Author: Kelly

Completed painting.

June 20, 2019

I believe that the painting can be considered complete at this point.

I was able to work on leaves on the trees both Monday night and Wednesday night for a little while.  When I sat down this morning I saw there were a few, last little touch up bits here and there that I could do before I went to work.

Tonight I got a chance to shoot it. I know that I can continue to find little things to work on but I’m trying to teach myself to just stop.

This was an interesting painting to do because working this large is new territory for me. Oh, I know, I have done murals but that’s a whole different venue. So, that being said, it was kind of fun. I have gotten used to reaching for small canvases that I know people can find room for in their homes, but working large is so fun! Who knows, maybe I just need to paint for myself and stop worrying about whether they can be integrated into someone’s home.

Part of the motivation for this picture was my love of the Hudson river school, and the luminists who tended to paint large canvases of bold places in nature where mankind is a very, very small element. I feel humbled when I’m out in the woods or when we travel and I see vistas of mountains and quick rivers and cool woods.

I hope you enjoyed following the process with this one. I have sure enjoyed painting it. Don’t hesitate to tell me what you think…it’s how I grow.

Day 3 – evening

June 17, 2019

I’m back at the easel tonight. After supper I spent a couple of hours dithering with the forest. The overall painting is beginning to pull together but has a ways to go. I don’t want to lose the loose, painterly feel but the devil is in the details, as they say. 

Day 2 – later in the afternoon

June 16, 2019

It’s been a real blessing today that I could just sit and paint all morning and into the afternoon.

For this particular painting it’s one of those situations where when you’re ready, and the time is right, and the image is right, … it just starts to fall into place. When it works it makes it all go faster. I have been having so much fun working on this that I almost forgot to take another picture and bring you with me.

This has been more of the foreground detail playing with the water, as you can tell. There will no doubt be a little more dithering with those areas but I’m going to set that aside for now. With the background atmosphere layed in, the next step is the silhouetted mid ground trees’ detail. 

I  am getting tired for today so that may happen another day. Hope you’re enjoying the watch.

Progress – day 2

June 16, 2019

Just adding an update to show you what’s been happening to the painting this morning.

As you can see, I am beginning to define the structure of the landscape so there’s clearer definitions between sky and land and water. This is also the time I have to think about atmosphere. I want my base colors to be deeper in tone and able to recede. Highlights come on top of those later.

Secondly it’s important to think about scale. That gets easier as I add the smaller detail but at this point I have to get the allusion of perspective, disappearing into a horizon. Still pretty fuzzy, but I’m sure you can see the definitions now.

Hope you are enjoying the process.

New work!

June 15, 2019

It has been a while since I have brought you along through the process of a painting so I thought I would take photos periodically on the one I just started tonight.

There was a sale at Michaels so I bought a new canvas. It’s a big one for me. I have a pretty good idea of what I want to paint so tonight was laying out the blocks of color and envisioning the picture on the surface in place. Feel free to stop back and watch the progress over the next days or weeks to come …depending on how much time I get to paint.

Spring has evolved into summer…

June 12, 2019

…and I have so much to tell and show you.

I know I am notorious for not posting here more often. I apologize for that. Sometimes it’s as simple as, “I get busy doing. and not writing about doing.” That may not have anything to do with my art abilities, but certainly reaffirms that I am no good at self marketing.

I have been painting in the studio, painting on trunks and boxes, painting en plein-aire, and illustrating a children’s book (although I cannot show you those illustrations until both the patron and at the publisher have moved forward with the printing). I have a summer scheduled wall-to-wall full of history, art, and travel. I just got back from a long road trip through the western USA seeing amazing scenes and painting a few. It was fabulous and I have photos to keep working in the studio.

Oh yes, I am still working full time as an academic librarian but summer is when the students are minimal on campus and it’s the perfect time for staff vacations. Keep your eyes peeled and I will try and post events that are coming up on the calendar. One heads up is -the tall ships are coming to Kenosha, Wisconsin the 1st full weekend in August and I plan to have an entire art show in my historical marquis. I’ll tell you more about that event later but save the date if you’re interested. 

Time flies!

March 16, 2019

Oh my, I cannot believe how time has gotten away from me. 

It seems like only last week instead of last month, that I was at Oshkosh, Wisconsin for the Echoes of the Past trade fair. That was a fun weekend -although the weather was certainly against us. We had snow and sleet and awful wind that made it hard to get to the building each day, but it was fun nonetheless, once we were inside. I enjoyed seeing old friends and meeting new friends. I am happy to have been able to go and share my paintings.

The first painting that I’m showing here is actually the painting that I worked on while on site – something I try and do whenever I am invited to bring my artwork to an event. People seem to enjoy watching my process and hearing what I am thinking about while I paint. And I must admit, I really enjoy interacting with the public, too. 

One new friend I met at Oshkosh was a young lady (hello “A”) who had some wonderful pointers about how various parts of the landscape should be done. She was quite familiar with Bob Ross and his painting style and so we talked about how I should paint the trees especially. I added the birch and pine trees on the right side in honor of our conversations. Thanks, “A”. 

The Second painting you see here is one that I started in the fall and kind of dithered with but hadn’t finished. I’ve been doing a lot of wishing for a cabin for my husband and I to retire to someday that I wanted to paint what we thought that cabin might look like.

Originally, the painting depicted a fall scene with fall leaves all over the trees and ground. It was almost garish with the color and I found I didn’t like it at all. In January I  picked it up again and painted out all the colored leaves, added snow, and put it aside again because I was so irritated with it. One final time I went back to the painting and decided to complete it.  I wouldn’t call it a great painting but it was important to finish it and think about all that I learned in the process. Equally important was the need to share challenges, struggles, and degrees of success or failure. 

You see, pride makes an easy trap for me to avoid posting pictures of paintings that I’m not so fond of. Art is so very subjective and that remains true even for the artist for their own work. When I talked to some of the people at the trade fair in February I realized that only showing my best is doing a disservice – it is deceptive. It gives the impression, especially to a young, emerging artist who may be watching me, that I don’t ever do medium work or even fail. It’s important to remember that I keep painting even if I don’t like them all, or if some are much slower to complete, or sometimes just needing to stop because it just keeps getting worse and I can’t fix it. It’s OK to fail with a painting and move on. It is not OK to quit painting.

Another point worth making is that I may not love a painting when I’m done with it because of any number of personal reasons, but it may be exciting for someone else. I think any one who is creative knows that we can be our own worst critics. 

The Third painting that you see here is a larger painting and the most recent, and depicts Spring in the deep woods. It’s depicting that time when Spring rain showers come and go pretty quickly and leave everything slightly damp. I can smell the old leaf clutter from the fall, that musty sweet smell of the Earth bursting with small flowers and the acrid wet scent of rock. All of the trees have the light green shades of 1st leaves …and yet the sun is drowsily warm.

Winter is passing and I have another painting on the easel. I look forward to what it can teach me, where it can take me in my imagination, and what new challenges it can gift me. Enjoy the coming spring and its adventures.

The promise of a new year.

January 1, 2019

There is something unique and exciting about the new calendar year, isn’t there?  Each year as we prepare for the holidays, we are anticipatory and excited – driven to reach out to friends and family and co-workers until we hit an exhausting pitch of social engagement.  Now, more than at any other point in the year, we have high hope that we can make things different in the year at hand. We foster a frantic desire for wrongs to be righted, hearts to be mended, and balance to be restored. We start diet’s, we make plans, and we dream dreams.

I am admittedly one of those dreamers. I chose to skip the frenzy and retreat to the comforts of home and hearth with my spouse and our favorite relaxing activities. For me that includes time at the easel so I began two paintings the day before my holiday break with a plan to finish both by the time I returned to the campus. One was a 16″ by 20″ and one was a 24″ by 48″.

The larger painting is a tavern allegory and has been fun to dither with off and on the entire holiday break. That painting is almost done but not ready for showing yet.

The smaller painting, however, I worked hard at for the first day and then set it aside because I wasn’t quite sure how to pull off what I wanted to do. Today, on this wonderful first day of the New Year, I set aside the large piece and went back to the smaller canvas with its night scene. This was the right day to finish it.

Although the setting is out on a large body of water it is not a painting about loneliness. While portraying a time deep in the night, it is not a painting about fear or darkness. Nor is it a painting about apprehension. 

It is a painting of peace, and trust, and faith and promise. It is a study of still nights and calm waters. Typical of my work, it is also about light and the love that light often represents. For those who are troubled by any number of the challenges this world presents, may this New Year bring you peace and hope. For those who are preparing for an especially difficult journey, rest assured, all will be well.

I give you, Hope’s Nocturne.

Is it the Holiday Season already!

December 7, 2018

Gosh, time has flown by so fast!  I am hurriedly wrapping up the end of an academic semester, and I still have boxes of art all over my home place from last weekend’s show. They need to be stowed so that I can decorate for the holidays. Slightly panicked, I’m trying to imagine how fast I can get my living room rearranged, my tree up, and my decorations placed around this Saturday.

I did take a moment yesterday to think about all of the wonderful people I had met at the Outlander Convention last weekend. I learned a lot at that show. Many of those lovely patrons had advice on how to present my work at a multi faceted venue like that was, and others had good advice on the need for a broader scaled pricing model. As a working painter I have tried to have some prints available but have also learned that offering prints of too many original works can devalue the original pieces. For this recent show I had made a few smaller prints that were created specifically as small and affordable works of art (Outlander icon pen and inks), some notecards using an image of one of my larger works (Morning Fog at Craig na Dun), and a small edition of a detail from a larger original (Safe Harbour).

Last night’s conclusion was that I needed to have a new gallery with a unique body of work for gift shopping and not solely investing.

ANNOUNCING:  the newest gallery in the STORE is the “Gift Shop” in your right hand menu bar. In this new gallery will be those unique, handcrafted, or small works and prints, usually under $100. It will be those items we’re looking for as a quick gift for someone else or a treat for yourself. I’m going to be adding some of the other fun things I like to create – craft or utility items such as note cards, jewelry, buttons, or whatever is not a large scale original painting. I have also made a link to the gichlee prints I carried previously and put them in there for your convenience.

As always, your feedback is welcomed and appreciated. If I don’t get back to you before, have a very happy holiday season.