At the exhibition “Homage to Salvador Dali” at the Museum of European Art on September 5th, ”Celtic Lady of the Lake” (oil) was selected as one of the top ten favorite paintings voted on by visitors to the museum! There were over 40 different artists displaying works, some from the Buffalo/Niagara region and many international artists.
I couldn’t attend though I had two pieces in the show, as I’m way over in England!
This painting was commissioned for the cover of a CD album by a Celtic musician Sheila Stratton-Peel and I have hand signed CD’s available if anyone is interested! @ $10 each.
It’s been years since I’ve shown at the MEA and in the past I had paintings selected as the Painting of the Month, that is the top one favorite selected by guests. Those paintings were: “Exquisite” a portrait of a Classical Indian Dancer, a portrait of “Salvador Dali” and also my Mythological painting of “Daphne Transformed”. Please click on these to read about them and see a picture in my gallery.
If I get pictures sent to me of this show, I’ll be sure to add them to this post…so if anyone attended and has some?? Please send them my way.
I thought I’d put up some pictures of the Harris Hawk oil painting I’m trying to find time to work on. I started this a year or so ago! The underpainting shown below, has been sitting around in my studio so patiently waiting for more! It’s done with wet burnt umber then I wiped off to ‘draw’ the bird on the canvas. A very nice, freeing technique, you just concentrate on the shapes like you should.
Then below, I start what’s called the dead color stage, flat blocked in areas of color as close to the final color as possible.
Below you can see me, wow do I look serious or what? I decided to hold the palette this time, sometimes I put it on my custom biult (by me) painting tower. But I like having the colors right there in my hand so to speak, for mixing and direct painting onto canvas. This is it so far…shapes are looking good, colors too. I have to decide what I’ll do with the sky or background.
I painted this 4″ x 6″ oil painting on an early November day, sunny, cold and gorgeous. I have updated this post with photos of the day out in the field, please see below.
"Oak Tree"
The great thing about painting or drawing outside, en plein air is what you observe…hear, see, feel, smell. This day it was the visit of the bees and teeny tiny spiders. It sounds creepy but when you’re used to treking around in nature you learn to just observe the critters for what they are and do, and not get ‘creeped out’!
Burnt Umber sketch with bee
So as a wasp kept landing on my painting and easel, I figured it was interesting. I took pictures of him of course.This shows the first stage of my painting, I used a ‘wipe off’ method here; you paint Burnt Umber on the masonite board and brush it out so it’s a medium value. Then you ‘wipe off’ with a rag and your finger or a brush, the areas that are lighter. It’s like sketching with value, it’s very freeing as you won’t try to catch details you just look for the big shapes and wipe them out. If you don’t like it you brush it back on, easy! Then you lay in darks and bring out shadow shapes with more burnt umber. I have my board attached to a piece of cardboard that has clear tape covering it. There is another small canvas ready to go next to it and they are both attached temporarily with ’sticky tack’ or ‘blue tack’.
spider on easel
Then every time I started to paint, a tiny spider would appear hanging from the brim of my baseball cap, I’d lift him off with his thread of silk and put him in the grass, then another would appear on my easel. My guess was they were ’sailing’ on their threads down from the beautiful oak tree.
This is an oil painting I did in early November. We’ve been having a mild fall, pretty dry, so I didn’t have to wear mud boots in my field! The painting is 6″x 8″. Before I did this one I completed the small oil sketch of an oak tree (4″ x 6″).
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