Humble pie

Hello dear followers.  I am alive and well and getting back in the saddle after a week-long intensive botanical art workshop with Anne-Marie Evans.  Yes, THE Anne-Marie Evans, a veritable phenom in the botanical art world.  She is constantly on the road giving workshops around the world and I was lucky enough to participate in one organized by Botanical Artists for Education and the Environment.   I took with me several scanned copies of my finished pieces as well as our friend, the flame azalea, for her professional critique.  We were to arrive ready to work on something new, so I took preparations for that, as well.

Suffice it to say it was an intense week. Anne-Marie is an incredible teacher.  She gets right down to business; so even though we were coping with the power outage effects of superstorm Sandy, we cobbled together enough flat surfaces and light sources temporarily in someones living room to begin working as soon as the storm would allow.  When she critiques, she really critiques.  (She reminded us, "After all, you are paying me a lot of money to be here, so I give you the full and unvarnished truth about your work.")  Her practiced eye kept finding errors in my painting: places where the detail was inaccurate or the color was all wrong.  As soon as she drew my attention to the problem, I'd see it too, and wonder why I hadn't got it right the first time.  At the end of each day I would sadly pack up my things, ready to throw in the towel on my composition (Why did I tackle something so enormous and difficult??).  And I'd slink back to my lodgings completely deflated.  (To one of my classmates she said: "I know I'm fierce.  I've been known to bring artists to tears!")  But by the next day I was ready to try again, and I'd get to class even earlier in the hopes that extra time would work to my advantage.  Somehow, some way, I was determined to succeed.

I was working on a specimen of Swiss chard:

And while she was very pleased with my pencil drawing:

She was not impressed with my early painting. 

I think I was nervous, to tell the truth.  Can you imagine bending to a task and having The World Expert hovering over your shoulder watching you work?  She kept questioning my rush to work on color before the form was fully set down.  On Wednesday, she suggested I add a study of the root system to make the painting more interesting, so I had to go home and dig up one of the other plant roots in the pot without killing my subject:  

and then somehow fit that into the composition:

Long about Thursday, she realized I really did know what I was doing; I just went about it a different way than she does.  This helped us a bit.  Finally her words made sense to me and I began to achieve the effects she was describing.  On Friday I decided to get her advice on my flame azalea.  I thought I was nearly done, but au contraire!  So much to correct and redo!  So much more depth to convey!  And I can't tell you how many times she walked by my table reminding me to dull the garish leaf color.  ("But it's a spring leaf!" I kept screaming inside my head...) By Saturday I was exhausted but thrilled with all I had learned.  It has been a long time since I've taken a class; and I think years of basking in the glow of my family's praise has kept me from refining my craft.  Now I think I've taken my skill to the next level, really. 

See what you think:



OK, I know.  I do still have to increase the intense tones to convey the depth more.  And fix the width-of-the-stem issue.  And paint the stamen ever so delicately and with varying detail and strength of color to convey aerial perspective.  But maybe, just maybe, this painting can be salvaged after all.

And then I'll get back to the Swiss chard . . .

Short strokes

Hooray!  I am down to the short strokes, as it were. 

Here's what is left to do on the To Do List: a little more darker shading in the flowers with the teeny weenie brush, a bit more definition in the stem, and the stamen (remember them?)  Almost to the finish line!!!

Mock Orange

Since we are talking a lot about orange these days, allow me to share with you my most recent "Musings -- in the garden" essay.  My painting session today was not terribly riveting, so you aren't missing anything earthshaking on that front.

And so without further ado:

Mock Orange

Something has gone dreadfully wrong with my fruit trees.  I bought the tiny twelve inch saplings for $9.00 each at Lowe’s on special.  This was my first mistake.  But how could I resist the thought of kumquat, Mandarin orange, lemon and tangelo trees gracing the pool deck in summer and perfuming my sunny studio in winter?  I brought them home and lined them up for inspection.  Everybody looked healthy, and so I planted them in matching pots and set them outside for their first summer.  No blooms, but plenty of green leaves happened.  And then they came inside to spend the winter with me in the studio. So far so good.  After a month or so, a couple of them even bloomed!  How thrilling!

It must be said that I am not too successful with houseplants, and all the pests in town know it.  Soon I had the local tribe of aphids and spider mites move in, and that was the end of the flowering season.  Still, by the end of the winter, I was delighted that one of the trees, the Mandarin orange, had managed to set two fruits!  There they were, little green balls at the end of two thin branches.  To be honest, I can’t really call them branches.  Twigs is more like it.  I wondered how they would be able to hold up the mature fruit, but figured they would likely be sort of miniature sized, on account of the tree’s young age and all.

Summer rolled around again and out the trees went to the pool deck where it was nice and hot and Mediterranean-like.  They loved it.  More green leaves happened plus a little more height.  And those crazy oranges grew and grew.  Long about July they turned light orange.  Not much longer to wait, I thought to myself. 

Wrong.  They kept growing.  The poor stick branches began to droop holding up such weight.  Let’s give it a little more time, I reasoned.  Surely they’ll turn dark orange any day now.  Right?

That was two months ago.  I am now willing to admit the error of my ways.  First of all, I am not convinced I purchased four different fruit trees, as labeled, from Lowe’s on special.  I have a sneaking suspicion these are the ones whose grafts failed and Lowe’s had to dump them on unsuspecting gardeners, like me.  If I’m really honest, I will admit that three of the four trees I bought have wicked sharp spikes protruding from various branches, which I’ve now come to learn are evidence of rootstock suckers overwhelming the graft. 

I am also willing to admit that I am not about to harvest two Mandarin oranges.  What is growing appears to be two rock-hard mutant oranges that bear no resemblance to a Mandarin whatsoever.  They don’t have that thick, bumpy, dark orange skin with a cute dimple at the stem.  These are pale, shiny and hard, like Christmas ornaments.  In fact, the poor tree looks like something Charlie Brown would have purchased.  I might just throw some holiday lights on it and see if that improves things.  I can’t imagine what else to do, since I’ve also learned that the fruit that has been developing for nearly nine months is inedible.  It is called a ‘sour orange’, in fact. 

Time to start over, I say.  But this time, I’ll head to the nursery instead of the bargain close-out shelf at Lowe’s!

Spring Orange

 

 

As I paint spring blossoms I am thinking about the color orange and how different it looks in the spring and fall.  Orange in the springtime is fresh and light and paper thin.  You see it in Narcissus and sometimes tulips and here, in my azalea.  It can be almost transparent and has a delicate quality easy to spoil.    In painting spring orange, I have to hold myself back.  Stop messing about.  Too much paint and the dreaded 'muddy look' sets in.

 

But fall orange is another matter.  Fall orange is a vivid leaf color.  If you see it in petals, it is on a sturdy, bold plant like a chrysanthemum or a late blooming marigold or zinnia.  It is loud and holds its own in the landscape.  It shouts, "Hey look at me!",  especially when the backdrop is a bright blue, cloudless sky.  The contrast is so vibrant you have to stop what you are doing and take a good long look.  You can't overdo it painting a fall shade of orange.

 

This spring blooming azalea, on the other hand, cheerily greets passersby, though shuns center stage.  It might get a nod or a quick mention, "How pretty!".  It gracefully bows and nods in the breeze, and adds to the spring palette of sweetness and light.  Remember back to April?  When the forest looked like Bambi just passed through?  That is the orange I'm trying to capture. 

 

Color memory is a marvel. 

 

 

 

Painting Distraction

 



Making progress, for sure, but I'm having trouble concentrating due to the color change riot happening outside my studio window:

 

I'm sorry, the Winter Wonderland thing is totally over-rated.  THIS is worth staring at for an undisclosed length of time.  I mean really, you can see the wind, or the effect of it anyway.  You can see thousands of individual leaves.  If you sit and stare long enough, and I'm not necessarily advocating this, you can see the colors shift right before your very eyes.  This view is yellower than it was this morning.  There's more brown, too.  There's more orange, pink and red.  I see more branches.  And it's an overcast day.  You should see it when the sun is shining!

Ah well, back to painting.  I think I am entering the final stretch, thankfully.  Just this last cluster to go, and then more work on some of the fine detail and shaddows.  Plus the branch needs to come to life, perhaps with the addition of a warm brown.  The end is in sight!

Onward!

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.