Tullps and Manzanilla Trees

This week we celebrated the official "grand opening" of the studio with a reception on Thursday night. The studios were packed with people and it was a wonderful event.  During the event, each of us artists sold a piece, which made it an extra special evening.  Roses, Paris, Spring will have a new home with an art collector who owns two smaller works of mine.

The reception leftovers included potted tulips.  I painted them by themselves and then in their setting in the studio.

The other painting I worked on this week was a 30" x 40" painting of the manzanilla trees on the beach in Mexico.  The 8" x 8" little study I had to work from was well suited to opening up into a rectangular painting.

One funny thing about the small study -- while in Mexico, a little boxer dog that had been visiting the house I was in, decided to take a leap up onto the bench next to the ledge the painting was drying on.  The first thing I noticed was the paint on the bench cushion… and then the dog paw print on the painting.  I didn't fix the paw print on the little painting -- it's a funny memory with a sound track -- the British voice of the dog's owner asking "but how do you know it was my doggie?"  That would be because I saw him on the bench….

Subconcious Wayne?

I was looking today at a book of Wayne Thiebaud's work.  He's an inspiration to many artists, I'm not the only one out there who loves his work and studies it for ideas about color and composition.   I know that influence on art is a tricky thing -- there's influence, and then there's unoriginal work.  I like to think of myself as influenced, but I was struck this morning by two paintings I'd done recently and two works in the Thiebaud book.  These are his.

Painting Donuts, Bethesda Art Walk

Tonight was the first Bethesda Art Walk since we opened Studio B.  The Art Walk is the 2nd Friday of every month and includes stops at the area galleries.   We had a really nice evening and good turnout.

I was a little concerned about spending the time talking about my work while people came through the studio and solved the problem with donuts.  A new donut shop opened just a couple of weeks ago right near the studio, so I bought a few Valentine decorated donuts to paint.  I painted my daughter into an early version of the painting, but took her out… and then she took a bite out of the donut in the front.  It was fun to paint and fun to talk about.

Beach (and patio) painting, Day 3

beach painting, day 2

Beach Painting

Experiment with Galkyd

I'm going to be traveling next week and continuing my endless search for an ideal way to paint, transport gear and get wet paintings home.  When I went to Montana, I brought a box with slats for a 12" wide painting and that seemed to work well enough to get the work home without a lot of mess.  This time, in my support of our neighborhood art supply store, when I went to get 12" wide boards, they had one.  So I got a mix of sizes and can't use the box to allow separation between them.

My idea this time is to use galkyd, a Gamblin product, as a medium for mixing the paint.  It's a bit shiny, but it offers the promise of "dry to the touch" in 24 hours, so I should be able to bring home a week's worth of work -- fingers crossed.

Today's little painting is my practice for using galkyd.  The tea cart is a new piece of furniture in the studio and it seemed like a good spot for a little painting of a teapot.  The paint seemed to be drying as I was working and I will get to check on it tomorrow.  I also hope the clean up got all the galkyd out of my brushes!

The other work I did today was finish the still life. I made the grapes a bit more defined and touched up the watermelon a bit.

Maine Still Life with Watermelon

I had an oil study of this still life and I'd also taken a photo of the set up at the time -- it was mid-August in the kitchen of the house in Maine.  I liked the study well enough, but when I was looking at the photo of the set up, I liked the view out the window and the greater depth of the image from that angle. Working in the studio today on a large painting, I used them both as reference for the painting in progress.

A little portrait sketch

I didn't have any flowers or still life or ready ideas for work in the studio today, so I put a photo up on my phone of two family favorite people and sketched out a little painting.  I didn't want to take out any fresh paint, so I did this with what was on my palette -- an interesting exercise.

Flowers, revisited

In 2012 I painted a picture of a flower store in Paris.  At the time, I was very happy with the finished painting, but a few months later, was dissatisfied. It seemed too flat, some of the drawing was noticably off, it was just not working for me.  It's a big painting, like 5 feet wide, so it was taking up a lot of storage since I didn't want to hang it anymore.  I brought it into the studio earlier this week and made a lot of adjustments to the painting to make the space seem deeper.  I also repainted a lot of the roses, leaves, well, just about everything.

this is what the painting looked like last year

this is the repainted painting, finished today

And I made some progress on the tulip painting.