Here’s today’s progress on a new tree.
Looking forward to getting back into this one tomorrow.
Apprehensive Pine Midday
Here is the finished version of the painting I started yesterday. I got my dark unison pastels and that really helped me to solidify some of the stuff I wanted to do but lacked the greens and reds I needed to do it the way I wanted to. I think I’m set for a while, but I’m sure there will be some color that I “need” down the line.
This one is for sale. 9x12 pastel on paper. 220 dollars without shipping or framing included.
Today’s Pastel Painting
Here is the tree I painted today. I don’t really like working on white paper, but I have it and I didn’t want to tone it so I did it anyway. I like it, mostly.
Preschool Princess And Fat Man
I’ve been working on this for a long time, but took a break to focus on landscapes.
This was drawn onto watercolor paper months ago, and then today I added some clear gesso, did a watercolor wash and then painted on top with pastels.
I think these colors work. If I want to do anything with the face I’ll have to do this a lot bigger, and then I’ll probably switch to oil and it’ll be a whole thing.
At least I got it out of my head.
Looking Up To My Pine Tree
Here is what I worked on this morning. A 9x12 Pastel of a Pine tree in my front yard that always sort of looks like it’s trying to get away from me. I started this on white mi-teintes paper, and I don’t think I will do that unless I have no other other paper to choose from. I don’t mind when the paper bleeds through in some of the paintings but when it is bright white like this and I am trying to get the vibrant green of the pine needles that are catching the sunlight it fights with the green too much. I’ll keep at this one, though. I really like the shape of the tree and the shadows.
My Backyard on Mothers’ Day
I did this study of a few trees in my backyard this morning. There are times when I walk away from a morning of study and feel pretty good about the end result. This time I mostly feel like I learned a lot from this and, possibly, I’ll scratch at it a bit more in my office later on, but I’m not panning on putting this into any kind of a competition.
I definitely need more stark darks in my plein air setup because I kept trying to find a green that would do the job I needed it to do in the background, but I just couldn’t get there. I wanted the leaves up front that are overlapping the thick upright tree to really pop, but they aren’t getting there for me. It’s all too much in the same value range I think. I do think that this is closer to what I was actually seeing than what I wanted to see and more importantly what I wanted to show people who looked at the painting.
The fallen tree in the background needs to curl up more and then roll away in a more convincing way as well. That, again, will be easier to achieve with some richer darks, and some better drawing of the shape initially. By better drawing I mean inventing a bit more than I did so that I can get the cross contours of the shape to work for me better.
I had some fun with some orange in a few spots that I regret now.
One thing that might end up being the best solution for this is to crop out a large part of outer painting and just try to focus in on the central idea. This is something Cathy McCormick has shown me in the past, and I have nothing to lose so I’ll give it a shot and see if I can find something good inside there that the overall composition has made invisible.
Mothers’ Day
I think this is mostly done. I’ve been trying to find a decent pose of Penelope for the last in a series of portraits that I’ve worked on for my wife over the past six or seven years. They are all 9x12 or smaller, and if I had known how much I prefer to work larger than that I would’ve just started with a larger size and likely experienced a lot fewer headaches.
Fortunately I have thousands of pictures of the girls to choose from these days and that means i have no shortage of potential references. That also makes it challenging at times because a good photograph doesn’t always make a good reference for a painting. In fact, I have come to believe, that the better the photograph is, the less you might have to say about it as a painting.
I have no interest in photorealistic painting, so that helps me to eliminate a lot of what I see as extraneous stuff from the compositions when I paint from photo reference. This picture, which is of Penelope on the rock wall looking out at the St Joseph River is more about her emotions and mine at the time of the painting probably than what is there. Her hair is basically an icon at this point, and her choice of clothing (a soccer jersey, some pants and some cowgirl boots), I think helps me to show who she is better than any clothing combination I could have invented on my own.
This photo was taken at the end of summer, and I just added some red and orange in the water to incorporate it into the background so that it wasn’t solely in her clothing. There were no leaves changing color at the time, and I am tempted to get into the tree reflections with some red and orange as well, but I know that really it’s time to move on. Once I move it off the easel I may carry the painting through to the edges at the top and bottom, but in order to frame the painting I will need to mat it, and that would make it pointless unless I glued it to a floating mount or something.
This one was done on Ampersand Pastelmat, and I love the way it takes the pastels, the unison pastels in particular. I think they’ve become my favorite. I really like the variety of Rembrandts in the half-stick set I bought, but as they run out, I’ll replace them all with unisons and keep my nupastels for hard edges when needed.
This is a gift for my wife, so it’s not for sale.
Penelope by the St Joseph River
Here is a painting of my youngest daughter sitting on a rock wall beside the St Joseph River in her favorite cowgirl boots. I just wanted to mention that I will accept any donations of unison pastels that people want to send my way.
Backyard Plein Air
I got outside for a bit this morning and tried to capture some of the spring colors in my backyard.
Lone Sentinel of the Yellowstone River
I finished up my 14x16 of the Yellowstone River today. It’s pastel on paper.
Yellowstone River #1
This is what I am working on today. It’s a pastel painting of the Yellowstone River.
More Rocks inspired by Handell
I’m still not sure what to title this one. I’ll figure it out later. Otherwise I may not paint anything else today.
Untitled painting inspired by Handle’s “Reflections”. 9x12 pastel on paper. Prince $220 not including shipping or framing.
Work Work
I have been pretty busy for the past four months or so. Many of the things I had hoped to accomplish last year fell away as kids got sick or I got sick or when new and more important goals cropped up. But despite all the ugly parts of the winter, we all made it through, and it’s been mostly good. I’ve been doing a lot of soft pastel paintings, and have once again opened up my novel and began weeding through it so that I can send it out to agents in the fall. I’ll be posting my art work here, and I will be talking about what I am doing here. I’m hoping to do it weekly, but the website is less important to me than the work, so it’s likely that most of what I write here will be brief.
Here is the pastel painting I started last night. It’s inspired by an Albert Handell painting called “Reflections”, and you can see it in his book Painting the Landscape in Pastel on pg 102.
Here is my painting in its most recent form. Until I finish it, I won’t give it a title.
All the work that I post in my galleries will be for sale from now on. I’ll mention this a few more times going forward, but the information is all on the homepage for my website. All work is priced at 2 dollars per square inch. Commissions are 3 dollars per square inch. That will never include shipping or framing and matting.
Painting Accepted to the 2025 MAAC Show
I am happy to say that one of my paintings, “Dancing Beech” will be at the MAAC show in St. Joseph Michigan at the Box Factory for the Arts this year. I’m grateful for all the help I’ve received from Cathy McCormick, and all the people at the Northern Indiana Pastel Society (to which I am now a member). I also want to thank Katie Neece and Violet Hayden at the South Bend Museum of Art for always answering questions and helping me find books and resources and being encouraging.
I’ve included the digital postcard below and made it into a link that will send you to the website with the list of other artists whose work was selected.
What’s Out There?
I started work on a painting of my youngest daughter. It’ll be a Christmas present for my wife. I’d worry she’d see it, but she doesn’t have time to read my blog. Here is the first day’s work of painting. I did the charcoal drawing months ago and then so much stuff got in the way that I lost track of it. It felt good to get a lot of it blocked in this morning after a good session of work on another one of my War Baby paintings.
A Day at the Park with Bombs
This painting is “A Day at the Park With Bombs.” I’ll be dropping it off at the South Bend Museum of Art this afternoon for the student and faculty show that runs from November 30th 2024 until January 5 of 2025. There will be be a lot of other work there done by folks in the community, so if you are looking for something to do on one of the many gray days ahead, then go check out my work and all the other work that will be on display in the Jerome J. Crowley Community Gallery at SBMA.
I know that as a child when I saw pictures of art I often wondered what the point in going to see the paintings in person was. I’d already seen it, after all. But this painting is 30 inches by 40 inches, and seeing it on a phone or computer screen is not at all the same.
I hope everyone out there is gearing up for a nice holiday. I’m very excited to have my family in town. I can’t remember the last time I had Thanksgiving with my brother and parents at the same time.
Big Sky Pastel 12x14 on Paper
This pastel painting was based on a cloudscape that I saw on our trip to Big Sky this past summer. We weren’t there in the fall, but I wanted some fall colors in the painting, and I added those to the trees in the dark foreground.
Naval Mine Park
Finally I am getting back to work on a bigger painting that I started last year. It’s some kids playing at a park where a giant naval mine has been left behind. The game the kids are playing is collecting and stacking UXOs (Unexploded Ordinance). I know it’s not going to fix anything, but these are the things in my head and if I don’t get them onto the canvas then they just sit in my head and stop me from being able to focus on being alive in the moment.
The South Bend Museum of Art is having its annual student and faculty show, and the deadline is Nov 1st. So I am hopeful that I can get this thing cleaned up and finished before that deadline. The deadline has lit a fire, and this will make it so I can get the thing off my large easel and out of my office so that I have room to work on some of the other things I’ve started and not been able to finish.
Sunset on the hill.
Soft pastels on paper. 18x24
This is a pastel painting of a West Virginia sunset .