Water

"Redear Sunfish" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic painting on Ampersand Aquabord, 7" x 5". Copyright ©2011 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved.

This painting proves that just about any subject can be found at the State Fair if you look around enough. The Indiana Department of Natural Resources has a beautiful display of fish at the Indiana State Fair. Outdoor ponds and indoor aquariums showcase native and introduced species.  There’s even a catch and release fishing pond where kids can learn to fish under supervision.

What attracted me to this redear sunfish was the translucence of his fins. The light shining through them reminded me of fiber optics.

A few images taken along the way:

"When Ducks Gossip" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic painting on Multimedia Artboard, 5 x 7". Copyright ©2010 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved.

These little rubber duckies in the Duck Pond game seemed to be sharing secrets.

Carnies look at you a little weird when you photograph their ducks for too long. I’m thinking next time I need to placate them by spending some money on their games.

Here are a few images captured along the way:

Usually I’d tint the entire board a darker color then paint over it, but some of the yellows I use don’t cover dark colors well. To keep my yellows pure and bright, I needed to define the yellow spots early, and paint the dark water around them.

I’m working in layers, building up the transparent yellows gradually. I wish I hadn’t used that dark grey marker for the drawing… it’s really had to cover with paint.

I’m still learning how to paint water. I tried to keep my strokes loose and calligraphic.

The final layers were glazes thinned with medium, used to push the yellows in either a warmer (duck sides) or cooler (duck tops) direction.

"Meander" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic painting on Ampersand Gessobord, 6 x 6". Copyright ©2010 Lesley Spanos, all rights reserved. Painted with permission from Google Street View image.

This week Bill Guffey’s Virtual Paintout explores the islands of Hawaii. It was hard to narrow it down to one image out of the fourteen I chose, but eventually I settled on this beach scene in Hau’ula, Hawaii, on the northeast shore of Oahu:
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If I could go for a walk on a beach like that every morning, I could give up caffeine…

"Tenerife Overlook" by Lesley Spanos. Acrylic on Multimedia Artboard, 14 x 11". Painted with permission from Google Street View image. Painting copyright ©2010, all rights reserved.

Every month I tell myself I should participate in Bill Guffey’s Virtual Paintout, but I never get past the planning stage. Google’s Street View is too addicting. I get caught up in wandering the virtual streets looking for the perfect painting location, always sure there’s a slightly better angle or view just around the corner. I keep going like a cartoon donkey following a carrot on a stick and never choose a spot. For the current Canary Islands challenge I decided to bypass information overload and just pick a spot and paint. Since I love the ocean – and frankly, didn’t want to struggle with buildings and perspective – I restricted my search to a random five mile stretch on the southern coast of the island of Tenrife.

Here’s my chosen location:
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Google uses a pod-like cluster of cameras on top of a mast on the roof of the car, so the view is much higher than normal eye level for anyone but an oversized NBA athlete. In addition, the images are taken through wide angle lenses and stitched together, so the photos are distorted in odd ways, and sometimes bits are missing. When drawing from Google Stree View, we can either make the most of the quirky distorted look, or try to get rid of it.

I don’t like my paintings to look like they were copied from photos, so I try to get rid of the distortion. Easier said than done. I try to imagine I’m there and paint from the image in my mind, rather than copy the digital image in front of me. To help with that process, I put the photo behind me on the computer screen across the room, and glanced at it as little as possible. It worked for everything but the car.

Not much in-progress work to show this week. The acrylic paint was drying fast (the painting took less than two hours) and there was no time to shoot. I started with the standard red underpainting, which you can see in the car area. My favorite spot in the painting is the area in the water below the sun where the red shows through.

"Boogie Fever" by Lesley Spanos. Gouache on paper, 5 x 9.5". Copyright ©2009, all rights reserved.

I’ve long admired artist Karin Jurick’s paintings of people relaxing on the beach, so how cool is it to get to paint from one of her beach photos, with her blessing? That was our assignment for weeks 27-28 on Karin’s Different Strokes From Different Folks online painting challenge.

It’s mega cool, yes, but also intimidating. If there was one contemporary I wish I could paint like, it’s Karin. Her colors are rich and pleasing, like comfort food for the eyes. Her brushstrokes have that confident, casual look I long for in my own work. Her narrative demonstrates a keen sense of observation and a quirky sense of humor which takes a pretty picture to the next level and makes it Art.  She’s building a solid body of work, and I fully expect her work will hang on museum walls some day. Man oh man, why didn’t I buy something when her paintings first showed up on eBay, when they were more affordable?

Because I like Karin’s work so much, I have to dig deep each time I participate in her challenge to find myself. The last thing I want to do on her blog is a cheap imitation of her work, from her photo! I think it’s a dilemma most of the participating artists share. It’s like being a contestant on American Idol, trying to put your own spin on an iconic song. It’s damn hard, but if you can pull it off, you’re a better artist for it. Even if you can’t pull it off, you’re still a better artist for it, because you were true to yourself. That’s a big reason why I keep doing these challenges – it forces me to listen to my own voice.

That, and it makes me stretch my abilities by painting stuff I normally wouldn’t paint. Like those people on the beach – I love to paint surf, but I have never included a person in a seascape. Never! So it’s Challenge Time!

Here are a few shots I took along the way:

The painting begins with a waterproof pen drawing on paper.

This time I toned the paper after doing the drawing, using transparent washes of acrylic paint. Why? I dunno. Just felt like it.

The rest of the painting was done using M. Graham gouache. My palette consisted of:

• burnt umber
• phthalo blue
• ultramarine blue
• dioxazine purple
• cadmium red
• quinacridone rose
• cadmium yellow light
• zinc white
• titanium white

Oils might have been easier and more effective, but I needed a good workout in gouache. Gouache is tricky, because you need to work quickly, and you can’t put on too many layers before it turns to mud.

Waves are well within my comfort zone. People aren’t! So the beach background fell off the paintbrushes effortlessly, and within twenty minutes, it was done. Then I spent the next two hours struggling with the figures.

Having painted a few waves in my lifetime, I think the main thing I need to keep reminding myself is to let them flow. Because when you let the paint do its thing, all sorts of happy accidents happen that make it look more convincing. Labor over a wave for hours, and it looks contrived, like those frozen in time paintings of waves where every little droplet is defined. (You know the ones I mean… usually there’s light shining through the wave right where it’s starting to break.) I like to paint waves as I see them, churning and violent and random. Today’s waves started as dark humps with lots of brown mixed in, because they’re dirty with sand. Then I made a pass with a lighter color, using a circular, rolling motion to imitate the motion of the breaking wave. The cool thing about gouache is that it remains water soluble even after it dries, so as I painted the undercolor was picked up by the lighter paint, mixing with it and creating multiple tones in between. I finished the wave with a pass of thicker white mixed with a tiny bit of red. The red makes the white pop against the complementary blue-greens of the water.

That’s me smiling at my favorite happy accident in the painting.

Starting to mess with the figures (and yes, they are a mess)…

…and the (butt) end result. I’m not really happy with the figures, or with my gouache technique here. I didn’t know what colors to use or how to define the planes on a human body with paint so I fussed with them too much. Gouache strokes should look confident. Lay them down once, and move on! Mine are unsure. You can see me searching for the right answer. That’s why I need to practice in gouache a LOT more.

But there are some things happening here that make me happy. I like the bits of underpainting showing through, and I wish there were more of them. I like the looseness of the sky and the rough indication of clouds. I like the lack of hard edges around the figures, though I could have used a few hard edges here and there. I like the girl’s hair, another happy accident.

The foreground is a big part of the painting and it needed something to define it and bring it forward… so I added sand texture and pebbles. I flicked some light color on with a brush, then added burnt umber shadows to each speck. Fun.

What color is wet sand? Well, it’s darker than dry sand, and reflects a LOT of sky color. The wetter it is, the more sky it reflects. So I guess sand is a dirty brown mixture of sea color and sky color.

Here’s the finished piece. I was getting ready to send it in to Karin, but I have a few free hours to paint today (after I subtract Earth Hour), and there are more figures in the reference photo calling to me. I could just stop here, but in my head I hear Thelma’s last words to Louise – “Let’s keep goin’!” I’m thinking it’s diptych, or even triptych time!

"Canyon" by Lesley Spanos. Oil on paper, 6 x 15". Copyright 2009, all rights reserved.

Today I felt the need to break away from small paintings and tiny brushes and cut loose. Funny how I always want to paint loosely, but my paintings get tight anyway. I know that happens to a lot of us, but why? Why is it so hard to leave things a little less refined?

I love the look of paint just doing its thing. My favorite paintings look like piles of paint up close, and something real from a distance. The kind of paintings that keep me walking up to the wall, then back ten feet, over and over, trying to see how the artist created his magic.

I don’t know if I could ever achieve that look, but if I don’t try, I won’t for sure. So on this one I forced myself to keep it loose by using only big brushes and unmixed paint. I think the smallest brush I used here was a #10. What a mess I made! I got paint everywhere – on my hands, on my sleeves, on my coffee mug. Did you know that Shout Ultra Gel laundry stain remover is really good at getting wet oil paint out of clothing? I didn’t until today. It has a little brush attachment on the end that rubs the paint right out. My long-sleeved black T-shirt once again has black sleeves!

The reference is from the Wet Canvas image reference library, and was posted for a challenge on the landscape forum. I’m still working up the nerve to post my version over there.

I was painting so quickly and was so covered in paint, I only got one in-progress shot. For what it’s worth, here it is: