I have been busy on the business end of my art life and getting distracted by quilting projects. Yeah, quilting. Its my dirty little secret. I feel like I'm betraying my mission on earth when I quilt, but I do love it. The color play! So addictive. I will just have to find a balance of one more piece of my life.

I am now on Fine Art America. You can buy prints of some of my work. I have been slowly scanning (small scanner! See below.) paintings into my laptop in sections and then Photoshopping them together. It is a long arduous process involving propping things up on books and stools. I just finished scanning "Muscle Shells" in which is 36" x 52" and requires 30 individual scans. My next step is the "knitting" step where I erase and soften those edges. I found it particularly difficult to keep the work square with itself so each piece isn't tilting just a tiny bit. I also find it useful to do this on a cloudy day. Nothing like a bright blast of sunshine right on the scanner to skew the color balance.

Spent the weekend struggling with photoshop and signing up for online print services. You will soon be able to get prints of my art work at an affordable price. But first I have to scan the pieces in, in sections because my scanner is the size of cereal box and then "stitch" them together. That's the part that's proving difficult. It's a learning curve, figuring out how masks, clipping layers work. I'm disapointed in the delay, but staying positive. It's that or the day job!

Toggle City

I just figured out how to toggle back and forth between my personal Facebook which has a different name than mine and my Facebook, Victoria Haskell, the artist. Phew! This shouldn't have been this hard. Now to start "liking" things as me, the artist and get some positive marketing vibe going.

Four days left to my vaca week. I'm excited about doing some painting again. I have some new ideas to work out. I usually just rough things out and go for it, but I think I want to do some drawings first this time, work out the masses, the lights and darks, the aura of the piece a bit ahead of time. I also want to eliminate some pitfalls and errors before I start painting. The problem with a planned approach is that it can end up feeling like a straight jacket, like paint by number forced labor. Can't have that. We'll see how I make out.

Blue Water

I have this week off from work, so I am painting and working on a variety of projects. I don't know if you can see a whole lot of difference between this and my last post, but I did re-paint the water and it is an improvement. I added more color to the dark reflections so they are not as flat and I softened those edges so they are not as jarring. Sharp edges can be distracting, they make lines for the eye to follow. I want the attention on the boats and the water.

I'm still debating whether to add the reflection of clouds or not. It could make the painting too busy,  but the symbolism of the clouds passing and the empty boats is hard to resist. I may try to make the cloud colors kind of grey and make the edges very fuzzy, so the clouds stay put in the water. I can always paint them out, as long as I scrape down some of the thickening layers so those pesky brushstrokes don't show as much. If I don't include the clouds, or at least some water ripples, there is the danger that the water could be too flat and look like a blue parking lot.

Every part of a painting project has risk associated with it. We must always make a decision about whether to go forward and try something risky and stretch a little, or play it safe. It may be a technique we are perfecting or a design element that we are struggling with. In this picture, what initially attracted me was the water, I need to keep that focus there without confusing the structure of the whole. That is the challenge.

More progress. I worked on defining the boats more, adding detail. You can see a difference, but they are by no means complete. I am leaving the paint "brushy" with the strokes showing, juicy. I am not trying for photo-realism, more like expressive representation. I also added the stuff on the dock. I have not repainted  the water or the vertical supports of the dock, yet. I am not being real particular about perspective, especially where the foreground items are concerned, the ladder. Some things are "indicators" not literal objects. I'm trying to de-emphasize the background items, using less detail there so the attention remains on the front 2-3 boats. I think my next step is the top right corner, where the shoreline is. That will be tricky because I don't want it to move forward unintentionally. I am itching to do the water, but am saving it as a treat. In the original photography there were many reflections of clouds, which I may leave out. I don't want the picture to get too busy and I want the deep blues to really shine.

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I have been doing landscape painting again and focusing more tightly on its design and the meaning an image has for me. The photograph below is one I took of Wellfleet Harbor in Massachusetts several years ago. For some reason it has stayed in my mind waiting to be worked on.

The painting is not finished, it is a work in progress. I've done about 3 sessions on it. As you can see all I've really done is block in the colors and the design making minor changes along the way. I've done a first round of defining the shapes and some details, but I'm no where near completion. I'm trying to capture a certain shade of blue in the water, the depth of it, the reflections and movement. The blues definitely draw you into the scene and then the structure of the wharf and the verticals bring you back to the front two boats.  I think I need to differentiate those two boats more, they look too similar to each other. In this painting, I ave been working all over the picture, bringing separate parts further along so the painting is in harmony with itself. If I add too much detail or complete one section too much too early, it is distracting and the details look too fussy though there are some pictures I have used this approach with.

I've always been drawn to boats as a subject. They are not as forgiving as trees to paint as they have a lot of hard edges, so they bring out a certain anal attention to line and detail. It takes a lot of careful workmanship to do marine subjects. And I'm not always in the mood for it. Sometimes I like to just to splash.