the right side

The right side of the 2006 painting has survived with some adjustment to foliage on all trees. It's growing on me. I'm going to cut the mat for it now and order the frame. It has become "Coastland Revisited."

5 years later

I'd like to thank those who commented or sent me an email on my March 14th post with their opinion about what to do with this painting.

I intended to cut it into two pieces, crop and reframe each as smaller, vertical paintings. But when I unframed it I was immediately drawn to the spontaneous marks in the border area just outside the picture and how they differ from the more controlled strokes within the scene. This led me to reflect how my work today differs from this 2006 painting. Apparently my view of the world has softened and become more tolerant and playful, less literal. My application of the medium has evolved which affects the character of my marks.

So when I cut this painting into two pieces, I couldn't resist reinterpreting the scene on the left. Then, putting the two pieces back together, it was easy to visually compare how I, and my work, have changed. Click on the image to enlarge.

congratulations

Washington state is well represented in this year's Annual Pastel 100 Competition in The Pastel Journal.

Susan Glendenning Third Place Abstract/Non-Objective,  

Barbara Noonan Fourth Place Landscape and Interior, 

Diana Sanford Silver Medal Award for Excellence, 

Karen Schroeder Honorable Mention Abstract/Non-Objective 

and me, Honorable Mention Abstract/Non-Objective 

for "From the West Unto the East."

These are artists I know. If you live in Washington and received an award in the 2011 Pastel 100, let me know and I'll add you to the list. Congratulations to all in the competition.

Cropping Queen

I love to crop. In our Critique Group I'm known as the Cropping Queen which is probably not what artists really want to call me when I suggest cropping away hours of their work. But, as with reworking, sometimes you have to let go of a precious area or two to get a better statement. One of the challenges of cropping occurs when a painting has a couple nice areas but they are at opposite ends or corners. In that case, you might be able to get two paintings out of one.

I've gone through my inventory and scheduled pieces for upcoming solo and groups shows and find that I need more work! I came across a 2006 painting that I like too much to wash off and rework, but it isn't great the way it is. I'm thinking about cropping it into one stronger statement or maybe into two small paintings.

Below, I've posted some of the cropping possibilities and I'd be pleased to hear comments from anyone who sees a clear best choice. The last image at the bottom is the painting the way it is today.

Leap-of-Faith Abstracting

Red Square evolution

I was trying to forget about Red Square #1 and was pretty sure everyone else had forgotten about it too but today, The Pastel Journal Pastel 100 Second-Place-Abstract recipient Debora Stewart emailed that she was looking forward to seeing what happens with my red squares. So I turned it upside down and painted on it for a little while. Sometimes you feel like a red square, sometimes you don't. I'll let it rest for a few days before I go back to it (and add red?).

simplified red square

Another hour of painting last night to simplify red square number one. I took a palette knife and scooped up all the paint on my palette and dragged it over the existing painting. Lost some precious statements but got rid of some awkward/tight areas. Click to enlarge. I'll get back to this painting next week.

resting red square

This is what red square number one looks like today after an hour of evening painting yesterday. It is resting in my studio, waiting for me, but today I am busy planting the first packets of flower seeds in flats. Oil on cradled panel, 20 x 20 inches.

snow light

Finished pastel paintings hang from a beam along the back wall of my studio. It's a good storage place while they are awaiting their frames but it is also usually quite dark. Today we have 3 inches of snow and the whole studio is illuminated by snow light coming through the opposite wall windows. Click on the image to enlarge.

red square number one

This is what red square number one looks like now. It was completely red with a strip of blues/greens in the upper left corner. After the red was dry, I applied an oil paint wash of several colors and left the red showing in places. We'll see where it goes from here...

another spaghetti sauce side-track?

A couple years ago I got side-tracked by the color of spaghetti sauce. At that time, I fell in love with the color and dropped everything to paint my kitchen walls.

Today I used the remaining paint in the gallon can to paint over three very bad oil paintings. I had the first panel almost completely covered, just one more brush stroke of red to go in the upper left corner, but I loved the original color peeking through so I left that area unpainted. On the second and third panels, I deliberately left areas without red paint. Now, I'm feeling myself pulled toward abstraction...side-tracked again.

31 to go?

Another try using the thumbnail sketch I liked so much. I might have to take a break from this winter-marshland series or maybe change the colors to represent another season. The little image below is the oil-wash foundation. This painting is "Hometown Yesterdays," 13 x 13 inches.

32 to go

I really love thumbnail number 4 but just as one can rely too heavily on a reference photo, getting determined to duplicate a thumbnail can be a problem too. I finally just put the thumbnail out of sight and let the painting go in another direction. "Hometown Memory," 13 x 13 inches, on raspberry ground.

Speaking of memory: artist Loriann Signori has been posting insights about memory painting for many weeks. If you want to go deeply into this subject, visit her blog.

I thought you might like to see the thumbnail I referred to. I may use it again for a painting on a different color ground.

33 to go

This painting started out based on the third thumbnail from left, top row, on the sheet of 35 but it stayed on my easel in the oil-wash foundation stage for days because the composition made me wince each time I looked at it. When I went back to work on this piece, I thought about how much my hometown has changed since I lived there and what it is that still binds me to the area. One fondness is the sound of the train whistle of my childhood that I heard again as I was shooting the reference photos for this series. I kept that sound in my mind as I painted this one, "Hometown Heartstrings," 14 x 14 inches, pastel on paper.

34 to go

One down, 34 hometown marshland thumbnails to go....oh, maybe not really that many but enough for a series of paintings from this photo shoot.  How many is a "series?" Maybe it is however many it takes to get bored with the subject. "Hometown Marshland," 13 x 13 inches, pastel on paper.

jump-start

I think the 35 thumbnails did the trick to jump-start my work for the new year. This is the oil-wash foundation for my first painting of the Hometown Marshland series. It is based upon the very first thumbnail in a previous post. I like this very much because of the spontaneity and am SO tempted to leave it as it is and call it an oil painting. But, the point of my bright idea was to take a reference photo, paint a watercolor thumbnail using the photo as a guide, and move on through the process to complete a pastel painting. My goal for the finished painting will be to keep the looseness but to add enough detail to draw the viewer into the story behind the scene.

My hometown is Auburn, Washington. I spent my first 21 years there with my family, in a little house built by my father near the railroad tracks. When I was shooting the photos for this series, I could hear train whistles in the distance...music to my ears and soul.

35 thumbnails

Here is the result of my bright idea of painting 35 small watercolor thumbnails while viewing reference photos on my computer display. The paper is a 14 x 20 inch pad of Lanaquarelle, 140 lb. cold press. To begin, I used a fat black Sharpie pen to layout squares  -  the format I prefer for my finished paintings. Click on the image to enlarge.

I started at the top left corner and closely followed what I saw in the reference photo. My left-brain said "You should write the photo number beneath the thumbnail so you can find the photo again." So, I did that for about 5 thumbnails. Then I got involved in the process of painting and decided that identifying the specific reference photo wasn't important to me.

I found myself caught up in playing with the color and experimenting with the lovely things that watercolor does - such an alive medium! By the time I got to the bottom row, my thumbnails had evolved into value and composition studies with much less detail than the thumbnails painted at the beginning of this experiment. For additional information, I used Photoshop to turn the thumbnail images into black and white. See the image below.

I plan to paint finished pastel paintings using the sheet of original thumbnails and a print-out of the gray scale images as my references.  This was a fun, totally absorbing exercise.

my bright idea

I'm trying to jump-start my painting year. Went on a photo shoot (see two photos on my display above), then started with black and white thumbnails but my thumbnails always end up with too much line work and too much detail. My bright idea is to bring the reference photos up on my display and do tiny loose watercolor thumbnails concentrating on value, color and form. The first two were fun. I'll let you know how this goes.

hometown marshland

Today we drove to my hometown for a photo shoot. I didn't realize there were so many marshy areas...we even found this elevated perch built specifically to view the wetlands. Grasses and trees are moist and muted with colors blending one into the next...a beautifully subdued time of year. Today's scenes should lure me away from tax preparation and get me painting again.

books need new homes

I'm cleaning out bookshelves and have 36 art books from my private collection that need new homes. A variety of mediums, all in very good condition. I set up a little store on Amazon under my business name, Bina Designs (since 1988). To see my books for sale, CLICK HERE.

a book for you?

Some of you may know of my past with colored pencil and the book I co-authored, "Colored Pencil Solution Book." Since I posted last -  10 days ago - I've been cleaning the studio and I found a box of 9 new books (8 soft cover, 1 hard cover). If anyone is interested in purchasing one of these, please email me at barbaranewton@comcast.net. I'll be happy to sign it!

2010 in review

2011 is here and I'm excited to begin painting again after the holiday break, but I was curious what 2010 looks like in review.

I began the year with a studio clean up and posted a tour on my art journal blog. Studio Tour

2010 painting began with experimentation in mixed media and non-objective work.

It wasn't long before I found some old pastel paintings to hose off so I could use the paper for new paintings.

"Tuesday's Child" was the result of a pastel rework.

Then, I found some old oil experiments to repaint.

Suddenly, it was summer and I was back to pastel.

A trip to Carmel, California and a series of 5 x 7 abstracted landscapes followed.

I was honored to have an article, "Infinite Possibilities," about reworking pastel paintings, published in the October 2010 issue of The Pastel Journal.

In the fall of 2010, I began experimenting with mixing my own pastel grounds.

2010 ended with a series of seven pastel paintings on my hand-made surfaces.

Looking back, 2010 was a year of experimentation. While The Pastel Journal article was certainly a highlight - as were awards received, the primary achievement of the year was learning more about myself through my work and through contact with other artists and those who appreciate art. Thank you for visiting my journal and for your comments and support. Wishing you a happy new year!

The Forest Above Me

My nine year old grandson created this picture this morning.

december rain

It has been pouring rain in the Pacific Northwest for days. The colors of wet trees, grasses and branches slide into one another and on into the creek. The only bright spots are the lichens on branches.

come dance with me

This painting of dancing grass (again on gessoed rag mat with no pastel mixture ground) came together in about an hour last night. Add another 3 hours of messing with it this morning then another hour of trying to get the color right in Photoshop - now I'm tired of it. Maybe the last painting for a while...Christmas is coming.

pastel on gesso

In my studio, another batch of 4-ply rag mag boards with gesso on both sides is awaiting the pumice-gesso ground for pastel. I wondered what would happen if I painted directly on the gessoed board (no pastel surface mixture on it). I applied a watercolor foundation on top of the gesso and pastel on top of that. This painting didn't require any wipe offs so the gesso alone had enough tooth for my needs.

back to bare bones

The good news is my "hand-made" surface held up through three total wipe offs of this painting. I wasn't sure if this surface (my pastel mix on rag mat) could take a hosing as Wallis can so I sprayed it a couple times with Spectra Fix to get some tooth back. After a couple more hours of work on this painting, I took a stiff bristled brush and brushed the whole thing off AGAIN from top to bottom. LOVE the trees in the background, I didn't touch them again after the wipe off. A little work on the purple bush and grasses on the right as well as some distant turquoise. I think it is now as good as it is going to get.

the point of no return?

I'm at a turning point with this painting. I was happy with the oil-wash foundation (left) but the painting went downhill from there because I was torn between the colors of the reference photo and a darker version that I had in mind. I have wiped the pastel off twice, pasteled the whole thing over in violet once, and scrubbed and scratched this "home-made" surface close to the point of no return. I may have to simply rip this one up.

a good photo problem

Today I used a reference photo that looked very much like this painting. And once again, I am reminded that though I am interpreting the scene and making it my own, it isn't as challenging or interesting to me as painting from either a really bad photo, a compilation of photos, or from no physical reference at all. Note: I left plein air painting out of this comparison because it is a completely different experience.

the ground or me?

Another painting that I am pleased with on my marble dust/gesso ground on rag mat. I'm mixing different recipes to find the ground that will make my paintings paint themselves (haha). But, I think I may have stumbled upon one variable that I hadn't figured into this experiment. I am painting on "scraps," the windows cut from rag mats, and I feel so much more playful (translates to loose for me) painting on them rather than painting on an expensive piece of my beloved Wallis. So, while I'll continue to mix recipes - I have some extra-fine pumice on order - this has led me to another question: is it the ground or is it me?

tender season

This painting was on my easel through the Thanksgiving holiday and it cheered me each time I looked at it. With Christmas less than a month away, we are in the tender season. Emotions run high, challenges and opportunities are magnified. This painting is the second test of the pastel ground recipe I'm trying to mix. This time the test is on rag mat board (instead of masonite) and it feels better because it is softer.

On another note, my long-ago instructor, William Cumming, passed away last week at age 93. I am honored to have a painting he gave me when I was his student. I found this interesting quote from him: "We are not creators -- we are created. I hold the brush, but what holds me? These are troubling thoughts for me as a practicing atheist."