Art

Landscape painting from the front porch

| maggiebird
Death Valley at Stovepipe Wells
Death Valley at Stovepipe Wells

The bad thing about staying in Death Valley National Park is that there are limited options of where to stay. You have three: an expensive hotel; a less expensive hotel; and camping.

The good thing about staying in the park is that there are only two hotels and limited camping. There are no neon-lit chain hotels, no glossy fast food signs. There is not even a food truck glowing in the parking lot. That means the views, even from from the less expensive Stovepipe Wells, are unobstructed million-dollar vistas.

So I set up my pochade box on the front porch of the hotel, and painted what what was in front of me: the broad valley and mountains beyond.  A friend stayed with me, and she knitted while I painted.

It was a simple equation:

Being outside + Cookies and tea on the table + companionable silence broken by occasional conversation + paint on my canvas (and in my hair) =  Heaven. (Bonus: bathroom nearby—a plein air painter’s dream.)

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A gift to say thank you

| maggiebird

BusinessCards

I want to say thank you to my  readers for reading my posts and commenting. I love to hear from you; a comment from you makes me smile all day. And I want to give you something in return.

I recently had business cards made at moo.com. These cards are slightly bigger than most normal business cards (they’re 2.15″ x 3.30″, which, as it turns out, is the size of a credit card), and very pretty. Totally suited to framing in a tiny frame. There are three styles, as you can see in the picture above.

To the first 6 commentors to this post, I will send you two sets of business cards (that’s 6 cards, two of each style). One set for you to keep and one set for you to give away.

Of course, after you comment, you’ll have to email me your postal address so I can mail them to you. Don’t put your postal address in the comment section!

You can email me at mockingbirdatmidnight *AT* gmail.com.

Scenes from an art show

| maggiebird

As the visual artist part of a collaboration for Hungry for Yiddish; a Mitzvah Project (organized by fabulous singer Heather Klein), I was honored to be included with musical artists Heather,  Anthony Russell, and the Saul Goodman’s Klezmer Orkestar.

It was so wonderful to see 13 of my paintings hung on the gallery walls of the Subterranean Arthouse in Berkeley.

Three paintings

My fiddler said, “I live with these images while you’re painting them, and they’re alive, but I’ve never seen them have so much presence as they had when they were all on the gallery walls.”

Two paintings

Normally I paint, finish, and file my paintings in the flat file. If they get framed, they are briefly displayed on a dining room chair, then they’re off to their new home. It was amazing to see that on the gallery walls the portraits came to life in a way they never do in my dining room.

Show2

The painting above at left is, yes, a bowl of potatoes. Since this show was about feeding people (a benefit for the Berkeley Food Pantry) I thought a few paintings of potatoes would be appropriate. After all, potatoes have fed the world for over 500 centuries, haven’t they?

NicoleandCat

Many thanks to Nicole Rodriguez and Katherine MacElhiney of the Subterranean Arthouse for helping hang the show, and especially to Katherine, who, despite a dreadful cold, stayed around after we hung the show so that a friend of mine could come in the afternoon and view the paintings.

Show1

And this is me with the painting Desert Rat. I am not normally a smiley kind of person, but on seeing all my paintings looking back at me, I couldn’t stop beaming.

But it wasn’t all paintings and portraits. We heard Heather and Anthony (both magnificent performers) sing, and then we danced to joyous Klezmer music.

Dancing2

The dancing was led by dance teacher Bruce Bierman.

Dancing1

The band was terrific! In the photo below, blazing through a tune, are Jim Rebhan on keyboard accordion, Illana Sherer on violin, and Dave Rosenfeld on mandolin. Also in the band was Gerry Tenney on guitar and voice, Stu Brotman on poyk (a bass drum), and Aharon Bolsta on snare drum.

Band

And show curator and clarinet player, Mike Perlmutter.

Mike

Thanks to Heather (on left, below) for organizing this wonderful evening!

Heather

A sheynem dank!

Hungry for Yiddish; a Mitzvah Project

| maggiebird

My work will be gracing the walls of the Subterranean Arthouse in Berkeley on December 13. I hope it will provide inspiration for these wonderful musicians, and joy to all the folks in attendance. For the next couple posts, I’ll be interviewing two of the singers in the show, founder Heather Klein and  Anthony Russell. So come back to learn more about the project!

Click on the poster to order tickets.

The mess and the makings

| maggiebird

A new painting is taking shape, which means I’m making lots of color sketches at my little art desk. This is a shot of the mess and the makings.

I use a metal palette for nearly all my watercolor paintings, although sometimes I dip into a round plastic palette when I need a color that’s not in my metal palette. You can see by the stacks of yogurt containers that I eat a lot of Pavel’s yogurt.

These are a few of the studies I’ve made for this painting. The earlier ones don’t really look like anything, just blobs of color.  You can see that the Space Shuttle Endeavor is going to be part of this painting.

Don’t worry, the stained paper towel on the table has been used to mop up cadmium red and burnt sienna. It just looks like blood in the photo. Well, it looks like blood in real life too. While painting, I go through a lot of paper towels—Viva brand is my favorite—and they litter the floor around the easel. When I’m working on a particularly red-heavy painting, the drifts of  red-covered paper towels make the studio look like a scene from a Stephen King novel.

These two studies are my favorites. They will go together somehow. I’m still working that out.

And this is part of the final drawing. I spend a stupid amount of time on drawing—nearly 12 hours for this piece. But while I’m drawing, I’m also planning the painting, thinking about what I want to do. Where will I lose edges, where will I find them? How will I place the value pattern? How will I apply the paint?

I paint in my head many times before I ever put paintbrush to paper. I often dream about it in the early morning hours when I’m in that half-sleep waiting for the alarm to go off. Those are pleasant dreams, mostly, because watercolor wipes off easily in dreams.

The sun finally rises

| maggiebird

I always thought I’d be like painter Chuck Close, painting feverishly from my sick bed if I had to. But when I was actually confined to a hospital bed?

I’m ashamed to admit, I was useless.

That senile body part I mentioned in my last post? That had to come out. It was to be a surgery that would be a walk in the park, the surgeon said. He didn’t mention which park, or how difficult the trail would be. It was a class-5 trail, I’m afraid, uphill most of the way.

For 4 days I huddled in the hospital, hazy, woozy, hungry and sick to my stomach at the same time. My sketchbook, paints, and pencils waited for me on the bedside table, but I could not sit up long enough to sketch. Worse, my mind—usually brimming with stories, pictures, and color—was a mud-hued blank.

But finally, one morning I woke to notice the sun streaming onto the building next to my room. It was perhaps the first image of beauty I had noticed all week. I clambered out of bed, sat in the hospital chair, and painted the picture for this post.

The painting is not a thing of beauty, but the morning was exquisite. As I finished this, the surgeon came into the room and sent me home.

Riding the wheel

| maggiebird

Turning the wheel-Unfinished watercolor
© Margaret Sloan 2012

While I’ve been working on this painting, begun on my birthday, the meaning of getting older has become more germane. Last week a certain body part, which until now was self-regulated and well-behaved, went rogue—well, senescent, really—and evidently needs to be removed. It’s nothing major (thankfully it’s not my brain), but it still reminds me that, while my wheel is still spinning and humming, the revolutions per day will someday begin to slow down. But not just yet.

Still, it’s all the more reason to enjoy this crazy ride while I can!

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I want to thank the Toemail blog for picking up my original post about this painting. 

Best in show

| maggiebird

I was thrilled to win first prize at the Santa Clara Watercolor Society show “Think Large…Paint Small.” Really thrilled.

And see the red dot? Someone bought it–A friend who does Irish step dancing.

I couldn’t stop smiling.

Think Large…Paint Small

| maggiebird

Sorry, I have to do a little more crowing. My painting was included on the poster! (click here to enlarge the image).

The opening is Friday, July 6, 5:30-8 p.m. in the Norton Gallery  (That’s the small but beautiful upstairs gallery) at the Pacific Art League in Palo Alto. It would be great to see you there; you’ll know me because I’m the one who will be beaming with smiles.