What was I thinking.

 

 

I volunteered to do a demo in the hallway at the Art Gallery of Burlington during the Christmas Show and Sale.  The idea being to let the public see an artist at work. 

I have only done a handful of portraits in oils and since I am no longer allowed to use my walnut oil based M Graham paints in the gallery I purchased four tubes of Winsor and Newton oil paint (Anders Zorn palette).  Unfortunately I mistakenly picked up a tube of very cool transparent yellow instead of a nice warm cad yellow.  I always do portraits from a sitting model but since there wasn't room I decided to do a portrait of a friend from a very bad black and white photo so that I wouldn't be tempted to become a slave to the two dimensional photograph.  After all I know what this friend should look like.  I kind of forgot that this experiment would be done while answering questions and chatting with dozens of people walking by me in the hallway.

The portrait is terrible but it was a fun experiment.  I chopped off the back of his head and I made his ear much bigger than it really is but with those issues fixed and a warmer yellow this wouldn't be all that bad.

On a brighter note I am happy with the next two portraits.  I have been offered the chance to do a solo show in St James Church in April and Debbie thinks that I should hang my sketches.  I certainly have enough of them so I think that I may do that.  Etienne and Joanette were as usual great models so these were just plain fun to do.

I do need to work on my photographic skills too.  These are about 20" by 16" and look much better in real life.

What a day!

The normal highs for this time of year are 8 C if we are lucky.  Today it was 23 C and sunny.  I painted for two hours in a tee shirt and then came home and fell asleep in a lawn chair in our yard.  To top it off I have a painting that I actually kind of like.

This is looking downstream from one of the bridges in Lowville Park.  Most of the leaves are on the ground but there were some oak trees making a perfect backdrop for an old maple with no leaves.  The oaks reflected off the water in the still part of the creek turned the water a very rich brown.  There was just enough of a breeze to create movement in the dry leaves. 

I love my job but on days like this I feel especially blessed.

Cassandra is fun

I almost didn't go to the sketch group today but I had to drop a painting off for the Art Gallery of Burlington "Small is Beautiful" show so I decided to stay for the sketch group.  Why is it that when I am not really in the mood that I do some of my best work.  I have sketched Cassandra many times but today I think that I got my best likeness yet. Maybe I should only paint when I am looking for other things to do.

Hidden Valley again

Yesterday was another perfect day to paint.  A clear blue sky and warm enough to paint comfortably without gloves.  The fall colour is well past its peak but the colour that is left stands out against the grey background and the orangish yellow leaves were brilliant against the bright blue sky.  I should have made the sky more blue however I wanted a smooth even hue for the cloudless sky and was concerned that I would end up with too much texture if I went back in.

Bernie again

Bernie has posed many times for our Wednesday morning sketch group and he is always fun to sketch.  He is a wonderful old gentleman who has a really craggy face and always looks miserable. One would think that getting a likeness of a face with this much character would be easier than a plain face that looks like everyone else but I don't find that to be the case.  If you have a person with a very average face all you have to do is get the shapes relatively right and it looks like them.  It looks like a lot of other people too but it looks like them.  With a face like Bernie's you have to get all the odd shapes and nooks and crannies correct or it looks nothing like him. 

I like this sketch but it doesn't look like Bernie or at least it doesn't look the way I feel Bernie should look.

A Great Day to be Canadian

Yesterday was as close to a perfect day as it gets.  I went out and voted in the morning, painted in shirtsleeves in the sunny afternoon, had a wonderful turkey supper with Debbie, watched the Toronto Blue Jays beat the Kansas City Royals and then watched the very divisive Conservative party get removed from power. I love being Canadian.

About a dozen of us gathered at Hidden Valley Park in Burlington to paint fall colours.  The colour was past its peak and not all that impressive however it was sunny and very warm so a great October day to paint.  This pine tree seemed to be dancing in the park and I thought that it could be a very dramatic composition.

I always start a painting by putting a thin layer of a mood setting colour (in this case cadmium red light mixed with transparent iron oxide) on my board using oil paint.  I then wipe out the highlights and add some darks to get a sense form.  This under painting usually gets almost completely covered with more paint however in this case when the painting was complete except for the sky four different artists (all of whom I respect) came by and told me that they loved the sky so guess what. No blue sky.

I kind of like it.  What do you think? 

We painted at Kerncliff Park in Burlington on Thursday.  It is one of my favourite painting locations at any time but in the fall it is especially grand.  The colour in this old quarry is magnificent and I have failed at every attempt to paint it.  This one is my best to date probably because it is so much fun to let the colourist in me loose.




I spent the week before Thanksgiving paddling in Algonquin Park with my son Nathan and five of his friends.  The very generous deal was that I was exempt from chores provided I painted.  I again failed rather miserably with acrylic paint but I am getting a better feel for how it works so I will keep at it.  You can play with oils but acrylics dry way too fast for my liking.  I used some retarder this time and that helped.  This is the best of the three completed paintings.



I did a few watercolour sketches along the way and this one is of  our mascot "Trojan" who is a rubber chicken that showed up in the oddest places during the trip.