VIEW FROM MARY'S COVE

This is the 3rd attempt at painting this view.... I did a sketch while camping in the little cove in Glacier Bay about 10 years ago and later from photos taken in early morning light.... there was smoke from forest fires in Canada at the time. This one, done last week, is only about 6 by 6 inches.... I'd like to do a larger one. I don't know who Mary was and its not an official name, but that is what at least some people call it..... between Ptarmigan Creek and Lamplugh Glacier.... my friends and I hiked to above the face of Lamplugh from here.

SCANNER DOESN'T WORK

I have at least one new painting, but can't get my scanner to work. After all morning trying to figure whats wrong, I've given up. This happened before and I got it going again, but can't remember what I did. The scanner won't connect with photoshop elements.


Anyway, thought I ought to put something here, so here's a photo of some books I've made recently.

MOOSE PAINTING

watercolor 9" x 12"

Is this Alaskana or what? I've been intending to do a large painting of this boggy meadow for years... a place we pass on the way to Bartlett Cove. I want to paint a panoramic view, but did this to see if I could get things right from the references I have. The trees on the left side bother me.... always something.

I've never seen a moose out there, but always look when I pass by. This moose is from a photo of one in my yard.

MY LAST EVER COMMISSIONED PAINTING

Here it is at last. I started this in July and it was a struggle to draw and paint every last inch of it. Its 15 1/2 x 22 inches. All I've got to say is I'm glad its done and I'll never ever agree to a commissioned painting again.... at least not of a building, a least not this large, at least not with ducks..... not of a boat either. I think I've said this before.

PICTURES FROM MY TRAVELS

My trip started out in Juneau where besides "town stuff" I visited my son and grand daughter for 3 days. I left just before the first real snow of the season.



On Monday, Nov. 9, I flew to Yakima Washington where my friend Louise picked me up and took me to her home near Zillah. I took this picture a couple of years ago while visiting. Her house is below the big white one on the left just above her reddish orchard of organic bosc pears.

She had had a house party the weekend before with lots of food left over. We ate well. Always lots of pears. Here is beautiful Louise in her beautiful kitchen.

Off to Seattle for a couple of days and stayed with Nadine and visited with Lani, and Emily. I met Aimee at the Best of the NW Arts and Crafts show and walked miles and again ate very well.

On Sunday morning, the 14th, off on the Coastal Starlight train to California. I arrived in Davis the next morning and had an enjoyable day with my cousin Gillian. We spent a couple of hours in the UC Davis Botanical Garden, a Native American art and crafts show on campus and an afternoon at thrift and junk stores..... found a little treasure.

A few images from the Garden:


These were beautiful.... reminding both Jill and me of O'keefe's paintings of them.


We could see many of these night herons in the trees. There are lots of them and other birds that have become a problem, upsetting the ecological system.


I was quite impressed with the mosaics on three sides of this restroom in the garden.


Here is a close-up of one of the walls.

I met Aimee at the train station in Davis on Monday morning (she had left on Sunday) and we rode the rest of the way to Berkeley where we stayed with Aimee's old UCBerkeley college friend Charley.

Charley makes some really good wine and we helped him with bottling. We also helped him drink some.

The Berkeley hills are beautiful. Walking and looking at gorgeous house and gardens was a delight. My last day there ( Sunday) we went to the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens and it is now my favorite garden.




This is "Charley's tree" He brought the seeds (or maybe it was the actual tree) back from New Zealand years ago.



On Sunday afternoon we drove over to San Francisco and walked around the Golden Gate Park and enjoyed the art and an organ concert at the Legion of Honor Art Museum. We had previously gone to the city on BART and walked for miles.... ate well there too, both times . Also visited and went shopping with relocated Alaskan and blogger friend Aurora in Berkeley, and to 2 other concerts.

.... a view from our last walk in San Francisco.

I flew all the way home on Monday..... was a little doubtful getting out of Juneau, but the visibility got good enough about the time I got there.

So here I am home.... I am about use to the cold again. I didn't go outside until we went to friends for Thanksgiving dinner. It's blowing and raining now, pretty dark at 4 AM.

ON VACATION

I'm in Washington now visiting friends and will go to California this weekend. Thought I oughta put something here so here goes. I'll be posting on my other blog before getting home just before Thanksgiving.


This is the belladonna amaryllis that I posted a few weeks ago.... I did a wash on the bottom to ground it and I think it works a little better.


I started this painting some time ago and had about given it up (the second attempt).... a year ago,at least. I added the ink lines and a lot more painting. The photo I worked with was taken on an overcast day, but I've seen these trees when the setting sun was hitting them and they glowed and that is what I was trying to capture. Don't know if I did and the composition isn't right.... there should be more sky and trees at the top to balance out the foreground. I could crop some of the foreground, but thats the part of the painting I like the best. Guess I'd better do it again.

DSFDF COLLAGE

I hadn't done one of the Different Strokes from Different Folks challenges for quite some time and had been thinking about doing the latest one ever since it was offered; but with the woodblock due and paintings to finished, and numerous other things, all I did was just think about it.... every few days I'd go over to the site and see what had been done... and think about it some more. I knew when I first saw the photo that I'd like to do a painting with some collage in it. Thinking the deadline was Thursday night, I pulled out the collage stuff on Wednesday and started cutting and pasting and kept it up all day. I ended up covering what painting I'd done completely with collage. Luckily I looked at the site that evening and saw that I was wrong about the deadline.... it was Wednesday, not Thursday night that it was due...I rushed to the studio and scanned what I'd done and cropped to just part of it which is here. Maybe I'll work on it some more... how I love cutting and pasting. But I'm back to less fun things now. I cut mats all day today and tomorrow will do some framing. Much to do in the next week before I take off for a two week trip to Washington and California.

NASTURTIUM PRINT

I finished the nasturtium print for the Baren Exchange 42 last Sunday. Here is a bit of some of the process:

I decided to do something a little different..... use linoleum for the key block.I had never printed with lino using the Japanese method (pigment, water, and paste) and was planning to do the key block with oil base.... but happily found that the watercolor and methyl cellulose that I'm used in this worked fine.

And I also was surprised and pleased that I could do somewhat fine lines using the linoleum. I have never been able to get much detail with wood. And it was so easy to cut and my arthritis didn't flair up at all, though by the time I'd cut all the wood blocks I had a pretty painful blister on my middle finger.

Most of my prints in the last few years have been reduction. This is a small print and I'd at first thought I'd might do some reduction, but like the idea of doing more prints later. I might do some reduction later in a final edition.

After trying different ways of registration, I find the following gives me the best results:

I cut my key block and then cut my kentos in all of my blocks before transferring my key block to the additional blocks.



This poor picture shows me rolling oil base ink onto my linoleum key block. I will print onto a piece of tracing paper.


Here is my piece of tracing paper on the lino block after I have rubbed the back with my baren.
You should print a new piece of tracing paper for each color block.... If you use the same one the ink will build up and make the lines print on the block wider than they are.... I found this out and it caused problems on one of the blocks.


On the bottom I have placed the printed tracing paper face down on to the block into the kento marks that I'd already cut. The kentos aren't very evident in this picture. I will rub the back and it will off set (transfer) from the paper onto the wood. I had already offset the key block image on the other side of the block (on the top of this picture). You can see the kentos better in the top one.

I was taught to transfer the kento along with the image from the key block and cut along with each color block. But when I did that, I seemed to always be off on the registration.... its easier to get the paper in the kento correctly than to cut a kento correctly. After I cut each block, I clean the oil image off with paint thinner. (I had of course cleaned the key block and roller off after printing the tracing papers.) Some of the oily ink image stays on the color blocks (you can see some in the following pictures of the blocks) but doesn't affect the print.

I didn't take pictures of the prints in each stage, but here are the blocks.


No need to say what color they printed. The yellow and the aqua combined to make green. The while speck is something on the scanner.




I cut a seventh block with just the bloom on the bottom and the bottom of the larger bottle.




TA-DA......


Here is the final print.... at least what I hoped for. Thanks to my too thick lines when I reused the tracing paper when I transferred my image I had some mistakes in the background block .... I've corrected it here some with a brush and watercolor.

Since my finger was in no shape to cut anymore, I decided to leave out the yellow background for this edition.
It wasn't just the yellow background block that wasn't right....the stem just below the yellow flower is the most obvious which I thought I'd fixed but made worse and didn't realize until I was done.

I used a product that I'm sold on..... DAP PLASTIC WOOD CELLULOSE FIBRE FILLER. I corrected several little mistakes and will fix the background block. I don't know if it will adhere to the linoleum, but will try it as there are a few slips there too.

Now the printing things are put away and I'm back in painting mode.

BELLADONA AMARYLLISES AND A BIG CABBAGE

I have 2 big pots of belladonna amaryllises which bloom often and are often the only thing blooming around here. I painted the flowers last year and did the jar and background this week. I'm thinking I'd better put a shadow or maybe paint on a table to ground the jar and flowers... or maybe not.

Me and my 25 pound cabbage. I made sauerkraut out of most of it.

NASTURTIUMS

So far, this and my other blog have been just current work. Well, today I am starting showing some things from the past. I just haven't been productive enough to keep this blog active.... just not much enthused to get much work done. My little postcards are about all I've managed to do all summer. Well, hopefully my looking and thinking about these older things will get me going in the right direction again.... at least in some direction.


But first I do have something new to show. I finished this painting today. The flowers were painted from life a couple of weeks ago. It took me a while to decide how to do the back ground. I had first painted the gray with gouache, but decided it needed something more, so added the design today. This is the way I approach most of my floral still lifes.... paint the flowers then decide what to put around them.

And the name of this post is Nasturtiums, so I've found a few old paintings of them.


This was a small study I did of the same flowers and jars.... if you follow my Watercolor Postcard blog, you would have seen it there.

This is the oldest of the paintings here..... it was probably done about 15 years ago. The color is way off in the photo and its blurred. The black is gouache, painted after the flowers.

This was painted from life in the Gustavus Inn green house in 1996.

This has a gouache background too.
This one is small, though the image here seems big compared to the others. In all of these but the second one, the flowers are pretty much life size, so you can kind of guess at the size of the paintings.

The top of this one was cropped in the photo.

I don't know what to say about this one.

And lastly, this one which is my favorite.

Looking at these, I'm remembering that most of them were done about this time of year...... when nasturtiums were the only flowers left in the garden and usually a somewhat productive time.

RHUBARB

At last after a couple of months, I finished this,

and this. They were both done from the same photograph.

SUMMER FUN

If I wait until I've got some paintings to show here, its going to be more than the month its already been since I last posted. I've got some things in the works, and have been somewhat faithful with my watercolor postcards. And I've also made a few books. But all in all a very unproductive summer.... but for the garden which I must take some pictures of and show soon.

Here are a few photos of time with friends.

This beautiful quilt was made by a group of local women and is being raffled to raise money for our local clinic. They make one every year and they just keep getting better and better.


It was unveiled at a party at the Gustavus Inn on one of the beautiful days in June. Most of these ladies worked on it.... not me though.

Another party in July at the inn to celebrate my and Nadine's birthday... which are on the same day, I'm a year older. Here is the cake that JoAnn made. It was a lovely garden party on another beautiful day.


About a week later, another birthday party, this one on Kate's birthday, on Kate and Fritz's boat, the Great Sea.

We spent a perfect day watching humpback whales, enjoying friendships, and walking on Pleasant Island.Here's everyone but me.

Kate and her cake.

On August 8, yet another birthday party, Carolyn's 60th, a surprise party at my house. Carolyn on the left with Annie.

Cakes tart and pie. Yumm.

Just one more photo:

New PostThis little guy has been hanging around a lot with his mom. When I took this picture, he was eating my flowers and mom was on the other side of the path to the car and I was ready to go somewhere. They pretty much ignore me when I try to shoo them away. So far they haven't jumped the fence to the vegetable garden.