Do You Want to Play? Or Bridge Times Four

 

Starting out my artistic new year with a different kind of painting.....something that is a bit outside of the box (of a regular painting canvas) and also, around the outside of multiple boxes. That sounds really confusing.....right?

I got an idea to show some movement and passage of time in a painting of our dog, Bridge. (So named 'cause HE adopted US when we passed by a local bridge while on our afternoon walk) If you look Bridge up in the dictionary......waaaaay down the list under “motion”, you'll find a teensy tiny pic of Bridge! His flowing movements just didn't seem to fit within a normal rectangular painting canvas.......so I decided to show him in action “sequentially”.

I took four 6x6 inch gallery wrapped canvases , and sketched out an idea for a different kinda hanging set up for the four mini-canvases, all with different views of Bridge. Frank Lyne, (last week's guest blogger) came up with a wonderful solution to hang all four canvases in sequence.

 

Frank not only got the four canvases to hang with one hook.....but made the whole thing so's it hangs flat on the wall. All three of the connecting wood strips are “sunk” into the back of the canvas's frames! A fantastic solution.....

 

So now I was ready to paint. I started at the top, and roughed in the first, far away view of Bridge, busily biting his current chew toy.....an old plastic coffee can. He can have more fun chewing and tossing his can than any fancy toy we could buy. The more teeth marks and the more distorted the shape, the better he likes it!

 

Next time I'll show another "act" in this “Bridge times Four” artwork.

Wood Selection or A Kitteh Approved Beginning

 Guest Post by Frank Lyne

When Alison asked me to do a series of guest blogs about the process of wood carving, I said that writing about it on the go would likely change the process, but agreed to do it anyway. Since completing my most recent carving in mid April of 2016, I raised my final tobacco crop and redid the living room. Yesterday seemed like a good time to select a billet for my next carving.

My shop and stable have more shelves stacked with all sizes of wood billets than I can possibly ever turn into carvings. My last selection was made from the shop stores, so for this one, I head to the stable.

 

There's no electricity and thus no light other than daylight in the stable. The day is mild, but overcast with sporadic misting rain. A couple of hundred sticks of my last tobacco crop had been housed in the stable and part of the empty sticks are still strewn about. I gather the remaining sticks and tie them into bundles, this final time separating ancient hewn sticks from newer sawed sticks. Styro-foam transplant trays are scattered about everywhere. I gather them into stacks. Plastic sheets litter the floor in front of the wood stacks. I gather them into large wads into one corner. Finally disorder is subdued enough to appraise the wood stacks. Nothing speaks to me. The light is too low to carefully assess the properties of the assorted billets. Since I split most of my fresh wood in half before storing it, most are irregular half cylinders. But some are cut where a limb branched off from the trunk. Those are the most interesting and challenging billets to work with. My last carving was a fairly ambitious figurative study, so this one should be something other than a figurative study, and maybe smaller than my last piece. Still nothing catches my eye. Another scan.

 

Something in a dim far corner isn't a regular half cylinder. It has a flat area on one side. That's good enough. I take it to the shop where I can see it in good light.

 

Kitteh appraises it and says, “I think it should be a cat.” But within a few licks with gouge and mallet, I decide that it's going to be a turkey. And I deny categorically that selecting turkey as a motif had anything to do with the fact that it was the most recent thing someone suggested that I try.

 

Haying or a Small Bit-o-History

Haying 8x10 inches acrylic paint

 

This time around I'm showing a small painting I did a few years ago. The painting is based on an old family photo showing how hay for livestock was handled in the 1930s. Hay was cut, left out to dry and then raked up with a “dump rake” into huge piles. Those huge piles were scooped up by the pitchfork full, into a wagon. Which was transported from the hayfield to a barn via a mule drawn wagon, then scooped up, by a hay fork (think a huge double arm scoop, sorta like what you use in a mechanical arcade game machine with crane claw). It was swung into the barn where it was stored. You can see the opening in the top of the barn where the hay fork came out to scoop the hay up in the loft. Then in the winter it was doled out, again by the pitchfork full, fed from hay racks on the ground floor of the barn. All this was by hand, mind you!

 

I've always been fascinated by the older black and white photos.....they usually have such a wealth of detailing.....you can see almost every blade of grass! Every time I see a really neat old photo, I always want to “see” it in colour. Since I tend to solve a lotta of my desires with paint.....I will often take an old black and white photo and bring it up to colour. It's a nice challenge to see if I can get the black and white values correct.....while still injecting what I feel would be the right colours to fit the scene.

But bringing an old black and white photo into colour, offers another neat opportunity.....a chance to learn about the circumstances that the photo is presenting. In this case, it's revisiting a vanished farming era. Other times, painting someone's family member from an old faded black and white photo, lets me learn more about that person in the photo......and how the person commissioning my painting really “saw” that family member. I always learn SO much!

Red Vase or Mostly, Some and a Bit in Red

Red Vase - Acrylic - 8x10 inches

  

This time around I've got another of the small 8x10 canvases that I wanted to do a small still life on......an idea that doesn't really rate a full size canvas. A summer or two ago I'd taken a lotta flower photos in various “antique store finds” vases. This vivid red vase just seemed to beg for the flashy white peonies that had just a hint of the same red in their centers. I positioned it for a back lite “pose” and this one was my fav.

I sketched the photo onto the canvas and started painting. I laid in the bare bones of the painting in the first session:

 

The next session I did some glazes with different reds on the translucent red glass vase. Using three different red glazes really intensified the red of the vase. Since the red vase was the star of this painting, I wanted to paint it first and let everything else literally “pale down” beside it.

I continued on painting till I felt satisfied with the values of the different flower petals and the other background elements. I was especially pleased that I could contrast the petals on the left against the curtains in shadows. I also like these smaller canvases as they wrap the canvas all the way around the sides to allow me to paint them with a continuation of the painting itself. 

 

How I Spent my Saturday....or Christmas Ornaments at the Library

 Last Saturday our local library invited me to do a mini program on Christmas Ornament making. I had been making a bunch of Christmas ornaments while watching nite time TV. After the program director saw some of my designs, she asked me to share some of the techniques I'd been practicing for Christmas ornament making.

 

 

I had a box full of cloth scraps from loooooong ago, along with a bunch of embroidery thread in lotsa colours. So's I came up with some designs for Christmas ornaments, using cloth scraps, and threads covering styrofoam balls.

A while back I'd gotten interested in temari ball making.....a Japanese needlework technique also using stryofoam balls and threads. Of course, being me, a lotta colour was involved in the designs.....so I was a happy camper. I'd made some ornaments using the traditional Japanese methods.......

  

but wanted to do some simpler ornaments using Christmas themed cloth and coloured threads. These are the kind of ornaments we worked on at the library program.

 

 

 

A few lovely ladies joined me at the library on Saturday, and we had a ball (pun intended!) covering stryofoam balls with with fabrics and stitching red and green threads around the centers. We added some hand made cording and hand made tassles and viola! We all had lovely Christmas ornaments to start off the holiday season.

Thanks so much to the Logan County Library for suggesting this event and all the lovely folks who turned out to have a bit-o-holiday crafting fun and share some laughs.

Hopkinsville Art Guild's Pennyroyal Art Show 2016

Frank with his sculpture in cherry wood titled String Player

Winning First Prize in 3-D sculpture

at the Pennyroyal Juried Art Exhibition at the Hopkinsville Community College Auditorium Gallery

 

Today I'm sharing a pic I took of Frank at the reception for the Hopkinsville Art Guild's annual Pennyroyal Art show. He's posed with his (first in 3D) prize winning sculpture: String Player. I took the photo with my phone, and it was smart enough to prompt me with a request to identify the “person” with Frank, meaning the sculpture!

I also had a couple of paintings hanging in the show:

 Vine Ripened Puppys for Sale

and

WinterGlow

Here's a link to more about the Pennyroyal Art Show:
 

http://www.hopkinsvilleartguild.org/fallshow2016.html

Mostly, Some and a bit.....in Yellow

BLUE JAR

 

This blog post shows off a bit about a small acrylic 8 x 10 on stretched canvas piece called Blue Jar. After seeing friends do series of smallish works (8x8 inches or 8x10 inches) I decided I'd try a few. I wanted to try a coupla ideas that I liked, but felt wouldn't rate a full size canvas.

So's I grabbed a two pac of inexpensive stretched canvases. The bad news is the canvases were really thin material, compared to more expensive duck cloth canvases I'd painted on in the past. The good news is the canvas was indeed really thin.......so thin I could use an old illustrator trick of transferring a drawing using a light box. In other words, I put the cropped (both digitally in Photoshop and after printing out....with scissors) photo I'd taken of the jar, and put it behind the canvas. I shinned a bright light behind the canvas and photo, and viola! I could easily trace off the main outlines of the jar with paint. Thus getting the image transferred in one fell swoop! Here's what the backside looked like.

 

So I had the main outlines on canvas and I could start painting. Tho' the main subject was the cobalt blue jar, I was designing things under the “mostly, some and a bit” guideline. So's it was going to be mostly yellow, some blue, and bits of red......i.e. A triad color scheme.

I got this far in my first session:

 

I wanted to do this piece fairly quickly and use larger brush strokes than I usually do. My imagination had been fired by some really nice impressionistic artwork I'd seen recently. I have to admit I was drawn in by all the lovely reflections on the jar and found myselves reverting to my old detailing habits. In the end, I went back in and removed some of the excessive brushwork in the background to allow the detailing in the jar to shine.