Month: March 2007

An Artful Life

I’m doing something different today, inspired by a visit to my best friend Barbara’s house today — I’m sharing some of her wonderful artwork and photos of her garden. She truly lives an artful life and every corner of her little house and garden has something to delight the eye and spirit.

Images can be enlarged by clicking them and selecting “All Sizes”

Left: Life size ceramic woman (celebrating retirement and gardening). Right: View from the front porch. Just beyond this is the lush vegetable garden.

When Barbara retired not too long ago, she completely redesigned the tiny rental cottage beside her 3-story house in North Berkeley, sold the big house, and moved into the cottage with her husband and teenage daughter. Barbara is an amazing gardener and artist.

Above: Cottage front. Barbara created this mosaic on the foundation of the cottage using broken pottery and her handmade ceramic chickens.

Left: Barbara’s mosaic studio she built herself from recycled doors, windows and other things. Right: Path in her garden

Two pretty corners in the garden. Left: A ceramic gardening woman holding a carrot and a tall mosaic garden mirror.

Left: Whimsical ceramic whistles in Barbara’s sunny kitchen and a graceful ceramic woman in the hallway window. She started by making ceramic whistles and then learned how to make Ocarinas. I wonder if the female sculpture was inspired by our figure drawing sessions.

Two canvas painted “rugs” on the kitchen floor by the sink and fridge. I have rugs on my kitchen floor in those spots too, but they’re ugly things from the hardware store.

Above: Even the laundry room is artful. The detergent is hidden inside a tapestry cover.

Two of Barbara’s acrylic cactus paintings from back in the day (after she was a fabulous silversmith making exquisite silver jewelry when we first met, but before she became a teacher). During her years as a teacher she stopped painting and focused her art on quilting. Now she’s painting on her ceramics and plans to start painting on canvas again too.

I’m looking forward to some time painting in her garden. It’s about as close to heaven as you can get in Berkeley, especially when it comes with her homemade lemonade!

Tags Acrylic Painting, Photos

Acrylic Painting Art theory Flower Art

How to Overwork a Painting

Post author By Jana Bouc
Post date March 15, 2007
11 Comments on How to Overwork a Painting

I started this attempt at acrylic painting with a lovely bouquet of flowers and a plan to be free and easy, working from life but also from my imagination. I covered the canvas with a loose wash of orange and red and purple paint. Then I sketched in the flowers using a brush with thinned violet paint. Next I blocked in the colors and shapes of the flowers and the background with fairly thin paint. So far so good…nice and loose. Here’s what it looked like at that point:

Acrylic on canvas, 12×16″ – I wish I stopped here

I was happy. It was free and loose and going pretty well. Then I had to go back to work, so I missed a few days. When I returned to the painting I completely forgot about my plans for loose and free. I started trying to get realistic which was dumb since I’d invented some of the flowers, there was no good directional light to model the shapes of the flowers, and they were starting to smell badly and flop over. I kept working for another couple nights anyway, trying to at least cover the canvas and finish it. Here’s how it ended…

…because I got sick of working on it (and of the smell of the gross flowers). Now it can join the pile of “learning experience” paintings I’m accumulating as I continue to try to learn to paint with oils and acrylics.

(Above) One of many useless reference photos I took but didn’t use (note how the light from above creates unpleasant shadows but no real modeling of form and no reflections in the vase).

What I learned:

Remember my original inspiration and stick to it (or end up with a weird hybrid creature, neither free nor realistic)
Take the time to get the lighting right if you want things to look three-dimensional.
Acrylic mediums are my friends — use them to make the paint the consistency I want because it sure isn’t right out of the tube.
The Stay-Wet palette will keep acrylic paint wet indefintely but will also turn it to useless colored slime. (Skip the special paper and just stick another palette inside the box atop the sponge–the paint will stay wet without absorbing water.)
There is no Golden Acrylic equivalents to Winsor Lemon Yellow, Alizarin Crimson, New Gamboge or Permanent Rose (mainstays of my watercolor palette) so practice mixing the colors I need with other pigments.
Before applying a mixed color to the canvas, test it on a piece of paper…yes you can repaint acrylics forever if you get it wrong, but why go through that?!
Acrylic paint dries darker because the white medium makes it look lighter until the medium dries clear…just the opposite of watercolor which dries lighter…so take that into consideration or add a little zinc white to compensate and make the color the same as it will dry.

And most important of all:

Lighten up, enjoy the learning process, humbling as it may be, and remember that in a year I’ll probably be much better at it (as well as a year older, so don’t rush to get there).

Tags Acrylic Painting

Oil Painting People Photos Sketchbook Pages

Woman at the museum

Oil on canvas board, 12 x 16″
To enlarge, click images, select All Sizes

Thumbnail sketch (1.75×2.5″) in sketchbook for painting

Ink in small Moleskine notebook
(original sketch at SF Museum of Modern Art cafe)

A few weeks ago I went to see the Picasso and American Art exhibit at SFMOMA and was inspired by this woman’s thick, grey hair in a giant clip and the way the teeth of the clip separated her her hair. I also took a photo of her while I was there (below) but the view was different from my drawing so I didn’t end up referring to it when I made the painting. I’m still struggling with oils and acrylics but this one was a little easier because I stuck to black, white and 3 grays. I had intended this to be an underpainting and was going to glaze over it with the colors of eggplant and chocolate but decided to leave it because I like it the way it is.

I used Gamblin Chromatic Black for the darkest darks which is not a dead black pigment like most. From the Gamblin website: “Chromatic Black is black, but it has no black pigment in it. It is made from two perfect complements: Quinacridone Red and Phthalo Emerald.” For the grays I used Gamblin’s Portland Greys in light, medium and deep. So there was no color mixing, just a value study and an attempt to get some control with applying and blending oil paints.

Tags Pen and Ink, Pencil drawing, People, Photos

Outdoors/Landscape Plein Air Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Cerrito Creek

Ink & watercolor in small Moleskine watercolor notebook
To enlarge, click images, select All Sizes

Today was a glorious sunny day — perfect for a mid-day walk to Peets Coffee. This is Cerrito Creek, a little urban greenway hidden away a block from Peets beside the California Orientation Center for the Blind and Albany Hill in El Cerrito. I got my coffee beans and an iced decaf latte and did these two little sketches.

It was a lovely spot except for the smell of dog pee along the fence I was using as an easel/table. This path must be a favorite dog walking spot. It’s funny how sensory experiences get embedded in a painting done outdoors — souds, wind, sun, friendly people…they’re all in there.

Tonight I tried adding a little Aquacover (a white-out designed for watercolor paper) mixed with some yellow paint to try to put back the falling water and reflections. I’m not sure it worked. Here it is before I added the splashy water.

Tags Pen and Ink, Plein Air

Drawing People Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

The Horn Players

Ink & Watercolor in Moleskine sketchbook
Composed from memory, a quick scribble on a sticky note and a small photo (see below)
(To enlarge, click images, select All Sizes)

When I was taking a lunchtime walk on Wednesday, I saw this guy playing his sax on the corner. A mom and little boy stopped in front of him and the mom pulled a little toy plastic horn out of her bag. She handed it to her son and encouraged him to play too. The boy was fascinated by the sax player, who sadly showed no interest in the boy and just kept on playing. I didn’t have time to take a photo or sketch so tried to take a mental snapshot. As soon as I got back to the office I grabbed the first pen and paper I could find and tried to draw what I’d seen on this purple sticky note.

The next day I was out walking again and the horn player was back on the corner so I took this quick photo from across the street.

Tonight I finally had a chance to draw the scene in my sketchbook, using my mental snapshot of the scene, my sticky note scribble and the photo (which was really helpful since I didn’t really know what saxophones looked like enough to try to draw it).

Does it bother you that the sax player is more realistic and the mom and boy are more cartoonish since they’re drawn from memory?

Tags Pen and Ink, People

Animals Drawing Dreams People Sketchbook Pages

From my AM/PM Sketchbook

Art show update: Thanks everyone for all your good wishes. The opening was so much fun! All my best friends, family and local art buddies came, including a (formerly virtual) friend from the Everyday Matters art blogging group. Some people brought friends and neighbors, and there were a few unknown faces too. From all reports everyone had a good time, and there were quite a few “small world” connections between people who I had no idea knew each other. The show will come down March 31.

Every day I write and draw something in my AM/PM sketchbook, usually from memory — in the morning an image from my dreams and in the evening something I’ve seen during the day. This is an assortment from the past week in my Handbook Journal Co. notebook drawn with an Expresso pen which I don’t like much but for some reason am using for all these drawings.

PM (Tonight): Walking around the lake by work today at lunch the geese were acting crazy, honking at each other and wiggling their heads and flapping their wings while the pigeons and seagulls looked on. I saw some seagulls with festive polka-dotted tails.

PM: Kitties are already asleep and I should be too.

AM: View out the window (at a distance)

AM: A silly work dream and another dream about Donald Trump (watched the very bad Apprentice LA that night).

Tags Animals, Cats, Pen and Ink, People

People Puerto Vallarta Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Puerto Vallarta Corn Snacks

Post author By Jana Bouc
Post date March 6, 2007
7 Comments on Puerto Vallarta Corn Snacks

Ink and watercolor in large Moleskine watercolor notebook
To enlarge click image, select All Sizes

I wish I could have actually done this sketch in person along the Malecon waterfront in Puerto Vallarta but there was no time alloted for outdoor sketching in my workshop. I noticed several different people selling both corn on the cob and corn kernels in plastic cups that they barbecue on site (the corn not the cups).

I wanted to do a small watercolor in my sketchbook since my painting time lately has been spent working with oil paints and acrylics. When I went to look through my Puerto Vallarta photos for something to paint I discovered most of them were missing. I’d done some nifty photo organizing the other day, sorting everything, trying to back up onto DVDs (but it kept eating the DVDs so I gave up and copied files from my PC to my laptop). Somehow I’d deleted half of the folders I’d sorted, thinking I was deleting extra copies from my laptop. Without going into lots more detail about how this stupidity occured, I’ll just say that I went through all the steps of the grieving process: anger, denial, bargaining etc., through to acceptance and then oh so gratefully, found a folder on my laptop that had the files!!

Tags Pen and Ink, People, Puerto Vallarta

Art theory Cartoon art Other Art Blogs I Read People Sketchbook Pages

Cezanne in Provence

Ink in Handbook Journal notebook
To enlarge, click image, select All Sizes

Today I was tired after all the prep and then the party at last night’s opening for my show (which was great fun by all accounts). This morning I tried drawing little sketches of everyone who attended the opening in my AM/PM journal. It was hard to remember the details of people’s faces, though surprisingly easier for the people I’d just met than the ones I’ve known most of my life.

It occurred to me that if I tried to superimpose in my imagination a caricaturish outline on the faces and features of people I see, it might make it easier to draw them and might also be a good way to start to see and understand the essential components of each face that make it different from every other face.

So tonight while I was watching a documentary I’d TiVo’d a couple weeks ago — “Cezanne in Provence” — I saw the guy on the top left, Curator Philip Conisbee, and discovered I was doing exactly that — I could see the imaginary lines superimposed on his image that I wanted to draw. So I paused the program, grabbed my journal, and drew him. Then I did the same for other people I saw in the documentary, Cezanne, Monet, Cezanne’s grandson Philippe and art historian Nina Kallmyer (sorry for beard Nina, I went a bit too far with the shading).

I also jotted down some of the quotes by and about Cezanne: “He is a true artist but has far too many doubts about himself.” “He liked to be free and alone when he was painting.” “He was a hermit.” Cezanne said, “The pleasure must be found in the painting” when dismissing with disdain the importance of showing and success. “Vollard displayed 150 of Cezanne’s paintings (that he’d bought from the art supply store where artists traded their paintings for art supplies) and Cezanne didn’t come to the show. He stayed home painting.”

While I fantasized about painting today, I never did get in the studio other than to tidy up a bit. I think Cezanne might have been right. Preparing for a show sure diverts time and energy from painting!

Tags Pen and Ink, People

Life in general Other Art Blogs I Read Watercolor

Yay! Show is Up!

I had the most amazing experience tonight. Two very special people helped me hang the paintings for my show (well actually they climbed on ladders and hung the paintings while I nursed a beer to calm my nerves and said things like “Yep, you got it. Perfect!” or “Let’s move that one over there and this one over here” and they didn’t even get annoyed!) I’d been so worried about trying to hang the artwork in this rather challenging space and they made it look as classy and grand as a show you’d see in any gallery. I am so grateful and proud to have such caring and careful people in my life!

I have a hard time asking for help, never wanting to bother others. So when my dear friend Richard, who is a brilliant photographer and absolutely the best computer and audio technical guru around, volunteered to help me when he heard about the show I was amazed and thrilled because I know what a perfect job he does with anything he touches, as does my wonderful son Cody, who was the second to volunteer (after I asked him, but still…) Cody is my best art critique and has a dead-on eye for detail and is meticulous when it comes to the things he’s passionate about (including restoring to perfection fabulous “muscle cars“ from the 70s). With a team like these two, I knew the show couldn’t fail. I’m so proud and pleased at how it looks and how much fun it was to hang with my team.

Here’s a few photos taken at the end of the evening (in dim light and not the steadiest of hand).

Above, Richard after we finished hanging and he treated us to a slice of pizza.