A promise of calligraphic sea life paintings to come!

I was so happy to see Ronell's recent scampi sketches----they reminded me of how much I love painting and drawing sea creatures and I couldn't wait to get to the fish market to find some models myself! I learned last Saturday that it is not the season for shrimp and blue crabs now. I'll just have to wait until spring, but spring will come.
In the meantime, to remind myself and you of what fun it is to paint these creatures, here are some paintings and sketches from the past two or three years. These are MY visions of sugarplums!

Watery Norway scenes

Surfacing here on the very last day of the year to wish all Watermarkers and our readers a very Happy 2011! I have had fewer watery pieces to show this year, but here are some from my recent mid-December trip to Norway. They will already be familiar to most of you, I think.
I am purposely not overplanning my art life for 2011, but one thing I know---water will figure in it, somehow, somewhere, and I will be here sharing it! I am so grateful to be a continuing part of this talented group.

Watery sketches from Turkey

I had the great privilege and pleasure of visiting Turkey in April, as a guest of wonderful British/Iranian friends. Though it was a short 6-day trip, I sketched as much as I could. I was enchanted by the places and people I encountered. One glorious day was spent sailing along the Aegean coast. The water in early afternoon was purely turquoise in shallow spots.

Koi studies, part two!

I am so glad I decided to make a series of 30 small studies (emphasis on STUDIES) of koi in water ---you cannot imagine how much fun I'm having!! I have painted in acrylics on a large-ish scale so intermittently over the last few years, that I had really forgotten a LOT about technique. The same thing happens when I don't cook ambitiously for a while. I forget nuances of flavoring and method. Which is odd since I've been a pretty avid cook all my adult life, but there we are.
I have already moved on a bit, technically, from this batch of four, so I thought I'd better share with you THESE in a batch, so whatever progress and direction my process reveals will be clearer to you and to me.
At this point, I promise you that I have NO idea where all this is leading! That it will lead somewhere interesting, I have no doubt---fish by fish, swirl by swirl.
I have to stop myself from fiddling endlessly with these, stop myself from wanting to get everything "right"----they are teaching me so much as they are. Now, on to the next group of four!

Koi in progress

You don't know how hard it is for me to show unfinished work! As I've said before, it goes against my very private artist's nature and my training, too, BUT this blog is about all the aspects of the making of art about water and the processes involved, so here we are.

What I love about koi as subject matter is that, in painting them, I can give free play to my love for calligraphic shapes, my attempts to render movement and energy, and my passion for the physical qualities of paint and painting surface.

Painting koi in water is a revelatory experience. It is a meditative experience. It is challenging, and it is, above all, and shockingly, fun! Since I am not a natural painter in the way I am a natural draftsman, I don't often feel that painting IS fun. But when it is going well, there's nothing so gratifying to me.

In the first two paintings above, you'll see my struggles with opacity and transparency in rendering water using acrylic paints. This struggle will be ongoing over the next months as I continue this series. But I welcome the struggle. I'm learning from it. This is what I mean about the revelatory nature of this project.
I've begun a series of small studies (about 5" x 7") to give me quick ways to explore various palettes, various acrylic mediums to add for texture and flow and transparency, various compositions, and to help me define the shape, form, movement inherent in MY approach to this subject. I'll make 30 of these, one daily when I can, in addition to continuing to work on my large pieces. I have 6 or 7 larger pieces going right now!. Here are the first three studies. They are VERY loose, very coarse. They're exactly what I need!


These issues of transparency, opacity, texture, and wateriness have been with me for a long while. Here is (a very bad photo of) one of a series of paintings I made around a lotus theme in 2005. It may be that I'll move back to a more abstracted style such as this. It may not. I trust the koi to show me the way.

Northern lights for the new year!

I have our Jeanette of Illustrated Life to thank for the most, albeit coldest, fun I've had all year, all five days of it! Remember my Norwegian coastal voyage was in December, so that doesn't count! Jeanette's method of painting with ice crystals seemed so much fun, I had to try it. The weather here has been frigid, so the timing was right. I experimented with a few colors and then hit upon indigo and phthalo green, the frozen effects of which reminded me of... northern lights! Dancing around outside at 6am, in my pajamas, on two subsequent 17F mornings, I swashed water on paper and flung paints! And shivered, but hardly noticed, in my delight! Some results were better than others, but I think all of the following look northern lightish---don't you?
This one is more purely wet on wet. The ice formed very little for some reason:

The greens were too dark here, but I loved the crystalline swirls:




I'm not sure why this one granulated instead of freezing, but that's one of the fun things about this method---it is highly unpredictable!

Thank you so much, Jeanette, for sharing this method! It's the quintessential 'creating art out of water' technique!

Cold and watery Norway!

On a ship traveling northward along the Norwegian coast, earlier this month, I made sketches of some of the wondrous things and some of the ordinary things I saw. Here are a few of these sketches. On this cold and wintry note, I wish you all happy holidays and a brisk, stimulating year of wonders ahead!

More from Brittany

The subtitle to this post should be The End, because I've come to the last of my Breton sketches. To see them all, check my blog. For now, you will have to scroll through recent posts, but I'm in the process of making a separate Brittany sketchbook there, as well.

Oh, how I miss that time and place already.

I have one more, VERY exciting watery trip upcoming next month! See you here, with sketches, in midDecember!

Brittany sketches

I spent more than three glorious weeks in Brittany and became completely enamored of its tranquil beauty and its intimate scale. It is less dramatic than I'd imagined, less rugged than coastal Scotland and Ireland, less vertiginous than some of the places in Cornwall I remember, more temperate (there are palm trees and camellias and fig trees in the Golfe du Morbihan!), more feminine somehow, more French than I'd expected. May I please have another lifetime? I'd live in Quimper or on the Morbihan coast, I'd rear my children, I'd dine on the freshest oysters imaginable, and I'd paint every spare moment I could steal or borrow.
I'd originally planned to take acrylic paints and gessoboards to make rock and water studies on location. Due to my mother's precarious health, I had to travel as lightly as possible, knowing I might have to return home at any moment. Thus, these sketches, from which later paintings will ensue:
I have more of these sketches and will post them here soon. I am in the process of sharing all my sketches from Brittany on my blog Laurelines, so please drop by and have a look!

Some glimpses at works in (slow) progress

I've never posted images of unfinished paintings and I have some qualms about doing it. I have my own concept of the 'skin' of a painting---and until I have achieved that skin, a cohesive visual and tactile surface, I don't show my work. 

Still, the paintings I'm working on now are telling ME what they want and they are taking their sweet time doing so!

 I keep regular studio hours every day. I'd anticipated being finished with these long ago. But this process has been fascinating--- and that is why I'm letting myself give you a midcourse report.

 Besides, I'm going to Santa Barbara, California tomorrow for a five-day business trip, so there'll be a pause in painting. And maybe that'll be a good thing, though it means more delay in finishing.

I've relearned two contradictory lessons:

Lesson one: Don't pick a painting subject that presents tasks you're not interested in! Here, it's the inclusion of strict geometry in objects. It's one thing to pick a subject for sketching that isn't intrinsically interesting to you--a sketch is not a big time commitment. In this case, I fell in love with the cloud reflections in a swimming pool in Texas, and the way a pair of butterfly chairs there, also reflected in the water, seemed to float in space.  I decided to paint the scene, without analyzing the pictoral problems inherent in it. I need to always keep in mind what it is that engages me as a painter--- illusionistic representation of objects and space is not it. Oops.

Lesson two: Be receptive to new experience and accept that the honing of paintings skills of all kinds is useful---and fun. So, I'm enjoying this self-imposed task---when I'm not throwing things at it;D. Here are the two things I'm working on, seen in the context of my studio.

I've enjoyed the Iceland rock and water paintings the most of all the water paintings I've done so far. To try to convey the energy and shapes of rushing water is thrilling, allowing for a level of abstraction that I find very challenging to define and produce.  The one on the left is the one I'm now working on. The one on the right is my favorite of this series so far, because it combines abstraction with energy and it has a good skin! The one on the left is less abstract. Not sure where it'll end up, but we'll find out!

Here's a detail of the pool painting. I am so eager to start my colorful, nongeometric, calligraphic koi paintings, but I want to finish these first. They're worth completing.