The BTW Method of Painting

Spring Thaw, Acrylic on Gallery Stretched Canvas, 20" x 20"

PAINTING IN PROGRESS

Spring Thaw, #1 in the new Woodland Series, is tough.  Every time I passed the studio door on the way to the pantry or storage area, it kept pulling me into the studio to make an adjustment. Yesterday, it got more than a stroke here or there. It got put on the floor, sprayed with water and then painted wet into wet to soften some of  hard edges. I call my pass-by painting sessions the BTW ( By The Way) Painting Method. I glance in at the works in progress as I'm passing the door. I duck in to correct the oops I spotted. And in fifteen minutes or so continue on my way with whatever I was doing in the first place . The method is very spontaneous, intuitive and not at all stressful. . It is slow going, but so am I.

When the sun is out, planting is on my mind, cycling is on my mind, painting not so much. Not caring to be  a shut in in the studio during the summer months is the way to go in this clime. Summer is the time for Plein air painting and gathering reference photographs on photographic excursions.  Knowing I want to do more Woodland pieces, I had my brawny landscape guys clear me a path into the woods so I wouldn't be kept back from hunting down new photographic material. They did a wonderful job with their axes and machetes hacking down  last winter's debris. I can now come and go with only a couple of logs to get over. I did hate missing my walk out to the daffodils earlier, I won't miss it next time  the lush green field beyond log two turns brilliant yellow with blooms. Beyond that is a much bigger lake due to our Spring thaw and abundant showers since.  I think I need some hiking boots to go with my whittled walking stick to get there--also what does poison ivy and sumac look like? --What does Michigan's one poisonous snake look like? I need a book--something like What Every Hiker Should Know...I was a Girl Scout, but my badges weren't for trekking in the woods--more for trekking in the kitchen.

A clear path to next year's wild daffodils beyond log two

And a clear way in. (That's not my place you see. It's my neighbor 's, the one with wind chime complaints).

 I came across this video. It made me laugh out loud. I adore Father Guido Sarducci and his wise-cracking wisdoms. I hope you do too.If not, you need to lighten up; you're taking art way too seriously and that attitude produces stiff work devoid of spirt. The stiffness of Spring Thaw is exactly what pulled me into thethose studio doors.  After yesterday's wet into wet treatment, it's softer now.

White Knuckle Road Trip

Road Trip #1, Digital Photograph

What is it about Memorial Day that the heavens always weep upon our heads?  In spite of all the barbeque plans, all the home gardeners planning to plant their annuals to welcome the unofficial start of summer, the weather on Memorial Day is foul. Appropriately so.

Memorial Day is a day of mourning all the brave, beautiful young men and women who sacrificed their lives in service of our country. It's a solumn occassion--and from records I've kept, always a bad weather day. So Ellis and I drove to Lansing to visit our kids. By the time we were headed home, what was an easy hour ride became a white knuckle road trip that made us rethink the road trip we had been planning  earlier in the day to Jefferson's Monticello near Charlottsville, Virginia. We thought we'd go  in September, after Labor Day when kids are back in school and tourists are fewer in number.

Road Trip #2, Digital Photograph

After just an hour in the car however, we began rethinking our plan. We were doubting our bums were up to many more hours spent sitting behind the wheel in what could be just as adverse conditions as were beating against the windshield.

The rainy ride suggested  we needed some stamina training--a few small road trips around the state plus some glute work in the gym--plus short routes.  Pulling  into the safety of our garage, we sighed relief.  Warming ourselves in front of the fire, I reviewed  the loose itinerary we had put together. It was ambitious, the itinerary of middle aged people who can stand being strapped into bucket seats for long periods, not for youngsters and oldsters who are in a rush to get there and see the sights. Route times had to be considered.
Four hours seemed okay. But could that be done?

Road Trip #3, Digital Phtograph

FORTS AND MANSIONS  ITINERARY AS IS:

Pittsburgh was the longest stretch, five hours and forty five minutes from our doorstep, but was worth the push. The city had history-- its downtown area was where the original fort the French had been two hundred and fifty nine years ago.

The Indians wanted a trading post where Fort Duquesne
 had been, but the colonists built a new Fort
next to the site and named it Pitt after Edward Pitt, the elder.
Chief Pontiac didn't take too kindly to that.

Pittsburgh, originally called Fort Duquesne by the French,  was the fort that General Braddock's British/Colonial troops went to capture in 1755, with George Washington riding along to show them the way to its location at the  Fork of the Ohio. The Fork of the Ohio is where the Alleghany river merges with the Monongahela river to form the Ohio. The British were of the opinion that the French fort was built on their territory. They wanted it gone. They didn't get their wish. The French won the confrontation. They won again in September of 1758 and tore it down, but then lost the settlement just two months later to Britian's General Forbes.  The Treaty of Easton of 1758 reduced  French alliances with the Indians.  With the Indians now siding with the British, the British took the fort.  I don't know yet if George was in on that battle or not?


From there, Gettysburg. Three hours and forty three minutes, Northeast.

Having just read  The Killing of Lincoln, I thought 'might as well.' I was curious to see this infamous, Civil War  battlefield where 51,000 Americans lost their lives in 1863 on what is now pastoral countryside.  (The total deaths in the American Civil War was 625,000, the most Americans lost in all the wars we've ever fought). I think this site is a two day visit PROVIDING I find comfortable lodgings, but that's my next task.
For now, I'm interested in the length of our routes.

Jefferson's Monticello  was just two hours and twenty six minutes South of Mount Vernon, an easy ride, but after that, I was amazed.  I couldn't find an easy way home--and I didn't want to go back the way we came.

Gettysburg Dead, actual photographic image, photographer unknown

From the look of the map, the lack of good highways between Charlottsville and Detroit, (Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit when it was a French settlement in George's time), looks like the Virginians are still a bit standoffish to Northerners. If we wanted to see new sights, Charleston, West Virginia, four hours and thirteen minutes across the Appalacian Mountain range, was our next stop.

Charlston is the capital of the only state that sededed from a Confederate State. It seceded from Virginia in 1861 to support the Union and became a state  in the Union in 1863--along with Nevada, but that's another story.

From Charlston, we'll head home through Aurora, Ohio--another four hour drive. From there, we're only three hours and thirty minutes from pulling in our driveway safe and sound and probably exhausted from the trek.

We've been to Aurora,  Ohio before. We stayed at a stable--not just any stable-- a five star stable where equestrians strut their stuff and keep their horses.  All  the rooms are suites. It's a resort sort of place where they  greet you with champagne, (by that time in this trip, well deserved), leave a basket of hot muffins on your door every morning and the turn-down service lights votive candles and scatters them about the room to delight you when you return from dinner at The Barn, which is not barnlike at all.  I think a massage maybe  available too, I hope, I hope? I have a feeling my legs will need it if we actually take this trip with 24 hours drive time. Now that we made it home from Lansing, Ellis is balking as I am dreaming.

WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN IT RAINS AND RAINS AND RAINS?

Rain #2, Digital Photograph

Hello Summer, Hello You

The Green Wall , pastel plein air sketch, 10" x 10" I had a lot of fun doing in late June, 2010.
The phalic looking tree trunk on the right is no longer there sticking
up like a sore.... it became compost this last winter.

The Green Wall  for real this morning,
May, 23, 2013. Totally uninspiring

Nevertheless, summer's here. Oh, I know it isn't official till the Solstice, but once Memorial Day arrives and Kathleen Turner nods approval for wearing white shoes, ( Serial Mom is a favorite movie of mine), I figure it's summer. Plus: The weed trees with the burgundy colored cone-like flowers throughout summer on the edge of the forest  have finally filled in with greenery and I'm walled in. With those leaves on the trees, this shut in is tending to  plans for continuous garden bloom and color through November.

My charcoal copy of a Peale sketch
of  a young George

While everyone I talk to is going away for Memorial Day weekend, we will be digging and hoeing and--hunting down  the hard-to-come-by, six  inch  pot, white geraniums I prefer because they are as cheerful at night as they are during the day. (How the patio, the deck or the garden looks from the house at night is as important as how it looks during the day, says the designing artist in me. In the dark, whites and yellows still sparkle while reds and blues go to shades of gloomy gray).

The painter in me says, "Shame on you." I haven't touched a canvas for nearly two weeks and don't feel particularly guilty. I've been outdoors soaking up the rays AM and indoors PM tied to my computer. My email program stopped sending and I've been absorbed in finding out why with absolutely no success. I should have given up  days ago, but being the stubborn bulldog I am, I just couldn't let the problem go. I have picked up a lot of computer lingo I never knew before--stuff like ISP and port protocols and profiles and smpt-- but who cares? I still can't send anyone a message. Socket error # 10060 and  Windows Live Mail error ID #0x800ccc0E won't let me. My ISP can't fix it. Microsoft was kinder than my ISP, but couldn't fix it either and turned me over to their online help, which didn't perform any miracles either. I figure there's a conspiracy and the culprit is Xfinity. I hate monopolies.

But on a positive note, I can still read. Did you know that according to Ron Churnow, author of George Washington, George, the first prez of the US and the guy who couldn't tell a lie was also the guy whose militia fired off the first shots on May 27th, 1754 that led to the French and Indian War (1756-1763) and a eventually to a world conflict (The Seven Years War)? So much for his Excellency Mr.Goody Two Shoes working his way up the ranks in the British Colonial Army.

George, a full-of-himself twenty two year old, was asked to deliver a letter asking the French to vacate the Ohio Valley; he was a surveyor who had mapped the area and knew it well.
When he got to the Fork of the Ohio and delivered the message, the French said no. George went home.

Gilbert Stuart's portrait
of George who didn't wear
wigs,but did powder his hair.

Then the French drove out the colonial traders and started to build Fort Duquesne in the area, so George was asked to return and ask the French to stop. They  refused  again and after George left,  sent off their own diplomat with a message for  the British about establishing some sort of peace... but it never got there.  George and his party of 100 Virginia militiamen and  a tribe of Irequois Indians ambushed the French diplomatic party in a bloody squirmish that turned into a massacre with hatchets thrown and scalps collected--including the scalp of Jumonville, the French attache. The massacre was called the Jumonville Affair--or more politely, just Jumonville Glen. It pissed  off the French who escallated their fort building, which launched  a war between the two great nations over the Ohio River Valley that lasted seven years.

The French despised George for the "assasination" of their guy--and he wasn't too popular with the British either, though they kept it hush-hush and stood by him. If they didn't, the Brits would have lost face having given this very young, self indulgent colonial the assignment and his first command.

Don't you just love a good cover up ? George always looked so dull and stern  in that copy of  the Gilbert Stuart painting in the auditoriums of so many American elementary schools. From his picture and with nothing-but-the cherry-tree tale we were told about his early life, who knew this guy was a social climbing, self indulgent, whatever it takes to get there, wanna-be aristoratic sombody as a kid, as a man? --Just the type that would be perfect for leading a young, whatever-it-takes-to-be free nation twenty some years later.

Have a good weekend, a safe weekend. May your skies be blue and your trees green.

This map of French, British and Spanish territories in the 'New World' when George took
 his first rides into the Ohio Territory fascinated me.I can't get over how large the French Louisianna
Territory and the disputed Ohio Territory was. The map came from a wonderful iPad App
 called Wikiview. Look up George Washington, George Washington and the French Indian
War, and Jumonville Glen.

I Can Fly...

If A Tree Falls..., (working title,day two, painting in progress)

with color and line, but then sadly, I have to land, quiet down and make hard decisions. Verticals and horizontals playing rough with one another. Choices  to be made.  What to play up? What to play down? What to whisper and what to shout? So it goes with painting. The days that follow the first are never as much fun, yet filled with interest.

A Beginning, An End

What the Hell is This?

It's A BEGINNING, a first pass using  very wet acylics, wide brushes, but mostly a sponge and an overkill of Payne's Gray. It's a fun morning session discovering the palette, before lunching with the girls.  Drawing freely with sponges is the absolutely great way to break the ice when beginning a new painting adventure. This is a photograph, cropped from another photograph. How close I'll want to go to the reality of the scene remains to be seen. all I know now is the sessions that follow will not be as much fun as this first impression. As for what it means to me, I have no idea other than it involves entanglements and inter-relationships, the stuff that fascinated me.




THE END OF SPRING THAW, (my final title--I hate titling).

Spring Thaw, Acrylic, 20" x 20"

The End is when there's nothing more I need  to know.

HISTORY NOTE:

George Washington's mother's name was Mary Ball Washington. His father's name was Augustine. His father died young, like all previous Washington men and left George and four other kids for her to raise. She was the first General George ever knew, a hard lady to please. She said no when he was offered a commission in the British Navy. She needed him at home on the farm. Her no was signifigant to US history in 1776.

Peinture en Plein Air

Olive Stand, charcoal, 18 x 24"

--for the very first time this year. Actually, I was really investigating how my watercolor easel would do outdoors.

Poplar Stand, charcoal
Painted in 1986, plein air in my last backyard.

Not being made out of wood, as the plein air easel, it is impervious to weather and can probably remain conveniently outdoors through out the summer?  It's also collapsible, has a carrying case, is light weight,  sets up in minutes, easily adjustable, holds cavanses up to 36" high and wide and can be positioned horizontal to the ground for wet into wet  painting--acrylic or watercolor. I chose charcoal for my first outdoor excursion for its facility. My tabour was my side table on the patio.

 I had a wonderful time in the sun and made a note to slather sunscreen straight out of the shower in the future.  My yard is so full of  intriguing vistas, it should satisfy my first season painting outdoors--unless I get an urge to travel down to the lake, then the plein air easel will make the trip.

DISCOVERY:  indoors or outdoor, I cannot sit while painting. I am always on the move back and forth scruitinizing.  Consequently, two hour sessions seem to be my limit. Any time longer and I'm icing my legs all evening. Oh to be forty five again when Poplar Stand was painted with more stamina and more finesse.

Sweet Choices Installed

Sweet Choices, Acrylics, 30" x 33", installed

No Skeletons Here

Having waited for weeks for my husband's rennovation project to begin, I planned to hang Sweet Choices in our great room--our living room--not in the kitchen as most folks would think to be a more appropriate place, as soon as he left the house this morning.

As the door slammed behind him,  I got the tape measure, the nails, the hammer, the measuring stick, a pencil and got to work.  The distance between the stretched gallery canvases had been determined by observing it on my observation wall outside my studio door.  While three inches between the panels of No Skeletons Here was good for that multiple unit painting; it was too wide a spread for this one. I cut the spread down to 1 1/2". It was a morning of measuring and measuring again.  How many inches off the floor? How far apart should the nails be? Are they in line and level to the ground and with each other?

View of Cake Shop from the patio doorwall. 

View of Cake Shop from the fireplace in the great room

I am pleased with how Sweet Choices relates to my large, abstract murel, Finding Home, on the adjacent wall.  My spacing left enough room between the two paintings to let them  breathe. The colors relate nicely. I can't wait to see it tonight when the spot lighting over the mural will add the shadows that will give this piece the illusion of depth. The designer in me is very much alive. While working out the math, I thought it was a shame artists can't control how their pieces are displayed in shows. I've always had a complaint when I saw my work squeezed in with others so close that  individuality and power was diminished.  Presentation is everything from the finished surface of a piece, to the framing, to the final installation.

STUDIO CLOSED!

Homespun Sunrise, digital photograph

My next charcoal? Could be.

Spring arrived this weekend and it was way too nice to spend any time indoors painting. It was deck time. It  was get out of the house into the garden and soak up the glorious rays time. It was pump up your tires and shove off  to tour the neighborhood time with hands high in the air welcoming the season.

The weekend was joyous from sunrise to sunset three days in a row.  All our lives I told Ellis the time to enjoy the weekend is whenever the weather was spectacular-- it could happen on a Tuesday, a Wednesday, a Thursday and even a Monday.  This weekend the dreariness lifted  Friday, so we made the weekend a long one and set up the patio furniture, bought the ferns and listed the new plants needed for our entrance garden. While I didn't make it out to photograph the daffs up close, I photographed a Michigan sunrise and a  colorful, wooded painting reference. I found a fine specimen of a walking stick, cut it to size, sawed off the knotches and crudely carved my name. With my sturdy staff in hand, I'm ready to explore.

A reference photo with great painting potential--minus a tree or two.

A Dawn to Jump Out of Bed, digital photograph

The glowing yellow, pink and blue of the sky is what got me running for my camera at six thirty AM to catch the sunrise. I played around  a bit digitally to bring out the details and deep colors in the lower portion. Ellis, just pouring his coffee, thought I was nuts. I knew I was energized.

HISTORY NOTE ON THIS FIFTH OF MAY:

Felice Cinco de Mayo!  The significance of this Mexcian/American holiday to the US is it is the celebration of Mexico's defeat of the French in the Battle of Puebla in 1862; the holiday is not a celebration of Mexico's independence.  By miraculously defeating the French forces, Mexico stopped the French from aiding the southern confederacy in our Civil War.  The battle also ended any further European invasions of the Americas. Viva Mexico! Check it out on Wikipedia. History is fascinating.

Sky Blue What's New?

SKY BLUE REFLECTIONS, 20" x 20" IS NOW THIS:

IT WAS THIS:

No matter how hard I try to ignore the details and simplify; it is the details, the intersection of the lines, the use of colors, one on top of the other to achieve the values, the distribution of the different weights, that intrigue me. The complexities and their connections in nature that interests me. So I've been plodding along, feeling my way--I still have a ways to go...

In the great outdoors to find a way to the field of wild daffodils that lies in a clearing deep in the woods.This morning, seventy degrees and sunny, was the ideal time to take a look at the situation. As I carefully slide the doorwall open, I was greeted by the steadfast gaze of a deer with a coat warming to the rays of the sun. She froze in her stance and stood there eyeing me as I adjusted my camera to get just the right shot, then took off as I made my way towards her domain.

The Accommodating Doe, digital photograph.

My plan is to have the gardener clear me a path into the woods. But after surveying the possible places of entry, I realized, it's some big job.Viewed up close, instead of from my bedroom window,there were a lot of  barricades between me and  those wild daffodils. While the situation gave me doubts about my idea, I was fascinated by the sculptural formations of the downed trees and the wide range of neutral colors. The structures were gorgeous. Powerful--certainly worthy of painting--worthier of sculpture. 

Reference photograph for painting or sculpting.

Close, But Oh So Far Away; To be Admired, but not touched. This digital photograph was the best I could do--till I find a suitable walking stick--or a guy with a chain saw and machete.