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.

Update on Savannah's portrait

This portrait of Savannah is coming along pretty well now and you can see the details in the hat. Her face is nearly done, but I see some changes that need to be made. Nothing is harder for an artist than capturing the exact likeness and I could be tweaking this for weeks, but there are more paintings to do in the meantime.

Savannah in her Party Hat

Savannah in her Party Hat is in progress now---I have about 6 hours in so far and it's starting to come together. The original photo included my grandniece Savannah from the waist up, a lovely photo, but for this portrait I decided I wanted to focus on her face and cropped the photo as shown. After making that composition decision, I was very uneasy about it, even after sketching it on the canvas. In fact, I put off starting the painting for a week, just mulling it over. I don't like to start a painting feeling that kind of uncertainty about the composition. However, I decided that rather than scrapping it and going back to the half-figure photo, I would go ahead and do an under painting. As soon as the painting was washed in, I knew it would work.

The background is subtle and muted. The dress and hat pop with color and the expression on Savannah's face is what made me want to paint this one. For background on this one, several months ago I had a formal, dress-up tea party for my friends, niece and grandnieces (3!). As part of those festivities, we had a variety of hats, ribbons and fresh flowers so everyone could choose and decorate their own hat for the party. Each of the girls posed for pictures in their hats and I have in mind that a series of paintings is in order. This is the first in the "Girls in Hats" series.

In coming back to this painting, you will notice the shadows on the girl's face under the hat are not as dark as in the original photo. That's deliberate as I wanted to show more details in the eyes and upper face with color rather than contrast. My favorite art teacher Chris DiDomizio would always ask, "What is this painting about?" So this painting is not about contrast, about deep and light values, but rather it's about color and a lighter mood. After all, it's a party!

So, in the original photo, the contrast between light and dark was so great that you couldn't even see the shades of color or reflective light in her eyes. In the painting, that's visible. I also took the liberty of filling in a tooth that just exists as a budding tooth. After all, that tooth will grown in and better to have a complete set of teeth for posterity. I mean seriously, isn't that what we all want?

Another 4 hours and it will probably be done. I need to add more green to her face--yes, that's what makes flesh tones real. Her arms and hands need more color and definition. Her hair needs to be filled in, smoothed out and at the very end, I'll add some silken strands of hair floating at the edges. The hat will need more details, too, and I have no idea how I'm going to loosely replicate the weaving of the hat. After all, I don't want to spend too much time on details that draw the eye away from her face. I'll add more dimension to the flowers in the hat, too, with lights and darks, keeping the details very loose.

Sweet Savannah.

An Evolving Composition--Still Life with China, a Bird's Nest and Oranges

Sometimes I start a painting with a composition fully formed in my mind, only to discover through the process that my original idea wasn't working and modifications were needed. In this case, editing the composition was necessary to draw the view's eye into the painting without too many distractions.

The original idea was to create a simple still life with a blue bird and fruit. So, I gathered props from around the house, including blue and white porcelain, fruit and an arrangement of ferns, ivy and a bird's nest---some of my favorite decorative items. Then I set up several compostions with these props and photographed them. This way I had a variety of arrangements to consider and looked at each one with the plan to add a blue bird to the mix when I sketched the composition on canvas.

Then I ran into problems...artistically speaking, I don't like to copy another artist's work. Copying a great artist's work is a wonderful way to learn color, composition and techniques, but I want my own work to be as original as possible. Knowing that another artist in the Northwest uses a western bluebird as a signature motif in still life paintings, I didn't want to copy that. At first, I thought that using my own props and creating a more complex scene within the still life would be enough to overcome any similarities to another artist's work. However, as the work moved forward, I still wasn't happy with the overall scene. It seemed too busy for the space.

First I laid in an underpainting for the blue and white vase and then painted the design over that. Next, I painted the oranges and china leaving the bird's nest and greenery for last. I had originally planned to paint the bluebird standing on the edge of the nest, but as the painting evolved, I discovered that the composition felt complete as it stood. As in life, things don't always go as expected or planned.

To my eye, I'm drawn first to the brilliance and color of the oranges, then to the blue and white vase and finally to the bluebird eggs. Eggs are a promise of new life, new beginnings and hope for the future. So, I'm calling this one good.