Winner: Artist's Choice

This last weekend at the Women of the West Show my painting "Bending Water" was honored as the Artist's Choice Winner. Yippee!
It is always nice to win an award, any award, but I would have to say - this is the one I most covet because it is determined in a vote by the other artists in the show. And of my works in this show - this one was the last I would have selected to win. You just never know.
Thank You to the other artists. It was a good opening and a lively night in Boulder. Thanks too, to Ron and Ann Wilcock's who put the show together at Earthwood Gallery on the Pearl street Mall in Boulder.
As to the award itself- I am sure other artists have different criteria for how they select their Artist's Choice but when I make my vote,  it is for the painting in the show that I most wish I had painted.

Women of the West 2012

Tomorrow night, Friday, September 7th, I will be in Boulder, Colorado at the opening of Women of the West 2012, featuring work of the women represented by Earthwood Gallery in Boulder.
Join us for food and art at Earthwood Gallery on the beautiful Pearl Street Mall, just a short drive from the Denver metro area.

This show comes right on the heels of a week of painting in Rocky Mountain National Park that culminated in the Western Light show that opened on Friday, August 24 in Estes Park and will hang through October.
Paintings hung in these two shows represent my very best work from this last Spring and Summer.

Highlight of the Week!

All Spring we, Sue McCullough, David Montgomery and myself, have been talking about hiking in the high county during out time in Estes. Our show, Western Light 2012, opened the night before, so with most responsibilities behind us we headed up to Loch Vale, a high country destination about 3 and 1/2 miles in from the Bear Lake trail head. Dawn Normali, friend and fellow painter joined our merry band and we headed UP from the trail head at 9,475' to 10,465' - where you see us in the photo above. I am not sure where Dave found the air to play that flute.

What's a Painter to do?

I am all for documenting what's in front of you but find very little to inspire in layers of grey atmosphere. With such smokey air quality in the whole area we found ourselves looking for short views and more intimate scenes - like: canyon waterfalls, small streams, tree groupings, and the lily pond below- complete with koi.

We went out Moraine Park (part of RMNP) one morning  and I painted this aspen group. On another day in that same area we spent time spying on a huge herd of Elk not 20 feet from us. They did not seem bothered by the air quality but it sure put a damper on my inspiration.

Copeland Falls was another kind of "short view" and we perched our easels on a big flat rock and painted the upper cascade. David Montgomery's painting and easel are there on the left. Sue McCullough had already closed her box and put her piece safely away, and my unfinished piece is on the left.

Are We Even on the Same Planet?

The time painting out in Estes Park this year was, - I hope, unusual. These 3 photos were all taken at very nearly the same location, early in the morning, high in Rocky Mountain National. The top 2 are from years past and the bottom one is the view that met us on our first morning out. The area around Sprague Lake was almost unrecognizable. Smoke from fires east of Colorado made for less than ideal painting conditions and I found myself looking for more intimate scenes like the trail that through the woods and around this huge Ponderosa Pine.

'12 Western Light Show, Estes Park, CO

August has just flown. I was in Nebraska last week, Frasier Colorado before that, Westcliffe Colorado before that and painting out morning and evenings with my class all of July and August. It never feels like enough, tho'. All the places, all the paintings that get stacked in the studio for future fiddling - sometime between gigs. . .
Speaking of,
Sunday, Sue McCullough and I will head up to Estes Park, CO to paint for a week as a lead up to the 2012 Western Light Invitational Fine Art show.  YIPPEE!!  This is a highlight of the summer plein air season and we spend most of the week painting our way around Rocky Mountain National Park!
The '12 Western Light show will open on Friday night August, 24th, 6-9 pm at Earthwood Collections in Estes Park, CO.  If you are in the Denver area, it will be worth a drive up to the mountains and beautiful Estes Park for the evening.
The show will feature the best work of western artists from Colorado, California, Arizona; a perfect hurrah for the end of summer.
These 2 pieces if mine will be part of the group of pieces that I will have in the show.

Class Notes: Plein Air in the Hood

My plein air classes wrapped this last Thursday; at least until September.
We parked ourselves in a lovely grassy spot behind the  local Safeway and found more than enough that was interesting and paintable.
The Adams State University campus is only a block a way, charming houses poke in and out of trees and flower gardens are blooming. This is the time to be painting neighborhoods, when trees are leafed out and serve to frame shapes and create compositional ideas.
Painting ideas are everywhere: a row of trees that frame a dappled
sidewalk, flowers against a fence, - my personal favorite is
trash cans waiting for pick-up.
The motto is: simplify, simplify, simplify.
Focus on a
simple scene,
simple shapes,
and simple brushwork.
Then ask the really hard question: What is this painting about?

Choose one idea and stick to it. Look for large shapes of light and dark and create a composition/sketch where you can figure out ways to connect those lights and darks like you are putting a puzzle together.

Class Notes: Painting The Evening

We are into the summer "monsoon" season which brings afternoon and evening rains to Colorado. This can be trouble for evening painters but if you are patient sometimes the sky will break apart with amazing late light effects.
On this Tuesday night our class met north of town, in what used to be a dairy. This spot has given me great long view paintings of Mt. Blanca and in the other direction, flaming sunsets over the San Juans.

One thing we have observed about early evening painting tho',  the sun seems to linger high in the sky - so it can be difficult to anticipate just WHAT the light will do as the sun sets and where the best scenes will be. We stare into the sun, block in landscape shapes, it feels hot like high noon, then bam - the sun drops suddenly, daylight vanishes and you are caught trying to frantically capture the most fleeting light.
This evening was just like that. Rain had come and gone all afternoon and clouds flew around the sky. Here Lara and Judith struggle with glaring afternoon sun while trying to make decisions about how to proceed. 

Richard and I set up looking west to the horizon where a bank of clouds sat blocking any sky.  It was a gamble but I was just betting that the sky would break apart, lighting up the clouds for a nice sunset - and it did.  As it turned out tho'- the best stuff was going on in other parts of the sky: rich alpen glo on Mt. Blanca, virgas that looked like fire falling from the clouds and distant thunder heads catching light from a sun long set. It was one of the most beautiful evenings - ever-
an unfolding drama that just got better and better. Painting aside, I was thrilled just to be out to enjoy it.
On the bottom is my piece from the evening.

Class Notes: Painting out in Alamosa

At this time of year, all of my classes go outside to paint en plein air. Not because these dedicated students aspire to plein air genius- but because painting "from life"- should be part of the painters vocabulary; and it's the best way to learn.

Last week our Tuesday night class had just hit the street downtown when the clouds began to throw lightning every which way; a portent of the massive storm activity and drenching rain to come.  I took this one photo of the pub before abandoning the field.


The Thursday class had better weather and we gathered on the shady side of a downtown building for vistas across the street to the County courthouse, a choice of churches with trees and blooming hollyhocks and views of business people, mostly lawyers,  heading to court. We also got a visit from local law enforcement.  I guess the sight of 5 painters on the street looked a little threatening.
Here Judith takes an alternative to painting with a small sketch using water-based crayon-style colors.

 Saturday we met in a local park by the Rio Grande River in Alamosa and above Lara sketches the view of a shaded walkway down a long avenue of cottonwoods. The painting here is my view from the park- looking toward Mt. Blanca.
For students who have only painted with me during the studio season, the idea of dragging it all outside is a little daunting -
but I hope to encourage the idea that "painting from life" - whether in doors or out, is the norm, not the exception. We go out because "real life" resides in the landscape- not in photos.
And, I have yet to hear a student say " I am sorry, I went outside to paint today."

Class Notes: Why Plein air?

The last couple of years have seen a big explosion of the "plein air" phenomenon. Everybody's doing it!  And to stay in step, or to keep up with the trend, some are - that shouldn't and many should that aren't.
So what's it about?
If you aren't familiar with the term- it simply means to paint out doors/on site.
As a kid, painting and drawing at the back yard picnic table, it would not have occurred to me to do anything else but try to make images based on what I could see. In college, the best classes sent student artists tramping into forest and field, to the docks or downtown to make the best of what was in front of them. The lessons of direct observation were hammered out back in studios, but it all started with learning to see.
Whether painting en plein air (outdoors), from a live model, or from a still life set up in front of you, direct observation reveals things that cannot be seen or gained from photography or taught by any other means.
This was the whole idea that drove the Impressionists into the landscape, seeing from LIFE. That particular group of painters called Impressionists, did work defined by Webster's as a "style of late 19th-century, characterized by short brush strokes of bright colors".
Whoa! That is a pretty terse definition for a group of artists who were actually less technique driven but gave us the philosophical ideas about artists - that today, we take for granted.  The Impressionist ideas of artistic freedom - not defined by politics or fashion, propelled art and artists into the Modern age. But I digress. . . .
They were impelled by the need to SEE, not rely on the formulas of the past that had long since parted ways from anything having to do with direct observation.
Recently, I participated in an outdoor quick draw and met a local artist doing the event because they felt they SHOULD- for self promotion. What a shame. And YES- that artist SHOULD have been painting outside - more because their studio work lacked freshness or the breadth of light and color variation that comes form outdoor observation.  For this artist, it was all about getting on the "plein air" band wagon, instead of using landscape observation to improve the studio work.  Maybe we all do that sometimes; we hitch our wagon to a current trend.

So the question I ask myself is: Why PLEIN AIR?  If for its own sake - we are just a bunch of painters, taking studio formulas and standing in the landscape.
There IS a real benefit to going out doors. I don't want to forget that next time I am scrambling to get my name in print or jockeying for position with a group of painters lined up for a event photo.


This plein air piece done in the Rockies last year, sold out of my studio this week - that's a good thing - but I had planned to enter it into a gallery show this August. Hmmmm. . .
So, my intention is to recreate it in the studio, from the sketch.
The challenge here is to resist the desire to "fix" things but make it true to the original in freshness and life;  that may prove harder than it seems.
. . . and ps. it will not be billed as a plein air painting. That fact to me is incidental but I will try to capture that plein air vigor.