Agapantha Fireworks over Hydrangeas, watercolor, 9×6″
In honor of Independence Day I spent the day quite independently, doing a little gardening, a little cooking, and then starting the first of a series of autobiographical paintings in acrylic on canvas.
I skipped the picnics and fireworks (except for hearing them boom in the distance and having to comfort my stressed out cats, and again just now, after 11:00 p.m., they’re illegally exploding somewhere in my neighborhood). So I thought I’d sketch these agapanthas that looked a bit like fireworks exploding over the hydrangeas.
I like the idea of celebrating independence day with flowers rather than the sound of “bombs bursting in air” anyway.
Pacific May Lilly at Tilden Botanical Garden, ink & watercolor, 4x6"
My plein air group met at Tilden Regional Parks Botanical Garden this cold and foggy morning. Since I wasn’t familiar with the park I explored a bit and then decided to sketch instead of trying to drag my painting gear around the hilly, pebbly paths. Since I only had my large Moleskine and a Micron Pigma .01 pen with me, I added watercolor later at home. The May Lilly above was so sweetly but delicately scented that drawing beside it was like breathing in a dessert.
Bridge & Creek, ink & watercolor, 5x7"
This bridge and creek was the first thing I sketched when I arrived, still arguing with myself about whether to go get my painting cart, whether to go home because it was too cold, whether to go home because I arrived late, how I should have brought my watercolors, how the scene was so complicated and so maybe I should just go home.
But as I drew, I started noticing interesting details, how dark and light shapes lined up, where one puzzle piece fit against the next, the design the water was making as it poured over rocks and down the creek, the sound of frogs and birds, and before I knew it that busy, chattering mind had shut off and I was having fun.
Manzanita Tree, Ink & watercolor, 5x16"
As I sketched this spectacular Manzanita, I began noticing how much like strong lean muscles the branches were, with their smooth, polished red surface. Then I found other human attributes: the knotholes looked like eyes while the bends in the branches looked just like elbows. This led me to consider the oneness of all things and I felt very connected to all the nature around me. During our critique at the end of the paint-out, we each take a turn showing our work and talking about our process. When I shared these thoughts someone laughingly asked what I’d eaten for breakfast! I was high on drawing, not Cheerios!
Cat Napping in the Buckwheat, Ink & watercolor, 4x6"
Walking to our critique, I spotted this garden kittie, having a nice nap in the buckwheat section of the garden and had to stop and sketch it. Nothing bothered this plump pussy who slept amidst the plants, little signs, wood chips and stones near the garden entrance. I added the whiskers with white gel pen.
Artichoke Heart, Ink & watercolor on hotpress Arches paper
I think the soft, flowery heart inside a prickly artichoke perfectly illustrates my feelings about Valentines Day. I love artichokes and the heart is always the best part, but you have to work to win the right to savor it. I was surprised how soft, gentle and flexible the leaves were when I peeled them off to get to the heart, compared to how tough they are when they’ve been boiled. I’m sure there’s a good analogy there about love and tenderness, but I’ll leave that to the poets.
I first tried to do this painting using a sketchbook I hadn’t tried before: Maruman Art Spiral, that has what looks like cold press watercolor paper in it. It started dissolving when I tried to lift paint or glaze more than one layer. Yuck. I wasn’t at all happy with the first try below and started over.
First attempt on crummy paper
As I wrote in my last post, the past few weeks have been rough. When I finally got in the studio today. I began by wasting an hour trying to rescue a painting of 3 artichokes I’d started last night and finally decided it was unsalvageable. I felt uninspired, clumsy and like everything I tried to do is crap.
Then my cat jumped on the drawing table to sunbathe under my lamp. I had a brush in my hand, my gouache palette open, a sketchbook I wanted to finish and a willing model. So I did quick kittie sketches with paint, trying to get back in the flow. It helped get the juices flowing again, although my inner critic was still harping at me, telling me these were crap too.
Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t, but they’re bright and colorful and were fun to do, and the stupid sketchbook is filled and on the shelf.
No, the injury and insult referred to in the title of this post does not refer to this painting of a Tangelo. It explains why I haven’t posted lately.
First I had the stomach flu (or was it food poisoning from the dreaded peanut/salmonella scare?) The next week while waiting at the doctor’s for my flu shot, I felt a little tickle in my throat and wondered if I might be getting a cold. I was. It wasn’t terrible, and went to work all week.
When the weekend arrived I expected to feel better and get to paint. But the cold (or was it the flu?) hit full force. For the next 5 days it hurt to think, let alone do anything creative. On day 10 my doctor prescribed antibiotics and I began to recover.
That Friday night after a 10-hour work day, my cat Fiona begged me to come play tag with her. She loves to run through the house chasing me, and me, her. My house is perfect for this game because it’s quite long. It was originally two flats, mirror images, that I connected with a doorway, so it’s a nice long run.
We look completely ridiculous, but it gets us both a bit of exercise. We’ve tried to teach Busby, my other cat, to play, but he doesn’t get it. He comes out of the closet that he’s been sleeping in to watch us, with a confused look on his face.
So there I was running after Fiona when I felt a “snap” in my calf and then a sharp pain that made it nearly impossible to walk, except with a sort of peg-leg gait. When I called the advice nurse he ruled out all the really bad possibilities (broken things, torn apart things, blood clots, etc.) so apparently it’s just going to take some time to heal. It’s been four days and I’m still limping (and coughing).
Despite the limp I was determined to paint this weekend, and chose a delicious Minneola tangelo sitting on the lid of a glass refrigerator container. I liked its funny little poofy crown. I learned that Minneola is both a city in New York and a combination of a Duncan grapefruit and a Dancy tangerine.
I wish I could push rewind and go back one stage on this painting. Knowing when to stop is one of the hardest things in painting.
My next door neighbors were pruning their roses for winter so I asked them to save some for me to draw (they were going to throw the still perky roses in the recycling bin). I started by trying to paint them in oils but was having a terrible time mixing the right colors. I scraped off the paint and went to bed, planning to try again the next day.
When the cats knocked the vase over during the night I was actually relieved, thinking the roses would be too funky to paint since all the water was on the floor, not in the vase. But these were some tenacious roses, and were still fine so I decided to try sketching them in watercolor (above and below). I also consulted one of my books on flower painting that said roses were shaped like teacups, so I added a few of those tilted at the same angles to the sketch to help me understand their shape better better.
Blood Red Roses, Ink, Watercolor & Blood
I’d just finished the sketch (above) and was writing about how hard it is to mix the highlight color of “blood red” roses in oil paint. At that very moment, my nose started bleeding for no reason at all and it dripped onto my sketchbook! Now I feel like a real Avant-garde artiste, painting in blood!
P.S. A little pinching of the nose and it stopped.
Red Roses, Oil, 6x6"
Mixing a light red color in oil paints
It’s hard to mix a warm, light red in oil paint because when you add white to red oil paint, it makes a cool pink. This is because all white oil paint is cool (meaning it tends more towards a blue than a warm color like orange or red). But the color of these roses in bright, warm light was a hot pink. It’s easier to get a warm, light red in watercolor because you use the “white” of the watercolor paper to show through and “lighten” the red, not white paint.
To get help with the dilemma I sent an email to Diane Mize at Empty Easel since she and I had recently corresponded about color charts and she’d written an excellent article on Empty Easel about how to mix correct color in oils. She validated that mixing a light red is challenging and offered some good suggestions, including using Naphthol Red, which is a more intense red than the cadmiums (which quickly lose strength in white).
I tried making the lighter areas of the rose thicker, using a palette knife, since those raised areas will catch the light and reflect it making it appear lighter. I also intended to make the dark areas on the roses more neutral and cooler, so that by comparison the warm light area would look even more brilliant. But the roses finally died and that put an end to the painting. My favorite part of this painting are the leaves at the bottom left.
Bedside Table with Coffee & "An Illustrated Life" - Morning
DeLuxe Parked - morning walkPoodle Waiting at Trader Joes, El Cerrito - Midday Busby Annoyed, Trying to Nap - After DinnerFiona "As Seen on TV" (literally) - Evening
Messy Desk - Late Evening
I challenged myself to do a sketchcrawl of my day, making a 10 minute drawing (almost) every hour, wherever I was at the moment. I was surprised by how many times during the day I saw things I’d like to draw. But I waited for my timer to tell me, “Now!” and then started drawing. If I was out and about, I added the watercolor at home in the evening.
Reading Danny Gregory’s book, An Illustrated Life, inspired me to get back to my sketchbooks which I’d been neglecting while I focused on oil painting this past year. As a result of that neglect, I had half a dozen unfinished sketchbooks that I’ve challenged myself to complete by the end of the year. Hence the sketchcrawl above (and more to come as the year draws to a close, or should I say, “as I draw the year (and my sketchbooks) to a close!
I’m learning to appreciate the bits of paintings that work while letting go of the parts that won’t/can’t be fixed. These two sections pleased me, even though the original paintings as a whole were not successful. In both cases I started off boldly, got the big shapes blocked in and immediately painted the two segments above.
Then I got tired, the sun went down and the room in the light changed, the flowers opened in the heat, the floodlight I was using burned out and I didn’t have another, the setup got moved (thanks kitties…see below) and although I tried to fix both paintings over and over I finally decided to cut my losses once again and move on.
I learn so much with each painting, whether it works as a whole or not. I’ve started putting labels on the backs with the year, a serial number and a few words about what worked, what didn’t and what I learned. It will be fun at the end of the year to review my progress.
Fiona taking up modeling:
Rose set up day one (and on my bulletin board art by Pete, Alison and John Sonsini‘s wonderful portraits):
I was folding my laundry and admiring my collection of wonderful SmartWool socks when it struck me: I haven’t lost a single sock since I began living alone. When I was married with kids, socks disappeared on a regular basis and I had a drawerful of one-of-a-kind socks.
My son still comes over to do his laundry but even so, only one sock temporarily migrated but he brought it back (a year later at the insistence of his girlfriend), along with a pair of my undies that had somehow ended up in his laundry.
There’s pros and cons to living alone, of course. One downside is that if you do lose something, you have nobody to blame for it. Even now, when something goes missing, my first thought is that one of my sons must have taken it. But my only available scapegoats are my cats.
Fiona the calico does like to steal my SmartWool socks (maybe they smell a bit like animals, being made of wool?). I try to keep them away from her, since she tosses them around and wrestles with them and when I find them under the bed they are shredded and holey.
At least she doesn’t eat them. My friend Marean has a beautiful Sheltie who eats her socks whole, and has had to have stomach surgery to have a “sock-ectomy.”
When I picked these roses yesterday evening, they were heartbreakingly fresh, new and beautiful. I put them in a vase of water in the kitchen, planning to paint them today. This morning I found them laying on the counter where they’d obviously been without water too long and looked limp.
Either they jumped out of their vase or my cats had a hand (er… paw) in their escape. After a few hours back in water they plumped right back up and were a joy to draw. I only had about an hour and that was just enough time to make a happy ink and watercolor.
But why do I feel so sad seeing the beauty of my seven rose bushes and thick patch of irises all loaded with flowers? It’s as if I’m already mourning their demise, knowing how temporary their burst of color and vibrancy is before winter comes again.
Is it my enhanced awareness of the cycle of life and death as I approach one of those milestone birthdays this June? Or is that time seems to be moving so fast these days that I can picture the blooming season flying by like those time-lapse films where the flowers sprout, bloom, shrivel and die within moments.
Instead of feeling sad about their demise (and my own, for that matter), I need to remember the Buddhist teaching of being in the present moment, accepting that everything changes, everything dies; that desire and clinging cause suffering and that letting go relieves it.
So with that, I will allow my flowers to live and die as nature sees fit (as if I had any other choice!), and will enjoy them while they’re here. I’ll try to make the most of my own moments while I’m here too, with as much acceptance as I can. And maybe I’ll finally return to my Zen meditation practice which always brought me such joy and peace, and made all of life more vibrant.
I sketched this at Peets when I stopped to pick up some coffee beans, now that my grinder is working again. It’s in my new combo wallet/sketchbook. I visited my local stationary store looking for a small binder to use as a sketchbook and the owner offered me this little Filofax for only $5.00 since someone had returned it. It’s a perfect wallet (even a zipper section for change) and has rings to hold nice paper. See the bottom of this post for photos of it.
The problem withbeing addicted to a morning cup of coffee is that I wake up stupid and dysfunctional until I’ve had my cup. This is dangerous since making the coffee involves handling scalding liquids, equipment with motors and sharp blades (to grind the coffee), drip filter holders that can be easily knocked over, and carrying cups of milky coffee across the room with shaky hands. I’ve encountered disasters with all of the above.
To read the rest of this post and see the wallet/sketchbook photos, click “Continue Reading” below:
Jana Bouc, Artist 
