Work in Progress, Seven Sisters Inn, Update 8

In this week’s update I’ve painted in the sign, the low stone wall, added more washes to the driveway, the sidewalk and road, painted in the back porch and added the shadow from the foreground live oak.

            The sign in the front yard is normally covered up from this vantage point from a large, six to seven foot sago palm in the corner where the side and front low wall meet. I elected to diminish the sago to about two feet so the sign would be fully visible and the palm wouldn’t interfere with the House. The color of the sign was also changed a little. The original color is a bright cerulean blue. I tried that but it was too bright and competed with the House for attention, so I subdued it some by diluting it. The color is there but a bit washed out so the House remains the center of attention. I added the lettering and image to the sign but kept it low key. If you look close the name is there. I’m still mulling over whether to increase the detail on it, so I’m leaving that decision until the end.

            The low wall was completed with a combination of paynes gray and raw umber, going over and over with washes and slowly adding detail.

            I added a couple more light washes of raw umber to knock down the whiteness of the concrete driveway, walk and road, then added in the shadow from the foreground tree. The shadow was painted in with paynes gray, raw umber and then a combination of winsor blue and burnt sienna to get the gray. At one point the shadow was too gray and I slowly added raw umber to get a bit of brown into it. It was also a bit too uniform and so I started picking up color here and there to show light filtering through the trees and hitting the ground. I feel good about the shadow now but not sure if I’m finished with it yet.

            Next, I added the strip of grass along the driveway, keeping part of it in shadow darker and adding spots of lemon yellow where the sunlight peeked through.

            Finally, I added in the bit of back porch.

            So I’m getting close to finishing this. I’ll leave it alone, then come back here and there, look at it and see what jumps out as needing further work. I think it will be finished by next Update.

Work in Progress, Seven Sisters Inn, Update 7

Work in Progress, Seven Sisters Inn, Update 7

            Sorry for the delay in posting this update. My wife and I got away for a few days to our favorite spot in the world – the Blue Ridge Mountains. Spent some time hiking, birdwatching and sipping hot chocolate on a porch with a beautiful view. Lots of inspiration there.  Waterfalls, deep woods, rushing water over boulders. That’s paradise! For me, at least.

            So, here is update 7, which gets you caught up on the painting. In the last Update I roughed in the foliage of the foreground tree. Here I painted in the trunk of the tree as well as added more detail to the foliage. I purposely made it all dark to frame the House. In painting the tree trunk I put in multiple layers of raw umber, shaping the trunk and giving a feeling of bark as well as three dimensional qualities. The light color will remain in the light areas where the bark is highlighted but will be replaced in the shadowed areas by darker color.

   I then started laying in washes of a mix of French ultramarine blue and burnt sienna. It gives a dark brown/gray color for bark. I just kept adding glazes until I was satisfied with the depth of color and tone. In the process I gave shape to the trunk and suggested deep furrows of bark. 

            After darkening the trunk, I started working in the bark texture with the same dark mix. Going over and over, adding more cracks and furrows, continuing to darken it and add detail.

            Before finishing the bark I went back over the foliage and started darkening it and adding detail. I didn’t paint in individual leaves but added brush strokes to suggest leaves, I used a combination of hunter’s green, winsor blue and yellow ochre in a myriad of proportions. I wasn’t satisfied with the dark, so I added paynes gray – which also has a blue caste to it. The places where I defined leaves were on the margins where there was a big contrast change, such as on the outside against the sky or against lighter, sunlit foliage. The interior is just a mass of dark greens and only a suggestion of leaf shape. Leaf shapes are just for areas of greater contrast. I painted in areas of sunlit leaves also.

            Then I went back to the trunk and added more detail – again – only in areas of greater contrast, where it would make a difference. I added in more branches and darkened others.

            Finally, I worked a bit more detail into the lawn and started laying down some preliminary washes for the low wall, driveway, and sidewalk. That’s where I’ll be concentrating in the next week.

         

Solo Exhibit, Brannen Bank, Dunnellon, Florida

I was thrilled to accept Brannen Bank’s (Dunnellon, Florida) offer to exhibit my paintings in their lobby for a month and a half. I spent much of this past week preparing for the exhibit and hung the paintings this morning. The Exhibit, titled “Creations: Of Nature and Man” opens today, June 13, and runs through to the end of June. If you are in the area please stop by and view the paintings. Let me know what you think.

Work In Progress: Seven Sisters Inn, Update 6

Work in Progress: Seven Sisters Inn, Update 6

Some major changes made to the painting on this update. I’m starting to pull the entire scene together now to see how the parts fit and work together. The tedious and slow work on the House will be replaced by more loose and quicker painting of the surroundings. There’s greater opportunity to ad lib a bit.

The first thing I did was complete the foundation of the House. The brick piers, lattice work, front steps and front rail were all painted in. There may be more detail to finish up later as I look it over, but for the most part the House is done – except for the back porch, a little bit of which shows between the foreground tree and the House.

I then roughed in the lawn in the front of the House and on the side. I used hunter’s green, winsor blue, cadmium yellow, lemon yellow and raw sienna. I wanted a base color for the lawn over which I would apply the darker colors. Then I added more detail to the tree form shrub off the front steps and the hedge on the side. After that I added in the shrubs in front of the porch, using the same basic colors as the lawn but in different proportions. More raw sienna was added to keep the colors warm. Using the same colors I painted in the shrubs on the left side of the House and the larger shrubs at the far left near the front of the walk. All of this had the effect of grounding the house to its surroundings and started to give a feel of a real neighborhood House.

The house on the adjacent piece was also blue but I didn’t want to emphasize it much, so I painted it in a light wash. You can see it’s there but it doesn’t interfere with the main subject.

I filled in the small area between the House and the foreground Live Oak Tree on the right to give a feeling of trees in the back yard.

Lastly, and the part I’d been anxious to do, to see how it would affect the composition, I roughed in the dark foliage of the Live Oak overhead. For the foliage I mixed french ultramarine blue, burnt sienna and hunters green in a medium tone and then splotched it in all over, making sure I left enough sky holes. Adding the foliage already made a difference. It started to frame the House and bring more attention to it.

Next on the agenda was to work more detail into the tree and add the trunk in. I’ll take that up in next week’s Update.

Preparing For An Exhibition

It appears I’m about to have my first solo exhibition. I’m excited about it and hopeful that the exposure it will give me will possibly lead to the right individual seeing my paintings. It’s not at an art gallery but a bank. The actual preparation started innocuously enough a year ago.

            I had been showing a few of my paintings in a local gallery, an eclectic small gallery in the historic district of Dunnellon without much happening. I stopped in one day and the owner told me he was going out of town for a few weeks and the gallery would be closed. Even less would be going on then. He suggested I ask at a local bank if they wanted to hang some of my pieces. The owner said he knew of other artists who displayed their work there and that I should give it a try.

            So, I grabbed my paintings and drove over to the bank. Once inside I was directed to the office of the Vice President. I asked if he would be interested in exhibiting a few of my paintings. He told me that the Bank would be happy to do so, that they had been periodically showing paintings of local artists and wanted to help promote the arts in the area. I was, needless to say, pleased to hear that and promptly dashed out to my car and dashed back in with two paintings. The bank officer seemed genuinely impressed with my work and promptly hung the paintings.

            So, by seizing the opportunity, I had managed to get a little better stage in which to show my paintings. Over the next year I continued to have a presence in the bank, changing out the paintings periodically to keep it fresh. I did get one bite a couple of months ago, when I was on vacation. A couple had stopped in to transact some business and noticed one of my paintings in the lobby, one of a historic home in Ocala. It was a print, a giclee, a copy of the original commissioned piece I had done for the owners of the House. Apparently the couple in the bank had owned the House some time in the past and wanted to buy the painting – but wanted the original. Since they didn’t want a copy I lost the sale. But I was pleased that the painting had generated interest.

            Recently I stopped in to see the Vice President and he asked if I was willing to exhibit a larger selection of paintings. I was, once again, thrilled and said yes. We set a tentative date for the exhibit and I left to plan out the showing.

            It’s not a complicated event. No personal appearances, just my paintings hanging up near the entrance. But I want to get the most exposure I can. In addition to printing up title, description and price labels to place on the backs of the paintings I checked to see if I had enough business cards to set out with them. I also decided to issue a press release. It’s a good, inexpensive way to let everyone in the community know I’m having a showing. I contacted the local newspapers and asked what their requirements were for a press release. Then, I sat down to write one. I first needed a title, one that would get attention. Since my specialty is painting historic buildings and Home Portraits, and I also love to paint scenes of natural beauty, I combined the two with the title “Creations: Of Nature and Man” I wrote a few lines about my passion and, since my niche is historic buildings and Home Portraits, I emphasized that in the press release. And, I included a photo of one of my paintings. A picture always catches people’s attention. I then included contact information, website information and the address of the bank, as well as exhibit dates and times.

            In addition to sending the press releases to the newspapers I thought it a good idea to send copies to local art groups and galleries. You never know, someone at a gallery might decide to check it out.

            Finally, even if no one was interested in buying a painting of someone else’s Home, they might be interested in commissioning one of their own. So, I designed and printed up a flyer about Home and Garden Portraits – why a prospective client would want one, how I create one and how to contact me to commission one. I included photos of my work on the handout. The handouts could be placed in a holder in plain view and taken home, hopefully to prolong the experience and maybe to generate a commission.

            This exhibit has not yet taken place but will shortly. I’m in the midst of pulling everything together and I will post further on this as things progress.

Work in Progress: Seven Sisters Inn, Update 5

This past week I pretty much completed the House. The House is the most detailed object in the painting and the one that took the most time. The rest of the trim work was added, the multicolored blue boards on the front and the side and more shading. I put in the detail on the roofing shingles and darkened the lower roof over the porch.

Just for a change of pace I started roughing in the shrub just off the porch and the hedges on the side of the House. I also re-drew my lines for the remaining part of the painting – the lawn, the low border concrete wall, the sidewalk and tree-form shrubs out near the sidewalk. I also drew in the sign on the front lawn.

After the House, I’ll start painting in those areas I just mentioned. They are not as detailed and can be painted in looser. Next week’s Update will show a dramatic change as most of the surrounding landscape will be roughed in.

Art, The Natural World and A Crucial Moment for Civilization

I love to paint. I love to create paintings of nature’s beauty – of elk standing on a rise on a crisp autumn morning, its breath crystallizing in the cool air of a mountain valley. I love to paint sandpipers scurrying about a beach in search of lunch. And I love to capture my grandchildren on paper, enjoying themselves on a cold winter morning playing in the snow. I’m terribly afraid that we are slowly leaving those experiences behind as we rush headlong into the future, indifferent in our greed for more, to how we are degrading the world around us - consuming more, depleting our world of its beauty and natural resources and replacing it with pollutants that will leave our grandchildren with only paintings, photographs and distant memories of its past beauty.

On May 9, 2013, for the first time in human history, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 400 ppm. That was higher than it’s been in at least 3 million years. It only remained above that historic level for a day. But, this year it has remained above that milestone for all of April and into May. Within a few years it will remain above 400 ppm all year – on its way up to 450 and 500 ppm. It will not fall below 400 ppm again for centuries! It has been relentlessly increasing since the dawn of the industrial revolution, and with it, the average global temperature has risen one and one-half degrees. The last time carbon dioxide surpassed 400 ppm, the temperature of the earth rose more than 6 degrees higher than today and sea levels up to 131 feet higher.

We’re on a path that will take us to those same conditions by the end of the century. My home state of Florida and the fabulous Florida Everglades, home to an astonishing array of wildlife – and the inspiration for countless wildlife paintings – will cease to exist if that happens.

And that seems to be the path we are on now. We have now passed a tipping point – a point of no return – the irreversible collapse and melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that will eventually drown much of the Florida peninsula, as well as many other low lying areas around the globe. That cannot now be stopped. The current warming is making natural weather events more extreme. Wildfires are beginning earlier in the year and lasting longer.  Droughts alternate with record downpours and flooding. Devastating heat racked Australia during the winter of 2012 and the U.S. in the spring and summer of the same year. Deadly heatwaves killed more than 35, 000 people in Europe in 2003 and 15,000 in Russia during 2010. Thirty million people were displaced in 2012 because of climate related events. 2013 was the 37^th consecutive year with temperatures above the 20^th century average.

As polar ice melts, many low lying areas across the world and in the U.S. become vulnerable to rising seas. Higher sea levels reinforced storm surges from hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. Sea levels are rising four times faster than the global average from Cape Hatteras to Boston. Three 1,000 year floods have occurred in Minnesota in the last 8 years. Three fourths of Florida’s population lives near the coast. The Florida Oceans and Coastal Council, in 2009, published a report discussing coastal vulnerability and predicted that the expected 40 inch sea level rise this century will submerge more than 9% of Florida’s land area, jeopardizing an infrastructure worth more than 2 trillion dollars.

Insurance companies are paying out more claims due to the increased risks of storm surge. The World Bank, in 2012, warned that if we don’t alter the path we’re on now, one that will likely take us past six degrees, we threaten to “make the world our children inherit a completely different world than we are living in today”. The International Energy Association (IEA), in its 2012 Energy Outlook stressed that no more than one third of proven fossil fuel reserves can be extracted and keep the world from heating more than 3.5 degrees, but, in its Mid Term Report, it described a world ignoring its moral responsibility.

We’re so focused on becoming more energy self sufficient that we ignore the fact that not only are we destroying the world around us, we’re accepting the human toll it’s costing us. On our present course we aren’t engineering a better world for our grandchildren, we’re condemning them to a hellish new one.

Climate change is not a political issue, it is a purely scientific one. 97% of scientists knowledgeable of climate science agree that the climate is warming and humans are causing it by burning fossil fuels.

So, what should we do? We must convince our elected officials to force producers to pay the real economic costs of oil, coal and natural gas production by eliminating subsidies, enacting a carbon tax on their extraction and passing the taxes on to the public. In addition, two thirds of known reserves must remain in the ground. Leveling the playing field will allow clean, renewable energy sources to become a major part in our energy needs. Then, we must learn to conserve, repair and recycle in order to protect our diminishing natural resources.

I want to continue painting scenes of natural beauty – and I want my grandchildren, and their grandchildren to be able to do the same. I don’t want to leave them a world where wildlife and natural beauty can only be found in paintings left to them by their grandfather.