August 24, 2021

Mason Jars


 I took oil paint and gouache paint to Maine with me this summer.  My usual practice is to start with oil paint and then switch to gouache to allow the oils to dry before traveling home.  This year, I spent the weeks leading up to my trip to Maine working in gouache to really settle in with it. 

I'm using Turner Acryl Gouache, which is an opaque water-based paint.  It doesn't reactivate like regular gouache, so when it's dry, it's done.  It's a challenge, especially outside where the sun and breeze can harden a glob of paint in minutes, but the result is a matte finish paint.

The bouquets of flowers I'd been painting on the porch were arranged in mason jars and every day we had to pull out the flowers past their prime.  I reached a moment when I thought, if I had any courage, I'd paint the jar without the flowers.  Well, I have courage.  And I also loved to look at the way a striped landscape (table, railing, grass, rocks, ocean) seen through a jar became a mishmash of colors and forms.  So the jar series began.  

Now that I'm home and heading back to my studio, I'm planning on continuing the series in interiors seen through jars.  Maybe back into oil paints for larger canvases.  Stay tuned.

Website Updated!

 I have finally updated my website after neglecting it for way too long!  

Judygilbertart.com now has a painting gallery under landscapes for the work of Summer 2021.  I have been in Maine and painting landscapes and flowers and my new passion, mason jars, this summer.  I still have a lot of work to do to update the site -- and iPhone camera images are not the best way to view work! -- but it's a start.

The pandemic year upside has been my immersion in online classes with painters I admire, whose classes always were out of reach, too hard to get to, too expensive and unapproachable. No more!  Online art instruction is oddly more wonderful than being in a classroom in person.  The artists are generous with their expertise and the process of critique is so much better with online uploading and Procreate software used as a tool to teach.  All of which has led me to new ideas, new approaches and, as Peggi Kroll Roberts so aptly puts it, "expanding the universe."

More to come and happy painting.