Troubled Waters

Deconstruction of a painting... Beginning with the finished piece and working back through the process. Post-modernists should love this.

This is a very emotional piece for me. When I began it I was feeling fiercely jubilant and wanted to create a piece celebrating life and wonder. (I was listening to Beethoven's 6th at the time, that symphony usually has that effect on me!) Life events occurred in the meantime as I was working on the piece and let's just say I finished it listening to Mozart's Requiem. Basically the piece conveys an array of emotional upheaval in my life and, thus, is a bit confused. It is kind of subtle but what I like about the finished piece is that it has both sides. At first it feels like a happy little landscape, but if you look closer it is actually a little disturbing. There are not a lot of quiet moments in the piece.

The title is "Troubled Waters" and it is 30x40 on an archival panel.

Wax Job

I have had so much going on in the studio lately I have not been able to keep up with my computing! I'm posting a little encaustic work I did awhile ago to keep things moving until I can post more of my process-oriented articles. I have two new large-scale sepia toned pastels I am in the process of finishing right now, as well as a brand spanking new don't-brush-up-against it oil painting. Another large oil painting on the easel as well--like I said, lots to do, lots to do!

This little encaustic is about 9x12. Encaustic is one of the oldest media, combining pigment with beeswax. It is a fascinating mercurial pursuit, combining all of the elements in exciting and sometimes infuriating ways... (will talk more about studio accidents later... actually that could be its own blog.)

Now get off the computer and go draw something!

Dawn

Rocky Mountain PBS

So a couple weeks ago I got a call from our local PBS station. They have a feature called "Western Bounty" where they interview Colorado artists; apparently it runs several times during a month and I am their February artist. You can also view it online (if I did this correctly, anyway...) by following this link or by going to rmpbs.org and putting my name into the search engine on their site.

http://www.rmpbs.org/panorama/?entry=392

The image I was working on at the time is a big train hub here in Grand Junction. It was very difficult to work on while being filmed, even worse than painting for a demo because of the lights and the big freaking camera! Also, I work very quickly, layering the entire substrate rather frantically. At one point the camera man asked me if I could "just stay still for a minute." He was having difficulty focusing...

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