Cobbled together old house

pastel on achival paper, sanded surface

30x30 cm (12x12 in)

This is my "cobbled-together-old-house", pretty much as it is in real life, but taken down to its most basic form, as if filtered through memory. Perhaps my granddaughter might hold a mind's image like this of grammy's house when she is my age. I carry one of my grandmother's house in the foothills of southern Oregon. The image in my mind is like the one shown in pictures of the house, but with layers of memory that create an entire complex lens through which I see it, and gardens and fields around it.

Ebb at the Flats

pastel on sanded hot press

10x8 in (15.5x20 cm)

There is a memory here: a child poking around in the exposed flats, looking for special treasures. Happy birthday to my youngest daughter, no longer a small child, but a grownup, still with a sense of wonder and exploration. Thank you for all the delight you have brought to my life. I love you.

After a month of doing mostly other things, like knocking crumbling plaster off walls and finishing up matting and framing for a show, I really needed to get my hands dusty with pastel again. Something immensely satisfying about painting with pastels. So last week I did several, and thought I'd post this one here.

When I know a place as intimately as I know this one, I have a tendency to put in too many details as the place comes back to me. Then I take out what I need to in order to convey the essence of the place. I spent a lot of time here when I lived on Puget Sound: one of the many places where streams ease their way into the Sound, creating rich estuarine flats where shellfish thrive.

In the flats, on calm days when there is no wind to disturb the surface, you can see the bottom as clearly as if through glass. As the tide ebbs, water level simply drops, the only apparent flowing where water drains off exposed slopes. But if you look under the surface at the channel, you can see the patterns where water is flowing out, bending seaweed and moving particles of sand.

And out on the open Sound, as the currents from the various convoluted inlets gain force, they collide, creating debris lines and sometimes raising ridges as high as a couple of feet. Sometimes you see sea lions and kayakers playing there.

Playing around again...

Early Spring Bog Meadow

oil on linen panel, 9x12 in (23x30.5 cm)

So... it's been a whole month since I posted. What in the world have I been doing all that time, anyway?

Well, here's part of it. (Get ready, I'm about to embark on another story...)

I love doing landscapes. I paint from photos only if it is a photo I have taken, of someplace I know and have a feel for, because photos simply don't capture that. I like to paint from life. So I decided I wanted to start doing plein air someplace other than my back deck. I'm not particularly enamored of hauling pastels around, and the more I hung out around plein air folks, the more I admired what they could do with oils. Now, I haven't painted with oils in a very very very long time. I quit using them because of an extreme sensitivity to either turps or mineral oil, or both.

But as I listened and read, I realized that neither of those are really necessary. Finally, I took the plunge, and along with a small plein air easel, I ordered some basic oil painting supplies, some canvas panels, and selected a limited palette of colors to work with.

Colors! Brushes! The day they arrived was so exciting-- until I realized that I had not the slightest idea what to do. Oops. I had to relearn mixing colors, how different brushes work, oh, my gosh, where do I start? I don't even know how to start a painting anymore!

Calm down. At the beginning. Play. First, make color charts. One for each color, so eight charts, each with 40 squares. Well, for some reason, the first one had 56 squares; I'm not sure why. After that I decided squarish blobs were perfectly adequate and a lot less bother. More fun, too.

Believe it or not, color swatches are fun. No pressure, just color, and good practice wielding the palette knife (with an occasional oops). You can make messes and not worry a lot about outcomes other than color. (Except it helps to develop a methodical approach, for reasons that may become clearer below.)

Watching the magic of colors changing each other, new colors emerging. A feeling of accomplishment from entering the results in my studio journal. And then scraping up all the goop left after doing a chart and seeing what kind of mud color I got from it. Using it to tone one of my panels and setting it aside to dry. Cleaning the palette and starting a new chart.

This painting came after my second chart. This was the chart with yellow as the base color, Um, I had a lot of extra paint left over. Way too much to just tone a panel. I didn't realize how far Azo yellow could go. So I made this painting, using a photo of an early spring bog meadow at the base of a hillside as a reference. I chose that photo because, frankly, it was a scene I could do with what was on my palette! My personal challenge was to use up that paint and then quit. So I tended to work pretty much all over the canvas, and at the very end, used my palette knife to add foreground detail in the winter-ravaged rushes, leaving the background hillside kind of vague.

I think I only broke one major compositional "rule", too. Well, two. I doubt Edgar Payne will roll over in his grave over it, though. After all, it is only my first oil painting since most people on earth have been alive. It's here so I can come back in two years and say, "Oh, wow, I've come a long way since then."

Teetering on the Brink

Kiln-worked glass, 7x10 in unmounted
1/4 to 3/8 thickness

Actually, I've been catching up on this weeks' posts all at one go. All week, I've been busy painting, shoveling snow (my PT released me for heavy duty as long as I don't overdo), and trying to figure out which frames to order for which paintings. Oh, yeah, and doing glass.

I have a few small sheets of System 96 glass and some boxes of scrap left over, so I decided to use them up before I start using the boxes of Bullseye I've got waiting for me. They are not compatible for kiln work, so using up the 96 will prevent confusion and ruined pieces. Nothing against 96, I just got a great deal on a load of Bullseye-- and the colors are... mmm.... mmmm.

I decided to use the 96 to make a series of small panels to mount either on a backing for the wall, or set into bases as small scultural pieces. This one is on the whimsical side, and it was a lot of fun to do. Using my scrap box, I cut many small pieces and fit them together in a playful way. Here it is assembled in the kiln for the first firing:

Yeah, all those little pieces are a bear to deal with. There are two layers, some overlapping, some stacked, some little teeny weeny strips layed side by side. I laid it up on a thin piece of clear acrylic, used thinned tack glue to hold it more or less together until I could slide it off onto the kiln shelf. Unfortunately, the design of my kiln does not allow me to simply set the shelf straight down in place, or I'd simply build my designs on the shelf. (I really really want a bigger kiln to play with.)

I programmed the kiln for a tack firing, which would allow the pieces to fuse and the edges to soften, but still retain their shape and texture. The firing took about 13 hours, and then a few more for cool down. I program the kiln to shut off when it drops to 300 degrees and let it cool naturally to room temperature. If I start by noon, it is off by the time I go to bed, and cool by morning, ready for another load.

For the second firing, I added some elements to the base as embellishment and to fill in some bare spots. The second firing is the same as the first, but with a longer hold time as it enters the anneal phase, because it is now thicker in some spots than others.

Jagged Edges: City Sketch

Pastels on Tiziano with pumice ground added

30x23 cm (12x9 in)

This is another piece of the Tiziano. Happy with the first firing of the glass piece (you'll see that tomorrow, after it comes out of the kiln for the second time), I approached the paper with a feeling of adventure. I've had images of downtown Portland, Oregon, where I used to live, moving around in my head for some time. I decided to do a freewheel sketch with the bright colors of the Nupastels to see if I could capture a little of that feeling of city movement and light and energy. Whatever it is, it was fun to do. Makes me remember the fun of being young and involved in a city full of lively art.

Island Eclipse

Pastels on Tiziano with pumice ground added

30x23 cm (9x12 in)

Remember that oversize piece of blue Tiziano I was supposed to be doing something with? It turned out to be the wrong background for what it was intended for, so I brushed off the pastels and used something else. It's just been sitting around here, bugging the devil out of me. So the other day I used alcohol to set the base, and cut it up into smaller pieces. One of those pieces went through several iterations, leaving me with massive frustration and an even odder looking foundation after all those brushings off of pastel dust. Now, I know the reason I am struggling is because something is trying to emerge, and I just am not there yet.

Trying hard to ignore the paper, I got the first stage of a glass piece ready for the kiln, and set it cooking. Then I couldn't avoid the paper. I just got my new set of Nupastels, and decided to use the darn paper just to experiment with them. Looking at the outlines of what went before, I turned the paper on its side and started laying in blocks. Guess I was influenced by the lunar eclipse, and thinking of how pretty it might have looked over Puget Sound from one of the islands, because that is what eventually emerged. Not the direction I feel myself moving in, but it has a certain appeal. And it got that piece of paper off my easel.