The morning sun

 



 

The thing I am conscious of today as I paint is the way the sunlight falls on this flame azalea branch.  It is morning.  The light is clean and pure.  It filters through the high canopy of poplar trees and falls at a slant on this shrub.  I like the glowing quality of light in the morning and I'm trying to capture it here.  It isn't the harsh contrasts of high noon on a bright day.  Nor is it the long shadows and golden glow of a late afternoon.  No, morning light in the understory is calm and quiet, like a whisper.  It says, "Psst!  Look over here!  Something beautiful is coming to life!"

Seeing color

So it is October.  Fall is setting in.  It's my favorite time of year.  Soon the woods will be ablaze with yellow tulip poplar and hickory leaves.  Specimen maple trees will begin to burn bright red from the top down. Yet even now, before fall's full glory sets in,  I love that sense of nature yielding to the inevitable ebb of life as summer's green gives way to the earth tones of fall.

The other day after Andrew read one of my recent blog posts, he said, "Mom, I would love to see the world through your eyes.  You see beauty everywhere!"  I have to say he's right.  In a word, what I see is color.  The arrangement and juxtaposition of color excites me.  Looking at the world, I think to myself what colors make up this or that?  What is the contrasting color next to it?  In the shadows?  How did God come up with that color?? 

As I mix and swirl pigments around on my palette, my thoughts go to my Granna, my dad's mom.  To be honest, I get my creative genes from both sides of the family: my mom is very artistic and she inherited her eye for beauty from her parents, both of whom had a fabulous Asian-inspired aesthetic sense.  Though my artistic gifts came from all of them, I credit Granna for actually teaching me how to draw.  How to mix colors.  How to see like an artist.

Granna was an oil painter.  She did Impressionist style still lifes and portraits brilliant with color. She'd fearlessly slather paint on the canvas with palette knives.  I don't even know if she ever used brushes.  Like Monet and van Gough, she'd lay one color down after the next, and turn those blobs of paint into vegetables piled on a chair.  Or peonies in an enormous vase.  Or my Aunt Karen in her pretty yellow dress.
 

My family would travel every year to my grandparents' house for Thanksgiving. Granna rarely painted when we visited . . . she was too busy being an amazing Granna.  You know, the kind that always had a cookie jar full of fresh oatmeal raisin cookies for just any old time you felt like eating one.  A big stack of children's books from the library, ready for story time.  Newly repurposed dress-ups salvaged from trunks in the attic.  And best of all, a brand new 64-pack of Crayola crayons and our very own pads of drawing paper set out on the children's project table in the sun room.  She'd give us art lessons if we asked her. And lovingly praise us for our efforts.

So I give thanks to Granna for setting me off on this journey.  She died when I was 18 and never knew the artist I have become.  And yet I like to think she's looking over my shoulder as I paint.  Saying in her soft, age-crackled voice, "Oh, just look at the colors!" the way she always did.  Reminding me to look up, look out at the world.  See with an artist's eye.

Life really is beautiful.

Flame Azalea ballet

I am going to stop counting painting days in my blog post titles.  After a while, it gets to be a sore reminder.  I can hear you saying, She's still working on that thing?  Again with the flame azalea?!  Hasn't she about got that done already?  Really, your patience is remarkable! 

Fear not.  I am getting somewhere!  I'm well in to the second flower cluster.  This one is at the bud stage, nearly about to burst open.  I love how the buds all spring up together from the center of the cluster, all facing up and in, like birdies in the nest.  In real life, suddenly and soon they would open and fan outward, like the cluster in the foreground.  If I could have captured this with slow motion photography, it would look like a gracefully choreographed ballet.

I am not going to take the detail too much further with this cluster right now.  I have explained before about utilizing an "atmospheric fade" to accentuate the depth of field.  I want to preserve the possibility of using an atmospheric fade until I've painted every element of the composition.  Then I can figure out the right thing to do. 

Onward!

Flame Azalea - 13

I learned something today.  I went online to order some more paint from my favorite online art supply, Dick Blick Art Materials, and I noticed strange icons next to the cadmium paints.  Turns out these were environmental and health hazard warnings.  Caution, caution, caution must be used when using these products!  They are toxic!  They are carcinogenic!  Yikes!  It is true.  Cadmium is a highly toxic substance and 2,000 tons of it are used annually in colored cadmium pigments.  Brilliantly colored, with good permanence and tinting power, the cadmium colors gained quick popularity when they were introduced, replacing vermilion which is very fugitive (quick to fade).  But are these wonderful attributes worth the risk of coming in contact with them at the artist table?  It turns out much of the risk can be avoided by taking normal precautions.  Don't breathe the vapors, don't get it on your skin, don't lick the paintbrush, wash your hands, etc.  Well I think I'm OK.  Unlike oil paint, which is extremely messy in my opinion, watercolor is a neat medium, especially the dry brush methods I use.  Unless I have a fight with the cap of an old paint tube that refuses to loosen up and unscrew, I stay pretty well clean and paint-free.  So I went ahead and placed my order.  Onward!

Flame Azalea - 12

I cannot see the forest for the trees.  Or in this case, I cannot see the flower cluster for all the petals.  I can only see edges, fine shaddows, layers, filaments, and strange colors that are not orange and not yellow.  Time to step back and try to see it as you do: a Whole Thing.  Interestingly, the best way for me to do this is to put a frame around it.  I look at the painting through the lens of my camera.  And somehow, surrounded by a crisp, black rectangle, the form reveals itself.  Oh there it is!  Beginning to turn in space and take shape there at the end of the branch.  There's a long way to go yet, but it is coming. . . . Isn't it?

Flame Azalea - 11

Today I am thinking about creativity.  The act of creating.  From this:





To this:

 

I go along day by day describing to you the technical details of how I paint a picture, inching along step by slow step.  First this, then that.  But also realize what is happening at the tip of my paintbrush.  Blobs of paint are doused with water, swished around and mixed with other colors, and put to use on a piece of paper.  A formless puddle of paint becomes the petal of a blossom, the nub of a new leaf shoot.  Telling the story of the life of this little shrub in my front yard.  Not to overdramatize things, but I like to pause every now and then, and think about the 'what' instead of the  'how'.  Touch base with my right brain.  Remind myself of the wonder of it all.  There is a color palette for every living thing, really.  What are you painting today with the palette that is you?

Flame Azalea - 10

Welcoming some green to the palette: