Riding the wheel

July 10, 2012 | 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.

Into a show!

July 1, 2012 | maggiebird

Beginner’s Reel
Watercolor on 300# Arches hot press
© 2012 Margaret Sloan

I’m super excited to tell you that this painting of a little Irish dancer has been accepted to the Santa Clara Valley Watercolor Society’s show, “Think Large…Paint Small.”

It’s one of my favorite paintings I’ve made this year. I saw this little girl dance last spring at an exhibition show for children at the Bay Area Discovery Museum; she was the only one in her beginner class, and she danced alone. I thought her quite a brave little girl to dance solo for an audience of her peers.

Galloping life

May 11, 2012May 11, 2012 | maggiebird

Quebecois dancer — Dance party where the brilliant Lisa Ornstein played fiddle and led the band. This photo was taken at ISO 1600, f3.5, 1/10th of a second. Then I fussed over it in photoshop for awhile.

Life has been a whirl, consumed by daily tasks that impinge my art practice. It’s been a long while since I’ve posted.

It’s not that I haven’t been lifting pencil and brush. I have been, but most of what I’ve created is not for public consumption.

I’ve been incubating. I’ve also been learning a few new skills. I’m taking a beginning photography class and finally learning to use my fancy camera after owning it for 2 years. At the same time I took a landscape painting class. Yes, more classes. I know I said I wasn’t going to take any classes for a while, but then a while passed. And when these two classes presented themselves I couldn’t refuse.

The photography class has been fun, and now I know where the on/off button is located, and why it has three clicks. And instead of putting the camera on automatic, I make choices about the geometry all the little dials form. Getting the little orbiting concepts of ISO, f-stop, and shutter speed aligned well enough to create a perfect crystalline photo is darn hard. I still don’t understand white balance, but I know these things take time.

It’s a good thing I don’t have a television.

Painting from life

April 3, 2012 | maggiebird

Red-haired Girl (cropped)
Watercolor 300# Arches hot press
Copyright 2012 by Margaret Sloan

Model guild benefits are wonderful opportunities for painting. There are often two sections: short poses and long poses. I like to spend the morning at the short pose session, warming up with gesture drawings. After a quick lunch, I get down to brass tacks for a single long pose. After racing through the brittle morning time of 1-, 2-, and 5-minute poses, I can relax into the long 3-hour pose, and the afternoon unravels and stretches like a rubber band. My mind settles solidly into the work.

It may feel luxurious to have 3 full hours with the same pose, but the model’s timer is still ticking, so I like to organize my process. For this 3-hour pose, I allowed myself 40-minutes (2 20-minute periods) to make a graphite drawing, then I started painting. I try to get an accurate drawing quickly, as poses shift slightly over time, and even the best, most rock-solid models have to take a breath now and then. And once you start painting with watercolor, you can’t make a lot of easy changes.

There is really nothing like painting from life. You are able to see infinite numbers of color that could never show up in a photograph. The blue-green in the shadows around the eyes, the mineral violet in the shadows. You can see the subtle shifting of values, the way the skin flows over muscle and bone.

I’m not against painting from (your own) photos. In the interest of time and money, I often use digital references. But there is nothing like painting the portrait of a live person. Here’s to life.

L’chaim!

The power in a word

January 27, 2012 | maggiebird

Kate
Watercolor 23″ X 19″ 300# Arches hot press
Copyright 2012 by Margaret Sloan

When I painted this picture, I remembered that Mary Whyte, in a workshop, told us to name our paintings before we made our first washes of color. I couldn’t for the life of me remember this girl’s name (the daughter of a cousin-in-law, she’s a delightful girl, but I only met her once), so I just called her princess. I don’t mean princess in a bad way—all diva and finer-than-thou—but princess in a good way, a fairytale Cinderella-sorting-ashes or brave-and-loading-bullets sort of way.

As readers of fairy tales and fantasy-fiction know, names have power. So I let the word princess guide my brush. When I was stuck for a color choice, I whispered the word: princess. The taste of the word on my tongue gave me the flavor of the color I needed to use in that passage.

My favorite part of the painting, and the whole reason I wanted to paint this, is the shadow that curls under the sunlit eye. I love the way the curve describes the roundness of the cheek. There’s something delicate and fragile in that shadow, a sweetness and hope particular to young women.

Kate Detail
Watercolor 23″ X 19″ 300# Arches hot press
Copyright 2012 by Margaret Sloan

Then suddenly, as I approached the end of the painting, I recalled that her name is, or might be, Kate. If it’s not, it’s still the name of this painted princess-girl.

Dandelion fluff and painting

January 16, 2012 | maggiebird

Looking forward
Watercolor on Arches 300# hot press
Copyright 2011 by Margaret Sloan

It’s an odd, drifty feeling to paint without a teacher at my shoulder. It’s like being dandelion fluff caught on the surface of a pond, stuck to the water film but still blown about hither and thither (that thither-zone is an uncomfortable place!).

While I painted this picture, I anchored myself in the painter-pond by studying painters I liked. I kept those painters’ images on my computer, and every so often would take a break from my painting and run over to study how they handled a similar passage. I didn’t feel as if I were copying a master, but rather, as if I were asking a master a question.

I also talked incessantly to myself. I’m sure I sound like a muttering madwoman escalating into a full-blown fit: What color should go here? Should I use a warm red or a cool red? Can I get away with a purple or a green? How can I get this form to turn? Is the value dark enough yet? It’s too dark! Oh no, that’s Alizaron Crimson, it won’t lift off the paper! What am I going to do now? Gah! What am I thinking?!!!

At this point there is much wailing and whining, stamping of feet and tearing of hair. Then I do what Rose Frantzen recommends: I take a paper towel and clean my palette. She’s right. It’s calming. It resets my clock.

I’m stuck on the background of this painting right now. I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit, and will probably have to think about it a bit more. Turning and churning it in my head while I float about uninstructed.

Looking forward (Detail)
Watercolor on Arches 300# hot press
Copyright 2011 by Margaret Sloan

St. Stephen’s Day

December 26, 2011December 26, 2011 | maggiebird

Yesterday we spend Christmas on the San Francisco Bay. It looked rather like this, although this painting was actually painted this summer, under Felicia Forte’s tutelage.

Baylands
Oil on panel

It was a bright, hazy day yesterday, another spare-the-air day, so we couldn’t see through the smog to the mountains across the bay. But we knew they were there.

Today looks like this:

Fog study
Oil on Panel

It’s a foggy, muzzy morning, and I’m taking a good rest before the Wren Boy madness that tonight will bring.

Happy holidays to all, and may you have a good winter rest sparked with late night music and dancing!

Edges

December 19, 2011 | maggiebird

I met this young boy at Hidden Villa one late afternoon. He was with his family, looking at the chickens. Suddenly he scooped up one of the hens and cradled her in his arms. She didn’t seem to mind. I asked if I might take a photo of him. He nodded silently, so I snapped a few photos. I wish I knew who he was so I could give him and his folks a copy of this.

I made this painting after taking Ted Nuttall’s watercolor workshop. If you compare it to the painting of the fiddler that I finished before the workshop, I think you’ll see a lot changes and improvements. At least, I can see them.

In past paintings, I’ve worried the paint to death. I’ve tried to make every transition smooth, and ended up making everything is bland, and even, and lifeless. Ted’s workshop made me finally see that what was missing were edges (although other art teachers have preached edges to me, I evidently wasn’t ready to hear that painting gospel). When I did paint edges, they were too abrupt, unsubtle, unsophisticated.

Edges are important. They give a painting movement and life, tell the story, sing the song. Hard edges can describe a fold, a crease, or the boundary of a cast shadow. Soft edges show a rounded structure, a form shadow, or a distant horizon. Between the nounage of hard and soft edges, there is a whole visual dialect—a spectrum—of edges that make a painting speak with nuance and grace.

When I think about edges in a painting, I’m always reminded that in nature, the edges of eco-systems are the places where life is most abundant. And now, when I paint, I’ve been trying to remember that edges are ok; they are, in fact, necessary to the life of the painting. Edges are where things happen.

Face—Detail of Boy with Chicken

Feathers—Detail of Boy with Chicken

Fiddle player

December 12, 2011 | maggiebird

This portrait is on Arches print paper. I inherited this beautiful paper from a friend whose father was an artist. He’d passed a long time ago, and when they finally cleared out his workshop, they found a stack of this lovely paper that probably dates back to the 60’s. Isn’t that an artist’s fantasy—to find beautiful, antique paper from a time when craftsmanship still ruled the day?

I love to draw on this paper, and small sizes worked okay with watercolor. But this painting is big—a full sheet of paper, 22X30—and there were some issues.

Paper for letterpress printing has less sizing than watercolor paper, which makes the press paper lovely and soft, but without the sizing to protect it, the paper sucks up the paint. Plus, even though I stretched it and stapled it firmly onto a board, when the paper got wet, it got all floppy like a wet cotton sheet. But it dries nice and flat. The painting is still on it’s stretcher board, and I may rework it a bit.

This was painted before I took the Ted Nuttall workshop. I now refer to this as my BT (before Ted) style. Next post, I”ll show you my AT (after Ted) style. Very different.

Mockingbirds at midnight

The shipwreck of grieving

Portraits