Happy Christmas Season

This year the holidays have been particularly cold and snowy. With luck though, the clouds will pass with the snow. Regardless, the days are starting to lengthen. Here comes the sun!

"Winter Walk," oil on canvas, 24x20

Merry Christmas and a productive and Happy New Year.

Lazy River

Last summer I spent considerable time near the Middle Raccoon River, a slow-moving tributary of the river that runs through Des Moines, some sixty or seventy miles away. Here the river is deep, even torrential, in spring but runs shallow in late summer. Like many rivers through agricultural land, it is browned by silt and can often look dark. This view of the river gives the viewer an idea of how this land might have looked before the plow.

"Downstream, Middle Raccoon River," oil on panel, 11x14

 

Winter

Although it has seemed wintry here, with snow a little earlier than usual and some chilling low temperatures, the real winter weather has begun now. Snowfall has been small but low temperatures have kept it on the ground. And low temperatures are going even lower, with the daily high later in the week predicted to be only zero Fahrenheit and the low in negative double digits. Brrr. 

At the moment the weather feels like Union Square, an oil from several years ago, albeit with less wind. 

"Union Square, Winter," oil on panel, 10x8

Frankly, we Iowans are probably all hoping for sunshine, not wind and snow and sleet, even if the temperatures are low. Bright sunrises are the thing to keep our spirits up, here in the darkest few days of the year.

"Winter Sunrise, oil on panel, 10x8

Primaries

One of the exercises that helped advance my paintings skills was doing a painting a day. Those were not larger than 6x8 so that a still life could be completed in thirty minutes or perhaps an hour. The other part of that exercise was to place the object(s) to be painted without a great deal of thought. For me, arranging and rearranging objects is simply putting off the main objective, so I mostly simply plunk something down, consider it and the lighting for a few moments. 

This painting came about during one of those daily panting sessions many years ago. 

"Primaries," oil on panel, 6x8

Annual Review

One of my habits this time of year is review of past work. Sometimes the review focuses on work completed in recent months or perhaps the last year of two, but many times the review dives deep into older and often unseen folders. This time it's been the latter result. Many older works came to light. These two are watercolor sketches made in the Pacific Northwest more than a decade ago. In each case the colors and techniques were explorations and didn't lead to any major changes in materials or methods.

"Sunrise, Redmond," watercolor on paper 9x5

"On Puget Sound," watercolor on paper, 5x12

Reviewing older materials provides the chance to revisit places, techniques, ideas and a lot more.

Here's my favorite plein air oil from the past year: Whiterock Morning.

"Whiterock Morning," oil on panel. 9x12

And here's another older work, this time in casein, done to study light and also the medium. Casein is an infrequently used medium made from milk protein. 

"Shellac," casein on panel, 8x6

Invention and Experimentation

Although there are quite a few reasons why painting attracts me, one of the foremost is the chance to do something I haven't done before. It might be using a new kind of paint, or perhaps a new support. Sometimes it's mixing a specific color using different components. The kinds of experimentation and invention are endless. Not long ago I bought a stack of heavy paper from the Legion Paper, a well-known supplier of art papers. This particular variety has a slight tooth, making it suitable for metalpoint and other drawing media. But it's also somewhat heavier than lighter papers I've used for watercolor. So I gave it a try. 

"Country Lane," watercolor on paper, about 6x8

This particular composition is based on a photo I snapped not far from my house--that is, the reference is a city street, complete with driveways and houses along the left. I simply removed the houses, emphasized the trees and changed the street to resemble a gravel road. So in a sense this is an imaginary scene superimposed on an ordinary street. The paper held up well, too.

Favorite Artists 18 - Winslow Homer

Winslow Homer, ca. 1870

If ever there was a quintessential American artist, Winslow Homer (1836-1910) fills the bill. Mr. Homer was born and grew up in Massachusetts, in fairly middle class circumstances. His father was a businessman always seeking a big fortune. His mother was a gifted amateur watercolorist who taught Mr. Homer his first lessons. Eventually he was apprenticed to a lithographer after he finished high school. Leaving apprenticeship after a couple of years, he opened his own illustration studio in Boston, where he was immediately successful. Most of his work in those years was graphic--wood engraving primarily. By 1859 he lived in New York and kept a studio in the famous Tenth Street Studio Building in Greenwich Village, the first purpose-built studio building. Although Mr. Homer is said to have been mostly self taught, it's also true that he attended classes at the National Academy of Design and learned at least the rudiments of oil painting by Frederic Rondel, who taught there. 

Harper's Weekly illustration--"Sharpshooter on Picket Duty"

"Home, Sweet Home," oil, 1866

Although his family hoped he would travel to Europe to study painting, he instead secured a position with Harper's magazine making pictures of the Civil War, many of them wood engravings. He spent time at the front, drawing and collecting material that went into studio works like "Home Sweet Home" which he exhibited at the National Academy of Design to considerable acclaim, and an oil version of "Sharpshooter on Picket Duty," among others. But even though he did oil paintings of war subjects, much of his postwar output depicted women, children and rural settings, despite his studio being in New York. 

"Boys in a Pasture," oil, 1874

Following the war he did spend nearly a year in France, though he didn't study formally but spent time doing drawings for Harper's, seeing the art that was current and doing his own outdoor works. 

"Snap the Whip," 1872

Through the decade of the 1870s Mr. Homer focused on rural subjects, including one of his most popular works, "Snap the Whip," among a number of others that remain popular if nostalgic.

"Breezing Up," 1873-78

Something happened to Mr. Homer--perhaps a romantic loss--because in the late 1870s he retreated from much social contact. He lived in Gloucester and the UK before moving permanently to Maine in 1883. His studio was near the ocean, in Prout's Neck, and it was there that he painted a number of monumental works, including one of my particular favorites,"Undertow," a depiction of an event he'd witnessed elsewhere. Two women are being dragged from the surf by two lifeguards.

'Undertow," 1886

Mr. Homer lived in Prout's Neck until he died in 1910, though he traveled widely and painted many other works.

"The Gulf Stream," 1899

"Fox Hunt," 1893

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Also in this series:

Favorite Artists
Favorite Artists 2--Chardin
Favorite Artists 3--Grant Wood
Favorite Artists 4--Diego Velazquez
Favorite Artists 5--Andrew Wyeth
Favorite Artists 6--Wayne Thiebaud 
Favorite Artists 7 - Edward Hopper
Favorite Artists 8- Nicolai Fechin
Favorite Artists 9- Rembrandt 
Favorite Artists 10-Hokusai
Favorite Artists 11-Franz Hals

Favorite Artists-12-Vincent 

Favorite Artists 13-John Sargent
Favorite Artists 14-Thomas Eakins 

Favorite Artists 15-Ilya Repin 

Favorite Artists 16-Albrecht Durer

Favorite Artists 17-Holbein the Younger

 

Echo of the Past

Sunsets are coming earlier and earlier as winter closes in. We're in the colder and darker months but memories of summer help. This is a small panorama of oak trees and prairie, based on sketches and photos made last summer. 

"Oak Savanna, Summer," oil on panel, 12x16

It's sad when you learn that this kind of native landscape once comprised much of primeval Iowa--now plowed, planted and developed. These trees are old growth and the spot has never been logged or farmed. Echoes of the centuries resonate in this patch of prairie.