Watercolors_ to paint or not to paint

There are so many moments when I would just love to have nothing else to do but paint. Then there are plenty of moments when I have nothing else to do but I also don't have the slightest desire to do anything.

More often than not, life just gets in the way of having large chunks of time to spend uninterrupted making art. I wish I could arrange the time, and myself, so that I would know in advance that I have a minimum of four hours that will be just for me to set my butt down and feel like painting.

This is one of many reference photos that I have told myself I will do a painting from. I was walking with my friend taking our dogs out to the end of her field behind her house in Waitsfield. It was one of those rare days of perfection. The tree jumped out at me as if I were wearing 3D glasses. But it was the fence that convinced me to take the photo. I love old fences and without the fence this wasn't all that interesting an image to me. You agree?

2008 was a lousy year for trying to get outside to paint. Spring and Summer were non stop months of rain. I drove around with my supplies in my Jeep but never took them out. Mother nature decided to bless us with a glorious Fall and it lasted for a wonderfully long space of time. Seeing the beautiful, outrageous, colors is one thing. Painting them is another thing altogether. Sometimes it seems impossible that what I am seeing is real and if I painted what I am seeing somebody might want to have me locked up for being insane.

Those leaves have been replaced with snowflakes and that is another story.

Watercolors - Early Years

I thought it might be interesting to look at some early examples of works from the workshops I took. For reasons unknown to me I don't have the common fear of painting the sky. However, like many newbies I didn't have a clue how to paint the greens. Each one of these paintings has one color in it that does not exist in nature, Thalo green. This is a staining dye and must be combined with another color for it to be believable as a color in nature. For me this was lesson #1 and I have struggled with painting greens ever since.

In this painting I got very involved with the foreground and without thinking zapped those trees with thalo once again. I even managed to put thalo in the distant mountains!

This was painted before the other two examples. I did get the hang of mixing greens eventually. In this image I handled the tones/values correctly but my, oh my, look at those ugly green lollipop trees. I guess I was really impressed with the clay pot in the right foreground too. Not only does it stick out like a sore thumb it is also holding an impossible tree.





One other thing you should know about these staining dye paints, not only do they stain the paper, they will stain just about any porous surface/material. I have a friend who was not paying attention to the fact that her long necklace was dangling into her palette and when she stood up straight she ended up creating a permanent abstract painting across the chest of the pale yellow blouse she was wearing.