The Eyes of the Artist Exhibit

Currently I am participating in an exhibit at the Greater Lafayette Museum of Art in Lafayette, Indiana. There are five of us --- women who paint together and enjoy sharing ideas and resources so that we can become better painters and enjoy friendship in the process. Our exhibit is called "The Eyes of the Artist." It has been great fun...

Here are the paintings that are my portion of the exhibit. The first four have a railroad theme in honor of my Dad. He worked for the railroad for over 30 years, so the concept interested me quite a bit. The one with the red building is a scene from Main Street in Burlington, Iowa. The train station is near this crossing, and you have to go over these tracks to get there.







This second painting is more about an object, the luggage cart. It has less of an emotional attachment , though the colors were lively. The railroad museum in Linden, Indiana is an enjoyable spot to visit. I wanted this painting to be appealing, like a still life in the out of doors.














The third painting with a railroad theme is of the tracks behind the railroad museum in Linden. This was an exercise in color exaggeration. The buildings in the background catch the eye, and they are accented by the curve of the field and the tracks. It started out as an exercise in
compliments, painting an underpainting first that used the opposite colors on the color wheel. It was almost too much of an intellectual game to paint like that, and the method was soon discarded. The result was, nevertheless, a lot of color.




Finally, the last one with a railroad theme is of shadows over train tracks. When looking at things in the distance, painters have to consider color changes that occur as objects recede into the distance. Things become bluer and lighter as they move back in aerial perspective. That is what happened in this painting -- the intensity of the blue in the distance becomes like a focal point. The tracks lead one's eye to the blue in the distance, and the trees have lost their green color.


Here are the other paintings that were included: I will comment on them at a later date.

Bev in Boulder


Clouds


Museum


Red Girl in Garden



Snow

While getting ready for the open house we are having at the Stutz building, there has been a lot of working and reworking old images. Several will probably have a "do-over" in their future. This little chicken study is 6x8 -- a very friendly size to work with.

Still life with lemons and grapes is also a 6x8.

The Florida scene is of a Fort Meyers beach sunset. It is 11x14.

This is also a 6x8 painted on a cradled board. It is quite a different feel to paint on a smooth surface as opposed to textured canvas. Not so sure I like it as I prefer the tooth and paint-grabbing textures.

2008-2009 paintings

As plein air works and quick studies are my current focus, the painting formats are smaller. Most are now 6x8 to 11x14. In some ways that is easier because there is less canvas to fill, and you have to think more in terms of minimizing brush strokes. In other ways it is less forgiving because your eye sees the painting in one glance. The compositional errors pop out more because of this. Here are some more recent, smaller pieces:

The three paintings of Hawaii are scenes from Maui. The interesting feature of the scenery was not just the mountains, but the atmosphere above them. The clouds just seemed to hang on the mountain tops.

Another recent attempt is to believably capture snow scenes. More on this subject will certainly follow.

Archives part 2

This is 14 x 18.


A larger 18x24 size painting finished in 1974.

This is a small 6 x 8 painting. Probably the result of having some excess paint on the palette that "needed to be used up."


The tennis shoes were the result of a minimalist palette approach using primarily black, yellow, and white. The next painting in the shoe series had my husband's, our daughter's, and my sandals. When our second child was born, there was no time to paint anything, so the "series" remains incomplete. This one is 16 x 20 inches.



I believe at the time this one was painted, Richard Diebenkorn was a favorite painter. I still like the way he lays out his subject matter --- in an abstract, geometric kind of way. This is 16 x 20 inches.

Archives --- really old paintings...

This is one of the few portraits I did about 20 years ago. She looks pretty harsh. I think I would paint her with a little more softness now.

First Impressions

This one is a view from behind the Linden RR museum. This is a small study 7 x 9 inches. Probably needs more definition in terms of compositional values -- i.e. more interesting clumping of lights and darks. It is going to be 12 x 12 in the end, so the overall shapes may change somewhat.

A farm scene near Lafayette, IN . It is interesting to see one's art in this format. It really makes you better able to figure out what changes to make. For instance, that cloud in the upper right would come forward and "hang" over the foreground if it had a flatter, darker bottom. That is the change I will make next. This is 14 x 18. It was a remarkably sunny day, and the clouds were changing quickly.