Something About Red

Both of these are 8" x 8", oil on panel, $350. The top painting has sold.

Opening of 202 Market Square Galleries in Downtown Roanoke

We opened (or reopened after about 8 years of being closed) the galleries and artist studio spaces at 202 Market Square in downtown Roanoke, right in the middle of all the action. These photos were taken before anyone arrived. My husband, Tim's painting is on the right. Mine are the small still lifes to the left in the center. Diane Patton's painting on the left.

Here are 4 of my 8" x 8" still lifes.

This is the hallway to our small space (where the window is). Those are my paintings in the hallway.

A few of my husband's paintings.

My wall, inside our space. The third painting from the left sold.

A few of my husband's paintings inside our space.

Carol Phillips' assemblage pieces and three of Diane Patton's. We will have double the number of artists participating by next month.

202 Market Square Restaurant bartenders took care of us. The restaurant also provided the hor d'oeuvres. By the end of the night their tip jar was full. That is one of Diane's wonderful paintings behind them.

Another angle of the large open gallery space. This couple bought one of my pastel paintings. The window you see a piece of is very large and we could watch all the Dickens of a Christmas festivities below in the market. We really are in the middle of it all and we had a nice crowd. The gallery is located above 202 Market Square Restaurant. The entrance is between the restaurant entrance and Blues and Barbecue entrance, just a few feet from the farmers market.  Our hours are Tuesday through Friday 10-6, except for the first Friday of every month, when we will be open until 9 pm for Art by Night, Saturdays 10-3, or by appointment. Stop in and visit.

Plein Air Pastel at Rocky Knob on the Blue Ridge Parkway

Rocky Knob is an National Recreation area in Virginia where the trails follow a bald ridge, thanks in part to grazing cattle. This means the views are spectacular, with endless possibilities for plein air paintings. I chose this angle so I could include the winding ribbon of the Blue Ridge Parkway. I painted this on Thanksgiving day, with my son, also an artist, painting beside me. Several people were getting their pre-feast hike in. They all asked me if my Thanksgiving turkey was cooking nearby. I told them my husband was cooking dinner, an hour away. My job was to do the pies, which I did the day before. So, thanks, Tim, for this beautiful pastel painting. 11" x 14" on archival sanded paper.  SOLD

Fall Plein Air Still Lifes

I really find a lot of joy painting outside, even a still life.  All of these are oil on panel. The top is 12" x 12", the middle 8" x 8" and the bottom is 12" x 9".

The James River from the Blue Ridge Parkway

Tim and I painted from the pedestrian bridge under the Blue Ridge Parkway at the James River visitors center, milepost 64, one of the secret gems of the Parkway. This is the view facing NNW. The view in the opposite direction is just as dramatic.  One of the challenges was the overlapping of shadow and reflection, perpendicular to each other, on the water. Soft pastels on archival (museum grade Wallis) paper, 11" x 14".

Post-Przewodek Workshop

I spent a week in Eaton, Maryland at Easton Studio and School for a workshop with Camille Przewodek. Similar to Lee Boynton, she studied at the Cape Cod School of Art with Henry Henshe. I need repetition, repetition...before it really sinks in. I liked her direct style of teaching and I felt that I was getting in the flow in these two. Both are plein air, 12" x 9" oil on archival panel.

Plein Air Pastels

Sometimes I just need a break from hauling all the oil paints around. I paint plein air and that means on location, painting the light and atmosphere. This sometimes means hauling it all in a serious backpack on my back when I need to hike a distance. I also paint with pastels plein air, but they are easier to carry, even though I still need my easel and umbrella. They are also more direct. You can only mix colors on the paper itself, so you bypass the palette mixing. I use professional soft pastels (Unison, Sennelier) on archival sanded paper.

I approach pastels the same way as my paintings, as a colorist laying down large blocks of the color of light and shadow, making sure I have the values and color temperatures correct. Then I start breaking up the large blocks with the more subtle changes of color. I try to capture the "envelope" of light, which means the feeling of the atmosphere and type of light.

All three of these were done in the summer. The top was done from Rocky Knob, a bald on the Blue Ridge Parkway, which I had to hike a short distance to. Spectacular. It is kept bald by grazing cows who are part of the trail experience. This was an evening pastel painting, so the color is a warmer yellow than the one below to the left, which was hot partly cloudy summer day at a pond in the valley. The one on the lower right, also from the Blue Ridge Parkway overlooking Cahas Mountain, was an overcast day, which causes the ground to appear darker relative to the sky. We had recently endured an epic heat wave, so I escaped to this elevated site and actually needed my sweatshirt. While I painted a mother and daughter drove up, sat on the grass and read. What a peaceful place to read a book. We stayed for a couple hours until it started to rain. I hope that the painting has the feeling of "about to rain". The land becomes darker as the sky gets lighter...unless a big blue-grey thunderhead appears. I heard another plein air artist say once, "On an overcast day the sky is much lighter than the ground. If the sky appears darker than the ground, you better get the heck out of there as fast as you can." On an earlier painting outing on Rocky Knob, my husband and I hiked, set up and then heard thunder and the sky darkened on this high elevation bald. Although we tried to deny the approaching storm, once we saw the cows heading down, I told my husband, "Come on! We've got to be at least as smart as cows. Let's get outtahere."

If you are interested in purchasing pastel paintings, please keep in mind that they need special framing that involves a spacer, double mat with the inside reverse cut and glass. There are several sites on the web that explain how to do it, but one of my favorite is this site because of the cutaway drawings. They also sell the spacers on this site: http://www.frametek.com/HTML/Articles/pastel.html

All of the above are professional soft pastels (the finest pigments) on archival sanded paper, 11" x 14", except the top one, which is 10" x 14". Click on my Daily Paintworks icon on the top right to order them.

Two on a Summer Afternoon

I painted these two on a warm June afternoon, trying to capture that unique summer sunlight. Notice the thunderhead peeking up over the trees in the top one. It turned into one of those intense summer storms with hail. You know, the ones that show up as a red blob on weather.com's satellite image.

The top image is 12" x 9" and the bottom is 6" x 6", oil on archival panel. If you are interested in purchasing either, email me or go to my Daily Paintworks gallery (see icon at top of this page).

Lucky

Carvin's Cove again. I'm lucky to be living near this beautiful lake.  

Plein Air Still Lifes

Plein air still lifes are my favorite because of the challenge of creating a sensation of sunlight. I'm trying to create more casual arrangements, instead of formal compositions to give a feeling of the viewer being present.  This one is 12" x 12", oil on cradled hardboard, which means it does not necessarily need a frame.

Plein Air Workshop with Lee Boynton

I'm excited to be hosting artist Lee Boynton when he presents a 3-day Color and Light plein air workshop here in Roanoke in late June. Lee studied with Henry Henshe at Cape Cod School of Art and I thoroughly enjoyed taking one of his workshops last summer in Maine. Email me for printable copies of this flyer and an additional brochure, and if you have any questions And please spread the word about the workshop. Open to all levels. For more information, go to http://leeboynton.com/workshops.

About Lee Boynton:

The sea was the spawning ground for Lee’s art. He spent a lot of his childhood and youth “messing

around in boats” on Long Island Sound and along the coast of Maine. For fun, he would study the

works of Winslow Homer, Frederick Waugh and N.C. Wyeth, and yearned to paint the beauty and

drama of the natural world around him like his artistic heroes.

As an emerging artist, Lee spent hours sketching and painting the lobstermen and boatbuilders in

Maine. He saw these men, their boats and the sea as an intricate and colorful tapestry, just begging to

be painted. One of his first painting instructor gave him a copy of Hawthorne on Painting when he was sixteen years old. This was his first connection to the Cape School of Art in Provincetown, MA, where

he later studied with the renowned Impressionist Henry Hensche.

Henry introduced Lee to the idea that light has color and that the color of light changes hourly during the day as well as seasonally through the months of year. He impressed upon Lee the importance of painting convenient block studies in order to learn these effects. 

As a student of color, Lee began to discipline himself to paint the truth of what he saw before him. This exciting approach to seeing and painting color revolutionized his artistic direction. He took what he had learned in oil at the Cape School of Art and applied it to watercolor. In2004, Watson Guptill published Painting the Impressionist Watercolor, a book Lee co-authored with Linda Gottlieb, one of his longtime students. 

Lee is one of the founders of the Mid Atlantic Plein Air Painters Association. His oil and watercolor paintings have received top awards in east coats plein air painting competitions.

Another High Key Still Life

White teapot on white fabric with clear glass...always fun. 8" x 8" on Ampersand gesso board.

High Key Still Life

One of my favorite challenges is a high-key composition, which means most of the values lean towards the light end of the scale, creating a sensation of strong light bouncing around, like sun coming through a kitchen window, or hitting objects on a table outside.  14" x 11" oil on Ampersand gesso board.

Another Small One

This was a lot of fun because of the transparency of the yellow bowl and the wonderful color combinations. 6"x 6" oil on Ampersand gesso board.

A Small Still Life

After seeing so many other artists offering small paintings, I thought I would attempt one. Maintaining my brushwork on a small scale is challenging at first, but I quickly got used to it. These smaller still lifes are very charming. 6"x 6" oil on Ampersand gesso board panel.

Plein Air Still Life

I love painting still lifes set up in the sun. This was a hot summer day and although I was dripping in sweat, I think I successfully captured the feeling of light bouncing everywhere. This is 8" x 8", oil on cradled board.

The Yellow Pitcher

More still lifes exploring the red bowl on turquoise fabric. These are 8"x8", oil on board.  To purchase the top one, click here.  For the bottom one, click here.

Red and Turquoise

I set up a table with a backdrop, having bought fabric like candy. The red cup and turquoise fabric intrigued me. Oil on 8"x 8" board.

Still Lifes

These paintings are 8" x 8" on archival Amerpersand gesso board. The objective of a colorist approach to painting objects in light is simply to see and recreate the color of light. The color of an object is different in light and shadow and you must practice seeing and mixing all the nuances. Lee Boynton taught me to use a larger palette to accomplish this because, although you can mix a color wheel's worth of color with just a few tubes of paint, the purity of the hues is most intense in the many colors straight from the tube in a larger palette. The paint is applied thickly and confidently...well, at least it is supposed to look like I was confident. Some days I am definitely more confident and energetic than other days, and it does show in the finished paintings. 

Ideally, I would paint a still life outside in the sunlight (like the middle one), but that is not always possible, so I have a strong daylight lightbulb light for studio still lifes.

Lee Boynton Workshop

Early this past summer I took a 3-day workshop about color at Maryland Center for the Creative Arts in Annapolis with Lee Boynton. Lee studied with Henry Hensche at the Cape Cod School of Art and is a devout colorist. He is fun, energetic, kind and knowledgeable. He never ran out of energy although we felt like we were completely drained at the end of each day. Here is a painting I did during that time, focusing on the nuances of shifting color in light and shadow. I was also lucky enough to take his plein air workshop in Booth Bay Harbor, Maine later in the summer.  And I'm even luckier to be hosting another plein air workshop for him down here in the Roanoke Valley this summer.