Coming Out of a Creative Hiatus June 2021

It feels like it’s been months since I’ve done any serious painting. Oh, I’ve picked at a couple that have been on the easels for quite a while, but I’ve not made any substantial progress except to decide I can’t do the Pele one true justice. Even writings for my blog were started but never finished.

Photo: "Waiting for Attention" -- looks OK from a distance, but up close, I see too many flaws.

Of course, mid-April to mid-May is the big summer guide project, so that’s where my attention went, besides doing small projects here and there outside and in the garage. And then there was the studio revamp and getting rid of items I’ve not used in years… which I’m still working on.

In the meantime, I managed to get a few new photos for painting references while out and about – four areas this spring: Turkey Pond in Concord, a marsh scene along Route 1A in Rye, a series of The Hill in Hillsborough, and the Tooky River in Bennington. I edited the photos and printed out a few, and they’ve been sitting about a month or more.

A couple weeks ago, I received a list of painting tips suggested by other artists, and the most oft-given advice is “Paint every day!” Oops, have I fallen off that wagon!

Yesterday, I decided to tackle the initial sketches which I usually do on 6 x 9 drawing paper. These give me some direction when I do the actual layout on the support paper on which I’ll do the actual painting. However, when I opened the sketch book, there was already a sketch in there. 

It took me some time to figure out it was the Turkey Pond scene as I’d not made any notes on the page. I spent way too much time looking back through my logbook to find dates but couldn’t find any comments except I’d taken the photo coming back from the dentist. I write down everything in the logbook because I tend to forget things, and because this was just an initial sketch, I hadn’t started a spreadsheet or a timeline which I do for all my paintings.

 

Oh, yeah, I’d fallen off the wagon and got dragged under. Time to pull myself back up, onto the seat, and take control of the reins.

So, I got out supplies, covered the table with a cloth, and began studying the pile of photos to choose which scenes and angles to do. I tend to take photos of three or four angles of the scene.

With The Hill series, I have a few separate photos and there are three I taped together to create a panoramic scene. I was thinking of doing this triptych (three paintings hung side by side to depict a scene), but in measuring and the composition, this would only work as a diptych (two pictures).

I set to work. It never fails to amaze me, no matter how hard I try to work in the Rule of Thirds, I always seem to end up with main focus in the center. Duh! Of course, put together with the second sketch of the scene, the big tree wouldn’t be in the center. I used soft charcoal and mostly worked at getting shapes, values, and setting the composition.

One thing about progress photos, it shows me what I need to adjust and change. Already I can see what

I need to pull together when I do the actual initial sketch for the paintings.

The next photo I worked with was a river scene. Again, I’d taken a few photos to focus on aspects I want to put into the painting. By this time, the soft charcoal was crumbling to little bits. Still, I managed to get this initial work done.

Three individual paintings (in which two will become the diptych) and the one previously done means I now have four new scenes to paint. Of course, I need to finish the ones currently on the painting easels first, ha-ha, but I’m excited to get back to this. And yes, I need to work around all the many warm-weather projects I want to do.