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It’s been a while!

Thankfully, the lack of posts doesn’t equate at a 1:1 ratio to a lack of paintings. I’ve been skipping the posting to make more time for painting. I’ve also been oil painting closer to once per week while I have some big mural projects going this summer. Yay for hospitable summer weather here in North Dakota!

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I’ve got some of my favorite paintings hung above my kitchen sink and they continue to inspire and confound me when I look at them. They have that special… Je ne sais quoi. I love it. Today’s was inspired by the orange and spoon painting I’ve been eyeing in my kitchen.

I took my time setting up the composition just right with a viewfinder. When that was right, probably after around 45 minutes of fiddling with oranges, spoons, and lighting, I set off with a fresh palette. My drawing was extra precise as it related to MY CANVAS. Not my viewfinder. I wanted to make sure I avoided my dreaded final piece where somehow, my focal point ends up in the center space. NOT THIS TIME.

It worked to set my composition up on the canvas first to what came through my viewfinder. I’m pleased with this composition!

The lighting took a bit of fiddling with as well when I painted. I ended up going back a day later (the day I’m writing this post) and putting in a spot of light across the orange slice being hit with the spotlight at its base. The insight to how much this improved the composition came when I had my photograph set up in photoshop and I decided to try it out in there. It was much prettier so I hopped back to the kitchen for a few minutes and added in some spots of paint without my subject to look at. It felt great to go in with fresh eyes… I might do this again sometime!

The one complaint I have is that I sense a lack of freshness. I think the brush strokes got a little complicated and overthought. I did a lot of work with small brushes. It’s okay though, we’re learning over here!

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Are you interested in buying this painting? Let me know!

There’s something about fruit next to shiny objects that makes me feel alive. I painted this after spending a good while setting the composition up JUST right, leaving to teach a fitness class, and finally coming home to everything set up and ready for me to paint.

Having a whole afternoon ahead of me, I took my time on this painting. There was no rush to meet a deadline and I found myself lost in the work, stunned to look up upon finishing to see that in all, this painting took me an estimated five hours to set up, paint, and tear down. It’s one of the few oil paintings that I’ve ever made bigger than 6x6in and It’s good to see the effort I’m putting in returning works like this one!

This painting is successful in big part because it has clean edges, a pleasing composition, and the values are spot on. There are nice, trustworthy shapes chiseled out in the paint with a seemingly effortless attitude to the blocky brush strokes. It’s got a fine layer of paint on it, laid down with lots of linseed oil, as opposed to a thick coat which makes the background feel creamy and smooth. Yum! Strawberries and cream.

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Sometimes it seems these successful paintings happen without my say so… This insight arises when I believe my say so will lend comparable results and instead I end up with a painting that looks grotesque, unappetizing, and invokes a deep feeling of disgust. Today I made that painting. I am posting this one instead, from a few days ago, as I remind myself that success lies in completing a work, learning from it, and continuing with my practice. Good job Morgie! You painted today! And bonus points to you for sitting with the fear of your failure.

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A note on the grotesque painting………. I stopped writing this post after getting those thoughts out and putting a closer look into my self-proclaimed abomination. I saw the possibility of redemption and spent the rest of the afternoon performing careful surgery to revive this work. I’m pleased now with the result.

A further note: I went to edit the photos of the aforementioned grotesque painting, the first version that I hated and the new and improved version, and was shocked to see my hatred for the first had lessened and that the extra hours of work achieved minimal results. I’m intrigued by this whole short story. I birthed a painting that I hated, sunk into despair, revived myself by pressing forward to redeem the work, and finally found that I don’t really hate the original after all! I currently have the revised painting hanging above my sink as it dries. It inspired another painting with its shiny glass reflections. I’m thankful for the struggle that is a good sign of being on the path to artistic meaning.

This painting was all about values.

Looking at the scene from my seat in the kitchen, it took a lot of careful inspection to understand the value relationships between the foreground (anything inside the kitchen) and the background (anything outside through the window).

My first insight came from adjusting my perspective by moving the leaves with a highlight on them into the same field of vision as the very bright white roof frame in the background. It’s easy to see it here in this painting, but seeing it from life is trickier… To my surprise, they were the same value! This brightest value was the first to be mixed and from there I progressively mixed darker and darker for the outside scene, then moved inside where all of the values are darker than any through the window (aside from highlights)

The first brush strokes to go down were the bright green leaves where I wanted to preserve that intensity. I put down nearly the whole plant and left a good amount of my underpainting sketch behind. This wasn’t intentional… It was simply intuitive! I noticed the underpainting showing through after I had finished and was taking a closer look. I’m taking this as another sign that my daily practice is really adding up to improved skills.

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My favorite part of this painting is not how it came out… Although I am VERY pleased with that part. In order, here’s what rings the most:

1) I painted it with Sarah. It’s such a gift to have her as a friend. We had a deep conversation about our lives and I can’t remember most of what we talked about (I do remember returning to the idea “compare yourself to who you used to be, not to other people”) but I know it made me feel at peace. Thank you Sarah for being such a good listener, a vulnerable storyteller, and just a good person. I really love and respect and admire you and the way you live your life.

2) I made the most of a rainy gloomy day. This painting was a beautiful spot in a gloomy day and it’s immortalized now! That’s the gift of painting. You can preserve beautiful moments that lifted your spirits.

3) Okay, here’s the point about how the painting came out. I’ve always wanted to do a window painting and capture that light coming through. It worked! It’s working! And it wasn’t a (very) torturous process! (Sarah can tell you how much I agonized over getting the lines straight on the window sill and house in the background). I’m so pleased to continue to see progress and depth in my paintings as I continue this practice.

I am OUT of white paint. I scraped the tube for this painting and I had to seriously conserve. It worked out to not use an underpainting and reserve the bare white canvas for the focal point highlight on the spoon.

Conserving paint put me in a fun state of mind where I worked carefully to put down intentional brushstrokes of JUST as much paint as was needed to cover the surface. I also used a lot of medium in this one because I needed to stretch the paint. It was a lot of fun.

My inspiration for this painting came from this one I have up in my kitchen from a few weeks ago. Up close, it’s fairly abstract, but from far away, the spoon and grapefruit slices are crystal clear. I love it. There are distinct shapes of color that fit into each other just right to provide an illusion of light and depth from afar, and action up close. Yes please. More of this.

This painting has the same effect. I view it from across the room and I see a very smooth spoon. Up close it’s clear that there are only a few distinct shapes of varying hue and value that work their magic.

I am getting MUCH faster at putting down value and form. It’s working. I feel a drive in me to WORK BIGGER!

Good thing I will be starting some mural work again soon and that will be my daily painting work when it’s what consumes the bulk of my day. I plan to post progress 🙂

Ahhh. Fruit with a strong light from the side.

Once again, I am highly satisfied with this setup.

I am working on being precise with my brush strokes and am pleased to see the light coming through loud and clear on this one with minimal pre-mixing on my palette. It seems I am still improving!

Painting strong shadows like this is really fun… I might go for more in this style soon.

The composition here feels strong but YET again I have placed my intended focal point (the center of the lowest strawberry slice) in the center line of the painting. I don’t even notice this until I’ve finished! It works nonetheless… But I want to be more intentional about my focal points moving forward.

In honor of the beautiful bouquet Ryan had waiting for me when I got home from a week away, I am still painting it.

This is painting 4/4 from the bouquet and I see them getting progressively more interesting and beautiful to look at… As well as faster to paint! This one took about an hour and forty-five minutes to set up, mix paints, paint, and tear down. Not bad!

I wanted to focus again on creating a harmonious background with my subject. I sketched the subject out first, then mixed paints as I went since the palette for this one was so easy, nearly monochromatic.

It was fun on this one to block in the shapes and values loosely with paint mixed with spirits and medium. It helped to create a nice base to work off of and I think left some feelings of spontaneous brushwork behind. Very nice. That’s what I’m going for!

The composition was also in my mind and I think having the center of these flowers in the bottom right rule of thirds is working wonders.

Finally, I finished up by muting the saturated pink background down. This helped bring a little green in to contrast with the red flower and lessen the competition.

It seems the principles of value, color, edges, composition, and form are ENDLESS to play with. Will I ever feel I understand them well enough to paint on big huge beautiful canvases? Maybe! Until then, I keep working on these smaller surfaces and enjoying the expediency and ritual. Ahhh.

What a couple of weeks. I’ve not found much time for posting… Thankfully I’ve still found a little time for painting and have a few backlogged paintings that will be fun to share in time!

Today, I am finding the space to post and it’s an exciting one.

I took extra care on composition, placing the CENTER of the flower on a rule of thirds, and the exit point of the V created from the center on another point of thirds. In my humble opinion, it worked.

I also worked with a different underpainting than I’m used to with this nice bright blue. It’s a leftover panel from a mural project I competed with elementary schoolers last week. Feels great to be using old supplies and trying new things!

This is one of three paintings I’ve made from a bouquet Ryan got for me to have waiting when I returned a week ago from my residency. I love that I will get to look at the bouquet’s beauty for years to come now 🙂

NOTES:

I feel like I have so much to learn still. I want to get stronger with my use of values, smarter in organizing my palette, and find more intuition in my compositions. I think it’s working… But wow. What a great adventure I see ahead.

Sarah and I picked up some beautiful springy daffodils to paint together and they have been the gift that keeps on giving!I can’t get enough. They are such a challenge to do right. I’m not used to the color palette so I’m slowly learning how to handle bright yellows.

It’s fun painting with friends. Having Sarah by my side for the first two of these paintings it made the experiences more meaningful. We took our time picking the right angles for our paintings and we painted quickly when we got down to it.

Thank you Sarah for painting with me and listening to me sing and cry! I love that we are friends and I love you 🙂

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On painting daffodils:

This color palette. Whew! I am not used to it and it’s been throwing me for a loop… Here’s what’s going down.

Trying to find a background color that works with the flowers has been the biggest challenge so far. Everything behind them looks like a steely grey when I’m looking at the flowers but putting that color down just does not resonate. I think I’ve found a happy place on painting number three by intentionally adding in a lot of red. Strange! That’s not what I’m seeing but it looks nice on the canvas so that’s what it needs to be!

I’m also learning a lot about mixing the dark, dull yellows. Yellow likes to lighten whatever you mix it with so I’m having to start nice and dark with my red/blue mixture to get the look I’m going for.

I’m intrigued by the shade of green on the stems and am still working on getting it just right. It seems to be coming out too saturated and then a little too blue. I think I need to continue to work on dulling it down.

There are so many very saturated yellows and oranges and SO many greys. These are fairly simple as far as the colors involved… green and yellow… but putting them down to create a sense of space. Wow. I am at my edge trying to figure it out and I’m thankful for that!

All three of these paintings have been done with a dramatic side light. Perhaps the one tomorrow I will try with less intense lighting and see what happens.

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For the sake of satisfying my curiosity, I ended the background in photoshop on my least favorite of these three. I was pretty confident the background was the issue and I’m still not sure… But it’s interesting to see the changes and wonder what works best.

Dramatic lighting! YES!

I spent a good chunk of my time on this painting getting the setup JUST right.

Something about the light glowing through this piece of fruit lights me up too. I am proud of my progress as a painter. I was able to capture the glow with a reasonable, sustainable amount of effort today.

This painting of my half of the grapefruit that Ryan and I split took about 40 minutes from start to finish, this includes mixing paints!

Ahhh. Late night painting. How did I get here again exactly? let me tell you: I didn’t paint on the multiple occasions I thought about it during the day and kept thinking: “I have time!” While I did in fact have time, I still ended up working much later than I prefer.

I started around 10:30pm and the time crunch to finish before I was running on tired fumes led me to a smaller canvas, 4”x4”, and a simplified subject. I planned to work quickly and was thankful to have a palette ready to go from the night before that was PERFECT for these dried yucca seed pods.

Unrelated to the timeframe, also sought inspiration before starting this painting. A Google search for daily oil painting led me to a listicle blog article from learntopaintpodcast.com where I encountered another post about an artist, Sarah Sedwick.

Her work is AMAZING!! Check it out at the button below

I chose dramatic lighting to match her style with nice long shadows and bright highlights. The creamy, warm palettes she chooses suits my taste and I sunk my metaphoric brush teeth in.

This little 4”x4” still life was created with meticulous attention to detail and with a much smaller, looser brush than I usually gravitate towards. I enjoyed the control it gave me over cutting into the paint that was already on the canvas and in creating clean edges. I would do it again.

Today I was reminded to take care in lighting my subject, to choose a looser, smaller brush for details that must be experienced, and to continue to look at other artists’ work for inspiration. I’m grateful for this painting.