new shingle gets a brand new brush…the ones here on this shack which are well weathered got an older brush.
I came over quite early to the studio this morning and heard some salty language and the tinny clanking of swordplay…only to find Sir Bernard of the Fauquembergues taking on the slings and arrows of the disadvantaged weathervane. My hero.
Panel righted again…and ready for today’s glazing down and tightening up…
We took the weekend off … almost unheard of… traveled to Baltimore and were royally hosted by our friends Doug and Scott. Treated first to a cozy feast in their home and the luxury of an unhurried visit with their art collection…then a day of brunching and art hopping from museum to museum. Their generousity and genuine good natures and love of art is inspiring and always a much welcomed breath of fresh air…and the gift of time spent with them AND being able to study the paintings of 17th century masters …priceless.
Now, back again in the studio, I’m bouyed by the images still fresh in my mind and ready to kick my game up another couple of notches. One of the things that impressed me were the many miniatures in the collection at the Walters Art Musuem. Even though the current panel on my easel is almost 8 feet long, there are dozens of “miniature” paintings within this composition.
The windows in the primary fishing shack are two such sections that I began to work on last week. In real life they are only about 2 x 3 inches but they provide some much needed depth in a 2-D world and some middle distance interest in the overall design. Now I can seen the need to go back in and tighten up the initial work in there. I want to give the viewer as much pleasure as I got from taking my glasses off and leaning all the way into the tiny portraits at the museum to see what those patiently applied brushstrokes had to reveal.
Spent the morning framing and packing up a new painting which will be headed up to the Granary Gallery as soon as Herself gets back from her yoga class. So before I head back to the easel here are a few pics of the first weeks’ work on the big panel….
A swath of sky, then in for some long distance work and detailing, then over to the shack full of shingles… I have become quite familiar with the weathered cedar shingle and learned that there are no short cuts. Wet-in-wet seems to work well for the first layers. Then I come back in and crisp up the edges and add texture. Then go back and glaze it all down as a summer rain storm might…and back over that to bounce in some highlights where the appropriate sunlight…or shadow…would glance off the surfaces.
After over a week of drawing, reworking and fine tuning the composition …I finally finished getting the sketch for this mammoth painting on the panel yesterday. Since this is a Vineyard scene, and since my studio is in the almost landlocked state of Pennsylvania, I am relying on a bank of photographs and sketches done on scene for reference. The first shots were taken back in 2004 and I have supplemented those with over a thousand more…chronicling a wide range of lighting, weather and seasonal elements in the intervening years.
Without revealing too much of the subject matter yet, I can say that the view of this part of the island can and does change hourly. A busy intersection of human, waterfowl and nautical activity, there is almost constant motion…so trying to capture that energy in a static and narrow two dimensions has been a challenge.
It was also interesting to see the changes in some of the “bones” of the scene over the 5 years or more of photos and drawings. Shingles damaged over harsh winters waited years to be repaired, and names painted on boats worn by salty seas were all the sudden bright again as I flipped from one year’s shots to the next.
I decided to let the verisimilitude go and concentrate on finding the essence of the place. The early composition has expanded from a relatively small panel to fill an almost 4 x 8 foot frame. The challenges of working on a painting that size are offset by the opportunity to portray the beauty in the simplest of details that would be lost in a smaller panel. And there are hundreds of them in this composition. So here we go.
Once again my nurse has insisted that I not lift this thing alone…so together we managed to move it from easel to kitchen table and back again. When I have the sketch completed I scan it into the computer and print it out sized for the panel. In this case it was such a huge file that I had to break it up into smaller sections. The printer spits it out in a tiled format so there’s lots of trimming and taping to get it back together. Then I line it up and trace it onto the panel using a graphite transfer paper.
This shot is towards the end and I’ve cut up some of the main sketch to be able to better see how the transfer lines are looking. Once in a while the graphite paper is of poor quality and I have been known to go on happily tracing lines for hours only to find they are not visible on the panel. Not fun.
I have very little patience for this part of my job…but somebody’s got to do it.
And now….with the panel back up on the easel and the counterbalancing adjusted…I can move it all by myself….
I’m not supposed to lift anything heavier than a can of soup for 6 weeks.
And my nurse is watching me like a hawk.
So I had to come up with a fool proof plan to get this next, huge, panel up on the easel. Too heavy for Pat to carry in from the garage by herself, we recruited the old wagon made out of parts from an old radio flyer and together we inched it through the gate and across the lawn and up onto the porch and slid it into the studio…then we locked and secured the easel carriage and one giant heave was all it took and presto…. she’s up and ready to go…
I put the deck of cards there so you could get some idea of size… the panel is roughly 4 x 8 feet…
It reminded me of a quote my dear old Aunt Sal sent which is taped to the studio refrigerator…
“There is nothing, absolutely NOTHING !, that two women cannot accomplish together before noon.”
We managed that AND moving a 50 lb bag of bird seed….well before 11:30 !
Now the hard part…to fidget with the composition and get the sketch up on the panel…day two of sketching and reworking…and counting…
Van dyke brown and ultra violet magenta, tipped with Old Holland yellow reddish extra …outlining the mid-winter hardwoods against a field of king’s blue deep sky with brilliant sunshine flooding the air outside of my studio this morning…and after a week long medical leave…I am overwhelmed by the sheer pleasures of returning to this space.
Here are just a few of the things I have missed…
The early morning sunrise shadows that greet me at the door…
The everpresent piles of books, art magazine, and vineyard gazette back issues that create a nest of inspirational reference materials for me to dip into on my mealtime breaks…
Watching to make sure Zola gets on the morning school bus in time…
And when she has a snow day and goes sledding with Jed…
The mid-morning tea time ritual of the Uncle Donald Memorial 40 dunks of the tea leaves…
The always inspiring view out of my studio window…
The mysteries that attend a blank panel…
And, as I look back from the studio full of sunshine and light… on the log cabin next door where in my dark healing chamber of recovery lies empty and in it’s cycle of refreshing…
the thing I missed most was hearing the click of the doorknob each time my babe comes in to check on me …
Breaking through the rain clouds outside of the studio… and the walls of doom and gloom that seem to surround all of us these dreary mid-winter days… came a bright ray of sunshine for art lovers and patrons alike…
The Granary Gallery has represented my artwork for over 8 years and I’m pleased to be one of the cooperating artists for this unprecedented sale. As our friend Polly often said…” It’s a good fit ! ”
So Light up your torches… put on your dancing shoes…
The mid-winter sunshine is melting away some of the sadness in the studio and work and life continues to push me forward.
We had a wonderfully healing visit from my pal Peter Follansbee this week on his way to and from giving a lecture at a furniture conference in Colonial Williamsburg. Many of you know that Peter is THE world renowned expert in 17thCentury Joinery and I got to tag along with him on tuesday as he went to the nearby Winterthur Museum to take a look at a painted wooden box made in 1698. It was a blast to be his lackey and get a rare behind- the -scenes look at the museum and meet their curator and top scientist. Peter has been hired by the MFA, Boston to reproduce the missing top half of a cabinet which is in their collection. The details to which his assembled team is investigating how the original might have been produced and decorated…and the microscopic analysis of the paint samples from the four existing examples of this furniture…are beyond amazing. If you’re at all interested in woodworking you will find his blog entries to be a remarkable wealth of information both historical and practical. www.pfollansbee.wordpress.com
This week also saw the launching of Laurie R. King’s Fifteen Weeks of Bees project. Regular readers of this blog will know that LRK is one of my favorite authors and that listening to her books in the studio has inspired many a painting. So, when she wrote to me a few months ago to invite me to participate in a fun project to help launch the newest installment in the Mary Russell Series…I couldn’t reply fast enough.
The idea is an old one … in the authors words…” Russellscape is an ‘endless landscape’ or myriorama—a series of panels with precisely the same colors at precisely the same places along their left and right edges. If all those edges match, then the individual panels, when laid side by side, form a continuous image…”
In this case she was looking for the illustrations to relate in some way to the MR series characters, story lines or geographic locations in the books. My first thought was of the painting that I had finished last year… The Beecharmer. The idea for which had blossomed many years ago while I was reading the very first book in the series, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. It took a few years of incubation and a larger studio to bring my composition to the panel … and it has taken the same number of years for LRK to return to the hive, so to speak, with her latest novel’s title…The Language of Bees which hits the bookstores on 22 May 09.
So, with a little bit of help from Photoshop… and a lot of artistic license and latitude… here is the image I came up with …
and here’s where you can see how they integrated it into the Russellscape… (Scroll down to the bottom of her home page to see the slide show ) http://www.laurierking.com/ .
It was a lot of fun and a huge honor for this humble artist to be included, so many thanks Laurie.
You too can participate as she is encouraging other artists to add their own panels… so follow the links on her site to find the details. There will be a contest coming up to pick the favorite panel…so get to the library and bone up on your Mary Russell stories and have fun. ” The Games A-foot !”
And, one last plug…the original painting, The Beecharmer can be seen here on my website…and is available now at the Granary Gallery .
And Now… I weave my way from Ye Olde Cabinet Shoppes of the 17th century … through the back alleys of 19th century London… across the moors and back across the pond…to the dune swept seascapes of Martha’s Vineyard…and straight onto a movie set ?
Next up on the easel… a painting commissioned for a movie currently wrapping up production by producer/director Tappan Heher … “Mistover”.
Much more to come on this exciting project soon… but, for now, the muses are calling.
