Last week I felt like changing things up and took on a small (10.5"x13.5") portrait. About a year ago Meghan, a former student,
posted a Facebook photo of her very blond little daughter named Madeline. She and her family took a trip out west, and the photo was taken in Yellowstone National Park. I told Meghan I thought her photo was iconic and
she happily gave me permission to paint it--unfortunately she had lost
all of those photos during a recent computer crash.
Maddy is completely unimpressed with Yellowstone National Park. Old Faithful
is erupting in the background while an airplane contrail cuts across the
sky. That reminded me of a Steve Martin arrow-through-the-head. Her
fine hair is blowing all over the place
and she is wearing a white t-shirt and one of those plastic gold medals
you give kids. The bright sunlight is casting rather harsh shadows on
her tired little face, and I worked on that first. I masked off a significant amount of her hair--the masking fluid is shiny yellow, and it protected areas I wanted to stay white.
I posted my progress on my Facebook art page and was pleased to receive this lovely comment from Maddy's grandmother Barb:
"You
have captured our granddaughter's mood that particular afternoon. To
say the least it was a long camping trip for two little ones. You do
such amazing work, you have a true passion for art, and it shows. Thank you for painting her; of course we believe she is the most beautiful child."
Meghan loved the portrait too, and I can't tell you what a relief it always is to receive feedback like this, especially during the beginning stages when a painting can look awkward.
I painted some blondness over
the top of the rubbery yellow and allowed it to dry. Then I removed the masking fluid and worked to integrate
the resulting highlights with the rest of the hair. I also added the start of
a neck.
I covered a lot of ground the next day. The
light was a little too warm on this photo, but you can still get a pretty good idea of what I added, including her white t-shirt (the easiest item of clothing to
paint with watercolor), arms, ribbon, and a bit of the background. It
looks like Madeline is in the desert here. I had to paint the landscape a
warm gray first before adding vegetation.
I
spent the last day refining details and adding the medal, Old Faithful,
and lots of trees and plants, including some small yellow flowers.
As usual, I asked for Jeff's help in titling this. My working idea was
"I Deserve A Medal," which Jeff liked, but then he tossed out "Honorable
Mention" and we both cracked up. There's something good but kind of not
good about an honorable mention. I think Madeline's face really
illustrates that feeling.
Jeff and I met on Match.com--ain't no shame in it!--and one of the things he liked about my profile was that I had answered the "What was the last great book you read?" question with The Grapes of Wrath. It was one of those books that had somehow slipped through the cracks of my reading life, and I remember finishing it while sitting on a bench in Chicago's Union Station. The devastating ending made me cry, and then I just stared at things for a while, a character Edward Hopper had forgotten to paint: Heartbroken Lonely Woman Crying Over A Book.
Anyway, one of the characters in that book is named Rose of Sharon, and I always thought that was so unusual--she has a preposition in her name! Last year we were shopping for plants to decorate our new patio, and I flipped out when I came across a rose of Sharon. The man who sold it to us said it was blue, which is not as common as the white and pink version, and after planting it, we waited for about a month for it to bloom. It's in the center of the above photo.
I took a photo of the first rose and saved the picture for a future painting. I started it a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't all that revved up to paint it at first, but after a day of work I was excited. I loved the light on the petals, and the variety of blues and purples I used to create the bloom was challenging.
I fine-tuned the white thing and added more details and texture to the petals.
Then I filled in the background with some bloopy, blurry colors, and I started the rocks in the lower-left corner. Most of the white areas would become leaves and branches.
Next
up: I spent a lot of time with that dry grass on the left side. It had
lots of different blurry colors going on. I texturized the rocks with purples, blues, pinks, and browns. Finally, I did some yellow underpainting
on the leaves, masked off the major veins (seen above as yellow lines) and added an
additional green glaze over the top.
More leaf work...
I
added a lot of details to the leaves and attempted to soften and refine
the veins. Leaves in direct sunlight called for bits of blue, permanent green light, and a whole lot of no-paint. The bigger/closer leaves required some micro veins. This process reminded me of the way I painted the colorful leaf from my Mushrooms painting a year and a half ago. The colors in the photo above are a bit too bright--I took the picture during a thunderstorm and got aggressive with it in Photoshop.
On my last day of painting, I added a branch and some grassy shapes in the center. Those were surprisingly complex and colorful. And then, as if on cue, our new scanner arrived in the mail!
Eleven years ago I bought a kind of so-what HP scanner that did a wonderful job with my watercolors and cartoons, and Bun liked to sit on it, too. When it died in 2009, I assumed it would be easy to find a replacement. But that was not the case--the ones we've tried since then can't handle subtle color changes or things like pastel colors outlined in black pen.
Last month Jeff did some research (and great things happen when Jeff does some research). He found a used Epson Perfection V30 for only $30. A watercolor artist had blogged about this scanner and showed how to configure the settings to work for watercolors. It seemed like such a great deal, especially when you consider that I tend to pay $12-$15 per big scan at FedEx. The only problem was that the vendor was in Hawaii, and the scanner had to endure a month-long boat odyssey and cross-country road trip before it reached us.
We set it up and scanned my painting (which was too big to fit) in two sections. Photoshop miraculously pieced them together--seamless! We were impressed at how the scanner even managed to pick up on the texture (or tooth) of my watercolor paper. Terrific!
And you can find prints of this new painting if you click here!
Imagekind has finally gotten its act together, and now my other new-ish floral paintings are available as prints, too!
Almost every watercolor I paint has a sweet spot--an area that makes me breathe easier once I've completed it. Sometimes this is a section that "makes" the painting. Sometimes it's the hardest part, and if I'm satisfied with it I think, Well, if I can paint that, the rest of this will be no problem. And sometimes it's one of the painting's unsung heroes that nobody ever points out as being especially good, but it's one of the places I focus on.
I thought it might be fun to explore some of these. Readers who are familiar with my work: see if you can recall the painting from which I've taken each chunk! Here they are, in absolutely no particular order (click on the links to see the entire paintings and read more about them, and click on the images to see them a little bigger).
Apple Blossoms: This is the best leaf I've ever painted. I like how the shiny spring green on the top contrasts with the velvety khaki underside.
Glass Gems 3: The area under the red gem seemed molten, and I loved playing with that color range.
Planets and Foil: I like the way this marble seems to be grinning, and I'm especially happy with the window reflection near the top-right. I painted it with pink-yellow-orange, and it felt weird at the time, but I think it really works.
Mushrooms: Ugh! Those little purple fingery things were so hard!
Abandoned Knowledge: Most people focus on the apple, but I'm happiest with this vinyl seat. This was a one-shot, wet-into-wet situation. I really had to nail it. At a juried exhibition a couple of years ago, I was told that the judge pointed at this part and said, "Yep."
The Graduates: This little blue pot was tough. The colors shifted from cool to warm in a very smooth way that, like the vinyl seat, required wet-into-wet. Similar color problems are happening with the plant, too. This whole painting has a lot of individual still-life moments.
Dale's Super 400. The couch my uncle Dale is sitting on had a bunch of velvety pillows, and that's a tough texture to achieve with watercolor. Plus one of them was floral!
Married With Cats. This is Bun's happy pose, and I liked how her tabby pattern makes her blend in with the rug. Plus cute little belleh, sweet haunches.
Mabel. The Roger Ebert book is to the right of this section--I think I did a better job on these books than I did with his, but whatever, he loved it! I was thrilled to paint the magazine that was shoved in there backwards near the left side of this chunk. It featured a truck ad, I think.
Dr. Terry Sherer: I thought this was a cool intersection of patterns: his plaid tie, checked shirt, and the studs on his leather chair. The chair's arm features yet another softly shiny surface that required wet-into-wet.
Art Theater: This painting was very dark, so the bright areas really popped. These are just some orange/yellow lights on the left side of the street.
Ruby Liberty Dragonfly: I like this whole section, but I'm especially proud of the disco ball-looking glass earring. It was hard to draw, and I had to consider each segment individually in terms of color choices. I had the 15-minute version of Voodoo Chile by Jimi Hendrix on repeat as I painted it.
Emily and Cupcake: When my sister was little, I loved the way she looked when she slept, and a lot of that innocence is still there in this picture.
Last Meal in Italy: I painted this watercolor during a couple of snow days back when I was still teaching. I liked this white shell and the way it reflected the turqoise building nearby. Painting those tiny ridges was no joke!
Self-Portrait: I really need to scan this painting. What you see here is from a photograph, and in real life the titles, etc, are more precise. Anyway, this section was such a speed bump, and for a while there I completed one square inch per hour. But I loved the spines of these books, some with creatures and famous paintings and sculptures, some old and falling apart, and some instantly recognizable based on color alone. I painted this during my "I will never use masking fluid" phase, and I made myself paint around all of the white or light-colored words. That really slowed me down.
Treasure: This painting featured several orange glass beads that were incredibly tricky. The darker areas called for muted purple-orange-browns, and as with the earring from Ruby Liberty Dragonfly, the many diamond shapes had to be dealt with one at a time.
Sunflowers: When I see this part I instinctively squeeze my fingers together, mimicking it. I rarely work with this much yellow.
Wilting Parrot Tulip: The challenge here was to paint extremely bright colors in shadows. I toned them down a bit with some greens and browns, but they're still pretty blazing.
Hey, I enjoyed that! I have lots of other paintings I'd like to chunk-ify, so maybe this will turn into a series.
Imagekind update: as of right now (Sunday, May 5), it's still having problems, so in the meantime please visit my merchandise store for all your Cinco de Mayo/art-related needs. Thank you as always for your support!
After a month of gray-dominated paintings involving grandparents, I was overjoyed to return to vivid colors. In August I'm going to have a one-person show at the Decatur (IL) Area Arts Council. I had applied for a 2014 exhibit, but their August 2013 artist had to back out due to--I think it was a house fire...? Talk about one of my greatest fears. If our house was burning down, I know which paintings I'd try to save first, but I definitely wouldn't be able to rescue all my work. I can't even imagine how that would feel.
Anyway, the Decatur people asked me if I could display my work in just a few short months, and I said yes. So between now and then, I'll be producing as many new paintings as I can to bulk up my body of work. That kind of rules out creating month-long paintings like Treasure or Ruby Liberty Dragonfly, although I plan to paint more jewelry still-lifes for the show. But each of these paintings will feature four or five sparkly things instead of something like eighty.
But back to the flowers! This is a wilting parrot tulip after I had worked on it for a couple of days. I planted ten of these frilly, fancy tulips a year and a half ago and was beyond excited to watch them emerge last spring. They were even more beautiful as they wilted, and their petals created interesting and dynamic shapes. I took several dozen photos and saved this one, the queen of them all, for the next time I felt the urge to paint something floral.
That super-hot red is a combination of opera (out of control pink) and cadmium red light (stupefying orange). I can't tell you how pleasing it is to mix those two colors. Something scientific/magical happens.
I tightened up the petals a bit and added some freckly spots. The background came together quickly, and I painted some of that during my watercolor workshop a few weeks ago (also at Decatur). It's been a while since I've had an audience, and it took me back to my teaching days when students would watch me work. I took some photos of people at the workshop, and here is my favorite one:
On to painting two! This is a passion flower I spotted at Kevin and Natalie's home in Orlando. Jeff and I visited them last month, and as soon as I saw this strange blue flower/mini-spaceship, I knew I would paint it. To create its dozens of stringy blue petals, I masked off those parts and painted the petals and leaves behind them.
Next I worked on the flower's amazing center, a fun combination of magenta and acid green, and painted the petals a flat blue (with dark purple and white areas). I don't even want to know how many petals are on this flower.
I added shadows to each petal (painstaking!) and lifted some highlights with a combination of tiny brush/water/paper towel. That took the better part of an afternoon, and I fell into assembly line mode. Done, done, on to the next one.
And here's the finished product!
It was smooth sailing once I finished that flower, although I began to suffer from dark green fatique. The bud/pod and the little springy things provided some relief. Both of these paintings are 10.5"x13.5", and I'm eager to pop them into frames.
We've reached the part of my new-painting posts where I link to Imagekind and beg you to buy prints, but Imagekind has been having site-wide technical problems for several weeks (!!). They've assured their artists that they are working on solving the problems, but many of us are understandably disgruntled. I make most of my money in November and December with a little Mother's Day bump in the spring. So the timing here is bad for me, especially now that I'm in portfolio-building mode and not painting people's grandparents for cash.
While we wait for Imagekind to get its act together, I have this gifty alternative for you:
It's my CafePress merchandise store, and last night I spent three hours uploading images and creating new products for you to peruse and enjoy. I'm sorry, but I want that bag so damn much! Please consider supporting me by picking up a thing or two, and I'll let you know when Imagekind is back to normal.
Please like my Facebook art page if you haven't already! I update it every few days with in-progress paintings, and let's face it, commenting is easier there than it is here. No stupid Captcha thing, and I respond to just about everybody, too!
Oh, it was tornado watch weather for sure. Wednesday afternoon Bun and I went outside to take in the hazy, finally legitimately warm weather. I took some photos, including this one of our sort of flooded backyard stream. Normally this stream is easily jumped or even stepped across, but thanks to a wetter-than-usual early spring, the stream has been wide and boggy for about a month. I've enjoyed watching Canadian geese, blue herons, wood ducks, and even beavers swimming and nosing around in it. Near the top of this photo and running from right to left is the Salt Fork river, and beyond that is our town's wetlands area. It's about the size of six football fields (totally guessing).
Bun lounged in the mulch near our daffodils.
I took photos of pretty blooming things. This bush was humming with honeybees.
These little guys were finally coming up. I'm so happy that spring is here!
Later on Jeff and I took a walk uptown. I wore a dress that showcased my unapologetically pasty white calves to motorists on Main Street and route 150.
While we were on
our relatively short walk, Jeff and I experienced the
following: a sauna-like humidityfest (seen above in red), a few steamy romantic sprinkles but no
clouds overhead (blue), a cheeseburger break while monitoring alarming new clouds
in the northwest (end of blue), some uneasy double-time walking towards home (purple), followed by flat-out
running from a very dark squall line and a sudden 20 degree temperature
drop (green). It was awesome.
It rained all night and Thursday--nonstop thunderstorms with torrential rain. I didn't take any radar screen caps while this was happening. Basically a massive, seemingly endless, chicken strip-shaped blob of yellow, orange, and red doppler radar was working its way up Illinois from soutwest to northeast. Here, let me illustrate that for you.
(The red dot there is our house. The chicken strip radar shape was even bigger than this, too.)
So northern Illinois was getting hammered, and we eventually got hammered as well. All of that water had to go somewhere, and flood watches and warnings were popping up left and right. Jeff and I usually shrug off flood alerts, but this seemed major, like one of those 100-year floods that we've started experiencing every five years or so. We live in the lowest part of the lowest part of Champaign County. Back in January 2008--Jeff and I had been dating for almost a month!--a combination of major snowfall and epic thunderstorms caused flooding so severe that Jeff and his daughter Melissa had to evacuate the house that Jeff and I live in now. There was a rescue with boats and everything. <--I'm making that more dramatic than it was, but still. Boats were involved.
Thanks to the U.S. Geological Survey, we were able to monitor the situation online. They have some charts that show how high the river is near our house--so glad that this site exists. Jeff knew from experience that anything over 19 feet meant that our sunken living room would flood. Anything over 20 feet meant that the rest of our house would flood. We went to bed on Thursday night looking at this chart.
And we were feeling like bad, bad things were going to happen in the morning. Jeff set his alarm clock for 2:00 a.m., saying we'd probably have to get up and start moving furniture and books out of the living room. At 1:30 we were awakened by a bumping sound--I'm not sure what that was, but Jeff sprang out of bed to look outside. I got up, too. The water level had risen considerably over the past few hours. Throbbing with adrenaline, we abandoned the idea of going back to sleep.
Thinking it might be a while before he could do it again, Jeff took a shower while I rather insanely put on some makeup (I'd taken my shower before bed). I guess I didn't want to be one of those bagged-out storm survivors you see on local news reports. I wanted to look like I at least had my act together once the cameras inevitably descended upon Jeff and me, area homeless flood victims.
During the pre-dawn hours we moved as much of our living room furniture and books as we could upstairs to my studio. Oh man, we have too many books. The cats were bewildered. As I went up and down the stairs 400 times, Jeff did what he could to rig up a sump pump outdoors in the dark. He monitored the rate at which the water was rising with a tape measure and did a lot of heavy lifting. At around 3:00 it seemed like we had done all we could do, and we were able to sit down and watch everything that was happening in Boston. What a surreal morning.
As the sky started to brighten in the east, this was what we saw.
The water was about ten feet from the most vulnerable corner of our house. "We're fucked," Jeff concluded, and we called both sets of parents. My folks wanted to come help us in some way or another, but they live on the west side of the state, where a number of roads were closed due to flooding. So they couldn't reach us. Jeff's parents live 45 minutes away, and they drove over in their truck. Jeff moved my car to higher ground (the school parking lot). Meanwhile, I promised myself that I would cry about this later and started packing a couple of go-bags. I couldn't get this silly but great song out of my head:
Jeff's dad drove to Champaign and purchased another sump pump--Jeff had the idea to set it up near the corner of the house along with our other smaller one. They eventually got it going, and then all we could do was monitor the situation. It was an awfully helpless feeling.
But happily the curve on the graph made it seem like things might be slowing down. At around 9:00, Jeff's parents didn't feel like they could stay much longer, as the one road out of our neighborhood was flooding. All we could do was watch and wait, and I called my parents about every half hour to let them know what was going on.
And I took some photos.
I fed the squirrels who are bottomless pits of seed-want no matter what's going on.
Yeah, there's no hopping across this thing.
Bun: WHERE ARE ALL THE STUFFS;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Freaky!
Sometime during the late morning hours, and after coming within a couple of feet of the house, it seemed like the flood had stopped rising. Bun wanted to see what was happening, and she sat on our deck in the cold watching the water for five minutes as if hypnotized and bewitched.
Slowly over the next couple of days, the water receded. We both felt so relieved.
Meanwhile, one of my paintings was in the Skip Watts Memorial Exhibition in Springfield. I even won an honorable mention along with some money! The reception was Saturday afternoon, but Jeff and I were too wiped out to drive all the way over there to attend. And anyway on Friday I had informed one of the people in charge that we were dealing with flooding, and it probably wouldn't be a good idea to leave the house. So I was sad to have missed the show, but that's the way it goes sometimes. Instead we watched a lot of teals and coots glide around our backyard, and that was pretty wonderful. The light was always lousy while this was happening, so I didn't get any photos.
And here's what our backyard looked like this morning. After the flood all the colors came out, as somebody once said. I didn't have my promised cry, as it turned out, but Saturday morning I enjoyed a celebratory post-traumatic-stress migraine. It's a fun little custom of mine. We also went out and had pizza.
Last month I completed a couple of portrait commissions that shared dual themes: family and gray. On the left is a portait of my brother in-law's grandparents, and on the right is a painting of a college friend's son and father.
Both contain a whole lot of gray paint, and honestly that is my least favorite color to work with because I mix up to seven colors to create just the right shade. I was taught to mix my grays rather than add water to black--I don't use black at all--so it is a chore. Also it was March, and the weather was utterly depressing. But a paying gig is a paying gig, and I was happy to create these portraits for Tyler and my pal.
Tyler's family is from northwestern North Dakota, just a few miles from the Canadian border. His grandparents, the perfectly named Alice and Milo, were photographed at a wedding in late December. It's the last photo taken of the couple--sadly, Milo died about a month later. This 20"x16" painting will be a surprise gift for Alice.
I
asked Tyler to write a little something about his grandparents, and
here's what he had to say: "Their names are Alice and Milo. They were
married for 66 years. Grandpa farmed for so long he actually used horses
at one point. Grandma was a teacher at a one room school for a while.
She made quilts, gardened, canned her own food, and cooked for a small
army on a daily basis. They weren't exactly flashy, just incredible
people."
The reference photo and pose is super traditional, but the novelty of painting such sweet, elderly
faces is made this portrait interesting. And Tyler's grandmother looks so much like him! Tyler's only request was that I move Milo's glasses up on his nose a bit. This was kind of tricky--in the original photo, the glasses covered important eye details that I had to make up.
Nearly everything about Alice was easy to paint. Her skin, hair, and dress were so light, and light colors take less time to paint with watercolor. All the wrinkles and folds provided convenient stopping places as I painted. It's kind of hard to explain this if you don't paint with watercolor, but trust me when I say that older skin is infinitely easier to paint than young skin. I liked painting Milo and Alice's hands, especially that little skin fold Milo's thumb makes as it pushes into the back of Alice's hand. (I'm easily amused.)
The
last things I had to paint here were Milo's (gray! hard! pinstripe! harder!) suit, tie, and rose, along
with the background. I especially enjoyed painting the shiny blue tie,
and the rose had a droopy petal in front with a light area near the bud
that added some interest. I gave the painting a blue drapey background. Tyler and his siblings are thrilled with the painting, and I'm not sure how or when he plans to deliver the portrait to Alice, but I hope she likes it! It was an honor to paint these two. 66 years--how inspiring is that?
My
friend L. asked me to paint this 20"x16" portrait of her son Sean looking up
at her father with admiration. She planned to give the original to her parents. Sean and Grandpa had spent some time sledding
together on an overcast, typical Illinois winter day. Grandpa had hip
replacement surgery over the summer but was sledding again by Christmas.
That immaculate sled is over sixty years old! I created the reference image above by combining two different cell phone photos. I also moved Sean a little closer to his grandfather.
Little Sean's face was only about an inch tall, and grandpa's was only a bit larger, so once again I had to use my tiniest 000 brush. I think Sean's expression is what makes this painting work, so I painted him first. Note the little snowflakes in his hair and on his nose. What a cutie!
Their ruddy faces
are by far the coldest I've ever painted, and I had a good time adding
extra pinks and reds to their skin. I eventually darkened grandpa's teeth a bit--always a touchy thing to do, especially when they're so small. I sent these shots to L. ("Perfect!") before working on the rest of the painting.
Clothing, sled, snow, background trees... I masked off the big tree and painted the background, starting with a drab blue-gray that you can see near the top-right corner and adding lots of thin, mostly bare trees over the top. I liked painting the woodgrain on the sled. Woodgrain is one of those textures that are easier to reproduce with watercolor than other mediums.
Finally I added the big tree and the grass peeking through the snow. L. was so happy with this painting that she decided to keep the original and give a print to her parents.
I don't make a lot of print money from portraits like these--most people don't want to buy pictures of people they don't know--but if you're interested in seeing examples of my portraits/prints, click here. You can also see works in progress by liking my Facebook art page.
I've been offered a one-person show at the Decatur Area Arts Council in August, so over the spring/summer I will be busy completing new work to fill that big gallery. But after that I will be able to take on more commissions like these. If you're interested in having me paint something for you, please read this and send me a message any time!
Jeff and I learned about Roger Ebert's death last Thursday about an hour after everybody else did. We had spent most of the day away from our computers and were enjoying one of central Illinois' first truly springlike afternoons, reprising our role as The Couple That Walks Around St. Joe Holding Hands.
Jeff found out first. We were sitting in the living room and getting set to watch Justified when he gasped. "Roger Ebert died," he said, looking up from his iPad sadly. Oh no. Instinctively my arms and legs bent in toward the center of my body--sort of a seated fetal position--as sadness swept over me.
My Facebook and Twitter notifications started erupting with "you're the first person I thought of when I heard" posts, and I responded to them for a few hours. Thanks so much to those of you who contacted me--Roger would have appreciated the immediate, easy way people were able to reach out to each other. I would love to see a map of the world dotted with those whose lives he affected and the amazing web of connections he spun between us.
As some of you may know, Roger and I were Twitter and email friends. Not wanting to waste The Great Man's time, I only communicated with him when I had something on my mind that I thought he would appreciate. And he would contact me as well. My Gmail says we had 92 conversations.
One of my favorite exchanges with him was in 2011 regarding the movie Crumb, a documentary I've loved and rewatched on VHS countless times. I had received the Blu-ray edition that included Roger's commentary track for Christmas. I listened to it as I painted one day and told him about how I appreciated his insights and how great it was to hear his voice for a while. We talked about R. Crumb's brothers and their "stupid mother" (Roger's words). It was fun and more than a bit surreal to talk about one of my favorite movies with Roger Freaking Ebert.
He especially liked it when I sent updates about nature, farming, and the weather in this part of the state. I live a few miles from his boyhood/college hometown, and I'd let him know when the corn was sprouting and show him photos of things like a cluster of mushrooms I'd found growing beside a tree stump in the yard.
As time passed, his email messages became shorter--sometimes just a
sentence or two, but always cordial and often humorous. Ignatiy Vishnevesky explained why his notes were so brief in his
wonderful letter to Roger from a few days ago:
"You communicated largely through your computer, but you typed slowly,
your hand hovering over a key before pressing down. It could take you
thirty seconds to type out a sentence."
He wanted to include it in a blog he was writing and credited me there, mentioning (incorrectly) that he owned two of my paintings. I sent Roger a quick "I'm pretty sure you just have the Art Theater" message, and he responded with,
I believe I have that one and the child with the book shelf. I've been in the hospital so it's hard to say…
Anyway, I feel like I have 2. And it sounds better :)
Cheers,
R
Sometimes
he'd send emails to me accidentally--meant for other people--and I'd
let him know. In February I got one containing some
confidential information regarding Ebertfest and his health. He had some big, wonderful plans for the last day. I told him his secret was
safe with me and he called me a dear friend. Imagine!
It's hard to describe what it's been like to have known him even in my minor way. He had over 800,000 followers on Twitter and followed 255. I had the extreme good fortune to be one of them. Whenever I tweeted something, I asked myself, "Is this Roger-worthy?" So there were no "going to the library LOL" tweets from me. He was my writing's conscience, the little voice I heard and continue to hear before I hit "post."
Just when I thought he wasn't reading this blog anymore--the man was beyond busy--I'd get a comment (!!!!!!) or a retweet. He even read at least one of my recipes. He made my month when he told his Twitter followers that "damn it, she's right" when I ranted about how most fruit crisps contain too much fruit and nowhere near enough crisp. Roger Ebert cared about the fruit-to-crisp ratio!
So the past few days have been loaded with Roger memories.
I was in the right place at the right time when he discovered my watercolors. He gave me confidence to pursue my dream. I've made new friends because of him. I've sold watercolors and prints because of him. He gave me the idea for one of my best paintings. He sent me messages from the hospital asking me how I was. He told me "I'm there with you--thank God for Jeff" during my cancer scare.
I was lucky to have met him in person two years ago. He looked at me and applauded. He wrote in his notepad that I was an artist and underlined it. I'll never forget it.
Roger did so much for me, and he didn't have to do any of it. But he did. He did, and I'm one of many, many people who have been saying things like this over the past few days. I can't thank him enough, but I think the best thing any of us can do to remember Roger is to try to be as kind, thoughtful, and appreciative of beauty as he was.
I can sum up February in two words: antibiotics and Treasure.
Antibiotics: Bun is urinary infection-free after we struggled to find antibiotics that didn't make her sick. The first was a brutal regime of 56 pills that made her sick every time we successfully got them in her. We switched to a second type--28 doses of a pink liquid in a rather hilarious cherry flavor (because everyone knows cats love stuff that is cherry flavored). This delightful concoction caused Bun to drool and foam uncontrollably for ten to fifteen minutes after Jeff squirted some down her throat, during which time I followed her around with a billowing handful of paper towels, sopping up the drool as she hustled from one room to another. Thanks to all who donated to Bun's medical fund and even sent her valentines. Jeff and I were blown away by your kindness and generosity.
Between my drool cleanup sessions, I painted and painted. This was the main reason why I haven't updated the blog in a while. I became obsessed with my unusual and challenging still life. It's another cluster of jewelry along with other items including an old photo of me as a baby. My mom put it in my birthday card back in late Janurary. I whimsically added the photo to my still life setup and loved the idea of painting a tiny girl surrounded by objects she would eventually own. I spent the first couple of days painting my baby self. My head is about the size of a nickel. I'm in my parents' dining room holding one of Dad's college books. I had trouble sleeping during this first week of painting--I found myself repeatedly waking up at 4:00 aching to get back to work on it.
Next I added most of my turquoise bracelet (I wore it everyday during my early teaching years), some coral beads, and an antique dragon that might be made of ivory, but I'm not sure. I like how the orange-red beads resemble fire shooting from its mouth. In real
life the dragon is about an inch and a half tall. The
painted version is about five times larger in this 20"x26" watercolor.
During one productive week, I
finished the dragon and a lot of fussy jewelry in the lower left
corner, including an antique orange bead necklace that was nothing but
trouble! On our first Christmas together, Jeff gave me the swirly silver charm on
the right.
I selected the jewelry pieces mainly because I liked the way they looked together, and the setup came together shockingly quickly. Some of the stories behind the jewelry are meaningful, and some are not. For example, one
morning I was on my way to school when I noticed the beginnings of a
wardrobe malfunction and needed something to pin myself together. I popped
into a drugstore and bought the above purple pin for $4.95. It may have been cheap, but it took an entire day to complete. The orange beads run through the bottom half of the painting. They had many diamond-shaped facets and were difficult but fascinating to paint. I loved producing every bead in this painting, but the many connecty things here were a chore.
Not wishing to annoy my Facebook friends with daily in-progress photos where I had covered maybe a couple of square inches, I limited myself to Friday-only updates. The above photo shows some new objects: a
sparkly gold charm that is the focal point of a statement necklace,
most of a turquoise ring that is too heavy to wear while painting, and a
perfume compact of a leaf with a dragonfly on it. Because the gold
charm was so impossible, I couldn't make myself work on it all day, so
during the afternoons I painted fun stuff. The dragonfly/leaf
and the circular gold compact in the lower-left corner were gifts from my friend David,
who is a makeup artist at Estee Lauder in Bergdorff Goodman, NYC. I
bought the ring in Santa Fe, and the gold necklace is from some catalog
or other.
The next week I
finished the turquoise ring and dragonfly/leaf compact (that took a lot
longer than I thought it would). Then I worked on the space above those
two things. I referred to this area as "the little garbage."
Finally I painted the silver Eddington necklace, which I
thought acted as a kind of fun signature, a pearl, and some more beads.
Note the tiny chain draped over that red bead. Why didn't I think to
hide it when I put this still life together? Those links were so impossibly small, even on a large-ish painting.
Last
week I took care of the little items in the lower right corner,
including a raspberry-shaped earring composed of small garnets. Most of
the items here are resting on foil, except for those on the right side.
You can see where the foil ends and the table begins. (If you click on the picture above, you can see the details more easily.)
I adore Venice and was happy to find the above matchbox at a local antique store. It shows the Ca' d'Oro ("Golden
House") and was painted in a jazzy
style that I had fun mimicking. The lettering and skinny black lines made me so nervous that I kissed my right hand after I finished them. I devoted the last day of
painting to the turquoise chunks in the top right corner and tightening
up the gold floral piece in the center.
For a while the
working title of this painting was Treasure Chest, awesomely suggested
by Jeff. A couple of weeks ago we decided to shorten it to Treasure. I
liked that idea because it can be a noun and a verb. I'm so happy with
the painting and think this could be a great new way for me to create
portraits--a photograph of the subject surrounded by beloved objects--and I want to do more.
Prints of this brand new painting can be found here!
Bun, seen here all bein' a Rockette, wants you to go to my art website, kellyeddington.com, and check out its new, cleaner, prettier, easier-to-navigate design. I wanted to do a screen shot and add it to this blog, but Bun was like, Then they'd never go to the site.
The new design comes courtesy of Jeff, who noodled around with it on WordPress for about a month. And by "noodled" I mean "squinted at code, bashed his head against his desk, did fast and complicated cut-and-pastes, looked up answers on WP help sites, resized and inserted dozens of images, found widgets, and did many other things that I will never completely understand."
Thank you very much, Jeff!
And thanks also to Bun, who nailed the above photo in one shot today. She is easily the most photogenic cat ever. Observe.
Tomorrow is my sister Emily's birthday, and due to travel and scheduling issues, I had to give her this painting on Christmas. Emily (a.k.a. Poof) is used to this kind of thing, as is anyone born on or around December 25, but I felt bad about not being with her on her actual birthday. So to make up for it, I decided to give her something extra special.
I took the reference photo about a year and a half ago when Poof and I traveled to New York City together (she met Mally Roncal, one of her makeup heroes, and you can read all about that here, and there's even a video). In the photo, Poof is saying goodbye to Cupcake, her goofy and adorable little cat. When she's not asleep, Cupcake has that hyper-alert expression at all times. I thought about using the entire photo for the painting, but I loved my sister's face so much that I wanted it to be the focus.
Unfortunately for this blog, I accidentally deleted the three in-progress photos I took of the painting. I painted Poof's face, arms, and part of Cupcake's face on the first day, finished Cupcake on the second day, and completed Poof's hair and dress on the third. The painting is smallish at 11x14 inches, so I knew it would go quickly. I found a terrific half-price frame that I bought with an additional 40% discount--always great when something like that happens. Here's a photo of the framed painting (Poof quickly Instagrammed it).
Poof had no idea I was painting her, so when I presented her with the painting yesterday, she was surprised and quickly became teary-eyed. As usual, no one tops my sister when it comes to reacting to my paintings, or any gift, really. You want to have this kid at your Christmas party, bottom line. Here's a short video of part of her reaction--the first 15 seconds or so were cut off when Jeff realized he was shooting it vertically.
Happy birthday, Poof! <3
PS I turned this painting into some products on my CafePress store, including cups, bags, cards, and a 2013 one-page calendar print. You can find it along with my multi-page calendars, including the one with Mabel (above) here. Make sure you indicate that you want a 2013 calendar, not 2012. This new painting will be on my 2014 calendar.
And you can also buy art prints on paper or canvas (above) by going here. Thanks as always for your support this year!
