LJ and NJ

Twice a year the gallery where i take my painting lessons offers their “6 x 6” show. Anyone in the community can purchase a wooden 6” x 6” and then do whatever artistically you choose. Final products get entered into a show, with entries for sale to the public.

Over the past several years for this exhibit i have painted bird houses a few times, often in snow. This time i decided to do an actual bird. My choice is a female cardinal. She has lovely color and stands out against her snowy background.

Last summer i was in Spain, near the north coast, for a photography workshop. One night we stayed in a tourist home that was located near open fields. the area was near the water but not on it. Just across the street from our place was this group of deserted buildings, which for some reason i found captivating and very much wanted to paint. Until this week, when i was close to finishing the painting, i had no idea of what to call them. It turns out they are called “horreros”, or “paneras”, depending on the area in which they are found. The elevated one of the three is a granary — to store grain. It is apparently built in the way it is in order to keep rodents and pests away. The lower buildings might have been used to store tools.

The morning on which i took the reference photo was overcast. for the painting i wanted to liven up the colors. I also wanted to place some emphasis on the view through and behind the buildings in order to de-emphasize a bit of the prominence of the elevated building. With that in mind, i made the painting’s weather be sunny, and tried to indicate where the light was coming from, which allowed me to

highlight the opening through the buildings.

If it seems as though the building on the right is missing some walls, that is, in fact the case. Only the front wall remains; the sides and back walls are long gone.

This painting is based on a reference photo that Norma took on her recent trip to Scotland. It’s on the mainland, on a road just above the Eilean Donan Castle. When she arrived the whole area was socked in with mist and fog; and then suddenly it began to lift, revealing this beautiful scene in front of her.

I chose to make the whole scene a bit brighter, to emphasize some of the color contrasts. I also turned what is a sheep barn in real life into a house, mainly because there was not enough detail for me to figure out how to paint the pens. And i didn’t want to be painting sheep for this one! It would be fun to go back and have another go at this scene but emphasizing the much darker atmosphere .

Oil on panel, 11” x 14”

A few weeks ago i posted a photo of a painting i called “ Crashing Wave”. Today i’m posting a companion to that painting, calling it “calmer sea”. This sea is not totally calm; there is quite a bit of wave movement, because i found that much more interesting to paint and to think about than a totally flat glassy calm surface like a lake with no breeze. One of the most interesting things to me about these two works is that the color palette was almost identical for each of them. The main difference in hue between the “crashing wave” and this one was the addition of white to mute the wild greens and blues from the first painting. Not surprising, really, that there is such color similarity, as both paintings derive from photos of the same areas of ocean — off the coast at the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Photos of both paintings below:

A couple of months ago i decided i would stop avoiding learning how to paint human figures in landscape. I had no experience at all in painting people and had previously run away from taking on the subject. However, this time i decided i’d give it a try. The errors far outran the trials, but although i’m certainly far from comfortable with it, i can see it’s a topic worth continuing to pursue. I should note that for this learning experience at least we were spared trying to do real portraiture. No faces were required, so it was ok to paint the figures from the side, or from behind. There are multiple reference photos for this painting — a couple for the human subject and a couple for the landscape. I attach one of each below. Originally i thought i might actually paint both figures shown in one of the reference photos, but that was not to be. Painting is 8” x 10”, oil on panel.

I did not add the backpack to the figure because i like the way the blue shirt complements the blue sky.