The Balmain Fairy

One day in a land far, far away, we were able to catch a glimpse of an exuberant fairy running down the path.  Luckily, a camera was a hand that day and later I was able to capture that elusive fairy in an oil portrait.

Composition is always tricky for me and deciding where to place the fairy on the canvas took a lot of deliberation.  Ultimately, I wanted to express the vibrancy of color, the joyous expression on her face and the immediacy of the fairy running towards the viewer.  Some viewers have commented that they feel like the fairy is about to leap off the canvas....and that is exactly the impression I wanted to make.

Doorway in Eze

"Doorway in Eze"

My husband and I both took photos of this doorway in Eze, France last year.  While my husband's photo  was a great shot focused on the upper door, I stepped back for a longer range view of the doors and steps.  (The two photos are included below.)  

The painting focal point is the upper door, but I was able to include a lot of greenery and lanterns by using the longer view.  First, I put in the darks of the two doors and the shadows under the roof tiles, then added the greenery loosely.  The stones in the foreground and background are all painted loosely, impressionistically without any formal definition of stones, but rather, just the lights and darks and textures of stones.  

As it turns out the sharpest details are on the pots, lanterns and doors, in order to move the viewer's eye around the painting.  

closeup of the doorway

longer view

Portrait of Jackie

A few months ago, I painted this portrait of my dear friend Jackie in honor of her 90th birthday.  Luckily, I had a wonderful photo to work from.

Adding a darker background gave the painting more dramatic contrast as well as darkening the shadows in the elegant blouse.  This was an emotional painting for me because the subject is not only a close friend, but a remarkable woman and I wanted to express her warm personality, wisdom and loving heart.  She is as beautiful on the inside as the outside and I hope I captured that.

Walking Tour of Balmain, New South Wales, Australia

Wherever I go, I am always looking for painting material and I thought I would share some of the scenery.  First, a little background on Balmain:

Birchgrove Park, Balmain
Behind Birchgrove Park with its iconic views of Sydney Harbor and the Harbor Bridge lies the peninsula of old Balmain.  Founded in the early 1800's,  Balmain was largely the home of the working class, including shipbuilders,  dockworkers and their families.  Many of the homes are tiny workman's cottages, Victorian terrace houses, Australian Federalist houses and occasionally grand homes overlooking the harbor and scenic parks.   By the 1920's, Balmain had a reputation as a tough working class community.  Today Balmain is one of the most desirable and affluent sections of Sydney's inner west suburbs.

Darling Street is the main shopping street of Balmain, running from the ferry terminal at the base of the peninsula in East Balmain to neighboring Rozelle to the west.  On weekdays, Darling Street is home to the locals taking their children to school, commuters flowing in and out of the city center of Sydney, and residents running errands to the green grocers, the butcher shop, the patisseries and the markets.  Coffee shops, cafes, restaurants and pubs line Darling Street, along with original boutiques and salons.  On weekends, daytrippers flood into Balmain to shop and eat.  Balmain is a thriving village and home to many young families and residents of all ages.

Stately homes in Balmain

 Riotous color cloaks the entrance of this Victorian terrace house...a delight for the senses.

waterfront in Balmain

Old workman's cottage with an updated entry and bold, dark fence.

A charming home with picket fence and flowering trees.

This cottage looks like something out of a fairy tale....and I wonder what it looks like inside.

Front entrance of an old sandstone workman's cottage.  I love the contemporary touches of color and the tall modern planters beside the door.  Most of the homes in Balmain have tiny front gardens like this with plantings ranging from an Asian inspired contemporary look with layers of evergreen plants and trees to exuberant flower gardens, bursting with color in trees, vines, roses and planters.

Wandering down this sidewalk in the fall, I loved the vine covered wall and the leaves piled on the sidewalk.  Then,  I came upon this doorway:

Of course, a garden door tucked into a brick wall should be painted red.  Love it!  This all brings me back to my interest in painting stone walls, brick walls, doorways, alley ways, garden entrances, arches, etc.  These small details bring the landscape down to a personal scale, so interesting to paint.

Plein Air at the Smith Gilbert Gardens, Kennesaw, GA

Last week I painted outdoors at a Plein Air event at the Smith Gilbert Gardens in Kennesaw, Georgia, my first plein air outing of the year. The weather was wonderful, the garden in full, glorious bloom and there were 30-35 plein air artists who spent two days painting together.

The other artists were great company, encouraging and inspiring at the same time.

At the Smith Gilbert Gardens, I completed three paintings with the above being the best of the group. The composition is simplified and yet the combination of cool and warm colors works together effectively.

Plein air painting forces you to edit the landscape mentally, deleting unnecessary elements to draw the eye to the focus of the painting and develop a good composition. Then there is the issue of light. Colors change with the changing light of day. Cool, crisp colors in the early morning light change under the brightest, direct light of midday and shadows become sharper and darker. I have so much to learn about plein air painting and look forward to every moment of it.

Christmas Painting

Every year I create a Christmas painting and every year, I think that particular painting will be the last one. Mainly, this is because of the pressure and stresses caused by procrastination, which I have honed to a fine art in itself. Luckily, new ideas keep emerging and as unlikely as it may seem, I already know what to paint in 2011. So, maybe I can actually get it painted before the very last minute!

Last year's painting featured our grandson, so this year's subject is our granddaughter. Working from a photo, I edited the scene to emphasize the girl, the tree, the blue and white pottery and the reflection on the top of the chest.

Plein Air in Georgia

Last year I started plein air painting and this painting of a slave cabin on St. Simons Island, Georgia was one of my first attempts. My artist friend Susie Burch, set me up with a list of all the outdoor artist's gear required and a list of all the accessories that actually are quite mandatory here in the South: bug spray, sun screen, a hat! and an umbrella to attach to your easel. To top it off, she invited me to our own paint-out on St. Simons Island for a week. Now that's a great introduction to plein air painting.

I painted this scene of a garden gate at the old Bulloch Hall Plantation here in Roswell in two mornings this past June. In looking back at these two paintings, I can see an improvement in some areas. The first St. Simons painting I like better because of the looseness of the brush strokes, plus I took the artistic liberty of making the roof color more terracotta which was a great contrast to the moss-covered oaks. Other than the palms and Spanish moss, you might mistake this for a charming English cottage. It's quite lovely now, but I imagine it was much more utilitarian during antebellum South. The old plantation house on St. Simons is gone now and all that's left on the grounds are majestic live oaks draped in moss and a few old slave cabins like this that are now maintained by a local garden club.

However, in the second scene, I'm even more pleased with capturing the light. This was done on a couple of sweltering mornings on the grounds of Bulloch Hall and looking back on the experience, I'm so glad to have caught the light on the tops of the trellis gate slats and on the tops of the posts. You can tell that I spent a lot of time (maybe too much time) getting the perspective right on the gate, fence and outbuilding. In retrospect, the lines are a bit rigid and I missed the loose quality of the earlier painting. On the other hand, I like the lightness of the leaves and the bark in the foreground tree. The bark has an almost fluid quality in the brush strokes. This plein air painting was done on a canvas toned with cadmium red, which unifies the painting and makes those greens pop.

Overall, I like both these paintings and remind myself that this is a process. Once you lather up with bug spray, swat the flies away, resign yourself to the heat, you lose yourself in the painting process. My wish for the New Year is to do more and more plein air painting in addition to the 5-6 studio paintings that are now residing in my head and begging to awake on the canvas.