Again and Again

When I began art making in in 2006, I entertained a short period of thinking each rendering had to be of a different subject.  But I quickly realized how silly that was, having had some exposure to art history in college.  Didn’t Monet do a lot of haystacks?  And lilies?

And how about Degas with his ballerinas?  Winslow Homer at sea?  Not to mention (but I will) Georgia O’Keeffe with her massive flowers and striking New Mexico scenes.  Not that I am placing myself on a level with the above, but rather to simply say it is good to paint favorite subjects again and again.  Each work will differ from its predecessor, and there is infinite variety possible via palette, season, details, mood, and the list goes on.  Again and again.

I like to do waterfalls, ships in peril (I don’t want to BE on one, just to paint it), trees waving in the wind, adobe structures, gardens, bowls of fruit—and pots, pitchers, bottles, and jars often in the setting of a windowsill.  There is something about the bones of structure, even in the evanescent ideas I like to present.

At the top of the page you see what is one of my very first attempts at watercolor.  In a book, I’d found a repro of a painting by Fine Artist Jeanne Dobie, where she portrayed bottles in a window not by painting the bottles themselves but rather through showing the liquid color contents of the bottles surrounded by white paper representing light.  Pretty leaky bottles (mine—Jeanne’s were stunning).  But that was 2006 and it was what it was.

The next one down is a quick colored pencil sketch through the window of a rented condo in Santa Fe NM, where we spent a wonderful Easter week with our son, Karl, and his family in 2008.  The NM scene is followed by three more window bits with stuff in the windows, then followed by an albeit primitive and super child-like rendering of Milwaukee’s South Side as viewed through a lobby window at St Luke’s Hospital where my husband was undergoing cardiac care.  That painting, as odd as it is, is close to my heart because of the stressful time it represents in our family.  Painting IS therapeutic!

The domes of Milwaukee’s South Side, historically Polish and Serbian, are followed by a 2013 window scene—getting just a little bit more presentable.  Then comes a 2016 scene which I like a lot.  The print doesn’t do the painting justice, as in real life the colors and shine are noteworthy—and so is the real life size, which is 20″ x 24″.  I like wet, blurry effect, which was achieved with Gum Arabic.  (I tend to get that name mixed up with what I put in my gluten-free baking:  Xanthum Gum.  I hope I don’t get the gums mixed up in the cookies!))

One more of blurry bottles.  I like the frayed and fringy effect in the yellow/purple on the right side—produced by wet color introduced alongside another, slightly drying paint.  This works best on wet paper, and I love it even though it drives some watercolorists crazy.

And finally, the 12″ x 16″ pictured below is my very latest studio creation.  The wood on the window was textured by dropping Winsor & Newton Texture Medium onto the wet paint with a pipette or medicine dropper—one more tool of the trade available with acrylic ink bottles, or from your local pharmacist.

Since I will probably go on doing window scenes, along with Peril at Sea, etc., I am covering the latest in this series with one name, “Dans la Fenêtre”—because I am besotted with the FRENCH LANGUAGE (in which my proficiency is nearly zero on a scale from one to ten.  🙂

Margaret L. Been — March 18, 2018

Read Full Post »

Mystery Solved!

In the last post, I shared the bottle painting—initially thought to be a failure but then, after a water bath, not so bad after all.  I had attributed the shiny reflection to that desperate act of dousing the work with water.

After much deliberation and messing about at my art table, it dawned on me:  It was not the water bath that added to the shine.  In that painting I’d used a substance called Gum Arabic which is known to add ease of flow, and shine when applied to with paint.  How exciting to have an “art epiphany”!  Now I can “shine” whenever the mood hits.

Determined to make more bottles with shiny reflections, I did the below encore on smaller paper to be framed at 11″ x14″:

After framing these bottles and hanging the painting near the aforementioned big one, I kept looking at the smaller painting and thinking BORING!  It was too “ploomp, ploomp, ploomp”, like those disgustingly trimmed and groomed evergreens planted around commercial buildings and clinics—or a battalion of hostas marching in a row, planted because someone had no concept of anything more wild, lovely, free, and imaginative to plant in the shade.

So I unframed the above and invested another half hour in messing about, arriving at the conclusion pictured below.  Now, I LIKE it!  It belongs on the wall with the 24″ x 20″ original—Gum Arabic and all.  Oh, so much better!

Margaret L. Been — May 10th, 2016

 NOTE:  Here is the wall.  After a few days of studying the paintings, I realized that the painted bottles were in sync with a shelf of real glass bottles in cobalt blue.

 

Read Full Post »

Digressing from Flowers

This painting, matted and framed to 24″ x 20″, is obviously too large to scan on my printer.  I would have to take it to Office Max or whatever, and I just don’t want to do that.  So instead, I propped it on the couch and photographed it (without the glass) with my I-pad, emailed it to myself, and violà.  Here it is.

The painting, “Dans la Fenêtre” (“In the Window”), has an arduous history in its making.  I’ve been working on creating reflections, shadows, and the look of a wet still life or landscape.  Here I set out to simply do some bottles and their reflections.

Unlike my normal mode, I carefully measured and sketched the window sill and the borders of the painting onto the Arches 140lb cold press art paper.  Then I folded pieces of typing/printer paper in half vertically and cut the bottles outward from the fold.  When the papers were opened, I had bottles with perfectly symmetrical sides—something like a Rorshach.  I lightly traced the bottles onto the window sill, thinking I would (for a change) paint something that actually looked like it was intended to be—in other words, make representational art.  🙂

Then I began negative painting, around the shapes rather than starting with the actual bottles I’d so carefully transferred onto the paper.  The negative painting (background) grew more and more atmospheric as the colors blended.  Next, I dropped quinacridone gold, shades of magenta and opera pink, and a touch of  French ultramarine into the bottles to reflect their setting.  These merged and did their own thing which was to create a rusty, well-worn appearance.  Meanwhile, the background had grown a bit muddy so I washed a film of white gouache over the negative painting and into the bottles as well.

Suddenly I realized this was about the ugliest painting I’d ever produced.  I was disgusted with myself for (what I thought was) having ruined a large paper.  The back side was also a mess from the paint overflow which had seeped in from the table.  What to do!!!???  By now it was 1:00 a.m. and I was exhausted.  I ran a few inches of water in the tub, thinking the piece was too gooey to put in the garbage with all that mucky paint on it.  A good rinse would make the disposal a neater operation.  Having rinsed, I left the paper to dry off while I slept.  Tomorrow (now “today”) I would throw it out.

In the morning, when I went to pick up my disaster, I was stun-gunned.  Whatever anyone else might think, I felt this was an amazingly wonderful accident.  I loved the painting.  Somehow the gunky look had been washed off, exposing the original colors that had been applied.  The rinsing created a shiny reflection, much like the mirror image of the bottles was sitting in water.  To complete what I now felt was a huge victory, I slightly dabbed outlines here and there on the bottles—to add a hint of structure.  What had started out as a very structured piece had become illusory* so the Inktense® Colored Ink, Water Soluble pencil lines simply propped the bottles up a bit.

Here is the framed painting on the wall.  The photo of the picture behind glass does not begin to do justice to the life, light, and shine in the piece.  I had to photograph it in the evening, because in the daylight the glass reflected and transferred everything on the opposite wall onto the image of the bottles.  It was borderline hilarious.

But you can get an idea.  I will try to achieve this effect again, although it is challenging—sometimes impossible—to reconstruct an accident!  At least I’ve discovered one more way to salvage a less than wonderful effort:  just float it and douse it with water.

Margaret L. Been —  April 24th, 2016

*Our “artist’s voice” will win out every time.  I simply AM NOT a representational painter, even when I measure and draw lines.  When displaying art at local venues, we are always given a form to fill out where (among other things) we are asked to list a category which best describes the art.  I always write, “ABSTRACT REALISM.”  Perhaps that sounds like an oxymoron, but I can’t think of a better term at the moment.  🙂

Read Full Post »

And more . . .

. . . of May.  April is delightful; I’m loving it.  But I can’t get May out of my paintbrushes which seem to be set on “Automatic Paint May“.

Here is “Coming up Lilacs“:

Don’t you just love the lilac colors?  We have French lilacs at every corner of our condo buildings, here in Nashotah Condo Heaven.  They bloom a bit later than common lilacs, and are not quite so euphorically fragrant.  But the Frenchies are beautiful and perform well in a marinara sauce jar (washed of course, but with its label intact) full of fresh water on the dining room table.

(Parenthetical Commentary:  Why are jars with their labels so much lovelier and infinitely more interesting as receptacles for flowers and dried weeds, than conventional vases?  There is simply no comparison, in my book.  If you haven’t bothered to save a nice big marinara jar, a huge pickle jar or a honey jar will also work—but I hope you don’t wash off those labels!  During nearly every supermarket trip I grieve the demise of glass jars and bottles which have knuckled under to (ugh) plastic.  Every bit of glass is PRECIOUS.  Olive oil bottles reside near the top of my food glassware list, because they are normally green and have such pretty labels!  Wine bottles are definitely the most gorgeous.  I ask folks to empty their wine bottles, and then pass them on to me—please, with labels.)

Back to May and the lilacs.  We do have common lilacs just a few yards away, in the park beyond our front door.  Every May I make frequent strolls to inhale the lilacs and journey back decades in time to my small-town-Wisconsin childhood home—a rambling Victorian with a commodious yard and guess what:  lots of ancient common lilacs.

In a week it will be May.  I wonder what my paintbrushes will do then!

Margaret L. Been — April 23, 2016

Read Full Post »

Incongruities

Now and then I realize that I need to practice drawing—as my skill in that area is challenged, to say the least.  I like to draw and sketch at bedtime, when I’m snuggled in for the night.  With water soluble ink pencils at hand, it’s a pleasant way to spend an evening before nodding off.

When drawing, I strive for the incongruous—and I don’t have to try too hard to achieve something a bit over the top, or offbeat, for two reasons:

1)  Incongruities appeal to my benignly rebellious nature—“benign” meaning that I’m not militant.  But we Longeneckers have never been big on conformity.

2)  Incongruities are about the best I can do!  So it figures that bottles can be as big as the furniture in my paintings, that a bird bath might wander indoors, and that cattails will grow in the carpet.  By the size of the bottle and glass, you might deduce that wine is huge in our lives, but actually we don’t do wine.  I simply like the bottles*.  My friends and relatives are ever reminded to save their empties for me—especially if a blue bottle is available.  And glasses go with the bottles, right?  🙂

The above happy (and sappy) domestic scene was made with water soluble ink pencils, watercolor paint, and my highly esteemed SHARPIE® markers with ultra-fine points.  I’m not certain that the rendering is worth matting, but I went ahead and matted it anyway.  It’s an ego thing.  I love my babies so much that I dress them up and show them off, regardless of their condition.

Margaret L. Been, ©2012

*Not only wine bottles grace our windows and shelves, but glass most anything bottles.  Suddenly it’s hard to find a glass bottle anymore.  I prowl the supermarket aisles, looking for glass.  Olive oil still comes in glass, and we do use a lot of that.  I save the glass SMUCKERS® jam and jelly jars.  They are sweet with little clusters of flowers in them.

I may have bought the very last glass MRS BUTTERWORTH® syrup bottles a few years back, and these treasures sparkle in a sunny window.  Soon the antique and second hand stores will be charging a proverbial arm and leg for that wonderful brown glass lady.

Read Full Post »