South Dakota Summer Memories

I just finished a commissioned painting for a client of her mother's childhood home....a farm in South Dakota. Her mother provided some old black and white photos of the various farm buildings (house, barn etc), but none of the photos showed the entire farm , and all of the building photos were from different angles. Trying to piece the various photos and angles together into a convincing scene was harder than I had anticipated.

I took some photos of the creative process...(from gathering the photo reference to sketches and value studies to painting) and put them in video form.

I finally finished and varnished this painting....

Studio work

This is week 3 of the "virus from hell". I've been sick for 3...yes...3 weeks now. Really. On the upside, I've spent time in my studio working on painting some things I've been wanting to try. I love reflective and transparent surfaces. These are the first 2 stages of "Which One of Us is Thinking Clearly?" . The first stage includes the sketching of the light bulbs and the glass bowl...stage 2 is the "blocking in" stage where the basic forms, colors and values are established.

For some reason, I've been wanting to paint light bulbs. For me, they are symbolic of ideas. It occurred to me, especially during the elections, that everybody has their ideas...their opinions...and everyone seems convinced that THEY are the one who is thinking clearly. So, I painted one clear light bulb and one frosted bulb. I do believe everybody thinks they are the clear bulb...and if you disagree with them, they consider you to "not be thinking clearly".

Whirlwind

When I began blogging, I was sure that I (unlike other artists) would keep my blogs up to date...uh huh. Since my last entry...in March...life has been a crazy, swirling whirlwind of debris. Now that the wild winds have dissipated, I can sift through the events..pick them up and put them in perspective.

The mural work has been fantastic for the last four months. I painted lots of things in a new Mexican restaurant.... "El Padrino". I'm tellin' ya...that was the most fun I've had on a job in eons. Everyone I worked around was just a hoot. We all had a lot of work to complete, but everyone was a riot. I was rather sad to finish that project. Such fun.

The next big project (multiple murals and a wee bit of faux) began immediately after the El Padrino work was complete. This work was for Stonegate homes...for one of their houses that will be on the Parade of Homes starting next week. A great job...working for great people.

During all of this work activity, my mother in law...one of my favorite people on the planet...was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I really thought that if anyone could beat this terrible disease, it would have been Wanda. She fought right up to the end....and she maintained her humor and grace through what had to have been the most terrible challenge of her life. Her memorial service is this weekend in Ohio. Her absence leaves an enormous black hole in our lives.

My cat of nearly 20 years is in the process of dying. She's had skin cancers for years now, so she's actually lived longer than I expected. Even so, that doesn't make it any less painful.

On the up side, my parents took everyone in the family on a cruise in July. We had a festive time, and it helped to get our mind off of the depressing events back home.

Now that things are settling down a bit, I find I'm feeling rather lost. This happens to me every time I'm involved in a large project. I work like a crazed painting chimp for weeks and weeks, and then.....well....there's sort of a let down. I readjust quickly, though. :-) I'm looking forward to puttering in my studio over the next few weeks.

Play list for the European vacation mural

I spent the entire two weeks of this mural painting time listening to classical music from various composers, the "Phantom of the Opera" soundtrack, the soundtrack from the musical "Wicked" and "Beauty and the Beast." It all seemed rather "European" to me.

Notre Dame, day 2

I worked on Notre Dame for about 9 hours total. The wall was textured, making it difficult to paint straight lines......and as you can see...there are a bazillion straight lines. I tried to get every tower, every window, every spire absolutely correct. The finished detailed area was about 4.5'x5.5'. It was actually fun to really, really observe all of the detail in the building. There is a crazy amount of ornamentation on just about every area of Notre Dame, and I can't imagine the time and focus it must have taken to actually build such a structure.

Notre Dame

I'm starting on the West wall. Right now I'm working to the right of the dresser in the previous post's "before" picture.

I start by sketching the building in raw umber. I've got photo reference taped all over the place. Good googly moogly, those Europeans put a wicked amount of detail in their architecture. As I'm starting to really look at the photo reference, I'm thinking this is going to take longer than I had anticipated.

After sketching, I washed a thin glaze of Burnt Umber over the entire building and the sky...varying the amount of glaze here and there and adding some white for clouds in the sky.

Now I can start the fun part...detailing out the architecture.