Still Life Day 1. Painted for six hours yesterday and then collapsed. I probably pushed myself too hard but when you are painting flowers you have to move quickly. I'm keeping the studio cool so that they last as long as possible. This is a shame as I prefer to be toasty when I'm working; and also the paint moves better when the studio is hot - too bad, the longevity of the flowers has top priority!

This is a figure drawing from a few weeks ago. It isn't the subject of this post, which is the big still life I spent Friday and Saturday setting up and plan to start working on tomorrow, but I couldn't imagine a post without an image so I dug this one up and I think it looks pretty good for a 20 minute pose.

About the still life. You would think that an artist with four paintings already in the works would finish at least one of those pieces before starting a new one and indeed I wish I had done so, but the still life impulse came and I knew I had to go with it. The figure ideas will still be fresh when I get back to them in a few weeks: figure ideas keep forever. The seascape needs to marinate anyway. I'm not sure how to continue with it and just have to wait until I know what to do. Still life inspiration, on the other hand, doesn't last: it perishes just like fruit or flowers - though not as quickly, thank God!

I notice that I get the urge to do a still life when the seasons change. The last time I did a big still life was last fall; now it is spring. The change in the season must cause a shift in some internal tectonic plate - Aristotle would probably call this a Movement of the Soul - and the result is an eruption of artistic energy for still life: the desire to paint something immediate and physical and part of the changing natural world.

I'm very excited about this piece. It is based on a photo from the New York Times by Chester Higgins Jr. about an Ihop in Harlem and the big crowds that it draws on Sundays. Accompanying the article was a photograph of two ladies; I fell in love. They looked like two of the figures from my "Maenads" grown old, yet retaining their inimitable sense of style. It took a full week of drawing to rework the photo into a painting. I nabbed some condiments from the local diner (the waitress still gives me funny looks when I go in there now) got out my stash of diner china and set up the still life elements in my studio (the photo doesn't include the still life)

It took me a week of drawing to get all the sketches I needed. I hate to have to stop and work out drawing questions when I am painting so my recipe is this: solve as many problems as possible ahead of time, post the drawings by the easel for reference; paint freely.

Figure drawing last night; here are a few of the results.

This is post is part of what seems to be spring cleaning on this blog - an admittedly incongruous metaphor for a post about a winter moonlight! A few posts back I posted an image of this painting in a half-finished state with no comment along with an image of the half-finished "Maenads" which were also on the easel at the time. Aware that legions of people have gone to bed each night ever since asking themselves the question "What became of that painting???" I thought I had better finish the story.

The story of the moonlight is that it used to be a winter sunset. I did the sunset some years ago. It was an okay painting, I liked it, but it didn't sell and after making the rounds of my galleries it eventually came home to roost on my walls. I should explain that I have an uncomfortable relationship with my own paintings: I love them, but I'm critical of them. Fortunately, most of my paintings are sold, or at least away at a gallery, so I actually have very little of my own work around. What is here is mostly very old work from the period after my student days (I didn't sell a lot then) The best of the oldies get saved to remind me of my youth and to give me all sorts of ego-supporting feelings such as "wow, how talented and sensitive I was, but just think how much better I am today" The ones that fail to deliver that message get stashed in a closet and eventually scraped down so the canvas can be reused (that stuff costs money) And then there are the in-betweens, paintings that aren't that old but have somehow failed to sell. These are good enough to hang on the wall, but once they are there they irritate me: I look at them and see how much better they could be until inevitably I repaint them. Which is all by way of saying that one day I looked at the winter landscape and said - "that would be so much better as a moonlight".

So what I have here is the original winter sunset, an in-between state as I started to repaint it and the finished painting as it is today "Winter Moonlight"

When I saw my friend Gabrielle at our life drawing group the other week she came up to me privately and with a look of gentle concern said "Elizabeth, are you alright? I've been checking your blog and I don't see any new work, so I was worried that you aren't painting" That's Gabrielle: the soul of gentle concern and also someone who knows that if I'm not painting than something is really, really wrong. Before you take out your pocket handkerchiefs, be assured, as I told her, that I am perfectly fine and have been painting up a storm, it's just that I have been involved with a computer project that has taken up all the time I have to sit in front of a computer each day (two hours, tops) In fact I put myself on a blog diet until I finished the damn thing. Well, today I learned how foolish that attitude was and I'm back to my blog despite the fact that the computer project from hell isn't even close to finished.

I didn't know exactly how to jump back in, but I thought this image of what I call my "work board" would be a good starting point. This is where I tack up working sketches for figure paintings and if you look closely (hint: double-click the image) you might be able to tell that I have three of them going at the moment (and a seascape too, but it doesn't need a drawing)

This is a copy, or rather a new version, of "The Maenads" a 6' x 4" painting I did a couple of years ago (check my website to see the original) This version is smaller, 36" x 24", and I am very excited about it. I love the image and feel I still have alot to say with it. The red background is the ground of the painting; it isn't going to stay red!














This is the only good drawing I did at figure drawing last night. I was really having a terrible night, everything I drew looked smashed with a hammer - all in pieces. When this pose came up it was so exciting that I just forced myself to draw well and I think it is not bad for twenty minutes.

I have been painting, I just haven't been blogging. This is the most recent still life.

I finished this yesterday. I'm posting the accumulated photos of this piece's development with apologies because I've actually been working on it for about a month. Also the initial stages are missing. I neglected to photograph the beginning because after carefully documenting the early stages of the piece before this one I ended up wiping out. It is not often these days that I wipe out a painting but everything was wrong with that piece and it had to go. It was a great feeling to get rid of it. As soon as I started pouring the turps I knew I was doing the right thing. But when I started this piece immediately afterwards it seemed like a jinx to go through the documentation again. I let the first few days of work pass and only when I knew the painting was going to live did I start the photography.

So here's what you missed: there is a bright red underpainting under the black background.

Last week I picked up this half-finished sketch of Gabrielle's beaver pond which has been sitting on a ledge in my studio since last June when I gave her a private landscape class. For our first lesson we agreed to meet at 6:00 AM at her place to paint. Gabrielle lives in a beautiful valley here in Vermont; just below the house there is a big beaver dam and pond. On that first morning I painted for about 45 minutes and then gave her a lesson. It was the first time I had painted outdoors in a few years and I was pleased that the painting was not a complete mess but when I got it home I saw it was thin and a bit tentative. Still, there was something I liked about it. I stuck it on a shelf and there it sat until last week.

After working on the sketch for a day in the studio I am much more pleased with the piece though it is still unfinished. At the end of the day Tom came into the studio and said "How did you do that?" "Do what?", I asked, "Put light in it" he replied.

Still working on this one; actually this photo is from last month when I pulled the piece out and worked on it for a day. The good news is I think I saved it and will be able to make a decent painting.

As readers of this blog know, I have a difficult relationship with this painting. I am attracted to it; there is something big in this image. When I am massing in the circles of motion, light, and color I see it, I feel it, I grasp it; I'm going to heaven and Van Dyke is of the company. Then I try to bring my prize to the surface, to make the vision manifest itself in the rendering of light filtering through leaves onto the forest floor - and it slips off the hook and is gone, leaving me with a pile of meaningless brush strokes.

I keep trying though.