Camping and Painting

Apples and Cherries. 8" x 8" oil.

Sculpey polymer clay butterfly magnet - by Sophia 4" x 4"

Murals done based on the four YMCA character values, honesty, respect, responsibility, and caring. Each mural was designed by a group and painted together. This took a lot of cooperation. 8' x 12' acrylic on paper.

Well I am in week four (of tens weeks) of teaching art at the local YMCA. Months of planning has gone into all the lessons I am teaching and the lessons my co-teacher, Amber, teaches. We decided this week we could have just let the kids play games and use Playdough and they wouldn't have cared. They are very social creatures but not super interested in making art. Well some of them are, but the majority are there cause that's where their parents put them. So, we are taking a deep breath and repeating to our selves - process not product.

In the mean time I am trying to squeeze in time to paint and summon the energy needed to make it happen. So I get up at 5:30 am and try to paint Tues. and Thursday for an hour before getting ready for work, and again on the weekends. I really don't know how people who work get anything else done. I am so tired I sure don't want to do dinner, or laundry or the garden or anything!. How do you do it? Is that what Rachel Ray means when she says "America runs on Duncan"? What about us non- coffee drinkers? What should we be running on????

Next week I am going to the Hudson River Valley Art Workshop in Greenville, New York to take a three day workshop with artist Carol Marine. She is a Daily Painter, doing mostly still life and I am super excited to paint with her- plus they have homemade chocolate for extra energy. I will definitely post some pics of that weekend. Here's a few pics from camp. (Sorry no kids pictures are allowed, just their work.)

Garbage Collage

This is one of the "Garbage Collages" my students did. We saved our packaging from our lunches and reused it in our collages. You would not believe how much trash twenty people can make in three days just saving lunch stuff! There are many artists who reuse materials to make their works of art. The artist we looked at for this lesson was Sandhi Schimmel-Gold. She is a contemporary artist and she does really wonderful portraits reusing magazines. I noticed when I got done this week that I am much more reluctant to throw something out that could maybe be made into something else. Waste not, want not!

Arts Camp

Well I am back teaching arts camp again and this is our first week. Today we went outside and did a lesson based on the environmental artist, Andy Goldsworthy. If you have never seen his work look him up. He is marvelous. We watched some excerpts from a video showing him constructing some of his work and talking about it. Then we broke the kids into groups and each group was given a element of design to base their design on. This was space. We had a beautiful blue sky, not to hot day. It was perfect. Only a few bug bites and we all survived!

This is showing value. Shade of white from light to dark.

This is a little hard to see, but it is showing form. There is one main branch stuck into the ground with things added that hang from the branches. Several times the wind blew this down.

OLd Forge

The Bridge

McCaulley Mountain

Bald Mountain, Second Lake, Old Forge, New York

I was invited to spend three days in Old Forge this week with a good friend. I got to paint twice, which was a real treat. Both days it was high 80's and blue sky, perfect for painting. The bugs were very interested in what I was doing, so I was glad to have good bug repellent from Bert's Bees. I am experimenting with using a colored ground on these paintings. You can see the pink coming through. I like it much better than the white of the canvas board. This time I learned a few things: don't forget your umbrella, find a good bug spray, and bring a drop cloth. The drop cloth was good for protecting surfaces I set up on, but it also covered the tall grass where I set up to paint "The Bridge". This kept the bugs from crawling up my legs, which is very distracting!

Green Lakes

This was the first plein air outing that wasn't in my backyard. A few weeks ago I met another artist interested in painting outside so our first outing was to Green Lakes State Park. What started out as a nice, crisp, spring morning turned into a freezing, blustery day very quickly. We both were determined to get at least one painting done, so I choose a very simple view and painted as fast as I could. It was so cold. I learned you need to paint what changes fastest, which in this case was the water. I had planned to put in these beautiful dark reflections in the foreground water - but the wind kicked up and they disappeared. I also learned that a paper palette can blow away!

TLC really works!

I just wanted to post today and say I have not fallen off the planet into the abyss of not painting. I have been taking some great drawing classes and trying to get back into figure drawing after 25 years. Nothing worth posting just yet. I have also been spending a lot of time getting my garden into shape before everything is over run and the ground turns to a solid rock. I hope to do a lot of painting studies as soon as I finish catching up. One more week I think. The weather is holding and we are getting enough rain to make it some what easy (it's all relative) to pull out the enormous weeds. I wish the flowers would grow big and the weeds would stay small. Anyway I love my garden and this time of years it needs it's TLC to get a good start. I also have three beautiful new raised 4' x 8' veggie beds filled with organic compost, vermiculite and peat moss. Now I just need to find some worms and add them to the mix. I hope to buy my plants this weekend and start hardening them off for planting in a week or two. I did start some heirloom seeds inside but they are looking pretty punk and may not survive. We'll see. I'll post pictures soon. PS 6/25 - here's the results of the TLC

Going in Circles

24" x 36" acrylic

Concentric circles are something I love to paint. It's so fun to just paint random shapes and colors and see how it all comes together in the end. This one I did late last night and it is 8" x 8" oil.