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.

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: