by Diane; The elements in my photographs that speak to my painting

Seeing  interesting pattern, shapes, line, and color in the landscape is a step in framing my photographs to a rectangular window. Then without copying any photograph I repeat natural pattern, shape, line and color learned in taking pictures.
Or does the exercise of painting inform my picture taking with the camera at the same time taking pictures with the camera informs my painting?
I without intending to
selectively photograph these natural elements of design
 which are similar to what I have painted.

painting

photo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Practicing with the viewfinder of the camera, is similar to composing many paintings. It helps me see the emotional impact of the design elements. Only in a painting I have the license to make changes spontaneously.

by Diane, Painting my reality without camera references

Traditionally painters make plans like taking photos of their subject and making drawings of their composition before starting to transfer their final drawing onto the canvas. Then when all is perfectly planned, they paint.
          Rejecting tradition, I want the painting to be my first impulsive fresh statement capturing the vigor of my child- like enthusiasm. I try to summon my courage and go right for drawing in oil paints on my canvas. Of course my rejection of a safer path can result in more failures. Critics used to photographic reality will say my fox doesn't look like a fox. Most often I am the critical one meaning  correcting errors. For example, the dark background on the fox's right front leg is a distraction counter to the fluidity of the fox's movement. So I added more dark under the fox and transitional grays.

Convex belly,
left horizon line confused
right front leg

        During the past month of oil painting  fox in our backyard, I accept my depiction of anatomical inaccuracy trading it for lively exaggerations of gesture and color.  As I watch the fox, I am becoming more familiar and want to see if I can remember well enough to better capture an abstracted form on my canvas. I was not satisfied with my first paintings after continuing to study the foxes' flowing movements.  Before painting more oils, I drew in grays with sumi ink and washes of white acrylic ink.
   

The dark below the belly defined the belly as being concave
 because in order for the fox to have maximum spring
 the pelvis tilts down pulling the belly in before the apex of the jump as the back legs push
and the chest expands with air 

Other parts of my life come into play on how I am observing the fox. I have been learning Tai Chi Qi Gong for two months. So my co-ordination and memory of strange, slow, sneaky movements are foreign to my Western stiff tight neck and knees. I imagine myself as smooth and as a fox. but of course I am not.  I am becoming more aware of my breath and how I am distributing my weight and what it does to my bones as I move. So when I am drawing the fox, I can imagine the fox's body as if it were my body giving me a reality different than the camera's.  The fox has to move with the same principles as the practice of martial art. Interesting to make comparisons and record with a little distortion where the weight and breath is in the fox.
        Time to paint more memories of the fox, last seen on Monday. I sure hope one of the four foxes we watched, survives the predators.

        Not taking pictures with my phone, also, allows me to accept childlike distortion and simplification making the spirit of the gesture dominant.

I do not know if 6,000 years ago
when Qi Gong was first practiced
if the first masters
took inspiration from the movement of foxes.

by Diane Widler Wenzel: What time of day does art inspiration and creativity peak?

Morning is my peak time for inspiration just as I am waking up, the most imaginative solutions occur to me. Like a couple of days ago I visualized what to write in this blog.

Half awake and half asleep poetry crossed my mind. Remembering one late afternoons last week out in back of us across the fields the trees were veiled in a transparent white swirl that came ttowards me. Smoke from a fire? Going outside to see where the smoke was coming, I did not smell smoke. Only ozone's scent!  I heard a steady beating on dry leaves. I felt a few drops of moisture before the hail and rain stopped at our garden's edge and then silence.  All was fresh and more saturated in greens than before.

 Tuesday morning was a sunny day for a ride to Newport. Fog snaking between hills inspired me to take pictures. Many willows made early spring colorful with Naples yellow thickets near by crimson tipped branches of Naples yellow light. The pussy willows are in their full bloom.The alder tassels hang from bare limbs.  Log and gravel trucks frequented the road from all directions. 

 

Just at the top of the grade in Newport we saw the ocean. 

 

 

Crossing the Newport Yaquina Bridge and its gothic inspiration tricks the lens to recording the cement with the appearance of metal as we drive across. We only stayed long enough to trade boat props for one that would troll slower for fishing. We hurried back to Albany to go break in the new motor at Freeway Lakes. We spotted wildlife and the dock was busy with fishermen since trout was released while we were there. But the lighting in the morning is more inspiring. And painting more satisfying even then the colorful sunsets. There is a little more time to paint in the morning then during a darkening sunset.

 

Aging-- gracefully or not

by Rain Trueax

 Image from Stencil. 

No, it's not me but isn't that a great old face as she looks at a barren and dried up world. All she's experienced is seen through those eyes-- maybe,as she's getting closer to it, also what she sees of the other side.

There are reasons I come back to the topic of aging-- sometimes it's a lifestyle change, but it can simply be looking in the mirror. As people move into old age, some try to hide the numbers. I guess, that's fear of being devalued for being old. This is a cultural thing as it's not that way everywhere or even years back in my own culture.

The word elderly has its own connotations. I remember reading articles where the 'elderly' person in it was 63 or so. When does elderly begin? I would guess by 75, my age, or is it more than a number? I went looking and found varying opinions for elderly. This article on NPR seemed pretty good-- if you want to be politically correct about it. [An Age-Old Problem].

approaching a new year

by Rain Trueax

As we approach the new year, it's a time for me to look back as well as forward. In some of my looking back, I picked out a few photos from our year to share. They show one piece of what we experienced. Not easy even then to narrow it down to only two from each month. The music is some I bought a license to use from JewelBeat.

2018 Looked Like This to Us

So what 2019 will hold, well, time will tell :) 

Happy New Year

by Diane Widler Wenzel: Power of Agnes Varda photos and film, "Cinevardaphoto"

Cinevardaphoto is the second film of Agnes Varda reviewed here. The first was "The Gleaners", December 12.  As the words "cine" and "photo" suggests in the title, this Netflix DVD is actually 3 short films about the power of  photography by Agnes Varda.  The first is a documentary about a collector, artist, and curator, Ydessa Hendeles who made a photo art installation called the "Teddy Bear Project" first presented in a Toronto Art Museum and with a second viewing in Berlin. The project was installation included  two stories with a room on each level connected by a winding staircase. From floor to ceiling are photos. People of all ages, doing all kinds of things in all kinds of places but in every picture there is at least one teddy bear.
 Ydessa said her exhibit is not a theme show. The whole show include other rooms as sparse as the two exhibiting photos is crowded. The exhibit challenges the viewer. Ydessa connects on an emotional level with the viewer.
Included in Varda's film are the responses of the people viewing the actual exhibit, "The Teddy Bear Project".  Walking through the entire exhibition, the feelings of the spectator changes for the photos of people with teddy bears. After seeing the almost emptiness, they go back through the rooms of photos with teddy bears that previously gave them warm fuzzy feelings of connectedness. Now most felt the photos made them painfully sad.
But the way the film was presented, I felt uplifted with confirmation that all people are essentially alike including everyone. But I might be projecting my own beliefs into the deliberately understated theme.

The second film, "Ulyssis" documents Agnes Varda's photography after World War II.
The third was a documentary of 1950's Cuban revolution and the Cuban arts. I enjoyed how  a group of still  photos taken in succession were used to create the illusion of a motion picture.

Creativity is taking two or more ideas and combining them to make a new not obvious realizationship. Agnes Varda believes all aspects of making a film should work together to communicate the theme without anything to distract. 

Examples of fantasy cloud paintings

Yesterday's blog post featured photographs of clouds with fantasy titles that are inspiration for when I am on location and am moved to make a fantasy painting. These paintings are done on location during a period when I was seeing dragons in the landscape and clouds.

Silver lining clouds as inspiration for painting

  Thank you grandson Kevin Oliver for sharing your interesting photograph.

"Every cloud has a silver lining' is a saying of hopefulness symbolizing that life's dark clouds will pass. I have always fantasized that the expression "Silver lining" referred to clouds as being clothing to cover the landscape with a silver fabric lining. My imagination could picture clouds blown out into silken threads as they continue to be spun to cover the sky. Fantasizing clouds as recognizable things like dragons or fish is a pastime I have enjoyed since childhood.

My eyes are always surveying the sky for interesting clouds. When I see some that have striking qualities, I try to capture the ephemeral clouds with my I phone.

Pearlessence of sea shells

Freckled flight

Golden cauliflower

Grosgrain ribbons

Petticoat mist

Al these photographs are finished pieces which I do not plan to copy in a painting. For now I acknowledge them as a way to familiarize myself with them. Even think about how I would paint clouds like them so when I am in the landscape and I see a passing formation, I remember how I could paint similar clouds. I will already have fanciful titles to inspire me as well.

Platoon of Casper ghosts

 

popular or not

by Rain Trueax

Sometimes I dream something and wake with an associated idea-- sometimes only roughly associated. It happened this week. My dream had taken me back to high school relationships and one particular one where the dream mixed real life experience with fiction. 

In high school, I'd had a friend, the kind we did things together, had sleepovers-- and then one day I went to school and she was no longer talking to me. She never told me why. I never asked. To this day I don't know although I could hazard a guess. More interesting to me would be-- why didn't I ask then? I didn't and won't ever now. Her loss was painful for me as I didn't have a lot of school friends. The dream encompassed this real life experience but gave it a different ending-- think Hallmark ending ;)

When I woke, it was with this thought-- I am not a popular person. Is that why my books are not popular? Do they even relate?

To use photo inspiration or not.

In my paintings I will  not borrow the color arrangement in these photographic compositions. I will not reproduce the detail that is recognizably in these pictures. Turneffe Flats Adventure Guide, Abel Coe, gave those of us who he took snorkeling permission to publish his pictures on the internet or publish them in a book if we give him a copy. Yet copying his pictures in paint is plagiarism. And also important is the split second  exposure makes a picture frozen in time unlike how I am experienced it.

I Have Painter’s Block - What I Am Doing To Get In The Flow

I have not painted for several weeks resulting in being restless, worried, and out of sorts. I need some creative excitement like painting. But I kept finding something to do other than painting. Realizing I had painter's block, I took the following steps for preparing to paint again.

1) Checked my photos for my favorites of this year like the sky with clouds before the storm.

2) Took a few minutes to organize and make space to paint in my studio.

3) Borrowed  “From Generation to Generation” an acrylic and oil painting from Barbara Levine who has similar interests as mine but has an entirely distinctive style of her own. In the past we borrowed each other's paintings before exhibiting together. Last time we got together we both didn't know what we would do with our new art work. Like Barbara I have reproduced my grandchildren's art in my paintings, I have not done one with the sense that my creative journey is passing as my heirs are about to blossom and take flight.

4) Checked where I was running low on supplies and ordered some on line. Took advantage of Michaiel's Black Friday 70% off all canvases and purchased a 4 foot by 6 foot canvas and three 3 foot by 2 foot ones.

I hope soon I will be in the swing of painting something meaningful to me. Whammy! OH Oh! I am putting a terribly difficult demand on myself. I don't need to make every painting meaningful. That pressure is part of why I have painter's block.

So a couple of days later I had a whole day free to do the underpainting. I loved mixing the colors and how drum tight the canvases are.