Cezanne show ends on Thursday…..But Not For Me

 

#8 and 9. The Bathers confuses me. Who are those 2 small figures looking at the sky?  I keep thinking some are earthly bathers and some are spirits.  And why does Cezanne’s father wear a little cap indoors?

Sunflower done

 I like the way this went.  Have hundreds of photos of sunflowers on the balcony and think I will do a series on the subject.

Elaine O.—August 27, 2022

Finished! For a while, I thought it might look like wallpaper—nice wallpaper, but still,wallpaper. However, I've decided I like it. It has a quiet serenity and calm which stands in stark contrast to the loud angry chaos that the school year brings to our once peaceful little neighborhood.

18" x 6"

et / Randy Rainbow

 I started this portrait and so far have avoided overworking the skin tones, yay!

Recovering

 I’m still working on a new onion painting on Yupo. 

I like the flow a lot more now. I might add some stronger greens at the top. 

I redid the arched bridge. 

I added more detail at the top, changed the colors of the bridge to get rid of colors that I didn’t like (thanks Yupo), and did some serious work on the ripples. Still love the trees. 

I took another painting that didn’t have the zing that I was looking for. So how do we know when we’re done? I can go further. 

Summer harvest…

The big tomato painting, 11x15. I like the way the peaches are painted more than the tomatoes. I liked the composition, but I wasn’t really happy with it, so I did a smaller quick study below. Well it wasn’t so quick, as I was trying hard to emulate the paintings of Walter Anderson. He leaves a lot of white space, which gives his paintings energy imo. So I like the feeling of the little one below, which is 6x 9. He also does a lot of color mixing on the paper, which adds drama imo. He also went crazy, but who doesn’t eventually….

In between I did this little beach study from our trip to South Haven. I combined images from 3 different photos. I tried sketching actually on the beach, but I just couldn’t do it. People move too much…

 

sunflower again

 And here it is with its petals.

Elaine O. – August 20, 2022

Working long and hard on this one. You'd think something this soft and delicate would be quick and easy to knock off, but noooo—I find I'm doing more sketches and studies, working harder and experiencing more doubt than I'd have believed possible. 

18" x 6"

I suspect the final dark details will pull it all together, so until then.....

et / final salmon

 Not much accomplished this week, painting-wise. I got the final details on the salmon, and added some cobalt blue to the water. I think I want to do some people next, maybe try a portrait of a favorite celebrity... we'll see.

For Ken

 I stopped by my Michigan farmers market and found these large green onions in a big red tub. So I painted them on a Yupo-like medium. 

Still need to do some more work on the top but I like the bottom. Too many meaningless stripes on top with meaningless color choices. I will fix this and get more Czanney with this image. 

A Little love….

 Ken said the blog needed a little love, so here are a few of my morning sketches from South Haven.they’re very small - 2 to a 6x9 page. That was about all I did on vacation. I started the watercolor above this morning. It’s our farm stand harvest (red haven peaches and muskmelon) plus Joe's tomato harvest. I sketched with some cheap watercolor pencils I bought for my g-kids and painted the one finished tomato with them. They have a lot of color but I decided it would take too long to do the whole painting with them so I switched to watercolor paints. I was painting from life but then I got hungry thinking about how good a BLT sandwich would taste….

Cezanne #6 and 7

 

Getting a little bored with the frames and the AI floor and it shows. Shadow on lower right of first one is the way I took the photo. And Her head is a bit off, making it look as if she’s not looking directly at painting. 

Finished the top of the sunflower.  Maybe I need to lighten the background.

And here is the flower itself.

Fun with Yupo

 Here’s a Yupo watercolor of one of my favorite places. I didn’t draw anything and barely put in any structure. I just let the brushes and paint do their thing. After that dried I took out some color to better define some shapes. I could keep going but I kind of like where it’s at. 

I was wrong. Sometimes we see things in a photo that we don’t see in real life. Saw some things that should be better and made them better. Can you tell?

I worked a little on this plein aire sketch I did of a street in New Orleans. A little crooked. 

Gouache darn it….

 Well, I’m supposed to be packing but instead I spent the morning on this weird piece, mainly painting over the watercolor with gouache. The paper is worn to bits in the cloud area, as I kept putting down color and wiping it out. I kind of like the density of the gouache; it gives it a more foreboding feeling, like, what just happened: nature or apocalypse? And I did learn that you can’t reconstitute gouache on the palette like you can watercolor, so only put out what you can use….

Elaine O. — August 6, 2022

I'm really feeling these lazy days of summer, so I thought I'd try painting "quieter" to match the summer vibe. I'm going for a quiet, meditative feel with pale, minimal color and soft blends. I've seen similar paintings (mostly florals) and wanted to try to get the technique down in my sketchbook....

...before I tried to do a larger painting. This one is after an illustration in a book by Julie Collins. She is a master of this!

After Julie Collins    12" x 9"

On the one hand, I'm having fun and really getting into a zone just watching the paint move. On the other hand, I can't seem to resist going darker and higher-contrast. Maybe I'm just not a "quiet" painter. Or maybe I need more practice!

elaine t. / more Alaska vibes

 A salmon that just escaped the bears at the waterfall! I thought about adding a big open bear mouth in the background, but that felt too corny. He'll get more shading and scales today. More work to do on the rushing water this week.

Cezanne has inspired me to be looser

 Finished the Andersonville street scene. 

I decided to make the man in the foreground more interesting and forget about all the work in the background that I was not really interested in anyway  

Then I took a bad Yupo painting, washed the paint off leaving a faint image of the original, and painted a new version of it over the old one.

Moving Along…

 I did a little work on the still life, removing some of the intense blue from the vase. I really like this now. I just realized I cut off some of the blue flowers at the top in my cropping attempts, but you get the idea…

I’ve done a little work on the gas station apocalypse sunset, but it’s far from finished. Trying not to rush through the process too much. Stopping to think about it, letting the paint dry, then I wander out of the room and forget I’m painting….

I probably won’t post next week because I’m wandering all the way to Michigan for the week with the family. 

Maybe I am on the right track.

 Pretty abstract, but I do have a subject.  Getting a lot of transaction with the gum arabic as far as moving paint around, putting it down wet, blotting it, then putting down more paint and blotting it etc.