Category: painting

My Mission Meets Another Artist’s Vision

This week has been different for me. I’ve been working on a mural assisting another artist to bring her vision to life.

I’ve been wanting to do more in the public art realm for a while. It’s important to me that art be in the world so everyone can have it in their lives, but while I’ve applied to calls for public art for years, I’ve had very little success. So when the opportunity came up to help Georgie Nakima @gardenofjourney, I jumped at it, and let her know that I’m an experienced painter and that I know how to operate a boom lift. So this week, between teaching classes, I’ve been working on one of Georgie’s murals with a team of artists, and I’m happy to be able to fulfill my goal to bring art out into the community.

This is the last week to help me raise funds so that I can donate to recovery efforts in Western NC. I am donating 50% of all sales in October to help out disaster relief efforts in the Appalachians. Find available work here.

My Plein Air Painting Kit

These are the supplies I bring when I paint outdoors (in plein air).

Note: When I listed my paint colors, I forgot to mention: Titanium White, Transparent Red Oxide, and Cadmium Red Light.

If you don’t feel like watching the video here’s a list of the supplies:

  • Cigar Box Paint Kit (includes palette, paint, brushes and palette knife)
  • Prepped panels
  • Panel box
  • Stool
  • Sun hat
  • Newspaper
  • Rag
  • Odorless mineral spirits
  • Pliers
  • Sandpaper
  • Sketchbook
  • Pencil

The Dairy Farm Painting – What Makes a Landscape Painting-worthy?

plein air painting farm
A couple weeks ago on a bike ride, we rode by this farm and I knew I had to come back to paint it. It is conveniently located across the road from a water treatment plant, so I planned to park there to get a good view of the farm land.
This morning a friend and I met there to paint, and we had a chance to chat with the guys who run the water treatment plant. This is one of my favorite parts about working in plein air; I often get to meet people who know stories about the land I’m observing, and this morning was no exception. After finishing our paintings, we got a tour of the plant! Fascinating stuff… and I love the OSHA sign that lives in their lab.
funny OSHA sign
When a couple stopped while driving by, they shared with us what they think is another beautiful landscape nearby. And they’re right! It’s a spot I’ve noted many times, and forgot to return with my painting kit. So I know where I’m headed next…

Painting a portrait of my son

This month I’ve been painting a group of portraits of my family. I started with myself, then my husband, and finally our son. It’s been an interesting practice to notice how the experience of painting each one of us changes. For my portrait and my husband’s I worked from life: looking into a mirror for mine and asking my partner to pose for his. One of the challenges of working from life is needing to translate a three-dimensional thing into the two dimensions of a painting.

For my son’s portrait, rather than asking him to pose for hours, I opted to work from a photo instead. While it’s easier – in a way – to work from a photo because the camera does the work of flattening life’s three dimensions into two, it’s also easy to become obsessive about EVERY SINGLE DETAIL. This isn’t necessarily a good thing when painting. Part of painting is learning to discern which details to include and how much to leave out. The longer we stare at our subject, the more we discover. And if we include every little thing, the result will surprisingly look less realistic because of how our eyes and brains perceive what we see in real life. For example, if I paint an area in shadow with the same degree of detail and contrast as a part in the light, something will seem off when we look at the painting. For the spatial effect to work, we actually have to lessen the contrast and level of detail in the shadows.

Another part of what makes painting so interesting and complicated is the making of decisions of how to portray something or someone in a way that reveals an aspect of them and/or of the artist. It is an interesting challenge to make a realistic image that still looks like a painting rather than trying to make it look like a photo, which is more of an exercise in copying.

Portrait close up
detail of my son’s portrait – The large brush mark that appears across the face is from another painting. I made all 3 portraits on top of older work.

There’s also something magical about seeing an image in a painting, and then as you step closer to the work, gradually realizing that the image is just a collection of brush marks. (Have I mentioned that I often get into trouble in museums when I get a little too close to paintings?)

Here’s a collection of images showing the process of making the portrait of my son, from start to finish:

Finished Portrait of Son
Portrait of my son, oil on wood, 12×12 inches

Portrait Work in ProgressPortrait Work in ProgressPortrait Work in ProgressPortrait Work in ProgressPortrait Work in ProgressPortrait Work in ProgressPortrait Work in ProgressPortrait Work in Progress

Painting a Portrait of Tim

This week I made a portrait of my husband Tim. Since I made a self-portrait a couple weeks ago, I decided to make a trio of portraits that include our son too. Below are images of the process of day 1 and day 2. I’m really enjoying painting these at this scale. It was also fun to recreate one of my paintings in the background of this one.

Also this week I came across this photo of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera watching a solar eclipse with friends in 1932.

And I learned about about “Andrea Y. Motley Crabtree—the first woman to pass the rigorous U.S. Army test for deep sea diving, a highly specialized aspect of military service,” when I saw this portrait of her at the Met museum.

A little self portrait

I think making self portraits is a good practice as an artist. It serves as a benchmark to gauge skill and changing concerns in technique and color. Rembrandt famously made 100 self portraits (that we know of), and it’s interesting to notice the changes in techniques and age in each one.

The last couple days I painted a self portrait, and I think it’s finished. It’s oil on wood and measures 12×12 inches.

In the next few weeks as classes wind down this semester, I’m reintroducing coaching for artists. This will be in a new format, and you’ll be able to easily book coaching calls here. If you know an artist who’s feeling creatively stuck or needs some art-related guidance, can you let them know?

self portrait and artist in studioself potrait

Encaustic Sculptures Start to Finish

I recently made a series of 6 sculptures using encaustic. Encaustic paint is made by melting wax and damar crystals, and mixing them with pigments for color. Each painted layer then has to be fused to the layers underneath it by liquifying the surface with a propane torch.

The materials I used are: encaustic (wax, pigment, damar resin), cardboard, galvanized steel, and polyvinyl acetate (a fancy way of saying Elmer’s Glue or white glue).

I documented the process from ideation to completion, and you can scroll down to see it from start to finish.

The sculptures are on view and available from the Art Gallery at Congdon Yards in High Point, NC till April 19th.

My sketchbook a couple months ago: the sculpture shape ideas (right) and color combination ideas for sculptures (all over the place). There’s also a drawing for a painting (top left), planning for this exhibit (bottom left), and random ink marks

Drawing a shape on cardboard

Cutting out shapes using an X-acto blade

Cutting and shaping steel wire for the legs and base. The base pieces are also shown

Testing the steel legs and base for balance

Clamping and drying the sculptures. Here the body shape has been attached to steel legs, which has been sandwiched between 2 base plates.

Some of the sculptures after I filled in all the edges with Golden Light Modeling Paste. This way I have a nice smooth, not rough cardboard-y, edge. I sanded and shaped all the edges.

Priming the pieces using R&F Encaustic Gesso for a nice smooth absorbent surface. I sanded the surfaces before and after.

Four of the sculptures primed and ready to go

My encaustic hotplates with melted unmixed colors in the big pots and mixed colors in the lids. The big containers contain clear medium and white.

Six finished encaustic sculptures

In this video you can watch how I fuse the encaustic layer using a propane torch.

The quest: mysterious and weird

Last month I shared with you that I started painting people again. You can see the first four paintings of the series below. I’m now working on the fifth painting of six I planned to make. After I make six, I’ll decide if I’m going to continue making them. At this point, I’m loving the process, I’m learning a lot and I see no reason to stop working figuratively in the near future. It’s interesting to note that I was primarily painting people until a semester into graduate school when I began exploring abstraction. This was back in 2002, and over the years every time I tried making figurative work again, it just didn’t feel right.

This time feels different. The way I’m approaching painting the figures and establishing their relationship to the spaces around them, the way I’m layering the paint and using color feels like things I’ve been thinking of for the last 2 decades are clicking.

I’m interested in what happens when the figures aren’t looking out at us, when they look away or toward someone or something off the edge of the painting. The paintings feel like a moment within time, like something has just happened before we were privy to the moment in the painting and it will continue beyond the painting. The people occupy outside spaces that are ambiguous, sometimes deep and three-dimensional and other time more geometric and on the surface of the painting. I’m playing with colors, noticing which ones create interesting optical effects, particularly on the depth portrayed in the painting. The paintings are mysterious and a little weird and that feels like the right place for me right now.

Four recent paintings on my studio wall

Looking at the image of my studio above and of the painting Pilot Mountain 1 below, you’ll notice similar colors and compositions. Seeing my work from different periods like this together reminds me that I’ve been interested in the same things visually for a long time. I think it’s the subject matter thats most different.

Pilot Mountain 1 is available from my shop. It’s one of the paintings inspired by my favorite place to walk and run, Pilot Mountain. 

Pilot Mountain 1, acrylic and oil on panel, 20 x 20 inches, 2018

Two years in the making of a painting collection

Two years in the making of a painting collection… What started this body of work was a question I asked on Facebook: What outdoor spaces bring you peace and happiness? Friends sent me photos of their special landscapes, and I used those images as a jumping off point to create these paintings.

In this series of landscapes the feel of wide open spaces meets a soft geometry – a meditative play of shapes and colors.

Explore the paintings in the Searching in the wind collection HERE.

Make a watercolor botanical drawing with me

Hi everyone! Join me as I add watercolor to a botanical drawing. Here I’ll show you how to layer transparent watercolor in a loose relaxed way to add color to your drawings. This is the follow up to my Step-by-step botanical drawing video.

Share this freely!

If you are looking to dive deeper into watercolor, check out my new watercolor class HERE. It’s for all levels and features video lessons you can do at your own pace. See you in class!

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