curry powder

A Day Reserved for Painting

Daily life responsibilities tend to sweep us along and we often never get around to doing things that nurture our creative selves. To remedy this tendency, my friend Claire and I set up our second date to paint together last week. She paints with watercolor, I with oils (these days). We commit to a 10 AM-4 PM span of time, which includes a potluck lunch. Here are a few photos documenting our seasonally-themed still life painting day in my greenhouse:

Early in the day, we both launch into preliminary work. My small painting is seen on the left as an underpainting done in burnt sienna. Claire works on watercolor studies on the right. Our still life glows in the distance.

Claire's first work: on top, the rosemary pot is studied on a single page. Below was Claire's first take of the left side of the still life. Although Claire wasn't happy with this painting, the colors are beautiful.

As a final painting, Claire isolated the rosemary pot and added a turtle!

Here you can see that my painting now has color added as I work from dark to light values. Claire is seen studying her rosemary pot as she paints it.

My finished painting. After Claire left the "studio" I added a pair of soiled fuchsia gardening gloves to the still life. It just looked like it needed something more. Eventually I'll sign the painting on the right, and then maybe it will be balanced. I hope.

 

Larger Event: Refreshed Herb Garden

It's been over 25 years since I first designed and constructed my "Early Garden." It was thus named because it was the first part of our property that receives the morning sun. Over the years, I've wearied of weeding and maintaining it all. Know what I mean, fellow gardeners? But this spring has brought a renewed interest in beautifying the Early Garden, so last week I began with the NW quadrant to create a designated herb garden. It's the closest to the kitchen, so it's really the "kitchen garden" as it were. Here are a few pix with captions:

 

My digging up of flora from the past begins. Bess is on hand to pluck worms as I unearth them.

Gone are the rampant lemon balm volunteers, the feverfews, the love-in-a-mists, the past-blooming iris leaves, the old straggly calendulas from the 1980's. Time to plant anew.

The first new residents: a rosemary plant, a sage plant and a thyme from friend Jennifer, some parsley babies from friend Tom, dug up from the old garden, two pericallises (violet flowers; garden gifts from Rick), and a couple of new pansies for more color. The sorrel plant from friend Patty was kept, as was the heritage rose from my mother-in-law.The vinyl chicken fencing is to keep you-know-who from excavating in the soft earth. There is plenty of room for other herbal newcomers, so I'll post more photos as I make progress on the planting.

 

Small Events: Spring

About 22 years ago I created a series of six tiny (3"x5" or so) artworks called Small Events. They were mixed media works on paper using graphite and watercolor. They illustrated minor incidents that struck me as poignant. Today I decided to feature two "small events" that have occurred in this first week of spring--but to save time I'm offering them in the form of photos, not artworks. Here they are:

#1~ Returning home from the grocery store, I reached into my bag to pull out my two bouquets of tightly budded daffodils. One bud had broken off and lay at the bottom of the bag. Sad, I reached for the compost container to toss in the bud, but then thought, "if I stick this in water, would it still open?" I did this, and you can see the result! The slim, tight bud had the DNA required to keep on blooming.

#2~ All three hens are laying! And, today, all three laid! It's rare that they all lay on the same day, especially since they are no longer spring chickens, so to speak. They are going on two years old. But they have sprightly ways and plenty of spunk. Thank you, girls.

 

Over Coffee #6: My Diagonal Life

When I was 20, I took a quarter off from my studies at the University of Washington to study the Mexican arts and crafts in San Miguel de Allende. While there, I invited a friend to come visit. Her reply? To chastise me for flaunting my privileged life of travel. This remark came as a shock, as I was born into not a family of wealth but into one where investing in travel was paramount. To this day, I am frugal in most areas of my life, choosing to reserve income for two things: supporting my family and traveling. However it may appear from the outside, to me, traveling is as essential to my being as food is to my body.

So it was particularly fabulous (I'm trying to think of a better word) when both a long-time friend and a cousin invited me to come visit them at their snowbird homes in Florida, a place I had never been to and a place that distinctly contrasts where I live in Washington state. A long, diagonal flight has taken me to the SW coast of Florida for the past three Februaries now, thanks to their repeat invitations. To explore a new place with people I love, but rarely get to spend time with, is a keenly treasured experience for me. Of course it doesn't hurt that in February, escaping the gray damp of Seattle is an opportunity I would be crazy to decline.

I would have to confess to my friend from long ago that I think I now know what it feels like to be privileged. My current friend and my cousin have literally and graciously given me these travel experiences. Yesterday, while driving alone on roads through quintessentially Pacific Northwest scenic byways, I pondered all of this, and felt filled with gratitude.

Last week, I was here on the Lighthouse Beach on Sanibel Island, Florida (click on photos for a full view).

Yesterday, I photographed this breathtaking view from a parking lot in Darrington, Washington. I was on my way to a site visit for a new map design job, and was struck by the contrast between where I dwelled last week, and where I live most of the year.

 

 

 

 

Over Coffee #5: A Brief Conversation

In most community art classes, one can expect a fairly broad age range among the attendees. Last Sunday, in my day-long oil painting workshop with Ursula Stocke at the excellent Schack Art Center in Everett, my classmates ranged in age from about 18 to 70. My table mate and I didn't chat much, as we were busy trying to make it over our respective painting hurdles. But during the lunch break, we had a brief conversation.

I learned that she was a recently retired medical doctor. In college, she wanted to study art. But she needed to think about being able to earn a living, so she decided to become a doctor. As she approached retirement age and the end of practicing medicine, she correctly anticipated the need to care for her father. She cut down her practice so she and her husband could spend an intensive 18 months caring for him until his recent death. During this period, she and her husband left town only one time. Now fully retired, after nearly 40 years of life dedicated to practicing medicine and caring for others, she is now turning to her first, original love: art.

As our classmates gradually returned to the classroom, my table mate said one last thing: "In caring for my father, I saw my own mortality." She said this not with a smile, but with a sober, knowing look into my eyes as she put her last bite of lunch into her mouth. I knew what she was saying: that this painting class was not just a painting class, but part of a renewed beginning for her. At long last, she has freely chosen to do artwork as a way of relating to and enjoying life.

Our mortality. In the flurry and speed of contemporary life, let us not lose sight of it. It's not too late to take that class, visit that city, pursue what your most elemental self has cried out for but has not yet been given, for whatever reason. This is not selfish. It is for the overall good, and it's important.

My still life study from Sunday's class.

 

Breaking New Ground: Drawing Group Loosens Up

When our little group met up for the first time in January, we talked about what we might focus on in 2013. Not that our "focus" is all that rigid. After all, there's the coffee-and-pastry period that precedes the drawing. First things first, right?

But back to drawing. The consensus was that we would work on loosening up, becoming more confident and faster at the same time. So yesterday, I led the group through some drawing exercises with that goal in mind. Here are the second and third sets of sketches we did:

 

A raku-fired pot in terra cotta and black offered challenges in achieving accurate perspective & form, too. We sketched in graphite and then applied colored pencil. The emphasis in adding color was to be painterly in the use. I.e., terra cotta clay is more than one color, really, so we layered color and tried not to stay in the box. My sketch is on the left.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As a last subject, I offered an aloe plant in an orange pot. With five minutes left in our session, we had no choice but to work quickly and confidently to get the basic shapes indicated on our paper. By this time we were warmed up after our first two subjects. We ended up going overtime, finishing our sketches with focus in 18 minutes. (Mine is on the right.) When students ask me how to achieve a spontaneous look to their sketches, I usually tell them that it has to do with speed & lack of time to overthink it. With the aloe plants, I talked us through a sequence of drawing moves. The result: some nicely impressionistic aloe vera plants!

Over Coffee #4: Oil Painting "The Pink House"

Between daily life tasks, time with family, freelance work and my occasional teaching, I don't seem to find a lot of time to simply do artwork that has no "purpose." There are some subjects that often inspire me to paint in oils, to lay down color and create atmosphere with rich paint for the pleasure and challenge of it. Landscapes, primarily, inspire these feelings. Not that I've done any! But I have wanted to try my hand at them. So since my last Over Coffee, I did just that. In this case, I used a photo I took 7 months ago at Ocean Shores, WA as my subject matter. When I took the photo, it was with a future oil painting in mind.

Below are four photos showing stages of the painting. Once I did a quick tonal study in burnt sienna, I started blocking in the dark colors of paint over the tonal underpainting, followed by the application of some lighter colors:

Above, I had applied a light coat of titanium white over the sky. Below, the painting is further developed by my working on the buildings other than the large pink house. I applied an overall coat of gray over the sky.
The blue-gray was too blue for the classic, overcast-gray sky, so below you can see the change: another coat of paint over the sky! Problem: paint layers were, ahem, starting to get clumpy. Even with oils, there's a limit to over-painting areas, I am learning.
In the above photo, the dense beach grass is in the foreground (photos were taken without flash, in low-light conditions), and I continued to work on all the buildings.

This is the finished painting. It was only when I took the painting into the brighter greenhouse that I saw how 'textured' the sky had become! Ah well. I enjoyed delving into my paintbox again, and as this is the first landscape-with-buildings I've ever painted in oil, I feel that I learned plenty. My favorite part of the painting? The house to the far right!

Below: the photo I worked from.

 

Over Coffee #3: Feeding the Animals on a Frosty Morning

 

Espresso in Québec City

 

The thermometer read 25 degrees when I came downstairs this morning. My first thought was for my chickens, whose water would no doubt be frozen. In quick succession, I thought of the neighbors' cat (I'm feeding her this weekend), and then the hummingbirds. The feeder attached to my studio window would surely have frozen syrup this day, in spite of the sugar content.

I made oatmeal for the chickens, grabbed the neighbors' key so I could go feed their cat (indoor/outdoor kitty), and prepared a watering can of warm water to pour over the hummingbird feeder. As I attended to the needs of the critters, I felt like a suburban farmer. For the fun of it, I picked up my camera so I could document my farm chores and record them for this issue of Over Coffee:

 

Bess and Vita judiciously pluck the sunflower seeds and raisins out of their plate of warm oatmeal. Cinnamon, at the bottom of the pecking order, kept her distance but did manage to get some, too.

Here, pure white Georgia has scooted through the cat door at hearing me enter her house. She is waiting for me to leave so she can have her morning meal I left for her in the kitchen.

And then, when I returned to my studio to do some computer tasks, I turned to glance at the hummingbird feeder and this is what I saw:

 

Hummingbirds visit this feeder during January and early February, only. I don't know why they do not come earlier, nor later. Perhaps my feeder thaws in the January sun, and the birds know this. For me, their visits are very dear. Often, I am sitting but a foot away from them, here on the other side of the window, and they seem unaware of my presence. This was taken from across the room, with a telephoto lens. Last night, at dusk, was the first time I saw a hummingbird approach the feeder since I put it up 10 days ago. The news is apparently out!

 

 

Over Coffee #2: Field Trip

 

Coffee at the Lighthouse Beach on Sanibel Island, Florida

How often do our field trips actually take us into a field? As I was thinking of what to title this Over Coffee, the simple congruency of this term - and what today's topic is - quietly clicked in my mind.

Yesterday I attended a two-hour class on the renowned raptors of Skagit Valley at the Padilla Bay Estuarine Research Reserve followed by a field trip to see the magnificent raptors themselves. I had everything to learn about these birds of prey, so instructor Bud Anderson's 30 years of teaching this class (!) certainly sufficed. After a brief introduction to the topic, Bud startled us by lifting up from behind the podium a restrained, juvenile Red-Tailed Hawk. He had trapped her on his way to class, fitted her with a leather hood and an "abba," a straight-jacket of sorts used to secure a bird's wings to still it for leg banding or scientific observation. It was a rare opportunity, to view a wild bird of prey up close. Bud and his assistants banded her, weighed her, recorded the data, and then the class went outside with him to release the bird. Later, while in the field, we may have seen her soaring and hunting.

The rapid flow of information given in class didn't allow me to sketch much, but I did capture a little image of the classic leather hood used to calm falcons and hawks while they are being held. The little gladiator-type topknot caught my fancy.

 

The Skagit fields in winter have a beauty all their own. Their colors set off by the typically gray skies, the reds, golds and greens inspire me to paint. You cannot see it in this photo, but the one Short-Eared Owl we saw is perched on a short pole in the distance.

Many of us here in our spectacular NW corner of the U.S. know the Skagit Valley for the annual Tulip Festival. Fewer of us brave the harsh elements of January and February to go there to view the raptors. The discomfort is worth it. With each stop our group made, along the side of the roads at the edge of the farm fields, we were treated to viewing, with our bare eyes, our binoculars, and scopes, the perching and actively hunting raptors. We saw numerous American Bald Eagles, both juvenile and adult, many Red-Tailed Hawks, Rough-Legged Hawks, one Peregrine Falcon (a thrill), a Short-eared Owl, Northern Harriers, and an uncommon dark morph Harlan Hawk. An increasing wind grew colder and more fierce; Bud told us that soon the birds of prey themselves would stop hunting and seek shelter, so we went our separate ways at about 1 PM, our raptor immersion experience complete.

 

At our last stop, at the "West 90" turn, where there is a well-used parking area for hunters and birdwatchers, I photographed a juvenile Bald Eagle.

I drove home alone after this memorable morning spent with an expert and other students keen to learn about this part of our natural world. What wonders are ours for the seeing, and for the learning. At a rest stop along I-5, I called Rick to see if he had left the espresso machine set up, as I would be home earlier than planned due to the chilling winds. Yes, he said. I warmed up over my latté shortly thereafter, feeling the glow of fresh knowledge and fresh air.

 

 

Over Coffee #1

 

Cappuccino, Venice, Italy

Dear Reader,

I have coffee at two times most days. The first cup is sipped shortly after I get up. The second is usually in the form of a beautiful latté brewed later in the day by my own personal barista: my husband Rick. Over Coffee, thoughts written while drinking either the first or second cup, will be a weekly feature here on Curry Powder. A drawing of a coffee cup taken from one of my travel journals will accompany each post.

I've never been one to make New Year's resolutions. The concept doesn't have a lot of pull for me. That's why I find it curious that now that I face the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013, I am feeling philosophical about self-betterment.

First, let me say what inspired me to begin this new series, Over Coffee. Last week, Rick told me that two people in his circle regularly looked at my sites and wrote to him that they were disappointed that I have slowed down my posts to about one per month. This struck me. This moved me to want to post more often. I don't specifically know what these people would like to see or read. Art? My musings? Travelogues? Chicken stories? I won't ask them, but I will oblige their interest in my posts by posting more often, and gratefully so. To have my online contributions valued, and anticipated, is a gift and a reward.

Let me step back yet another week. While working on a project here in my studio, a news review of 2012 was being broadcast on TV. When the portion of the review started playing that featured the notable people who have died in 2012, I stopped working and watched. A stream of performers, artists, news people, politicians and athletes flowed by in a moving memorial. I was struck. I was moved by the evidence of each one's dedication to their life's work. They excelled, they contributed, they entertained; they enriched and bettered the lives of us who co-lived on the planet with them. It takes a lot of work to excel at anything. To make life better for others is a worthy goal for anyone in any vocation. 

As I approach January 1, 2013, I feel inspired. Not to keep resolutions, but to be mindful of excellence in what I do. In everything I do. It was inspiring to me that my posts meant something to two people who are not directly in my circle of friends and family. This means that my posts may mean something to others, too. Unbeknownst to me, they might better someone's life. I will proceed on this presumption. In my rôles as mother, wife, and grandmother, I want to do the very lovingly best I can. As a teacher, I will bring to the job all that I can to meet the needs of each student. As an artist, I will work hard, and I will be innovative. Once, I read that one of the supreme obligations an artist holds is to generously put forth their artwork, almost as though it really did not belong to her or him. I was struck by this, and have never forgotten it.

Thank you for reading this column, my first Over Coffee. I personally wish you a fulfilling and healthy and excellent New Year in all that you give yourself to in 2013.