Provence lavender lay-in (W.I.P.)

This has been my first real opportunity to paint in over a week. It has been really hot, muggy weather lately, so I've decided to stay close to the studio and scour some of my old photo archives for landscape subject matter. In doing so, I came upon some of my images of an area of Provence that I visited in lavender season almost 10 years ago (!) called La Drome Provencal. Here's a 16x20" composition I've mapped out:

I have more to flesh out in terms of both shadow/highlight and detail, but I've started with a basic block-in to nail down my composition. Up to now, I've used the same color palette as the previous painting I posted of Lake Como. But when I started to lay in the lavender I had the overwhelming temptation to reach for a cooler, more transparent red (like alizarin crimson) to add some brilliance. I have held off up to now.

What I aim to see is if I can achieve the proper color relationships in the painting without having to resort to any other colors than the three primaries I've chosen. Alizarin Crimson (permanent) has long been my default red when I paint in a single primary palette. While it is a beautiful transparent color, I sometimes feel it is almost too garish in my mixtures.

So I feel it is worthwhile to try and achieve a luminous, vibrant quality to my paintings without having to resort to over-the-top color. Being somewhat of a color slut, this is not an easy challenge for me! We'll see if I can hold out to the bitter (better?) end!

A small commission, with just weeks away...

Given how long it has been since I've posted anything new here at all, I am almost embarrassed to write another "yes I'm still here" post. But here goes! The baby is now less than a month away from her due date and I am finally feeling as if I have gotten our household in some kind of order to prepare for her arrival. Unfortunately, now that I'm getting a little respite from the baby books, the shower, the classes, and prepping the nursery, I am, in this final trimester, also feeling my least energetic and creative. In truth, I don't think I was prepared for just how exhausted I'd feel throughout the pregnancy. But now that I'm getting really big, I can't really seem to do any one thing for very long before I start to feel quite uncomfortable. So needless to say, painting has pretty much taken a back seat during most of my pregnancy, and it's hard to say when that will change to any great extent after the baby comes. However, I do have one new little piece to share. It's a small watercolor/pen and ink painting  (8x10" on 11x14" paper) that a client commissioned to commemorate her daughter's upcoming wedding:

"Flavor of Fagiolari" Watercolor and Pen & Ink on Paper, 11x14" (SOLD) ©Jennifer Young

The scene is of a B&B in the Chianti region, not far from where I myself have traveled a number of times. It's a special place to the betrothed because they met in Italy and stayed at Fagiolari during their travels through Tuscany together.

When I paint from photos, I prefer to work from my own references. I just have a much better feeling for the place if I, myself, have traveled and painted there, and my photos serve as a trigger to call forth those experiences. I also take several different viewpoints of a given scene, plus a number of details, so that I can have as much information as possible when I get to work. So it's always with a bit of reservation when I consider working from a client's photo, which is normally more of a one-off tourist snapshot.

But this commission was actually quite a joy for me. Not only was it great to be doing something in the painting realm again, but the photos provided were excellent. Having also traveled the area fairly extensively myself helped a good deal as well.  Plus I was given much leeway as to how I wanted to interpret them (the photos) and what I wanted to include, rather than being tied to making an exact, literal interpretation(a.k.a. an illustration) of a scene.

What was most important to the client was that I capture the "flavor" of the place (hence the painting's title). Luckily, the client was delighted with the finished piece, and I had a good time getting my hands back in some art-making to boot. I tend to feel somewhat more intimidated by watercolors (as opposed to oils) but given its manageable size and the properties of the medium, I was able to stop and start more easily than I can with oils. It's not without reason to think that maybe I can even attempt a few more before "D-day" (or make that B-day) but we'll see. The one thing I can say about my life this past year is that it is anything but predictable!

Le Bateau Rouge

Well the week has flown by and I'm still working away constantly getting ready for the show at City Art Gallery (final touches, varnishing, framing, etc.) Meanwhile I have developed some kind of tendonitis in BOTH of my arms, starting from my shoulders and running all the way down to my wrists and hands. This has been coming on for a while but now it's raging. Fabulous. It also hurts to do any kind of computer work, so since I haven't trained any other appendages to hold a paintbrush, right now if I have to limit one activity it's going to be the computer. Needless to say, blogging may be spotty at best over the next week or two, but I will try to keep posting here and there if I can. Today's painting is again of a scene in the Dordogne. I worked from sketches and a photo. The tree in my photo was very much like a reverse version (in type and lighting) to the plein air painting I did not too long ago of the backlit willow, so I for that part of the painting, I found my plein air work to be a better reference. A little bit of Virginia in France? Hey, if it makes a better painting, I'm all for it.

"Le Bateau Rouge" Oil on Linen, 24x30" (SOLD) ©Jennifer Young

From plein air study to studio painting

This new paintingjust flowed. I finished it last weekend but couldn't photograph it until the sun came back.  This painting is actually a larger, more developed piece derived from a plein air study I did last spring in France:

"The Gift of Spring" Oil on Linen, 24x36" (SOLD) ©Jennifer Young

Here is the study:

"Dusk in the Lot Valley" Oil on Multimedia ArtBoard, 6x12" (SOLD) ©Jennifer Young

Even though I took tons of photographs of this beautiful spot when I was there in France, I must say, having already done a memorable study of this scene helped me tremendously. The photos, even when edited to reveal more of the depths of the shadows, could not compare with the information I got from my little study.

I was inspired to work this painting out into a larger format after watching a really excellent DVD by Kevin Macpherson called "Winter Escape". This is a longish, 2 part DVD that is probably only fascinating to artists. To everyone else it might be a bit like "watching paint dry", so to speak. But art videos are a great for me especially on a cold winter Sunday during football season! I have only had a chance to see part 1 of the DVD so far...Kevin really takes his time in this one. But to me, it was great to see a fairly large painting develop stroke by stroke, with good explanations of his thought processes along the way. Throughout the process, he gives good explanations of how he uses his plein air studies to capture his in-the-moment responses, notes of color and light effects on site.

 Now, there are lots of plein air painters who will pooh-pooh studio work (for landscapes). And while I do think that the best thing I've ever done for my landscapes is to take my easel outside for the direct experience, it just isn't always practical in terms of weather issues and size restrictions. An art studio is essential to me as it allows me to develop larger works and to experiment and expand on my ideas.

Macpherson seems to agree. Although he is known as a plein air painter (and rightfully so--he probably has thousands under his belt by now) he uses his studio in just this way, taking his studies and experiences he's gained on site and using them as jumping off points for his larger more fully developed work.

It was interesting though, to see how, because he has traveled and painted this landscape so often, he has so integrated his outdoor experiences to the point that he hardly referenced the photo he took. He mostly used his plein air studies (neither of which, by the way, exactly represented the larger painting he was creating on his easel.) The easel painting, was a compilation of elements from two or more plein air pieces, so I liked seeing that in no way did he feel the need to be literal. Rather than feeling bound and limited by one photographic viewpoint, he used his experience, memory, his studies, his beautiful brushwork and gorgeous color to conjure up his emotional response to the place. Ah, now that is painting!

As for me, my painting developed pretty quickly with the use of the study. I knew I wanted more sky in the larger painting, so I used a combination of a couple of different plein air paintings, plus my photos from the site in France to determine my layout. Where the photos are useful to me is that they can help to work out composition and form. But information about the color notes and the light were gained from my plein air experience. The other added bonus was that I nearly felt transported back to my original experience, (which was a real joy) much more so than painting from photos alone. That is no small feat too, consideringI'm painting in what amounts to a glorified closet right now and outside temperatures are in the 30's - 40's.

If I were not such a cold weather wimp, I would be painting outside even now. I can usually deal with the cold okay excepting my hands. Yes, I've tried fingerless gloves (useless) and hand warmers, but the minute my hands are out of my pockets, any amount of cold is actually pretty painful, and I can't paint in big puffy gloves! But, barring travel to some warm tropical location (not a possibility this winter, I'm afraid) painting from my plein air studies is the next best thing.

Small WIP & value sketches amid the rubble

A series of wet gray days have kept me from painting outside, so I've spent some time putting my studio(and myself!) back together in the aftermath of the workshop. For me, "spring cleaning" always seems to make things look worse before they get better.

I have little piles around me...piles of books, of paperwork, and also a small pile of unfinished paintings. Among the latter is this demo painting that I started in the workshop, which I may noodle around with and bring to a more finished state. It's small, just 12x9", so we're talking maybe just orzo or macaroni-sized noodling.

I started this workshop demo talking about composition and values and how they related to each other. Since we were working with the limitations of photographs, I wanted to try to get folks to think about the possibility of composition beyond just what they saw in front of them in the picture. When I'm painting en plein air, I will often do a series of small value sketches before I jump right into painting. I will use this same approach too in the studio, to develop my design.

Along with a contour sketch, it is extremely helpful to do this in a very abbreviated quick grayscale, so that I can get a general idea of my value relationships and the overall design that is created not only by the placement of line but also by the pattern of dark and light:

This is not a new concept, of course. Artists have forever been studying and writing about the arrangement of values (lights and darks) to compose a strong design. The artsy fartsy term for this is "Notan". Okay, it's actually Japanese. Notan sketches can be fleshed out in recongnizable contours (like mine above) or they can be very quick and gestural thumbnail abstractions created for the purpose of identifying the underlying design.

The values are generally limited to four or less.  I used 2 markers; black and light gray, deriving my middle gray from a blending of the two, and letting the white of the paper stand as my lightest value. 

Of course, in life we see a much wider range of values, but in designing and executing a painting, I'm learning that simpler is often better.  If you look at many of Monet's paintings, you might notice that many of them have a very small range of values indeed, and he used color temperature and very soft edges to add a wonderful sense of atmospheric depth to his work.

A quick Google search for "Notan" yielded some good results for further exploration:

• A good series of Notan lessons from Virtual Art Academy
• Artist Robert Genn discusses Notan in his inspirational newsletter "The Painter's Keys"
• Painter Ed Terpening does it!
• Katherine Tyrrell does too.

How about you?