I Didn't Do It, I Swear.

I Didn't Do It, I Swear, 16 x 20

Still life class was today, most of which we spent working with a full pallet on a streatched canvas. Laurel brought in at least five different types of eggplant, which she got from our last plein air venue. Several looked more like squash to me than eggplant, but I trust our teacher knows whereof she speaks. These were about the most egg-planty looking ones on hand.

Gracy's Place

Gracy's Place, 20 x 24
NFS

I painted this today from one of many photos I took while in southwestern Colorado a few weeks ago. I haven't painted this large in awhile, so I was happy to be able to complete it in one session, albeit one that lasted several hours. As you might guess, that's Gracy in the foreground. My dog, Major, is in on up the road, waiting on his friend.

Thanks for coming

No images to post today, but thank you to everyone who made the trek to Round Rock this afternoon for Trish Siegel's and my opening at The Daily Grind. It was the first exclusive opening for each of us and it meant a lot to see so many friendly faces. It was a lot of fun and both of us made sales, which made it even sweeter. Now it will be nice to focus on just the painting part for awhile.

Value Studies, Part II

Our latest class assignment was to do more value studies, using one color and its range of values for each study. The top left was a set-up from class, while the other three were done from home this afternoon.

Left Behind

Left Behind, 6 x 8
$100
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The threat of rain kept the turnout low for this morning's scheduled paintout at Johnson's Backyard Garden, a small organic farm on the southeast edge of Austin. Three artists showed up, though just two of us stayed to paint. This was understandable, since there was a stong chance of rain. With almost no one else around and just a light, intermittent sprinkle, it turned out to be a wonderfully peaceful and enjoyable morning. I painted from my car for the first time ever, with the window down, and though it was a little cramped, I'm glad I stayed. I know I would have been grumpy if I had driven all the way out there and not gotten to paint. This little shack sits on land next to the farm, at the end of an old one-lane road. The quiet, along with the threatening sky seemed to add to the mystery of this old relic of a life long past.

Local Color, Value and Light

It's been a busy few weeks with work, travel and the start of a new art class, and thus my postings have been rare. Okay, they've been nonexistent. But that changes with tonight's post, which shows work from my first assignment in Laurel's "Color and Value in Still Life" class at Laguna Gloria.


After warming up by painting a simple value scale from white to black, the first phase of the main assignment was to paint only the local values in any one of several still-life setups Laurel had arranged around the studio. That is, render the inherent lightness or darkness of the objects in one of the still lifes without showing any of the cast light or shadows that we normally use to distinguish shape and texture.

Next, we were asked — ever so sweetly by our wonderful teacher, Ms. Daniel — to now do another study, showing how light and shadow affect the local values of the objects.

Finally, we were to try one more version, this time including the local color of the objects in the lighted scene.

In case you were wondering, the spherical object you see is what used to be called a smudge pot, for some indecipherable reason. They were used back in the day, more or less as heavy-duty lanterns by road crews to light detours or road construction boundaries. And yes, I'm old enough to remember them. But that was in deep East Texas, where I wouldn't be surprised to still find them in use today. So I'm not necessarily that old. Just for the record.

Lakeside Breeze

Lakeside Breeze, 12 x 9

My apologies for another tardy post, but I have another excuse to go with it. I've spent considerable time of late getting ready for an exhibit of Patricia Siegel's and my work, which we hung today at The Daily Grind coffee house in Round Rock. It's the first featured exhibit for either of us, so it's nice to have taken that step. As far as the picture above, it depicts a view from our paint out site last Wednesday, at Cindy Ridge's lake house on Lake Austin. As you can no doubt can tell, I had a lot of trouble with the mountain in the background. I tried to solve its issues back home afterward, the effort of which was further hampered by the fact that I took no reference photos to work from. There were some other elements I felt were working in the piece, however, and since it has been well over a week since my last post, I decided to go ahead and put it up for all to see. Please be gentle.