Morning Wash, Venice

We have been prepping for a kitchen remodel these last few weeks, so this little studio piece of Venice has been patiently waiting on the "back burner" (pun intended.) Today I got so tired of seeing its mournful state of incompleteness on my easel that I attacked it with the brush. Here is the result:

"Morning Wash", Venice Oil on Linen, 16x12"    I remember the day I and my traveling companion were taking photos of this little neighborhood. It was our first morning in Venice and we had spent it pretty much as nearly every American tourist does, snapping away with our cameras and ooh-ing and ahh-ing over every nook and cranny of the place. Then we turned the corner and, almost against my will, I blurted out, "Oooh, laundry!" My friend laughed, and of course, I realized immediately how silly that sounded. But to an artist, it has the potential to add both visual interest and an element of the human presence, even on an otherwise empty street. It's a mystery to me how the Italians can make even clothes hanging on a line an intrigue. But I guess it doesn't hurt that those clotheslines are surrounded by beautiful ochre stone, magnificent architecture and, I suspect, a little bit of magic too.

P.S. If you're wondering what happened to the still life I had started  in my last post, I gave it the 86. I will try again at some point, but I think I was  little overly ambitious with the size given my limited time. The flowers croaked before I could get them down, so I had to just chalk it up to one of the ones that got away.

Touring Venice

There are some times when my habit of waking at 5:30 a.m. (on the dot, and usually no matter what!) comes in pretty handy. With family visiting these last 10 days, early mornings have allowed me a few hours each day to complete this new Venice piece:

"Touring Venice" Oil on linen, 24x20"

This painting ( the bones of which you can see here) is the same size and format as the other recent Venice painting I posted a couple of weeks ago. They are meant to serve as companions to each other, though I think either would work just as well on its own.

In all the times I have been to Venice, I have still never taken a gondola ride. I wonder if it's possible to paint en plein air while aboard a gondola? A girl can dream...

More Venice, on the easel

I have a new Venice painting in the works this week. Here is the composition sketched in with thinned down burnt sienna. I have a lot of family visiting right now so any painting on this will need to happen in the wee hours of the morning this week before people start stirring. I doubt I will be able to do much blogging about its progress given my time constraints, but you never know. It's another 24"x20", to (hopefully) serve as a companion to the other Venice piece just completed.

Painting water

A reader recently asked me in my comments section about painting water, and as I am in the middle of painting Venice scenes I thought it might be good to "reflect" a bit on it here (pun intended). As we all know, pure water is transparent and has no color. It's power, pictorially speaking, lies in the colors and shapes it reflects. It's always a bit dangerous to apply too many formulas to painting, but some general guidelines are useful (just be sure to verify these with your observing eyes!)

Obviously, if you are painting a still body of water like a pond or lake that reflects the surrounding landscape, the reflected elements are upside down and reversed in the water. Reflected shapes are sometimes foreshortened, and water's movement also distorts the shapes reflected, depending on how much of a breeze or current is at play.

A common error is to paint reflected items tone for tone exactly as they appear in their solid counterparts. But unless they are in deep shadow (which does sometimes happen in the narrow canals of Venice) dark elements usually appear lighter in their reflections, and light tones appear darker. For me, painting the reflections (and especially the dark values) fairly thinly works best, as standing water has a glass-like appearance.

A common error of beginners is to paint everything reflected in horizontal strokes, and in doing so, overwork and over-blend these areas until everything is kind of a muddy mess.

I like to paint the basic value-shapes of the reflections in downward or vertical strokes first to follow the forms above, and then add strokes of movement horizontally. For detail and highlights, it's easy to "overdo" them in reflections, so take a subtle approach to start. Sometimes that is the most effective. You can always add more touches later, but it's harder to take away unless you just scrape down or wipe the whole thing clean!

Moving water like rivers, rapids and ocean waves are another thing altogether. They have their own unique properties, and probably could benefit from their own (future) post!

Some of my favorite reference sources for painting techniques regarding water (and everything else!) are the books by Emile Gruppe. Gruppe was a wonderful impressionist painter and teacher who was a part of the Cape Ann School of artists. He worked in and around Gloucester and Rockport Massachusetts. He wrote a triad of books on painting and they are all invaluable to the landscape painter.

Under the Bridge

Well, instead of blogging I have been tearing my hair out trying to figure out why my blog's RSS feed has not been updating. As a result, I did not get to do any progress blogging on this painting. But here it is, a new Venice painting that I managed to complete in between the hours of frustration:

"Under the Bridge, Venice" 24x20", Oil on Linen

I was going through my archives of former paintings and found a little painting I had done a while back of a single boat beneath a lovely footbridge. I thought it might be nice to expand on that idea on a 24x20" canvas. I really enjoyed creating this new piece. While the boat is still featured, I was able to add a little more context and show more of the background. I really thought I would hate painting those rails, but once I figured out the design and started painting in the highlights, I rather had a good time.

As for my feed, we are still trying to figure out the best solution (though it will definitely not be feedburner!) If you are an email subscriber and received this post in your email box, then I've made progress, at least. If not, there's probably a bit more hair-pulling in my future.

Venice Gondolas W.I.P

Just a quick post to share what's on the easel right now. I have really been wanting to get back into my Venice work lately, but given how complicated these paintings can be, and how complicated my life has been, I have kind of shied away from the idea. I feel pretty rusty, so since Venice is pretty much all architecture, I thought I'd make it easy on myself and keep the size fairly small (16 x 20") and the composition fairly simple. Here's the compositional sketch:

I'm also testing out blogging via my iPhone Wordpress app, so if this post looks strange or different, that's why.

Finally, it is done!

Pop the champagne, drop the confetti! Well, I have reason to celebrate any way. I finally finished this blasted painting! It's hard to believe I started this painting of Venice LAST YEAR, but there it is. I struggled with it at times, set it aside, tackled it anew, only to come away with yet more to do. I had to completely rework certain areas, especially the background buildings, because even though I was trying to be true to my photos, my hubby (one of my best critics) told me they didn't make sense the way I had them before. I do think he was right. I've said it before...if it makes a better painting, change it. In any event, I am glad I persisted because I think I am finally reasonably happy with the end result. Today is a pretty gray, low-light kind of day so I may need to reshoot it to get better clarity in the photograph (done). But I have to take advantage of a napping baby by sneaking this post in when I can.

"A Private Tour" Oil on Linen, 30x24"

In all of the times I've been to Venice (it's been several but I've lost count), I've never taken a gondola ride. I always say that I'm going to, but I never seem to want to justify the expense. I guess I'd rather eat a delicious Venetian dinner instead!  From walks along the waters' edge, I've always enjoyed seeing  couples gently drifting down some narrow passageway. It's something I really should try to do before I hang it all up. Next time, for sure!

Venice W.I.P.

"Start by doing what is necessary, then what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible." -St. Francis of Assisi

My husband presented me with this quote at breakfast one morning recently, and I think I would do well to have it become my mantra. Even with part-time childcare, I can't seem to get more than a few hours of weekly studio time right now. With a little baby at home, tending to the necessities of my daugther comes first, and that is as it should be.

Perhaps as I hit my stride as a mother, doing more as an artist will also become possilble. At present, though, what used to come easily in the studio now feels like a real struggle. This painting is kind of crawling along in fits and starts. Here's what I have so far:

Given that I am only getting about 2 hours of painting time in at any given session (which unfortunately still doesn't occur all that often) I can't really work alla prima (wet-into-wet) which has always been what I prefer.  The canvas size is 30"x24", and each time I return to the easel, the paint has dried pretty much completely. I feel like I am doing extra work at each session just to try and open it back up again. 

It's not as if every other painting I have ever done has been completed in one session, but for some reason, this multi-sessioned piece feels like more of a struggle. Maybe it is just the lack of continuity that has me stumped. Or maybe it's the lack of decent sleep! But whatever it is, I feel a bit like an inattentive reader, who keeps having to read the same page over and over again because her mind keeps wandering.

Still, in spite of my difficulties, I do feel grateful that it's possible to have a little time to paint again. Just starting something new and moving the paint around a bit feels good, even if finishing anything still sometimes feels like an impossibility!

Last chance to see JMW Turner show in D.C.

Over the holidays I finally seized the opportunity to head up to the National Gallery in Washington D.C. for the Turner show.  This traveling exhibition is a rare opportunity to see some 140 works by a true master of landscape painting (and, I might add, great-grandfather of abstraction). The show was wonderfully comprehensive, and featured so many of his larger scaled oil paintings as well as his intimate watercolors. It's probably an understatement to say that Turner seemed an interesting guy. His work showed a passionate interest in depicting disasters (caused both by nature and by man) in powerful compositions of dramatic color and light.  In painting after painting, one sees snow storms, shipwrecks, thunder, and fire swirling with emotion. The man must have been exhausted! I am not overly fond of the strong narrative element in many of his paintings, but even so, there is much to see and appreciate in these works. Turner was an artist concerned with social and political injustices both past and present and used narrative elements (both visually and in some of his ridiculously long painting titles) to make his points. He had some statements to make, that's for sure.

Turner started out as an architectural draftsman, and mastered drawing at an early age. This was quite evident in his beautiful paintings of Rome and Venice (pictured above). And while paintings of pure landscape were minimal, there were more sublime pieces as well, where the narrative was limited and light was the subject. Some of my favorites of the larger oils were labeled as "studies" or "unfinished". I loved the way these were so fresh and stripped down to their simplified essence of light and color. He was a precursor to the Impressionists and truly ahead of his time. As explained in NGA exhibition supporting materials, these "incomplete" works were just that, and probably not meant for exhibition, but as preparations for "finished" paintings to present to collectors and the Academy. But we can appreciate them with our modern sensibility as works of art in their own right, as well as for their wonderful documentation of this artist's processes.

While the oils were undeniably impressive and painted with skill and bravura, I personally found greatest delight in his watercolors. These just blew me away. Works ranged from highly finished watercolors with a lot of detail  and drawing, to quick expressive sketches (near abstractions) from his sketchbooks.

If you're anywhere near D.C., you can catch this extraordinary show at the National Gallery's West building through January 6th, 2008 . Check out this cool online exhibition preview at the NGA's website! Next stops for the exhibition are Dallas and New York.

A few gallery snaps from the "Small Stuff" show

Don't let anyone tell you that hanging a show for a bunch of small works is an easy task. But after it was all in place, we were very happy with the results, and I'm glad to report that my husband and I are still married. ;-) Here are a few shots from the show, on view now through Jan. 30th: When we were looking at this space for the gallery, one of the first things I noticed was this cute built-in. It's a perfect display for my minis and my new line of watercolor/pen and inks. Here I've decorated it with some lights and mistle toe:

A close-up that shows some of the ornaments--I like the little silver and gold Christmas balls along the bottom shelf:

On the opposite wall are the landscape paintings of Venice and Lake Como:

Close-up shot of the mantlepiece decorated with paintings. To the left of the large Venetian landscape are a series of little square 6x6" Lake Como paintings. Anyone who has read my blog for a while, or my squidoo lens on hanging art must know I'm a fan of grouping big and small paintings together like this. I'd love to do something similar over my fireplace mantle at home.

A small grouping from the next room of some of my more local autumn scenes:

I  guess that's really all I had time for, photography-wise. I may share a few more snaps and I will definitely share more info on some of the individual pieces in the show very soon.

Miniature landscape painting of the Tuscany sunset

This painting sold last night at my gallery exhibition preview, but it's still on view tonight for the First Fridays downtown art walk. It is a companion to another Tuscany painting I blogged about a couple of days ago:

"Lingering Light, Tuscany II" Oil on linen, about 3.5" x 7.75"

If you're doing the downtown art walk tonight in Richmond, come by Jennifer Young Studio & Gallery and see all of the "Small Stuff" -- miniature paintings and prints --on display for the holiday season. The gallery is located at 16 East Main Street between 1st and Foushee.

If you're not in Richmond, I am continually uploading new paintings to my web gallery, or you can see them offered first here, on the blog. I'm also offering free shipping (with some restrictions) until the end of the year, for holiday shopping convenience.

Useful links:

Ideas for hanging "small stuff" How I pack paintings for shipping My purchasing FAQ's My gallery information (and virtual tour)

Grand Venice painted as a small vignette

Though the subject matter is vast and expansive, this painting is tiny. I enjoy the looseness of it. With a painting this size you can't help but be loose! The little gondolier and other people were a challenge, so I resorted to a size 0 brush in some places:

"Grand Venice" Oil on Canvas, 4x5"

The image is about true to size. Painted on a mini gallery wrapped canvas with edges painted a near black (the gondola color). This is offered on its own or with an accompanying mini easel. Additional pictures and info will be added to the website later, but you saw it here first. Please contact me for all the details.  Available to ship this weekend, after my openings Thursday and Friday. Update: just sold! To see the other small works I still have available for sale, please click here and here.

"Lingering Light, Tuscany" miniature oil painting

More "small stuff" today as I continue preparations for Thursday night's gallery anniversary party and the First Fridays Art Walk that follows. This little painting shows the setting Tuscan sun over a sloping grove of olive trees .  There is a companion to this little painting that I'll try to post soon. 

 

 "Lingering Light, Tuscany" Oil on Linen mounted on birchboard Approx. 3.5" x 7.75"

It's an odd size, I know, but I do have a frame for it. It would also look great unframed, just perched on a mini easel.

I am enjoying the long horizontal format I've used in these pieces and in my previous painting of Venice. That's the great thing about making small works--you can experiment with formats and compositions (mediums too) with less sweat, tears, and expense than is sometimes required of a large canvas. And if they don't work out, they fit into the trashbin  a whole lot easier! I think this one's a keeper though. ;-) 

Venice oil painting, "La Città D'Oro"

 

This little painting is of a golden evening along the Grand Canal. It is one of the small works I will feature in my upcoming show, "Small Stuff".

I'm celebrating my first year the gallery, so I'm offering a preview of this exhibition at my anniversary party on Thursday evening, December 6th. Invited guests will enjoy a chance to win a free painting during the event! Contact me if you're in the area and would like to attend the preview. The show officially opens at the gallery on December 7th from 6 to 8:30 PM for the First Fridays Richmond art walk.

Click here or on the image above for more information about this painting.

Getting ready for tomorrow night's art opening

I'm busy today doing the last minute touches for a show that opens at my Richmond, Virginia studio tomorrow night. Read here for the details. No oil painting in the last couple of days so I thought I'd share a sketch of Venice, from one of my sketchbooks:

"Gondolas Near Piazza San Marco" 6x8", Watercolor & Ink

Bridge of Sighs

Here is a still-wet painting I've just finished of the Bridge of Sighs.

 

Built in the 1600's, the Bridge of Sighs (Il Ponte dei Sospiri) was so named because it connected the inquisition room in the Doge's Palace with the Doge's prison. Crossing over the bridge to their confinement the prisoners would give out one last, yearning sigh as they looked out at beautiful Venice before they went to meet their fate.

A rather sad and poignant story! But a beautiful bridge nonetheless, and one of the many landmarks of Venice. I've gone on a tour of the palace and the prison and it is fascinating.

This painting is 24"h x 18" wide (without the frame). It is oil on canvas, priced at $1200 unframed or $1350 framed. For more information, please contact me.

New Gallery Photos

I thought I'd post some photos of the new gallery space, which officialy opened last Friday night. We were swamped the entire night so I did not get ONE picture of the actual event! It turned out well--hectic but fun. We're both still recovering from total exhaustion, but at least we made it through "phase one". Phase two is still to come--moving my art studio part into the building. We hope to have that accomplished by mid January at the latest. Front room:

This is the wall to the right as you walk in the front door. The flowers on the table are from our new landlord!

This is the left wall of the same room--A great spot for the paintings in my mini collection:

This is a view of the right hand wall as you continue on into the middle room.

Here's a shot of the same wall looking back into the front room:

Here is the opposite wall in the second room. The picture to the far left is an original oil painting of Tuscany. The pictures to the right are canvas prints on the walls, and paper prints in the rack. People were amazed at the quality of the canvas prints, which looked so much like paintings that I had to tell them they were prints and not originals.

   

Heading out from the 2nd room and into the third room. This is where the band played opening night:

Rounding the corner into this third room, here is my wall of Key West paintings:

   

   I had these paintings framed differently from the usual gold because I felt like the solid gold was too formal for this subject matter. I like the linen liner and the platinum colored frame with the bamboo motif for these sunny Key West pieces.

   This last room will undergo some changes. The front two rooms with the hardwood floors will remain gallery space, but we'll use this area more for work space (to be determined), though we'll still hang some art here. Down that hallway is a fourth small room and a bathroom with a utility sink.

   Jennifer Young Studio & Gallery is located at 16 E. Main Street, Richmond, VA, 23219. Currently we are open from 6 to 9 p.m. during the First Fridays Art walks, and other times by appointment. Please call 804-254-1008 (1-877-DIAL-ART toll free) to visit the gallery or to inquire about the paintings you see on the website.

Venetian Balcony

I wish I could have posted more this week, but getting ready for the new gallery opening has had to take precident as things are really heating up. Here's another little gallery wrapped mini of Venice that I just completed. It measures 6x6":

The paint's pretty thick on this one. More paintings of Italy can be seen on my website here.

The Chariot Awaits

Here's another little square gallery wrapped painting of Venice for my mini collection. 

This vignette is of a quiet canal in the Dorsoduro. We stayed in this neighborhood when we visited Venice and it was nice because it felt like a more residential  area and not overrun with tourists (like us!) 

This painting measures 8x8 inches. The edges are painted a solid color that compliments the painting, so no extra framing is needed.

More paintings of Italy can be seen on my website here.

Gondola, Signori?

Here's a little painting I just finished of a Venetian scene. It is one that I did as part of a series of new gallery wrapped minis.

I am working on a few more of these "little Venice squares" (sounds like a breakfast cereal!) to offer in time for holiday gift giving season. This painting measures 8x8 inches. The edges are painted a solid burgundy color that compliments the painting, so no extra framing is needed.

This is a scene of a rather narrow side canal I saw while riding one of the traghetti across the Grand Canal.

More paintings of Italy can be seen on my website here.