NH PleinAir Exhibit

Here are two of the five pieces that I submitted for the NH PleinAire: On the Scene exhibit. The show will run from April 2-May 30 at the Pantano Gallery in the Shapiro Library Southern NH University, Manchester, NH. Aproximately 35 paintings will be on exhibit.
The sunflowers were painted at a farm stand in Harvard, MA and the other is Plum Island from the top of the observation tower (and boy, was it windy up there!)

Yellow mum

6x8 oil on canvas. The lights are mostly rubbed out with a brush or cloth. Only four more days until it's officially spring! Flowers are tricky- at least for me. The bottle was the easy part.

two charcoal studies

I drove over to Haverill this morning for a figure and still life set up with the Bradford Artists. The figure drawing is charcoal on 18x24 Rives' off white paper and the still life is charcoal on 8x10 MiTeints white pastel paper. It's so nice to get together with a group of artists and forget about the economy and real life in general for a couple of hours. Even with the frustration and difficulty of the work, it's very calming at the same time. Two artists commented that they were amused to see me going back and forth from one subject to another. One of them gave me a nickname: Speedy. Whenever the model took a break, I hurried over to the still life. When the model resumed his pose, I ran back to my easel. There was some wonderful work being done in this group, as usual.
After lunch I continued up the highway into Newburyport to see if the ice floes were floating down the river yet, but no luck. I hope I don't miss them again this year.

Stolen

This 6"x6" oil painting has been stolen from my exhibit at the Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Groton, MA. I know I'll never see it again but I thought I may as well alert my readers. I took my smaller works down, and another artist has removed all of her works. It's a shame that an incident such as this spoils the enjoyment for others.

apple

The main challenge here was to paint the part of the apple in shadow while retaining the round shape. I like this painting, but I would like more contrast in the apple. After the paint dries, I am going to try adding a green glaze on the shadow side. I did learn during this painting to add the complementary color instead of merely using a darker red to indicate the apple in shadow.

I used small swatches of color on paper to match to the actual objects and that was a huge help. It's a technique that I can use outdoors as well. A color isolator (i.e. a piece of cardboard with a 1.5" hole in it) is an aid that I need to start using regularly. Sometimes it can be tricky to decide what color something is when there is so much going on in the scene- especially the influence of other colors.

I read that while painting en plein air, Corot was in the habit of throwing a black cloth and another of white right on the ground before him and to do the same farther away. The cloths helped him to judge values.

onion

I painted an onion for my painting session with the Bradford artists but I wasn't happy with it so I started over at home. I like this one much better. I am about to begin two paintings of an apple: one using the grisaille technique and the other wet on wet painted onto a bright yellow background.