Vincent is perfect. I'm not.

Hello all!

As I begin this posting, it has been 46 days since my last blog; as many of you know, at the end of September, my husband made the decision to move his office, our house sold, and we have moved into a work/live loft space in the downtown of our small town's commercial district.  The move, consolidation of the office and our home, huge estate sale and final closing all are, at last, over.  We are mostly settled in, loving our space, and enjoying the stimulating and creative new environment that greets us each morning.  Finally, I can turn my attention away from the move, and refocus my energies on my art lessons with Vincent.

From the moment I had announced my hiatus, I had been itching to paint.  As I packed up the things we wanted to keep, and decided which items were most expendable, my mind kept circling back to painting.  What seemed like hundreds of ideas kept running through my head - new techniques to try, or color combinations that I wanted to see together, or which painting I would do first in my new studio.

The move was making me feel energized and inspired.  Making all of the decorating and logistical decisions didn't drain me of creative energy, rather it seemed to be feeding it.  I felt like I was conducting a big and energetic orchestra with Vincent rehearsing as the first chair in the art section.  With every cabinet I emptied, and every box I carried up the stairs, I felt I was one step closer to ripping open and attacking a blank white canvas.  I could not wait to paint!

So why wasn't I painting?  After all, I was doing everything else; shopping for furniture, arranging kitchen cabinets, making new curtains, walking dogs, chatting with new neighbors, watching TV.... There was plenty of time for Words with Friends, and even the oh so addictive Draw Something, but the real question was, why wasn't I painting?

I had arranged the studio almost immediately after we moved in.  I then rearranged and re - rearranged again to get everything in just the right place.

I put my desk in front of a sunny, east facing window that looks out over the downtown and then beyond to tree covered hills on the other side of bridge.  I can see the cars coming and going, and enjoy watching the pedestrians sauntering, strolling, and occasionally hurrying their way past the stores, restaurants, and the coffee shop.

Just opposite the window, I put my "egg" chair and ottoman, which is always piled with art books and sketch pads.  It is a comfortable place to read and doodle, and is an enjoyable spot for watching the ever changing Texas sky.  Next to the chair is my china cabinet, filled with my beloved rummage sale dishes and the water glasses my mother and her siblings gave to their mother as gifts during the Depression.  Each year at Christmas, one, beautiful, cut crystal goblet was presented; I was lucky enough to get the nine that remain.

From the office, I inherited two banks of drawers, as well as large and small shelves, and they have been outfitted with all of my art supplies - all neatly arranged, accessible, and ready to use.  Although you can't see them, the puppies are snoozing doggedly in the carrier in the foreground...  They seem to have no trouble re-embracing their life's work, even in this new setting.

 My easel fits neatly into the corner between my desk and supply drawers; It is clipped with lights, at just the right height, and is positioned to offer an over the shoulder view right up Main Street.  My Mac, the hardware for all blogging and searching, is at the ready just to the left of the painting area.

As you can see below, my magic palette fit serendipitously into one of the drawers; this let me cram a lot more work surface into a lot less space.  There was also handy room for my water cups and brush holders.

 So everything was arranged in the way most conducive to painting, creating, blogging, growing, learning, etc. etc.

And I was on round 338 of Draw Something.  And my email was all opened, read and organized.

And everything in the new house, which wasn't even dusty, had been dusted.  Hmmm.

So why wasn't I painting?

In a word: Fear!

Let me back up to the packing phase of the move.  When we first made the decision to make this huge change, we walked around the house and the office and identified only what we wanted to keep.  Because our space was going to be so limited, each item we moved had to be carefully considered, and The ArtDemigod and I agreed that, on furniture, we both had to love it at least 90% in order to take it with us.  Personal items were our own choice.  He kept his base guitar and fly fishing gear.  I was adamant about my studio.

So deciding what to keep was easy.  And, honestly, deciding what furniture, old dishes, and household items to let go wasn't hard at all.  (Now cue the bad ghost movie suspenseful music...)

I was fine until I went into to tackle my "craft closet." This closet was a 4' X 12' room that had actually lived a life (under the previous owners of the house) as a tanning room.  As I had little desire to spend my free time cooking my already plenty wrinkled enough skin, I instead lined the long wall from the floor to the ceiling with shelves, which I used to store all of my "projects."

That room was cram packed with supplies for every imaginable type of creative activity.  Beading, sewing, needlepoint, embroidery, knitting, upholstery, and costume supplies were just a few of the items in my own private Michaels.  Along with the inventory, there were literally dozens of half finished projects in almost every imaginable stage of (in)completion.  I had no idea what to keep and what to let go.  It was, literally, overwhelming.

But because the estate sale had been scheduled, and we had a firm closing date, I had to move beyond my paralysis and into action.  But every time I looked at, or moved, or even thought about all of those piles, I felt like a complete failure. Goddamn Martha Stewart, the queen of expectations, the matriarch of unrealized possibility...

What I finally realized about these piles brought me to a very upsetting thought.

I wasn't the the artist who had committed to The Vincent Project; I was the lazy big spender who never finished anything.  (To be fair, there was no corresponding craft closet on the other side of the house storing all of the things I had completed; those items had been long ago given as gifts, recycled, or used up in ordinary living.)  But, in the end, I was still standing in a room with a lot of incomplete passes.  This was something I had to think about.

Without a choice, under an ever shrinking time deadline, as I sorted through all of this stuff,  I realized a common thread - the partially finished projects were all completed to exactly the point at which one of two things had occurred:  either I realized that the end product that I had imagined was beyond my ability to execute, or the materials that I had selected had some how not lived up to my imagined expectation.

In other words, the projects were abandoned because the product had somehow fallen short.

This realization left me feeling very out of sync with The Project, and Vincent, and Art, and Creativity, and exactly who the hell I thought I was.  Was this blog just another thing that I would start and not finish?  Was I even capable of doing this huge task of 52 paintings and essays?  Was this going to be something that would just wind up, unfinished, in some new craft closet in my new studio?

For about two weeks, I just hid from thinking about this whole issue by busying myself with moving in.  I made curtains, and arranged the kitchen, and picked out new furniture and lamps.

On the first weekend after we were all moved in,  I even tried to just kickstart myself back into an inspired state by attending the Lucien Freud Portraits exhibit in Fort Worth (It was FANTASTIC, even in my less than receptive state). I even engaged in a brief fling with two fascinating books on Picasso, which only left me feeling more guilty.

Nothing was working.  What had happened in that craft room had left me feeling completely uncreative and as utterly dried up as an old sponge.

So I decided to think about all of this for a week.  I told myself I wasn't even going to try to paint, and I wasn't going to go near the blog.  I was going to try to figure out what it was about these unfinished projects that had stripped away whatever Mojo I thought I had.  I was going to try to figure out why I had walked into that craft room feeling like an artist, and walked out feeling like a fraud.

The projects were abandoned because the product had somehow fallen short.  If the product had fallen short, did that mean that I had fallen short?  And what did "fallen short" mean, exactly?  After about three days of thinking, I finally figured it out.  I abandoned all of those projects because I could not finish them perfectly.  In all of this work, I was not allowing myself to be "good enough;"  it had to be perfect.  I had to be perfect.

What an awful realization that was.  There was no way in doing this project that I could paint "perfectly."  Vincent had already covered that territory; no one, no matter how good, could paint a Vincent Van Gogh better than Vincent Van Gogh.  To be sure, a lot of people, including myself, have tried.  But all of that work could only be, at best, derivative.

That was what I liked so much about doing the Vincent Project.  From the beginning, I never felt like I had to be perfect because Vincent already was.  All I was trying to do was to try to learn about painting by copying Vincent and forcing myself to write about it.  And that's when I finally got it, or rather reminded myself of my original intent.  The purpose of The Vincent Project was NOT to produce "perfect" paintings.  The purpose of the Vincent Project was to learn how to paint.

And that realization freed me, at least enough to pick up a canvas and start scribbling. (Please see Author's Note, below*) 

On Day 46, I went back to the beginning.  I decided to paint a chair.

In my very first blog posting, I mentioned that all of this started with a student assignment from a painting class where we were asked to copy a painting by a great artist, and I chose to paint Vincent's chair.  This was the chair that he had painted while living in the little yellow house in Arles in anticipation of the visit by fellow painter Paul Gauguin.

On the left is Vincent's chair - mine is on the right.

As a companion to the painting of his own chair, Vincent also rendered the chair of Paul Gauguin.

                                                             



I would find my way back to Vincent the way I found him in the first place.  I could (at least try) to paint Gauguin's chair.  I could paint!  Finally! There was something I wanted to paint!

People read a lot of symbolism into the two chairs, saying that Vincent painted the chairs as portraits; they were expressions of how he felt about both himself and his guest.  Vincent's chair was a peasant's chair: rough, armless, and placed on a clay tile floor, probably in a kitchen.  Gauguin's chair, in contrast, was very fancy, with curved arms and a carved back, resting on a lush carpet in what looked like a more formal area of the house.

Vincent positioned on Gauguin's chair totems of learning (books) and culture (the lighted candle).  In contrast, Vincent's chair held the small, cheap pleasure of the common man, a pipe and pouch of tobacco.  Notice that, like the candle, Vincent's pipe could have been depicted with an ember of lit tobacco; instead he presents it with the bowl of the pipe turned away from the viewer.  Vincent's chair is seen in sunlight, Gaugin's is shown in a nocturnal scene.  In the background of Gauguin's chair is a lighted sconce, behind Vincent's chair are a box of sprouting onions.

Most telling, for me, is the door that Vincent painted into his own chair view.  As any patron of movie symbolism will tell you, a door is a portal, and a portal is an escape.  No door or window is presented in the Gauguin chair; Vincent clearly did not want to provide any retreat for the first painter to join him in what he fervently hoped would become a thriving artist's colony.  I wonder if Vincent meant all that I am reading into what he painted, or if there just happened to be a door right behind the chair he was painting?

So, with a newly opened, fresh, white canvas student board positioned to receive, I (re)started the Vincent Project by dividing a copy (that I had in a book) of the painting into quarters.  As I observed the image, I was excited to get started: Gauguin's chair was so much fancier than Vincent's chair, and it had all these awesome lights and very atmospheric electric blue shadows.

First, I transferred the image from the book to my canvas, one quarter at a time.

I drew out the entire cartoon,  then loaded my brush with the ochrey red that I observed underneath the wash of green on Vincent's wall.

Here is a close up of the red...

And a longer shot - notice the deeper hues behind the chair, away from the source of light

My trusty angled brush

And here is the green wash that I put over the ochre.  

Here is a view of the palette that I was using to make the green wash.  I think that my color wound up as a little to "tourquoisy," as compared to Vincent's painting, which had the wall as more of a hunter green.

Eventually, I do catch this difference, and it will get corrected later.  Can you see what I missed?  Compare the right arm of my chair to Vincent's.  His has a beautiful, sensuous curve, while mine looks like the arm of the chair was broken and badly set.  I wish I had noticed this before I went on with the painting.

(Author's note to herself: "Shut up! Think about the process, not the product... It does not need to be perfect... what can you learn from the mistake?")

The close up at right shows this mistake in all its ignominious glory.

But I do like the way the ochre and the green are vibrating against each other; it is so cool how our eyes process these opposite colors and make them come alive.

On this painting, I used a charcoal pencil (rather than a stick) to make the initial drawing.  I liked doing it this way because the pencil line was much more precise, and there was far less smearing of the charcoal, both from my my hands brushing against it, and from the black swirling into my freshly applied paint.

Here is my chair next to Vincent's, so far.

Next, I started to get my browns on.  I started with Van Dyke Brown and the ever popular alizarin crimson hue.

I also squeezed out the following:
raw umber and transparent raw umber,
burnt umber and transparent burnt umber,
transparent raw sienna,
burnt sienna and transparent burnt sienna (I did not have any transparent raw sienna).

Notice how all of these groovy browns have a raw or burnt option, as well as a "regular" (opaque) or a transparent option.

It was a lovely lesson to have all of these choices ordered onto my palette.  I admit it was confusing at first, but each of these tubes contains a unique product, and each of these products does a different and very individual thing on the canvas.

After reviewing the theme of this week's blog, here is my advice: do not be afraid of "wasting" paint.  You cannot learn from paint that is trapped in a tube.  Release the paint and let it teach you.

Observe my lesson plan below:  With the exception of the transparent raw sienna and Van Dyke brown (both shown at the bottom of the picture; raw sienna is on the left), transparents are on the right, and opaques are on the left.  The colors are ordered, (top to bottom, left to right) as raw umber, transparent raw umber; burnt umber, transparent burnt umber; burnt sienna, transparent burnt sienna, then transparent raw sienna and Van Dyke brown.  Alizarin crimson is (as of the photo session) still locked in its tube.

Ultimately, this is a rose by any other name situation.  The bottom line is that the colors are simply ways of expressing an observation or idea.  It is less important to focus on their names, and more important to focus on what they can do for you in your painting.  That said, knowing the names will keep you from a hunt and peck method of finding which color you want.  So, don't get bogged down by brown confusion.  Start squirting, painting, and take command of your colors!

At right are some browns on the chair.  I definitely used all of the colors that I had out; but I cannot tell you exactly what I used where.

(That is the point of a student board; it is a place to experiment and make mistakes - and remember, Martha - it doesn't have to be perfect!)

Speaking of "mistakes," has anyone yet observed what is missing from Vincent's original painting?  There are no stretcher bars  on the right side (as you are sitting in it) of the chair.  I observed this when I was doing the drawing, and decided that Vincent left them out on purpose because it would be confusing to see them juxtaposed against the patterned carpet.

At left is a close up of the front underskirt of the chair.  Notice how transparent the paint is, you can still see the white canvas peeking through the wood tone.

The Payne's gray outlining the rush seat will add depth and dimension to the straw as it is layered on.

I was observing other colors that I thought were missing, and threw out some cadmium yellow, yellow ochre, and a reinforcing portion of the transparent raw sienna.

These are the sunny colors of the South of France, and just seeing them got me in the mood for a glass of wine, the Provincial sun, and a Peter Mayle book.

At left you can see I have started on the rush seat of the chair.  As I painted the cover of the book, I accidentally slopped paint that should have been only on the cover onto the "pages" area.  (I know I don't have to be perfect; I just don't want to be intentionally sloppy.)

This was a classic case of coloring outside the lines.  And, although I am usually totally in favor of coloring outside the lines, in this case, I did not want the cover of my book sliding, Dali - like, down the pages below.

Luckily, I had my little "scrubber" brush handy to correct my mistake.  This type of brush can be purchased individually or in a set, and they come in various sizes for cleaning up all sorts of painting messes.

The red handled brush has stiff, white, synthetic bristles which can be used to literally scrub the canvas, as long as the paint you are scrubbing away is still wet.

The brush is really called a "scrubber," it is put out by a company called Creative Mark; look for it at your art supply.

When using a scrubber brush, I typically wet it in some water, then dab the bristles off with a paper towel so that the scrubbing area is moist, but not wet, when I apply it to the mistake.

The scrubber is such an excellent tool, and I am so glad that I have them to work with.

Shown at left is an extreme closeup of the newly cleaned canvas.

And now for the electric blue shadows.  I have already added a lot of greens and yellows to the rush seat.  I think it is looking appropriately rounded, and I am happy with the rough quality of the seat itself.

The first time I saw Vincent's painting of Gauguin's chair, I just didn't get the shadows.  They seemed unshadowlike, primarily because of the choice of color.  You could tell that they were shadows because they were placed exactly where you would expect shadows to be, but the color - that color was definitely not a regular shadow color.

But as I looked again, I realized that those shadows are what make that painting work.  Almost all of the other colors in the piece (with the exception of the green walls and seat) are warm and very cozy tones.  The green hardly even counts as cool, because painted beneath both the walls and the seat are still more layers of warm.  There are black outlinings, which are cool, but they did not pop at all until I layed in the electra glide.

Without us having to see the other side of the room, those shadows give us the atmosphere of a crackling fire's reflection on a well polished and barely used chair. Those shadows cool us, and cause our eyes to move around the painting in exactly the way that Vincent intended.  In the underlayment of the candle is the same bright blue - if the candle does indeed symbolize culture and knowledge (for Vincent), then he has absolutely bathed Gauguin's chair it.

Yet he does the same (although much more indirectly) in the painting of his own chair, by rendering the wall and door behind in a cool selection of turquoise and sky blue.  He may have just chosen these watery colors because he thought that they would look nice (if so, he was so right!), but who knows?  Half the fun in observing art is in asking the rhetorical "why" questions; the spell would be broken if we began expecting replies.



Above are some closeups of what I did to try to get the rug... Even Vincent's version was really just a series of different colored blobs.  Although I did not match him blob for blob, I think I got sorta close with it.  After doing the rug, I agreed with him 100% on the whole stretcher bar thing.

Below are some final shots of the finished painting.  What do you think?

Thanks for reading, everybody!  Please feel free to make a comment; I would love to hear your thoughts, whatever they may be.

*Author's note: Although it sounds like I just snapped my fingers to get myself out of my funk, nothing could be further from the truth.  The subject of perfectionism and its impact is a long and complex one, particularly for the women in my family.  I think that the impasse that I described at the beginning of this posting is really a signpost for me as I continue down the road of this project.  In future blog postings, there will be more said about perfectionism, it's effect on other artists, and the ways in which it has shaped my own life.

Happy holidays to all, and I will see you as much as I am able between now and the new year!

Catherine

I Present a Passion for Painting, Palettes, and Pork....

After pondering current events (and allowing myself the distractions of watching the extremely enlightening CBS News "60 Minutes" stories on Vincent's life and death, as well as the absurdly awesome Dr. Who episode about the kooky Doctor's visit and monster slaying bash with Vincent Van Gogh), I have finally finished enough of the painting to write about it.


Like NBC's "Today Show" and their recent overly enthusiastic coverage of ladies swimming at the Olympics, I will give you a very small spoiler right here - just a little taste of the painting to come:



Read on to find out if I made it all the way to a completed painting, how I might have accomplished that task, and why it was crazy to do such a large scale, finely detailed painting in just one short week.

In this post, we will be discussing light, shadows, glazing techniques, (not just for doughnuts any more!) transparence, translucence, opacity, and the most superb palette system ever devised...

As always, I began with a sectioned transfer and enlargement.  I had a book which featured Vincent's Almond Branches painting, which I used as my template.  First, I tore a sheet of tracing paper to fit the image, then lightly taped my paper down with masking tape.  Instead of my usual grid of squares, I decided it would be simpler to follow Van Gogh's example and divide the view, instead, like a pizza.



Because it was difficult to see through the milkiness of the tracing paper, the first thing that I did with my pencil was to outline all of the branches darkly so that I could find them on my pizza pie.  You will see that I am using a leftover school supplies coloring pencil; I don't think any fancy type of drawing instrument was required, and as long as my crayola had a sharp point, I was good to go.

It is a good idea to check the image you have just drawn before completely removing it from the image that you are trying to trace, that way you are still in registration in case you have missed something major.

I do not have 100% of the painting on my tracing, but I have enough of the image to get a semblance of what I want to transfer.


I hung up the tracing on my canvas so that I would not have to keep shifting my focus back and forth to try to follow my cartoon. At the bottom of the photo (right), you can see the faint lines where I used my giant ruler to pizzafy my canvas in the same fashion as my tracing.



This time, I used an enormous canvas, which measured a whopping 48" X 36" (4' X 3' - in keeping with the Olympic coverage theme, it was like going from ladies gymnastics to the shot put).  The canvas that I selected was a professional grade, prepared and wrapped canvas.  Unlike the canvas boards I have used previously, this one is gessoed canvas fabric stretched taughtly across a sturdy wooden frame.

You can see above and at right that the stretched canvas material "dimples" when depressed by my thumb.  Although this does not seem like a big deal, I had to learn to anticipate the "bounce" when I was drawing or painting on the canvas.  Each time that my pencil or loaded brush hit the surface, it was like my stylus was jumping on a tiny little trampoline.  The movement was not huge, but it moved, and that took a little getting used to.

Above is yet another out of focus photograph of the finished preliminary drawing on my canvas.  I spent about 8 hours rendering this, including the time spent on the cartoon.  Perhaps I should spend some time on my photography skills, as well.

Now some of you may be wondering why I am veering away from the original almond branches in bloom with what appears to be huge and floppy flowers rather than the tight buds and blossoms of Vincent's painting.  I chose to paint dogwood flowers because I love dogwood trees, which are native to the eastern United States.  Because he never crossed the Atlantic, Vincent probably never saw a dogwood tree in bloom.

Neither had I, until I was in college and went on a spring break camping trip to Caddo Lake, in East Texas (the very western edge of the North American dogwood range).  On that trip, we arrived at our campsite late in the evening,  and had to pitch our tents by flashlight.  Exhausted, we went to bed (sleeping bag?) and woke up the next morning to a crisp spring sunrise, ready to begin a mosquito filled but fun day of exploring the swampy beauty of Caddo Lake.

If you are ever bummed out about anything,
google flowering dogwood images
Your eyes and mind will be happy.

When we unzipped our tent and looked outside, we realized that we had encamped beneath a majestic canopy of flowering dogwood trees.  The sight of the large, creamy blooms with their oversized yellow centers literally took my breath away.  I had not even known such a flower existed, much less a whole tree full of them!  Ever since, I have loved dogwood, and each spring, I regret that I live 200 miles too far west to have one growing in my yard.  In his time in France, Vincent painted every kind of blooming tree he could find, so I don't think that he would mind too much if I deviate from the almond blossoms with a little flowering dogwood.


To give you an idea of the scale of the canvas, I am providing you with (another) supremely out of focus shot of my easel with the drawn canvas on board.  You can see that I had to adjust all of the picture holding clampy things on my easel to allow for fit.  I am grateful for my versatile and very adjustable easel.

This baby is going to take a lot of paint to complete, so there will be a break in the action while I hit the art supply store (thanks, friendly dudes at Jerry's Artarama in Austin, Texas!) for acrylic: mood indigo.  Cue Rhapsody in Blue.....

While I was at Jerry's, I wandered past the aisle where they keep the palettes.  A palette, for those who may not be in the know, is a board, or glass, or paper, or any surface where paint is squirted onto to hold it in an open state so that it can be applied to the painting support.  The palette is also where the mixology occurs, most usually with a palette knife (and only rarely with a cocktail shaker...).

At right is one of Van Gogh's self portraits depicting him with his thumb through the hole in his palette and his brushes gripped in the fingers of the same hand.  Vincent probably used this type of "no table required" palette because it is ideal for doing field work; it is easy to hold, light to carry, and provides a steady surface for mixing and blending with palette knives.  Was Vincent left handed?  This image certainly points in that direction.  Why, no fears, dear readers! This sounds like a job for the internet!

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Was_Vincent_van_Gogh_left-handed

 Anyhoo, there I am at Jerry's, not needing any palette improvement at all (or so I thought), when I spy this strange contraption that looks like a giant tupperware container.

The manufacturer is Masterson, and they claim that their "stay wet" Palette kit will keep acrylic or other water based paints moist and spreadable for days.

Their system includes a plastic box and uber tight lid, a sponge that is cut to fit exactly in the box, and special "stay wet" paper that, when properly prepared, will keep acrylic paint in a pliable consistency.

I am standing in the aisle pondering if I should buy or not, when I glance down at the  $40 worth of paint (3 small tubes) already in my basket.  The "stay wet" system costs about $15.  I am already buying "dry" palette paper (I don't use a board or glass; I prefer paper, which I can just wad up and toss without any haz-mat disposal issues.)  So I decide to take a chance on the "stay wet" system.  (Thank you again, to my husband, my patron, my art demigod!)

So the way you set up the stay wet palette system is that you get some very hot water (I used boiling agua caliente from my tea kettle; thank you, Earl Grey!) and you soak the special palette paper in a steamy soaky hot tub for 15 minutes.  (I used a big commercial cookie sheet for the soak, which was sized perfectly.)  In the meanwhile, you prepare the sponge by soaking it in cold water, wringing it out, then soaking it again until it can't hold any more liquid.

At left you can see me squeezing the sponge, which was very well soaked.  I wet it thoroughly, squeezed it out, then wet it again, letting it just hang over the sink until it stopped dripping (with no squeezing), then I put it in the bottom of the box.

Looking left again, you can see the wet paper, which I laid over the soaked sponge in the box; I did follow the directive to make sure that the surface of the paper was not visibly wet, this was accomplished with the swipe of a paper towel.  The instructions also indicated that it did not matter which side of the paper was facing up, and they said that the paper could actually be scraped and scrubbed if you were inclined to want to recycle.

And with that, I began to paint.  

I wanted to start with the tree branches, which I painted by mixing (basically on the canvas) ultramarine blue (a deep, intense blue) and burnt umber (a medium brown).  To my delight and amazement, this combination really started looking like wood because the ultramarine is  translucent (meaning you can see through it), and the umber (don't you just love to say umber?) is opaque.  The ultramarine always let the umber peek through, and there was enough ochrey yellow in the brown that the layer of blue on top gave it a greenish cast.  The two colors boogied together in a way that looked like variations in the wood tone, as well as dappling of light and shadows on the branches.

I checked some images on the internet so I could be sure what the dogwood bark actually looked like, and I found many examples where the trees had a greyish cast on their smoothish bark.

So I started adding in some scumbling (painting lightly on top of the base color with a different color on a dryish brush) in white on top of the bark, to represent the natural striations found on the trees.

And yet more branches; they are looking a little bit creepy, eh?

I further cool the mood by adding in some light bluish scumbles, as well.

This part was very fun to paint.  I could be very loose with the brush, and the color variation occurred naturally, with very little conscious effort on my part.  You can see that I left the flowers and smaller branches wide open, and just painted around them.

I used a bigger brush to paint the trunks and larger branches, then switched to progressively finer brushes as I tackled the smallest stems.

At left is the upper left corner of the painting, where I drew in many buds.

You can also see how the last stem bends around the edge of the canvas.

The photo at right shows more painting on the side of the canvas; by wrapping the image and background around to the sides, I will save myself from the necessity (and huge expense, with a canvas this size) of having the painting framed, if I wish.  It was also fun to paint on the side, and to imagine what I would need to do to make the wrapping and bending look believable.

At left is the main branch depicted in the center at the bottom of the canvas.  I think that the lights, darks, and scumbling lend the idea of dappled light and shadow, and I like how old and gnarly the branches look.  The big, cut off stump is where I had originally planned a large, many stemmed branch, until I realized that this branch made the composition overly busy, and the branch itself was just too large in scale for the supporting trunk.

The cool thing about painting is that (sometimes) you can evolve the composition as you go along.  (This apparently works with tree trunks, but not so much with portraits of handsome boys - see my earlier Fred Flinstone blog entry.)
At right you can see another error - my solution for this one was to repaint the branch, then cover the offending stem in a coat of titanium white.

Clockwise around are more close ups of the scumbles, including a view of the blue scumbles at right.  Note how I changed my mind as to the width of the branch...

As I neared the end of the trunk and branch portion of the painting, I sprayed down all of the paint (an amount large enough that I would have felt bad to waste it) on my palette with a fine mister, then carefully closed the lid on the painting system box.  Much to my annoyance, I was not able to paint again for about 40 hours, but  the paint was just fine.  Thanks to the palette system, the color was still moist, had not mixed inadvertently, and with the exception of the paint that had already been scraped very thinly on the paper, it was as if I had just squirted the blobs straight from the tube.  The sponge smelled very neutral, and did not mildew or sour, as I had feared.  The paper was perfectly cool and damp.  I also found that I enjoyed mixing and grabbing the paint from the soft, spongy surface; there was just enough "give" that I could easily get under the paint and lift it from below.  When the paint did skin up a little bit on the upper surface of some of the bigger blobs, I just treated that "skin" just like the skin on a blister, burrowing underneath like a pin prick with my brush when I needed to release the color.  (Please note: this is not medical advice, and even if it was, it would probably be bad advice.)  This system was well worth the $15 that I spent on it.  Two thumbs up from me.

And finally, some flowers.  I chose to paint the dogwood blossoms pink, because I wanted my painting to look quite different from Vincent's version.

( And yet more bad photography... I must learn to turn off my easel lights before I take the blog pictures, and I must learn to check the outcome of each photo before I move on to the next thing...)

I am painting the flowers with a mixture of alizarin crimson, titanium white, potters pink, cadmium yellow light, and magenta.

A close up of some of the buds...

and blooms.



These flowers are looking excessively pink and oddly familiar, but not in such a good way.

After a trip past the butcher department at the Supermarket, it hit me:  my flowers look like dozens of tiny pork cutlets, waiting to be taken home and braised, each searching diligently for their place in a shopping cart next to some applesauce.



Just what I was hoping for: a 3' X 4' painting of the other white meat....

Not to go all political on you, but what follows is, quite simply, more pork. (Vegans be warned... some of the following images may be graphic and unsuitable for an ethical vegetarian audience.)

More mistaken branches (left) and I think I have finally figured out how the mom of The Monkees Michael Nesmith was inspired to invent whiteout... (Look it up - I guessed correctly!)







At right are several examples of how different the various clusters of flowers are looking as I strive to correct my growing pork problem; all of this pork is feeling like too much bacon at a bad buffet.






The right petal on the blooming flower on the left looks like a hitchhiking thumb; consider it my homage to Sissy Hanshaw from Tom Robbins Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.





And these ones are just sad.  Just plain sad.  Now, what wine goes with pork?

My next step was to hit the web for more photos of flowering dogwood branches, which I apparently cannot reproduce from memory.  Come to think of it, I don't think I have ever actually seen a pink flowering dogwood; the only ones I've seen live, up close, and personal have been creamy white.   I can see why Vincent put up with the mosquitos and painted from life.  (The contemporarily unavailability of the internet probably also entered into his decision making process....)

Apparently, there is more than one kind of pink flowering dogwood.  Not one of them looks even remotely like a porkchop, but all would pair nicely with applesauce, I think.

So I decide that there is no other choice than to keep pondering the images on the web and go ahead and pour myself a glass of a delightful new wine: a soft, very dry rose made with malbec grapes, and served deliciously chilled.  I shall companion it with a vegetarian selection, for I have now completely lost my desire for pork, bacon, or sausage.


Next, I will begin the background of the painting.  I have laid in my supply of extra blue, I have a glass of the aforementioned wine primed for sipping next to my brushes, and I am ready to start mixing.

Sadly, you will have to wait to hear the rest of the story.

Blogger is balking at my download of additional images, so I think that in light of the size and scope of this week's painting, my blog will be broken into two separate postings.  I will be publishing part 2 on Thursday - I hope you will read along!

In the meanwhile, here is the finished painting:

I feel like Paul Harvey.  I wonder if he likes pork chops.  Until Thursday.  Bottoms Up!

Catherine