Thick and thanks

8 x 8
oil on BFK

10 x 8
oil on BFK

Thank you for commenting on the post from yesterday! I appreciate your encouragement and feedback, Celeste, Sam, and Loriann ! (Thanks to Gregory, too, for his Facebook comments!)

I have been trash talking my new oil paintings and that's not productive and smells a bit of behaviors I don't find attractive, so I will stop. Right now. Thanks for calling me on it!

Today I took stock of what I've painted so far. I wrote little critiques of each piece (which I will share with my teacher at our next session) and found something good to say about them. Of course, I had many criticisms, too. A common criticism was the miserly amount of paint I applied. Today I determined to lay it on thick!

On the top you see my return to fruit. The beautiful pear, lit from below. I wanted to play with the complementary color and leave big globs of paint untouched. The pear is floating and that's a problem I created with the odd lighting, but I still kind of like it.

Next, I tried a painting using only palette knife. It was like frosting a waterfall cake! Oil is fun and I will remember to apply it more liberally in my next paintings.

Another interpretation

After a day devoted to painting, I don't want to stop! Any day spent painting is a good day.

Forceful

Working with the same idea on Wallis Museum Paper. I stuck my watercolor under painting out the window to add some real water drops. Texture! Like magic!

Feminine can also be forceful.

A new way to work

Ever since we cruised through northern British Columbia and I saw many waterfalls. I have had an idea about painting them. While we were there, I did many gesture drawings of the shapes of the water. The waterfalls felt feminine to me.

Since it's raining here in Wrangell, I decided that today was a good "studio" day for painting. I set up my materials on the sundeck (might need to rethink that name after all of these gray and wet days) and started.

The bottom photo shows the simplified contour drawing I did from my original gesture drawing. Simple lines. Simple shapes.

From that drawing, I painted a washy watercolor under painting on BFK Rives paper. I wanted to establish dark to light, cool to warm shifts across the painting.

Once the paper was completely dry, I applied the pastel to follow the plan of the under painting. In this painting, I wanted to express the passive inevitability of the water falling down. Does it look feminine? Passive?

Rainy and 58 degrees in Wrangell, AK today. But I was kept warm by working with an idea.