Some days...

...I really feel like a painter.  Continuing to make progress in the studio...

The first two things to study are form and values. For me, these are the bases of what is serious art. Color and finish put charm into one’s work… …it seems to me very important to begin by an indication of the darkest values (assuming that the canvas is white), and to continue in order to the lightest value. From the darkest to the lightest I would establish twenty shades… …Never lose sight of that first impression by which you were moved. Begin by determining your composition. Then the values – the relation of the forms to the values. These are the basis. Then the color, and finally the finish. (ca. 1828)

- Camille Corot

Things are just coming right along in the studio this week...

...with help from some Contrast of Saturation in a Color Harmony complement tetrad.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to...the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.  

-Vincent Van Gogh

Identifying the commonalities of my new subject...

...for my forthcoming project.  My new subject has many of the same interests in nature as I, therefore I am exploring the common interests by repurposing a previous composition that blend and represents my new subject with some of my previous aesthetic concerns.  Below is an in progress work and two details from that work comprised of ink on Yupo, 30" x 40".

A working country is hardly ever a landscape. The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation. It is possible and useful to trace the internal histories of landscape painting, landscape writing, landscape gardening and landscape architecture, but in any final analysis we must relate these histories to the common history of a land and its society. We have many excellent internal histories, but in their implicit and sometimes explicit points of view they are ordinarily part of that social composition of ht land - its distribution, its uses, and its control - which has been uncritically received and sustained, even into our own century, where the celebration of its achievements is characteristically part of an elegy for a lost way of life.


- Pauline Fletcher, Gardens and Grim Ravines: The Language of Landscape in Victorian Poetry (1983)

Sketchbook Drawing of Cockroaches and Hay

Below:  An intersection of experience and memory...The cockroaches of the stray and hay that frightened him while incarcerated as a youth during the 19th century, informed his scientific research as a man.

Forthcoming project study #8, ink on paper, 5.5" x 13," 2013

Forthcoming project study #9, ink on paper, 5.5" x 13," 2013

Sketchbook Drawing of an Over the Top May Day Birth Announcement

Forthcoming project study #7, pencil and ink on board, 10" x 11," 2013

Forthcoming project study #10, ink on paper, 5.5" x 13," 2013

The world’s favorite season is the spring.

All things seem possible in May.

-  Edwin Way Teale

Another and another sketchbook study for an un-announced, forthcoming project

An over the top May Day birth announcement, take 2:

Forthcoming project study #5, pencil and ink on board, 9" x 12," 2013

Below: trying to visualize what a 19th century boy would draw in the margins of his latin book while distracted:

Forthcoming project study #6, digital study, 2013

He who labors diligently need never despair; for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor. - Menander of Ephesus 

Another sketchbook study for an un-announced, forthcoming project

An over the top May Day birth announcement:

Forthcoming project study #4, ink on board, 9" x 12," 2013

May's exquisite fragrance
of lilacs in my room;
Has brought me joy and 
pleasure and kept my
heart in tune.

The lilies-of-the-valley
strike up their notes of cheer.
For Mother's Day and May Day
are at this time of year. 

Florence Weaver