New York Sketches (plus bonus sketch!)

Last weekend I went to New York to see my family. They throw a pretty sweet annual shindig in the Catskill Mountains and it was so much fun to see everyone and celebrate Father's Day with the extended fam. I spent a good amount of the afternoon sketching my sister by the pool (pictured below riding an inflatable alligator). My younger cousins in the 5 to 10 age range sat and looked over my shoulder while I was drawing, then when I brought out the markers, it naturally became a collaboration. I told them what colors to use and they filled in my sketch, so Anna's portrait became a group effort, and a very successful one if I may say so!

After the party I headed to New York City to spend the night with my good friend Caitlin. We had a great night drinking wine and catching up and then in the morning my plan was to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and do some more master copies but the day was too gorgeous to spend inside so I ended up in Central Park, sketching those famous, twisty New York City trees and listening to street performers. It was perfect.

The last sketch is a bonus sketch! It is not from New York, but from a kitchen right here in Massachusetts! The first person who can correctly identify whose kitchen it is based only on the sketch 

Oil paints-- makin' a comeback!

We had a brief and powerful rainstorm over here today and the view off of the back porch was totally magical! I have not cracked out my oil paints in a while, so today was the day. I painted my neighbor's clothesline, which got caught in the rain. Oops!

The painting isn't done yet, but it is close.

Trees and Light

This painting is the completed version of one of the paintings I posted last week. It was loosely based on the view off of my back porch in JP during a snow storm. When I photographed the unfinished version for that post, it was directly after I had done the painting-equivalent of a rough sketch. 

I just realized how many trees I paint. I love trees. They are the most noble and grand of all plants.

Works In Progress

I am leaving for a trip to Miami tomorrow to celebrate the start of 2013 on the beach, where it is warm! As always, my watercolors and paper are packed and ready to go. 

I wanted to squeeze in one more post for this calendar year, but I don't have anything completed at the moment. I do have a couple of paintings in progress. They are both at the point where someone might look at them and think they were finished, and that they were just really boring. But do not be confused! They are not done yet! I have plans for their finishing touches, plans indeed!

Ula Installation

Today was exciting because I installed nine paintings at Ula Cafe in Jamaica Plain. This is the first time I have ever put work up in a cafe and I am very thankful for the opportunity. I would not have been able to put up the show without help from my friends Kat and Hel, who are both fantastic people! 

I snapped some photos of the work hanging up on the walls:

All of these paintings have appeared previously on this blog except for one. The largest one with the prominent leafy tree and the colorful fences is a piece that I started last Spring and then put on back burner. When this opportunity to show work came up, I decided it was the perfect time to finish the piece. It is based on my backyard in JP. Our neighbors have a lovely, multicolored fence that I had to get onto canvas. Here is a closer look at the painting:

And finally, I wanted to include part of my artist statement that I hung next to my self portrait:

I am primarily an observational painter and no matter where I am, my work is inspired by my immediate surroundings. I love capturing a place and then committing it to canvas or wood panel. The collection of oil paintings I am presenting is inspired by views from the windows of my house here in JP and the streets I walk every day. Because these paintings are all snapshots of my life, I have also included a self-portrait to complete the narrative.

Night scenes are particularly interesting to me because of the extreme contrasts of light and dark, the heightened importance of shape, and the way every color stands out, illuminated against the dark. Trees, houses, and clouds are some of my favorite subjects and it is fascinating to see how they change with the light at different times of day.

Thank you Ula for giving me the opportunity to show my work, thank you to my friends who have been incredibly supportive of my art, and thank you to my housemates for putting up with the smell of oil paint and my brushes taking over the bathroom sink. 

Brewery Nightscape

I just completed this painting last night, a nightscape from my front balcony. The building in the distance is an old brewery and it is a beautiful structure, very iconic of the neighborhood (at least for me).

Landscapes I forgot about until just now

Like the title of this post says, I have a couple of small landscape pieces that I found while searching through work from earlier this year and I wanted to post them. The first is the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain done in water color and the second is a view from the train in central MA done in colored pencil. They both have pretty interesting clouds.

New Yorker Spots

The second assignment for my illustration class at the Museum School was really, really fun-- we drew series of spots, which are the little images in the middle of magazine articles such as The New Yorker. The illustrations are in black and white and don't have anything to do with anything so we could draw whatever we wanted as long as it was tiny (3" x 3" max). Most people in my class did a few illustrations on one theme but I thought the assignment was awesome so I made it my personal goal to do as many as I could in a week.

Aaaaand here they are!

I did this candle and the small person with a giant coat and house plant in class:

Then I thought, "I should do illustrations on a theme. How about fluffy animals?"

In following the theme of fluffy animals, I drew the fluffiest animal I have ever met-- one of the dogs that belonged to my host family when I spent a semester in Mexico. Her name was Tonka:

Then I thought, "Woah-- ALL of my host family's dogs had so much character. I'll draw all of them!" so here they are. The wrinkly one is Jani (pronounced like honey), then there's Tonka again, and on the bottom row the black one is Pintocha, and the one looking away is Georgie.

(These dogs were not drawn to scale. See below.)

So then one day I was sitting in Copley Square with my sketchbook and I drew a series of spots of Copley. I did the dome of Old South Church:

The door to the Boston Public Library:

A house sparrow:

And a tree:

Also here is a shopping cart that is completely random:

... and a girl hugging a star. If she were hugging a real star, she would probably burn to death, but she seems ok.

And finally, I did a series where I messed with a bunch of famous art.

This guy with no clothes has stepped in yet another icky clock puddle while walking around in Dalí's masterpiece.

Someone is invading Mona's personal bubble here:

This is my take on the beautiful tradition of nautical painting:

And finally, I gave this guy something to REALLY scream about.

The assignment for next week is cookbook illustration, so get psyched for some food I'm about to draw! 

Also, I was enrolled in a second class this semester called Introduction to Adobe Illustrator but I have decided to drop the class for many reasons, the main ones being I didn't realize that I would find Adobe Illustrator so boring and I can't think of any way to apply it to any of my artistic goals. I think Photoshop would be more up my alley. Don't get me wrong-- Illustrator seems super useful and I'm glad we have artists and designers out there who can use it and enjoy using it. However, I am not one of them. Also, there was a wait-list for people who really wanted to get into the class and I figured they would make better use of it than I would. AND the class was on Zumba night and the thought of giving up Zumba for 14 weeks so that I could sit at a computer was very sad to me. 

Trees and Girrrl!!! and another little piece of my soul

The weather has been beautiful and I have been spending more time out on my back porch drawing trees. Here they are!

I am also working steadily on the next chapter of Girrrl!!!, I promise. Here is one panel of which I am particularly proud. I have not put the plaid in Aaron's shirt, nor have I made it pretty in photoshop, but I think you will like it all the same..

And to finish off this post, here is another swirly thing I doodled, which I likened to the shape of my soul in another post:

Laundry Time

I painted a mural in the laundry room of my house! I started it almost a year ago with help from my friends Marika and Abby and then I forgot about it until this week. I am heading to Mexico tomorrow to visit many, many people including an amazing artist who I worked with while I was studying abroad there. We collaborated on a mural so as I was planning this trip, I was like, "Hooray for seeing Rolando... Maybe I will see the mural we painted... Murals... Oh right, I was painting a mural wasn't I?"

Yesterday was my birthday, and I spent a lot of it napping and painting this mural. Just livin' it up over here, in Ithaca! The mural is based on some photos and watercolors I made last summer in Vacaville, California.

See? Now when we're ironing, we can pretend we are in the central valley in the summer time and not a basement! And on that note, I won't be posting again for another month or so because, as I said, I will be in Mexico.

¡Nos vemos!

Tiny Couch and Some Art Also

My dad is visiting me this weekend! Yesterday we went antiquing. It is sort of a tradition of ours that we go antiquing whenever he's in town. He knows so much about so many things that people have made, particularly American art and craft from the Civil War era through the mid twentieth century. One antique place had an old rope bed. It is a bed with a wooden frame and where we now have things like springs, they once used ropes to hold up the mattress. When the ropes got loose you had to tighten them so your bed wouldn't sag. This is why we say, "sleep tight." Isn't that cool?

Also we bought a tiny couch!

We think that the tiny couch was either used for small children or it was a salesman's sample. Furniture salesmen used to travel with these mini versions of the furniture they were selling so that people could see all of the things they could buy without having to lug around a ton of furniture. Now it is the perfect size for a stuffed dragon.

Behind the tiny couch and dragon, you might notice the infamous ugly apartment painting that I have yet to complete (but I DID work more on last night). I thought it would have been funny if my dad didn't like this painting because he finds that building so ugly, but he does indeed like it. He says it reminds him of a southern plantation.

I also painted a quick little sunset piece last week. I usually don't paint in pink and purple, but it looks like candy. Also it looks sparkly because it is they view out my bedroom window through a screen and that makes lights look kind of fancy and twinkly. Now when I look at this painting, all I see is pink and purple and sparkles. All it needs is a unicorn. 

I must be doing something right though, because I already sold it. Hooray!

Yup, I'm still working on this

Work on the ugly apartments painting continues. I mostly worked on the willow tree on the right and I added the beginnings of the pink chairs. 

It is taking forever. I don't know if I will be working on a scale this large very much from now on, but here's where I'm at:

I am eating Insomnia Cookies!

I am eating Insomnia Cookies.

They are cookies that you order like a pizza and they deliver them hot and gooey, right to your door. This is the best idea ever. I have nothing else to say about Insomnia Cookies besides: yes.

Oh and here are some more drawings I did at Bread and Puppet for the cheap art bus:

The Project Continues

I had to move this painting inside for the time being because some guys are power washing our house. Who washes their house? Apparently we do. My mom told me that she thinks one of the guys who is working on this power wash is eye candy. I asked her if I should give him my phone number. She said yes. I guess I'll work on that after I stop working on THIS:

It doesn't look great yet but I can feel it coming. This is how I work. It looks iffy until I am about 3/4 of the way done and then something clicks and it suddenly looks kickass.

Watercolor Class

For the last couple weeks, I have spent every Wednesday evening at CSMA taking a class about painting landscapes in watercolors. I work mostly in oil so I thought it was time to switch it up a bit. Plus, as I have said before, I love painting landscapes.

I have worked in watercolor plenty, but I have never been officially instructed in it and I am having a lot of “ah HA” moments in class, where I think, “ So THAT’S how you get that effect” or, “I could use this technique to do THIS.” So that's been awesome and I have a lot of new ideas for future artistic experiments. Sometimes I like to think of every artist as a mad scientist/inventor, laughing maniacally at themselves in their mad art/science labs as they create the perfect color or composition or concept to test out. Experimentation is important in life and in art, I believe.

On the other hand, learning about watercolors is making me long to paint in oil. Painting with oils is so smooth and easy and magical, whereas watercolors are unpredictable and well, fluid. Those qualities are part of the appeal of watercolors! I am just realizing that working in oil is like a language I speak fluently and I just don’t know how to say as much with watercolors yet. 

Let me show you what I’ve got so far:

We started by painting evergreen trees just to see what the medium is capable of and play with different effects. These are all my evergreens. My favorites are the top left corner and the yellow and red ones.

Then we used deciduous trees to play with washes and removing sections of paint once you put them down. Watercolor is such an involved process!

Here are more deciduous tree experiments. I dig 'em.

Then I did these practice trees at home.

I think I was subconsciously channeling this Counting Crows album cover (the Counting Crows being my favorite band from high school):

And Counting Crows aside, I completed one whole landscape, based on a photo I took in France:

Now that we have practiced all these fancy shmancy techniques in class, we are headed out to pretty places around Ithaca to paint en plein air, as they say, so there will be more watercolor landscapes on the way!

Oh, and one last thing-- I wanted to put up my latest oil painting for comparison with all these watercolors. It was so foggy and gorgeous the day I painted it-- magical!!