"Light Filled Forest" Exhibition began.

The wall is small but the space is lovely and the new work looks great.

Link to the exhibition space, Grand Art Supply here. Greg has a great supply of art supplies, and best prices too. Knows a lot, so you can ask intelligent questions and get intelligent answers rather than marketing in reply.

"Water Cycle" 23 x 9 inches.

During the reception an unexpected number of people, many established artists, were most interested in the piece I thought was most challenging; nonstandard composition – all were non standard format, and very unusual color and tone use. All the way around it was a painting done for me, that appears, again, to be connecting well to the patrons.

This is an interesting phenomenon, pushing edges and sometimes it works. And it often depends on how confined our thinking is; at a workshop a while back one student described a display piece as wrong because it was centering the focus in the center. She also said it was a great painting but that it was still wrong. Interesting, yes?

So "rules make bad paintings" came about from that point on and was talked about afterwards too since we had an optional afternoon session of plein air and there's no better place to work on our edges than plein air. It is a crush of opportunity, too much to work with, energy all around and decisiveness a must.

The student who couldn't compose fluidly also did not join the plein air portion of the workshop, interesting, yes? There is no safety or control out on site, at least not for ages and ages, until one is beating up all preconceptions and simply forced to try new ways through it all.

Here's the first day of working on "Water Cycle"

This is a lovely time of year to paint, spring, before things are sprouting and blooming and unfurling much. The mud colors and neutrals are excellent and one gets to use a new palette now not useful during the rest of the year. Browns and gray, touches of color and always the soft greens of lichen and moss running vertically up trees.

Things had begun their march to blossom. The spring beauties made a carpet and I learned to use them for their weather casting potential: they protect their pollen by turning down if it really is likely to rain and close. Today they were mostly turned down and mostly closed when I arrive on site, so no surprise to feel a mistiness begin that you can see here is tented, sheltered, sealed against. 

No avail, after twenty minutes it was clearly going to mist a long time and I packed up and left. 

This is the hazard of outdoor work—you sometimes need to contemplate things instead of rush to them. 

I want to comment on one of the grand inspirations in art, Robert Genn, who recently was given a deadline, read about it here: a marvelous spirit and worth an hour at his artist newsletter website (the link) and you may wish to also google him and see expanded info there.

"First Light", 3x18 inches, pastel and gouache.

Another long skinny from painting at the very formal Victorian garden in town, this one is probably sold, maybe sooner than later since I have two entities vying for it. What was fun with this painting is that blanched quality of light when it's so angular and bright and contrasts strongly with the equally angular shadows ... all with light touches of roses, bar berry and blue shadow colors.

And with this painting, there is a "going in and in" that people have described with some of my work. What I understand that to be is an effective illusion of space, detail, atmosphere.

"City Sanctuary", plein air pastel on dark Wallis sandpaper, 14 June 2009.

Painting the garden has been a combination of fun and extraordinary challenge. Verbalizing the difficulty with fellow painters has raised the issues involved and helped pinpoint them. The design is already done. There is a wild variety of shape/color/pattern issues that both limit artistic interpretation and force compliance of some sort for there to be a rendering at all. The color swaths also add a potential compositional hazard but are required in order to anchor the subject in reality. There's a lot going on. Because there are so many shapes/patterns/edges, the effects of the sun traveling is much more apparent than when in nature a plant community is rarely isolated to a handful of specimens and also limited to a handful of species. There is a formalized aspect of the garden space that again is predetermined and limits/compells the design making artistic processing much more convoluted and risky for the final interpretation to be successful.

And, so, today I learned something important about getting the work done in a garden. Use the rectangles. Working in my currently happy format of very wide, and wider, I'm finding that the inherent rectangles of the garden can be used to structure the shapes in my painting compositions to my advantage. It is more geometric and much less organic, so be it. Leverage these things. 

As Robert Genn has said many times about showing up for the work and finding one's way, today's painting showed me how to wrangle the rectangle into a subordinate position that helps the composition rather than hacking away at it.