Grateful for Beauty -- Wherever I Find It

Gift Bag in Oil, 10 x 8", Oil on Canvas, by Tracy Feldman

       Beauty sometimes comes in unexpected placed.  For instance, we had friends over for Valentines Day, and friends brought us some kit to use for dipping bread in olive oil.  It came in a beautiful bag. And while it probably was not intended to be a work of art, it was so lovely that I knew I'd wanted to paint it as soon as I saw it.  

       As you can see from this post, I did just that TWICE: first in watercolors and then in oils.  I  like the feel of the oil painting better than the sketch, but I've included it so you can compare them.

Gift Bag in W/C, Watercolor on Paper

      Notice that I changed the setting and the cloth on which I placed that bag, and I think I think those choices also make it more interesting than the sketch.  I ever paint it again, I'll center it a little more. But even so, I had a great time painting it and like how it turned out.  I hope you do too.

      As is usual with the small oils I paint (this one is 10 X 8"), it available for auction in my gallery on dailypaintworks.com.  Check it out if it interests you.

Being Inspired by Summer's Bounty

July Onions, 8 x 10", Acrylic on Canvas by Tracy Feldman

One of the things I love about living in our area is the number of local farms that include a "truck farm" section.  In that section, the farmers grow a larger variety of crops that they grow specially to sell on a retail basis to individuals.  Sometimes they truck the bounty of these gardens into town to sell at larger farmers markets, and sometimes they sell them right at the edge of their farm, so individuals need to come to them.

     Lancaster County has the richest farmland in the US, and the nature of our farms is greatly influenced by the "plain people" who farm around here.  The ones who depend on horses to plow their fields have to keep their farms small (for example farms here average 78 acres vs 241 acres in Indiana and 433 acres in Oregon).  Another difference is the commitment to diversity of what is produced, even in the farms' cash crops. On one farm, you might see a cornfield next to a soybean, and/or grain, hay,  melon, pumpkin, or potato field.  It is also typical for farmers to include among their cash crops tobacco, orchards, and fields left in grass so that their dairy cows can graze.  And we don't have the only rich farmlands in this part of the country.  Maryland and southern New Jersey are also famous for their truck farms.

    In summer, therefore,  I'm able to stop by many different farm stands to see what is good -- knowing that what I get will have been picked that day.  These lovely onions are from such a road-side farm stand in Maryland, just over the border from Pennsylvania.  I bought them specifically to paint -- my Arny is NOT a big onion fan, but we will eat them in some form.  I loved their vibrant colors and shape.  I even loved the fact that the dried roots were left on the onions.  It reminds me of their (and all of our) dependence on the earth for sustenance.  I felt a little "bad" buying these lovelies in Maryland, instead of my county. I didn't feel "bad" because our farmers are doing badly -- they are actually thriving.  But, because we in PA are prohibited from bringing certain types of consumables into our state.  It's actually alcoholic beverages because liquor here can generally only be sold in state stores,  Many ignore that rule, going over the state line and avoiding paying PA taxes by buying booze in stores as close to the border as the farm stand I went to.  Vegetables never were protected in that way in PA, but it still felt a little like I was being bad when I got my veg.  It kind of gives you a good picture of how rule-following I tend to be :).

     When I got my non-contraband onions home, I realized that I wanted the painting I created to have a somewhat modern vibe, so I placed them on vivid warm and cool placemats and took a lot of photos to determine the best composition and lighting for the piece.  I love how the colors of the shadow marry the elements of the piece (the onions and the placemats).  Hope you enjoy.  I'd love to know what you think.

    As usual, I'm putting this little piece up for auction in my Daily Paintworks gallery.  Check it out here, after July 27th if you might be interested in it.

Working from Life

Vegetables in Sun - wide,
Oil pastel on canvas board, 17.7 x 9.7"

The three paintings in this blog were all done from life.  In the past,  I've not generally worked that way.  I usually work from photos.  I've often felt a little guilty (a little less than) for doing this.  Why?  Because most people I've talked to -- artists and non-artists alike -- assume that paintings made from life are better, more-dynamic, than those that use photos as a resource.

Vegetables in Sun - tall,
Oil Pastel on canvas board, 12.3 x 16.5"

When I look back on my early works, I have to admit that some of  my paintings had a stiffness about them.  This was because, like a lot of beginning painters, I assumed that my paintings got better the more slavishly they duplicated their photo resource. While I've let go of that mistaken approach, I still often rely a lot on photo references because freezing an image at a moment in time preserves the way the light and shadow influence the shape, color, and depth of field. Working outside in the sun complicates that because natural sunlight changes all the time.  However, over the years, I've loosened up the way I use photos.  Now,  I am happy to edit the images and composition (in my own head and the final painting) to create the visual story that I want to tell.  In fact, it isn't uncommon for me to go so far as using elements from several photos in a single work.

      Vegetables in the Sun -  wide, and Vegetables in the Sun -  tall, are two works I created on a single piece of canvas board, and  that I later cut up to create the final pieces.  I worked in oil pastels and set up each still life on my porch using some of my favorite late-summer vegetables from Lancaster County farms.  I played with dramatically changing the point of view and the composition to add an unexpected element  to the works.  I have to admit that rushing to capture the light does add a dynamism to the way I laid down the image.  I love that -- particularly the more-realized Vegetables in the sun - wide.

Which Came First ....?,
watercolor and acrylic on canvas, 8 x 10"

    The final work I have here is a more-standard still life, set up under studio lights.  It's a topic I normally wouldn't do, but I was working to complete a Daily Paintworks Challenge  about painting a broken egg.  I have decided that one way to get back into painting is to do more of these challenges.  I chose the broken egg challenge because I knew it would really test me -- since I had no idea how I was going to do it.  It took me a couple of days to come up with the idea of breaking an egg on an image of a chicken so I could call the work Which Came First ...?  This work was my second attempt to complete the challenge because painting egg shells is ... challenging.  If you look at the original watercolor of the chicken, you'll notice I simplified and darkened the tail a lot so as not to compete with the main subject of the painting -- the broken egg.

       You can go to my gallery on Daily Paintworks.com to participate in the Auctions for the two larger works (bidding starts at $35 because they are larger, and will be priced higher after the auction), or you can pay $15 for the challenge painting.

    Enjoy!

   

Daily Painting -- Hammers of the World, Unite!

Hammers of the World, Unite! 
Still Life, Watercolor on Canvas
12 x 12"

 I did this daily painting to enter into one Dailypaintworks.com painting challenges.   The challenge was called, "You Know the Drill". The tried was to create a still-life using things that you found in your shop. I loved that idea because in my family I am the handy one.  I shop in home improvement stores like some women shop for shoes, so I had lots of "subjects" from which to choose.   When I spotted these hammers, the image of them in an arch in the strong light on our wooden floors popped into my head because I knew how much deep shadows would add to the image.  I quickly realized that my normal 10 x 8" format would not do it for this topics, so I chose a square, 12 x 12" format.

When I did the sketch for the piece, and noticed how the cup hook looked like a sickle, the title for the piece also popped into my head: Hammers of the World, Unite!  It appeals to my "reality with a twist" sensibilities.

A number of artists wrote me with questions about the process of doing watercolor on canvas, and their questions prompted me to experiment with the way I approached this piece.  For instance, a couple of people asked how I prepared the canvas to work; others asked about how I handled glazing (painting in layers) since paint lifts so much more easily from the gessoed surface of canvas than it does from the more-absorbent watercolor paper.

My first experiment involved playing with how I prepared the painting surface.  I normally don't do anything, but this time I used a Kirkland wet wipe on part of the surface to see how that later affected how well the watercolor stayed on the surface.  I noticed that while the wipe was great for lifting the watercolor sketch lines, where I used it sometimes did seem cause my watercolors to have a harder time grabbing the surface than normal.  Thus, in the future, I won't be routinely wiping down the surface with a wet wipe before starting to paint.

Another experiment I did when working on this piece dealt with glazing (creating layers) on the painted surface.  For that, I went to one of my the watercolor instruction books, Building Brilliant Watercolors by Judy Treman.  Judy creates beautiful, dramatic watercolors in a somewhat unusual way: she created an underpainting in purples before adding local color to her pieces. While doing a value underpainting is a classic technique in oils, it is not standard in watercolors where people need to worry about their colors getting muddied if their under-colors lift when glazes of other colors are placed on top of them.  Treman's works, however, don't have the problem because purple tends to be so staining. Thus, the layers of purple underpainting tend to stay put as she glazes the final colors over her underpainting.  Treman's "trick" for doing this involves not only the use of staining purples, but assuring the underpainting is dry throughly before she begins her final glazes.  The neat thing about the color is that after the final colors are glazed over her purple under paintings, the purple "disappears" -- but the values established by the purples remain.

When I finished my research, and got down to painting, I started out by doing what she suggested.  I created pools of purples of varying intensities and temperatures each in their own bowl, then I used them to create an underpainting for this piece.  However, I adjusted how I applied the underpainting colors because I realized that I the color's normal staining properties wouldn't make them stick more to a gessoed surface.  Thus, I tried out something I suggested to one of the people who had written me in response to a piece I wrote for  Empty Easel.  This woman wanted to know how to create glazes/layers in a watercolor on canvas.  I suggested to her that dipping one's brush in a little matte acrylic glaze (along with the water and the paint) might both help the under-layers of color be less vulnerable to lifting when other colors were worked on top of them without also interfering with ability of the later glazes of watercolor to adhere to the canvas.  I told her I'd experiment to see what I discovered.  This piece is the result.  I used my various purples (with matte acrylic graze) to create an underpainting.  I then grazed, and lifted, and glazed again and again over the underpainting until I got the image I wanted.  The intensity of the underpainting was maintained, so I'd say this experiment was a success.

 I'm entering the piece in the Challenge today, and it will be available in my Dailypaintworks Gallery for auction.  I'm going to make the starting bid $35 (instead of my normal $25 or $15) because it's a larger piece. I'd love to hear your comments, questions, suggestions.

Daily Painting: The Dark Side of Sweets

Dark Side of Sweets, watercolor on canvas,
10 x 8"  

This piece was done in response to a painting challenge on the Dailypaintworks.com website.  The challenge was to do a picture of something yummy that you might want to eat before you finished the work.  I loved the idea of that, but as a compulsive over-eater, sweets are something I've given up eating because I know they could trigger a bout of over eating sweets, and savories, or whatever was around.  People in my program warn against eating such things by reminding ourselves that for us, "One bite is too many, and 1000 is too few.  Thus, when I think of candy, etc., this dark side of enjoying them helps me not choose (no matter how yummy the sweet looks) to avoid that first dangerous bite.

That idea gave me the concept for the piece: presenting candy mostly cast in shadow, so their "dark side" was featured.

I'm also including this piece in this week's auction on in my Gallery on the  Website.  Check out my Gallery, and bid on it if you want to.   I'd love to hear your feedback on this piece.

"Daily Painting" 5 -- Lovey Dovey

Lovey Dovey
Watercolor on Canvas
10 x 8"

As you can probably tell, I painted this little still-life from life on the run-up to Valentine's Day.  It contains the bag I used to give my husband his little Valentine's gift.  A heart shaped container that housed a previous year's gift and a wonderful, ceramic craftsman-style trivet given to us by friends one Christmas (I think because the think of us as love birds.) I placed them all on a tablecloth we have in our kitchen because the old-fashioned lightness of the design was consistent with this old-fashioned homage to V day.
Hope you enjoy.

Even though it's not Valentines anymore, I'm including it in the auction this week on my Gallery on the Daily PaintWorks Website.  Check out the Gallery, and bid on it if you want to.   I'd love to hear your feedback, and if you want, I can do a tutorial on using these watercolor crayons to create paintings.