Daily Painting

This was a quicker sketch with less attention to accuracy - pen/ink forces that. I wanted to get to the painting and the pre-planned split complementary color scheme.

After a long time, I've done a painting from a photograph. I think I prefer plein air as it forces me to see what I see, and no more. And the squinting to try to see more has the right effect: minimizing the detail and consolidating the values. With a photo, I tend to zoom in on the device to see the details better, and the resulting painting is worse for it. This has a strange and incongruous color scheme - I need to pre-plan colors better, not just values. It needs a redo. I wish I had the sketch ready on several sheets of watercolor paper to keep doing just that, instead of the painstaking effort of re-drawing it. And don't even get me started on the shady, elongated lady. At least, I rhyme.

This was in Santa Cruz last Thursday with the SCVWS group. A lovely gorgeous place to paint, but a windy and chilly day. And a long hike from the parking lot to these two spots. Usually I am up for a hike, but wasn't prepared for this distance carrying my stuff - backpack with paints, a chair, and a hat threatening to fly off. Anyway, I joined the group at location #2 [preferring to do BollyX first thing in the morning, over starting with the group at 10 am], and then onwards to location #3 [Fern Grove].

I feel like I've been at a plateau for a while. Sometimes I like my paintings; mostly I feel they're just okay. In my mind, I can paint a lot better than I actually produce on paper :-( I don't feel like I'm really improving. It's a terrible and frightening feeling when I feel I am regressing. I'm not usually such a pessimist. But I persevere. This was at Allied Arts Guild in Menlo Park. I cannot believe such a treasure was hiding in our midst. I went with the POPs group to paint there, and Bonnie Joy Sedlak was there. How I love her work! Her website is bookmarked forever in my Favorites folder. She chatted with me for an hour, and gave me lots of tips on how to improve. She said I need to improve my composition techniques. I think that must be it. I am now reading up on composition and value studies [to think that about a year and a half ago, I didn't know what values were other than what I ought to teach the kids] and planning to audit Jane Hofstetter...

When I returned from Vipassana, I found a lovely bunch of tulips in a vase, courtesy my husband and two children. Thank you! I loved doing this very loose painting, and wish I could be this loose and watery with my architectural subjects. The architect in me awakens and I see, and unfortunately am compelled to paint, every little detail.

I hung 16 watercolors at Red Berry Cafe on April 30 [thanks to my husband who sits there over an espresso every morning, and noticed that the art on the wall was different, and urged me to explore how I could display my watercolors] - the hanging layout was planned out on ... yes, AutoCAD, after I measured the walls and decided that 16 paintings would be the right number. While I was hanging,  a lovely young mother started chatting with me and even offered to help me hang. She bought my "No Sugar, Please" painting of the china teapot and teacup, and reflective cream pourer!  She said it was a Mother's Day gift to herself [first Mother's Day; baby Alec is 11 months old]. I went next door to Gallery 9 and asked to borrow a red dot. How I love the red dot! A few days later, while I was away at Vipassana for 10 days, a local Los Altos resident who had previously lived in Campbell left me a voicemail indicating interest in "Downtown Campbell" (hereby named ...