The WSLP at the Delaplaine Visual Arts Center

    This beautiful exhibit of 87 paintings by the members of the Washington Society of Landscape Painters opened at the Delaplaine Center for the Visual Arts in Frederick MD last Saturday.  I am proud to be a member of this society which has been in existence for over 100 years. Membership is limited to only 40 members and we exhibit as a group at least once a year. We meet monthly for plein air painting excursions and several times a year for meetings and critiques.  I find the work of my colleagues an inspiration!

     I am the Exhibitions Chair Person for the group so I have been busy with this show, painting and getting ready for our next exhibit which is scheduled to open in November at the Athenaeum in Old Town Alexandria, VA. That too will be a spectacular setting for a show! If you live anywhere near Frederick please try to stop by this impressive arts center and see our show. It runs until July 30th and there will be an artist's reception this Saturday, July 1st from 3:00 to 5:00.
www.delaplaine.org 

     I have four paintings in this show and two of them are among the paintings in the photos. I wonder if you can tell which two are mine :-)

Getting Out of the Studio

Painting the Perennial Garden at Bon Air Rose Garden in Arlington

      Finally my favorite time of the year!  I adore spring and all it's glory, particularly flowers. Along with wanting to get my hands in the dirt and plant new things is the desire to be out painting all that color and light.  We have been having so much rain (pouring as I write) that I haven't been out and about as much as I would have liked. However, last Friday the sun blessed us from time to time on a mostly cloudy day and I was able to join friends from the Washington Society of Landscape Painters at the Bon Air Rose Garden in Arlington Virginia.  The roses were extraordinary but the textures and intense colors of the perennial garden lured all five of us.

"Larkspur" 8x8 oil on panel

      This is the little study I did of the bed I was facing. The actual color of the larkspur is somewhere between the color in the photo and the color in my painting.  I had left my cobalt blue at home and I think that would have been the right blue to mix with alizarin or pyrole red or cad red to get just the right color. Instead I relied on ultra blue with a little cerulean and alizarin.  I used a palette knife for most of the painting but also a loaded brush here and there. The panel was toned with a wash of salmon pink and you can see some of it shining through in the trees, among the flowers and along the walk.  I thought it a good choice for both a cloudy or sunny day painting.
       I would love to do a large, studio version of this one. Perhaps 30x30?

"Summer Grazing"

"Summer Grazing" 24x30 oil on linen

     Just a quick post of a painting I did in June of 2015 of a vista of rolling Virginia hills looking towards the Blue Ridge Mountains.  My mare Gypsy was hospitalized at the Marion DuPont Equine Medical Center in Leesburg and this is the view that helped ease the stress of that time.  This week we were back there again for another hospital stay and once again I fell in love with that landscape!
     This stay there were mostly large, dark ominous clouds scudding over the fields threatening storms. The day we came home was brilliant and sunlit with a sky filled with white fluffy clouds just floating along. Thank God for places like this!

Cloud Play

"Cloud Play" 16x20 oil on linen panel

     Many artists have locations that they like to paint again and again.  This is one of mine. Actually I have painted over twenty 6x8 studies, some plein air and others in the studio from memory. This is a scene I see everyday and as it is on high ground and fairly open it is easy to watch the changing sky and how those changes affect the color and light on the fields. This studio painting was developed from the plein air painting shown below.
     
     There are several exhibits looming in the near future and I think I will submit "Cloud Play" for one of them. This season is so beautiful that I would like to attempt another landscape from this property but next time perhaps the lower field and maybe a spring storm will be on the way. Time for a little drama!

Plein Air study, 6x8 oil on panel

Quick Studies

"From the Kitchen Window" 6x8 oil on panel

     I have a couple of paintings in progress in the studio as I have three exhibition deadlines to meet and I am finding it hard to stay focused when all is coming to life outside my windows. Last week, after painting in the studio most of the day, I was struck by how beautiful the early evening light was. I was standing in the kitchen considering what to cook for dinner when I changed tack and decided I absolutely had to paint that light!  I am so happy that I keep my pochade box loaded and ready for such moments. I had exactly the right panels tucked in the cover of the box and the one I chose had been toned with a wash of cadmium orange. Perfect!  So I spent a happy hour painting this tiny study, "From the Kitchen Window".

My process for studio work

     Studies like "From the Kitchen Window" have become an important part of how I work. Some, like that little painting, can stand alone and might find their way to a small works exhibit but mostly I like to keep them as references for larger studio works. I also work from drawn sketches in my various sketchbooks, most starting off from quick "thumbnail drawings" and then developing from there.  The above image shows how I created "Blues Alley" which I posted a short while back.  I like to carry a 4x6 inch sketchbook with me and just a ball point pen. That way I am ready for whatever scene might entice me. If it is something I feel I want to paint later in the studio I size it up on graph paper (scaled to the size canvas I want to paint)  and then do a color study (in oil) in the sketchbook I keep for that purpose. Those three things are my references for the painting.

Take a trip to the hardware store!

     In my last post I mentioned some new tools.  Here are some of the fun things I found at my local hardware store and that I am finding useful, particularly for larger paintings. Good edges, both sharp and blurred can be created with some of these!

   

New Tools, New Approach

"Yellow Sky" oil on panel, 32.5 x 32.5

          I began my art career (more years ago than I care to remember) as an abstract painter.  I worked large.  In those days a panel the size of the one above would have been considered a small work by me.  Working on paintings as large as 5x8 feet was physical and liberating. I enjoyed experimenting with the application of paint by using different tools besides brushes.  Lately I have felt the itch to revisit that approach to painting but this time I wanted to apply it to a representational image and this time not so large.

          Off I went to the hardware store and selected tools that I thought would help me create an interesting surface.  I selected a 3" wide, flexible edging blade (love it!), another edging tool which is a one inch wide wooden roller, and a 6" wide plastic paint smoother. I also unnearthed an old rubber brayer I used years ago.

           Next I did a color study in my sketchbook of a view I am very familiar with, it is the view of DC seen from the point off Daingerfield Island on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. I paint from that location often and working from memory I didn't get hung up on detail.  I used a limited palette of Paynes Gray, Alizarin Crimson, Vermilion, Yellow ochre, Naples Yellow and Titanium White. I propped the study up next to my panel and got to work.

          Ampersand gesso board can be slippery to work on so I like to heavily gesso the panel again myself.  I used both my wide gesso brush and a paint roller leaving behind the texture created by both. Then I pulled out my large brushes (2" and 3"), all my palette knives as well as the above mentioned tools and started layering on paint working dark to light. The water was painted almost entirely with the new 3" edging blade and palette knives.  The sky was worked from the top down first with the same 3" blade, then the brayer and the 3" brush. As the sky descends towards the horizon line the paint is applied heavier with palette knives and bristle brushes.
          I had a wonderful time! More to come....

Warming Up

"Blues Alley" 20x16 oil on panel

        Like many of you on the East Coast of the US I have been enjoying the warm, early spring weather and that has been reflected in my choice of palette for recent paintings. This painting outside Blues Alley, a popular jazz club in Georgetown in an alley of the same name, was originally planned as a moody nocturne. However, I was inspired by the weather and chose instead to paint early morning light, sort of a "morning after" narration of the scene.

        In fact the original, on site sketch was created in morning light last May. It was a quick ballpoint sketch in the 4x6" sketchbook I like to carry with me. I didn't think of it again until last fall when I did a color study for it using the morning light from my sketch and then decided to shelve the painting until I could view the scene at night as I thought a nocturne would create a more fitting mood for the scene. Then flipping through my sketchbook looking for inspiration late in February I decided to go with what I had and add some atmosphere to the strong contrast of light and dark of the morning light. I am pleased with the outcome but I still want to do a moody Blues Alley at night!
       
        Below are the little 4x6 inch sketch from last May and the color study from the fall. I like working from these better than from a photo because they represent what was important to me in the scene, sort of a short hand of everything that was there.  Incidentally, I originally added the overhead wires in the painting but felt that they did not add to it and were just literal elements so I painted them out to  strengthen the composition.