The Marina at Stillwater

Hello there: here are a couple of pics from my new work titled "Stillwater." In retrospect as I title this blog posting, "Marina at Stillwater" would have been a better title, but so it goes. It's easier to keep the current name than to scrape the painting down in order to re-name it!

This is from my trip to Minnesota last summer; it was a very hot July day and the sky was an amazing shade of blue. My sister and I drove out to Stillwater just for kicks and I was quite taken by the St. Croix. I live in the desert--give me a decent body of water and I'm infatuated with it.

It felt good to paint in oils again. I've been doing a lot of drawing, pastels, and watercolor lately so it felt good to get back to my main medium. This painting is a little more raw than some of my other work. It is looser and has less layers than some. I attribute this to my work in watercolor lately (watercolors make you leave them alone unless you want a muddy painting.) This looseness works well with the emotions I have from this particular summer memory when my sister and I had nothing better to do but to sit by the water and watch boats go by. I may take another wild childish stab at oil painting again this weekend.

Paint on!
Dawn

It was a dark and stormy afternoon...

I don't have a title for this painting yet, but I think "Dark and Stormy Night" is taken, by Snoopy. The painting is from a day we were up on the Grand Mesa when a major summer thunderstorm moved in. It rained so hard so fast that on the way back I had to get out of the car and walk across an area of the dirt road that had water running across it. We couldn't tell how deep the water was or if the road was being washed out yet, so I forged the stream ahead of the car. Brought back some glory days from the farm! Anyway, the clouds were fascinating.

This is a watercolor on 300# Canson. You can see in the first pic that I have a few of the bright whites masked out with masking tape (gives a nice torn edge as opposed to masking fluid.) The first step after masking, which I did not get a photo of, was to lay in a fairly flat solid wash of French Ultramarine and Burnt Sienna (one of my favorite landscape neutrals.) When this field was still wet but just with a light sheen to it (nearly dry) I dropped clear water into the wash and let it bloom. This is why I love watercolor--I could watch paint bloom all day, it's fascinating. Anyway, I lifted the paint from the middle of the blooms, then let the whole field dry, removed the mask, and started laying in layers of paint to push the values farther and define the clouds.

The foreground was painted using wet-on-wet washes initially with a salt texture--again, I let this define where the values of the foliage would lie rather than dictating it from the beginning.

This piece reads very well close up, but is a little lost from a distance. I will sit on it for awhile and see if I need to do something more to the foreground to make it more interesting compositionally.

My thought for the day: go buy yourself a tube of watercolor paint and some cheap watercolor paper and play with paint blooms. It's very therapeutic!

Dawn

More Water

This is a new watercolor, titled at least for now "December, Eagle County." I started this piece as a demo painting for my watercolor class at the Western Colorado Center for the Arts--amazingly enough I did not completely destroy the painting as I usually do with demo pieces! It is 19x25 on 300# Canson 100, my favorite heavier weight watercolor paper. (It has a great dual surface--rough and smooth, is slightly smaller than most full sheets, and is not terribly expensive.) There was sheer joy in painting this piece. Some of them are just like that.

My main body of work right now continues to be the monochromatic full sized pastels but this is a nice side work; I will always be fascinated with running moving water whether or not it is part of my current series.

Dawn

Shameless Self Promotion

So here is cute little old me teaching my watercolor class at The Art Center. This class has been a lot of fun so far; we've been looking at a huge variety of landscape techniques from painting foliage to how to paint realistic water in different settings.

I have a show scheduled at The Art Center (technically Western Colorado Center For the Arts: www.gjartcenter.org) in 2010, the exact date is yet to be decided. Yes, they are booking that far out! I am enjoying painting with watercolors on a regular basis again. I just like to keep things mixed up.

In other class news we are halfway through the semester at Mesa State: woo hoo! I have two good classes over there but it's that time of year when everyone begins stressing out. Plus I am looking forward to more studio time over the holidays.

Happy painting!
Dawn

Hiawatha

And finally we have some new work posted. This is "Hiawatha;" the subject matter is a big old grain warehouse on Hiawatha Ave in Minneapolis MN. Some of these images look like they were uploaded incorrectly but I actually laid this one out upside-down. I'd like to say it was for some great artistic purpose, like working on the right side of the mind by utilizing non-traditional compositional techniques, but what really happened is the paper was a little too large for the board I had it taped to and by the time I laid out my grid I realized the overhang on the paper was on the bottom. When I put it on the easel right-side-up it buckled terribly. I was too impatient to wait to fix it so I worked on in upside-down until I had the underpainting right. I calmed down enough to fix it before I righted it.

This is 24x36 pastel on Wallis sanded pastel paper.

Other Stuff I Do

Okay, in addition to the artwork and teaching art one of my many hobbies is agility training which I do with Millie, our Rat Terrier Extraordinaire. I have yet to compete with her, but have taken several classes with her. She is athletic, smart, and agile, so I mainly do this in the hopes some of those traits will rub off on me. These are the graduation pictures from our last class, Agility Handlers Class, which we took through Dashing Dog Sports. Amy was a terrefic instructor and I learned a lot.

So because I was taking the pictures there are none here of Millie the Wonder Rat. The two pastels at the beginning of the pictures are of Millie (they are 6x9" works on paper.) She truly is an amazing little mutt and we are happy to have her with us.

Classmates: I am so sorry I didn't get fabulous pictures of each and every one of your wonderful dogs. Frankly some of you are just too fast for clear images, plus my batteries were running low which means the camera takes more time to focus. I particularly enjoy the one of Piper doing the weave poles. That dog runs like she's being filmed for a dog food commercial.

In other studio news: yes, I have been very busy working on a new series of monochrome pastel pieces, largely of urban subject matter. It's been a great series for me and I will post the process soon. School started for us again last week so I have been busy getting ready for that. I have 2D Design again as well as Foundations Drawing; both classes are full and it's been a hectic week. I will also be teaching watercolor at the Western Colorado Art Center largely because I am insane. Inertia, however, dicates that my body must stay in motion if I want to get anything done.

One other sad piece of news is that Chloe, my one and only studio cat died this last summer. She was my constant companion for the past 12 years and always had lots of advice in the studio (i.e. she was mouthy...) It's been difficult working in there without the commentary ("Mrow! Meh Mrooow!") while I was painting. Getting through it but I still miss her terribly. You can see a good picture of her under the "contacts" link on the website.

Until next time--go to your studio and make stuff!

Dawn

New Encaustics

Two new encaustic paintings: these are exciting to me as they are the first pieces I have finished successfully using this new-to-me media. The black & white is titled "Mesa Feed," it's an old feed mill (still in operation) in Grand Junction. This piece is 16x20. The other one is, as yet, untitled. It is small, 8x10 in size. I am going to try to make my own encaustic medium tomorrow--it is time consuming, toxic, and fiddly, so I've been putting it off a bit. Oh, and the raw materials are expensive to boot. Send good thoughts my way!

Dawn

And...we're done! mostly...

Yea--the final step! I think, anyway. As you can see I killed some of the highlights and generally brought the tone of the entire piece down a notch (it was too light in hue overall.) I may need to bring it down another notch but at this point I'm going to leave it be, live with it for awhile, then see if anything is still bugging me about the final composition. If so, I'll try and fix it, if not, we'll call it done. This is a little-known but well-used part of the creative process for artists: the "can I live with that?" stage!

I will post my encaustics for your perusal tomorrow. Until then, get out there and paint something!
Dawn

Phase 4

The next step: I have finished filling out the main forms of the piece. Right now it has a lot going on; I need to think about it for a bit because something will have to be sacrificed in order to pull it off as a successful composition. I think there are way too many highlights, for one, and the light source seems a little harsh. We are very close right now, though! Time to fine-tune the piece then call it done.

Dawn

Phase 3

So now we're starting to get somewhere! Here I'm starting to flesh out the rest of the painting. I'm still underpainting this image, trying to build it up layer by layer while constantly pushing the values where they need to go. This kind of image with all its linear structure is very intriguing to me; I like to lay down lines then make them disappear then find them again and so on. The final piece should show that back-and-forth, highlighting the process involved.

I started an encaustic painting of another old building in town--will post it when it is finished as well. I think it is safe to say I am on another series, this one using old buildings as subject matter. Will elaborate on the content in another post--back to the studio!

Dawn

Phase 2

Okay, here's the second major step in the art piece. The initial layout has a lot going on: lots of lines and grid marks. I decided to lay in the sky first to give me a sense of atmosphere and help define my negative space. Sometimes the best way to begin a work is by painting the spaces you are not trying to define; "painting what isn't" as someone once told me. You can't see in the photo, but the sky has multiple layers of various shades of grey, whites, and iridescent silvers so it has a metallic sheen mixed in.

The building is up next: I am painting this (pastels are called paintings, by the way... even though it's a dry media it works more like a painting than anything) in curvilinear perspective, which is a method of linear perspective used when you want to convey a large space. I think it will add another dimension to the piece in any case.

Dawn

Ah, Summer at Last!

Yea! School is out, which means I finally have some uninterrupted studio time. I had an interesting semester teaching 2D design, which is a basic pre-req for all art majors plus a gen ed course for other majors. It comprises a bunch of little projects designed to teach basic composition, color theory, that kind of thing. It was fun but exhausting, and it's a really good thing to be back to work on my stuff!


So here's what I'm shooting for: I am going to post this particular piece step by step as it unfolds. Everyone keep their fingers crossed that this sucker turns out in the end; otherwise this will be a lesson in what not to do! The subject matter is a really cool building for Grand Junction Steel, a local plant. It is still in operation (as you will be able to see with the high-security gate they have in place!) It is a pastel on a panel I made myself using a wood panel, Kitty Wallis sanded pastel paper, black Bombay ink, and a lot of cussing. It is 48" x 18" in size.

The cussing came into play because I was using 4 sheets of 12x18" paper to cover the wood, the idea being that the seems where the paper meets will be another interesting element in the final piece. I also painted the Wallis paper first using Bombay ink: if you want a nice strong color for a background on Wallis, Bombay is the way to go. It tints it very nicely and doesn't kill the tooth of the paper. Anyway, I adhered the first 3 sheets of paper to my board successfully using Yes Paste, a great product that is a nice, thick, archival kind of paste. It's also a pain in the butt to use when you are dealing with thick, somewhat curled paper that doesn't want to be glued down, thank you very much. So I did these piece by piece, saturated the back of the paper with the paste, forced it into place, then weighed it down for 12 hours or so. I had paste covering my arms and legs by the time I got through this (so I'm not very tidy in the studio, so sue me...) I had this brilliant idea to use PVA (Poly Vinyl Adhesive) for the last piece--also a great glue known for its archival properties and its flexibility over time. Aha! Much easier application! The consistency is more like Elmer's glue, so it was easier to spread and I had a little longer working time. Oh, brilliant me! Yeah, well the other thing Yes Paste is known for is not wrinkling your papers. Yep, 3 of the sheets adhered nicely, the 4th was all lumpy. Sigh. I was able to force it into place eventually but it was a trial.

Okay, here is step one and we'll go from here, assuming that the worst is behind us now!

"Chasing Down the Sun"

So here's a new piece from the studio. This piece is 30x40" in size on stretched canvas, and I was trying to capture a certain effect of light we notice along this stretch of I70 pretty much every time we come back home from the Front Range of Colorado. We usually hit this area, no matter the season, at the peak of sun glare, yet it is beautiful. This piece of highway could be anywhere in the western United States. From this vantage I swear I can feel the continent falling away to the Pacific Ocean. As usual, I've posted both the underpainting and the finished version.

Elemental

Here are some images from "Elemental," my current show at Planet Earth & the 4 Directions Gallery located at 524 Colorado Avenue here in Grand Junction CO. The show looks great; please stop by and check it out. We're having a huge Earth Day Dance Party on April 22nd; art show opens at 7pm and the music starts at 8pm. Charles King, who also teaches at Mesa State College, and his band will be playing. It should be quite the event! Caole Lowry, owner of Planet Earth, has gone to great lengths to make my art look terrific in her space. Thanks, Caole! Dawn

Pentimento Epiphany!

Wow--so there is a series of work that has been floating around in the back of my mind for at least a year now but has never made it to the studio because I haven't found the right execution for it yet. It stems from wanting to take my drawings to another level and not being proficient enough in printmaking to make that happen yet. It also has something to do with subject matter. I've always enjoyed drawing from small natural objects and trying to abstract them somewhat in the process (bones, especially skulls, wood, etc.) So, there I was last week, home alone and channel surfing, when I came across a short documentary titled 'Pentimento' which is about an artist in New Mexico named Fran Hardy. (It's still showing now and then on PAEC, the Pacific Education Channel, as well as some PBS stations if you have a chance to catch it.) It was one of those true "AHA!" moments--her technique was exactly what I had been looking for. So here's the scoop: Fran does these amazing very tight botanical illustrations on large (4x5' or so) panels in graphite. She then layers an abstract / non-representational color field on top using oil pastels, and then scratches through to the original drawing without knowing exactly what she's going to find. This is it--it speaks of process and time and a certain spirit about the subject matter, exactly what I've been looking for.

Here are some of my first experiments with this--it's a drawing of a bevel fungus that I've applied the technique to.