Simple gifts

detail of a work-in-progress:

Well, the paint tubes are almost finished ... just have one more to go. I was thinking today how much I like the way the tubes are arranged. If I had made a conscious decision to a still life with paint tubes, I could have messed with arranging the tubes for an hour and not come up with an arrangement I like as well as this, which is how they were when I walked in the room yesterday and found this ready-made Still Life with Cat already set up and just waiting for me. I love little surprises like that.

Like happening in on Sophie this afternoon napping in our bed with Vermeer-like light coming in softly at the window.

Or this black-and-yellow butterfly that just happened to flit over a container of pansies on the front porch and hover over a pansy of the same color scheme just as I HAPPENED to be walking across the front patio WITH my camera in my hands, already turned on with the auto-focus engaged.

Hallelujah!

Work in progress, plus goofball Ray

Dreaming in Color II WORK IN PROGRESS

On any given morning it may happen that I go up to my office/studio already knowing in my head what I’m going to work on, only to be greeted by some cuteness that’s just BEGGING to be painted. Such was the case this morning as I entered the room and found Ray bathed in morning light, napping on my desk among paint tubes, with his head propped on my ultra-colorful Laurel Burch dog mug that I keep my palette knives in. It goes without saying that this was a painting just waiting to happen.

I didn’t quite get it finished today ... I still have to add all the paint tubes ... but here are the work-in-progress photos so far:

And here’s Ray, on the floor beside my easel, watching me work:

What a goofball!

Not quite sunflowers ...

Well, there were quite a LOT of sunflowers on our little road trip today, but hardly any were in bloom yet, so the plan is to go back in a week or so and get sunflower pics. We had fun anyway, and got a lot of good photos ...

... of a country road ...

... or two ...

... with some soybeans and corn ...

... some more soybeans ...

... an abandoned farm building ...

... the levee road ...

... the lovely little town of Belcher, Louisiana 

(I know, I know, it’s a funny name) ...

... but very pretty, nonetheless ...

... with some historical buildings, including this,

the First Presbyterian Church of Belcher 

(ok, stop snickering every time I say Belcher) ...

... and a beautiful little garden of ...

... umm ...

... whatever these are ...

... and something you don’t see every day,

a red barn with bright yellow doors.

After we left Belcher (I said, don’t laugh!), on our way back home ...

... we stopped at this field fairly brimming with thistle.

I wish I had taken our video camera with me ...

... so I could show all the little fluffy thistle feathers

(or whatever you call them) that were floating on the breeze

the whole time we were walking around taking photos here.

All in all, a fun outing.

Tomorrow ... back to the easel!

Sunflower Safari

Poppy Garden © Karen Mathison Schmidt
5 x 7 • oil on 1/8" Gessobord
gloss varnish for UV protection and easy cleaning

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Auction ends June 5

Poppies! I love how their stems are so skinny it seems they couldn’t possibly be strong enough to support such lusciously full blooms. They’re just happy little sidewalk heralds announcing to passersby that summer’s right around the corner. I love ’em!

Tomorrow I’m going sunflower hunting in Gilliam, Louisiana, with my friend Sandra and her sister. Gilliam’s Sunflower Festival is going to be on Saturday, so we’re hoping we’ll find lots of sunflowers to photograph tomorrow. When we went last year we drove around and couldn’t find ANY! Finally we stopped and asked someone, “Where are all the sunflowers?”

“Right over there,” he answered, pointing to a smallish patch of sunflowers down the road in front of the local granary.

“That’s all?” we asked.

“Pretty much.”

So we got back in the car, laughing, scooted down the road to said sunflower patch and spent a leisurely hour or so taking a couple hundred pics of this one little crowd of sunflowers. It was pretty fun, anyway, but we’re hoping tomorrow’s trek will take us to acres and acres of sunflowers.

Although, seeing as how there’s a lot more money in corn than sunflowers these days, I expect we’ll find only a few sunflowers tucked in here and there amongst acres and acres of corn.

We’ll see!

Original Morning Light art for published illustrationnow available for purchase

Morning Light © 2009 Karen Mathison Schmidt
16 x 20 • acrylic on 3/4" cradled Gessobord
sides painted dark umber
can be beautifully displayed with or without a frame
gloss varnish for UV protection and easy cleaning

$1,250

Click here to purchase from my eBay store.

I’m happy to say I was selected to be one of several contributing artists in a book on painting techniques by UK author/artist Gill Barron. Several of my finished paintings are used as illustrations; I’ve decided to make my ORIGINAL “Morning Light” still life/interior painting, which is one of two multi-page step-by-step projects I have in the book, available for purchase in my eBay store.

The step-by-step demo for this painting, along with a full-page image of the finished piece, appear in the book, entitled Acrylic Secrets: 300 Tips and Techniques for Painting the Easy Way, distributed by Reader’s Digest world-wide. You can find a link to the book on Amazon in the sidebar to the right.

Stealth Cows

What’s Your Beef? © 2011 Karen Mathison Schmidt
6 x 6 inches • oil on 1/8" Gessobord
gloss varnish for UV protection and easy cleaning

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Auction ends June 5

The difference between horses and cows is: when you walk toward them with the camera, horses walk toward you, thinking “Hey, this creature might have a carrot or an apple or something else crunchy and yummy in her pocket.” When you walk toward the cows, however, they think ... well, think is a pretty strong word, so ... well ... who knows what they’re “thinking” but they invariably turn and trot in the opposite direction.

Twice in the past few weeks this has happened to me: I’ll walk out on the front porch and see that the pasture is chock full o’ cows (and I’m talkin’ a BUNCH of cows), all pastoral and picturesque-like, so I quietly run back in the house to fetch my camera, which takes me maybe a minute and ten seconds, tops. I get back out to the yard only to find the pasture udderly (pun TOTALLY intended) devoid of bovine presence. Completely cowless:

Who knew cows could evacuate so fast? All this to say that it’s mighty difficult to get a close-up reference shot of a cow without a pretty powerful zoom lens, and even then you have to kind of sneak up on ’em. That’s what I had to do to get this reference photo. Today when I looked out the window and saw them, before they suspected a thing, I walked out into the yard very quietly, focused my camera on these two grazing out in the pasture, and called out, “hey, you cows!” Not a very imaginative phrase to call out, I know, but it did the trick. They looked up, I snapped the photo, they stared at me for about 8 more seconds, then turned and trotted off in the opposite direction and in less than a minute were nowhere to be seen.

I really like the chunkiness of cows when I’m painting them. And their heads are kind of lumpy looking. And have you ever noticed how big their ears are compared to their heads? I wanted to keep this painting loose and chunky, like the cows.

Here are the work-in-progress photos, starting with a red underpainting:

At this point, the mouths were completely wrong (I think because I’ve been doing so many cat paintings lately ... they looked like cat mouths!) so I decided to wipe them and start over.

They were much more cow-esque the second time around!

Lesson one: Impressionism means impressionism.Lesson two: Embrace the wildness!

Evening Reflections © 2011 Karen Mathison Schmidt
11 x 14 x 3/4 inches • oil on 3/4" cradled Gessobord
gloss varnish for UV protection • sides painted dark umber
can be beautifully displayed with or without a frame

CLICK HERE TO BID
Auction ends June 4

I hope everyone had a wonderful and safe Memorial Day holiday yesterday. We had a quiet time around the house, and so I had a good, long stretch of time at the easel. Wonderful!

I don’t know if it was the leisurely big breakfast, or maybe the four-plus cups of coffee, but I managed to finish this one (which I had already made a start on) and another little one of the pear tree yesterday.

This painting is a late spring, just-before-sunset landscape painting of the pond just down the road from us. I used a painting knife on the foreground grasses, and brushwork on the tree and sky ... lots of color layers and fun texture ... and somewhat different from the way I started out to make this painting!

Here were the work-in-progress photos as of the beginning of yesterday’s work:

First, the acrylic underpainting, consisting of the initial sketch in indigo, and glazes of color in the different areas. Then, more glazes: yellow in the sky, red and fuschia over the horizon trees and their reflection, and the foreground grasses:

Now I started adding the oil colors, starting with the sky and its reflection:

I kept adding oil colors; what I didn't realize at this point was I was getting far too attached to my initial sketch, not allowing for any spontaneity at all ...

... so by the time I ended up with this, at the end of the day ...

... I did not like the way it was turning out AT ALL! As a result, I was in kind of a grumpy mood at dinner time. I said, “Well, it’s over. I’m a TERRIBLE artist. I’m going to have to figure out something ELSE to do.” At which point Paul just started laughing, and kidded me out of my crummy mood.

So the next day before I sat down at the easel, I took two of my art books, which I often use to get “unstuck,” off the shelf: California Impressionism by William H. Gerdts and Will South, and Painting the Impressionist Landscape by Lois Griffel. I browsed through these for about half an hour while I finished my morning coffee, studying the paintings in detail and coming to the realization that I had been trying to be too controlling in my approach, instead of balancing that control with some spontaneity, a MUST when trying to capture the untamed wildness of the landscape around here.

I don’t have any work-in-progress photos from today, because once I picked up the painting knife I just went to work and got lost in the process. I did stop once for a lunch break, at which time I studied what I had done so far and made a few changes in my head. Paul always laughs at me when I do this ... just staring trance-like at the painting propped up on the mantle while munching on my sandwich. Then after we finished our lunch I couldn’t wait to get right back to it until I finished an hour or so later. It was kind of funny, a whirlwind of painting right there at the end, and then, quite suddenly, I stopped and looked at the painting, put my knives and brushes down, wiped my hands, threw my arms up in the air like a rodeo contestant just finishing up roping a calf, and said aloud: "DONE!”

Which made me laugh.

Then, because I wasn’t quite ready to stop for the day ... those creative juices were still flowing ... I did another little one, of a couple of ripe pears on the pear tree out back (no, it’s not quite harvest time; I used a reference photo of last year’s pears.)

Anyway, my two lessons that I already knew but were reinforced during the execution of this painting are:

1) The root word of impressionism is impression. Keep it LOOSE! Let the viewer’s brain complete the work of seeing.

2) Especially when it comes to attempting to depict the rural landscape of Louisiana, don't try to tame the untameable (we already get enough of that trying to keep our yard in shape)!

Oh, by the way, below is a photo of the actual scene of this painting. As you can see, although we do have plenty of irises growing wild around here, there are no waterside lilies beside this pond in real life; those just sort of appeared during the painting process, like a little gift, and I went with it.

Now who would want to tame this?