The Four Directions

This is a new work titled "The Four Directions," part of the traffic series I've been working on. I like the formal elements of this composition as well as the idea behind it, that we subconsciously pay homage to the Four Directions whenever we drive a city that is laid out on a grid.

The bigger studio news of the day was that PBS came out to conduct an interview and take footage of me working yesterday for a segment they'll run in February. I believe it will be on statewide for Rocky Mountain PBS here in Colorado but I don't know for sure yet. I will post the times when I know them, as well as a copy of the video itself I hope!

Other than that I am teaching at Mesa State College again; we started last week, as well as a few classes at St Mary's hospital (the Pastel Society of Colorado teaches classes there for people undergoing cancer treatments and their caregivers--always a terrific bunch of students,) and a watercolor class at the Art Center. I'm also conducting a workshop on pastels at the Art Center which is going great! All my classes have fun people; that helps.

Happy painting!
Dawn

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