Challenging Lessons

Painting at the foot of Neahkahnie Mountain

Here it is, only Day 7 of the challenge and I have learned more than any of the other challenges put together. Of course, with each challenge I am in a different place so it would make sense that I would learn different lessons.

I think the biggest lesson I have learned this week is this: Much to my chagrin, I have come to realize that  I currently do not have my life set up to paint everyday or even as often as I would like or need to. I will say right here, this needs to change because I understand the value and necessity as an artist to having ones life set up to revolve around the creation of art.

This seems like such a simple and obvious thing, but it isn't really. Like so many people, I have a busy life. On taking a good hard look at where the time goes, I have come to the realization that I really need a system to manage my time more efficiently, or a ritual.

I have to admit, I don't seem to be able to keep to a highly structured ritual. Life seems to throw in extra goodies such as the peaches at the Farmer's Market on Friday. How do peaches disrupt a schedule? Well, peaches are tricky to come by here on the coast. At this Friday's market, someone brought flats of organic peaches from their farm. We bought two flats, which meant I had to can and freeze them before they go bad. This all came to an unscheduled task tacked onto a long day, leaving me exhausted today after working at the store all day. I can hardly see straight, let alone think straight enough to paint at the moment. This also explains my not-so-polished off the cuff blog posts too by the way!

I could go on to list all the wonderful and not so wonderful things I get to do in this life but I think I made my point. Change is needed.

Yesterday morning I had a wonderful two hour online seminar which dealt with what it takes to create a successful art career. I know, there are a lot of these but this one was given by someone with the experience and track record to back it up. The seminar also brought home to me some of the issues and obstacles I have been discovering during this challenge and gave me a good roadmap to overcome them. Coincidence? Maybe but I think more like synchronicity.

I am not going to go over all two hours point by point but will start with just one, time management so I can paint.

The challenge continues of course but will shift. I started out with painting everyday as my goal. That is still my goal but in a broader sense. My challenge has been refined to creating a lifestyle that puts painting, drawing, and artist related activities into a daily practice.

I feel that I am putting this so poorly. It reads a bit like a cliche to me but that could be my tired mind and body. I will stop here on this topic and leave one last fun tidbit .

I am going on a short artist road trip! I will be leaving this week for two days to go down the coast to visit the 21st Annual Maritime Art Exhibit at the Coos Art Museum in Coos Bay, Oregon.
I will be staying at one of my favorite spots on the central Oregon Coast, Yachats (pronounced Yah-Hots). I will be taking my painting pack of course. I will also have time to think, plan, and reorganize so I can be on my way to having consistent time at the easel and continue to build skills and a body of work.

If you made it this far through a somewhat rambling and personal post, thank you! I promise I will have some fun things, and paintings, to share this week too. Here is a bit of the beauty that inspires me to keep at it.

Short Sands of course, as the tide is receding.

-Renee

Day 5: 30/30 Challenge: Hot Sands!

"Hot Sands" work in progress

The unusually hot weather continues and I did indeed go to Short Sands. I went in the morning and took a liter of electrolyte enhanced water with me. It wasn't as windy at Short Sands as it was a couple of miles down the road where I live. If I would have known that there would be almost no wind, I would have taken my plein air umbrella. More about that in a minute.

This is a work in progress. I was already quite warm when I got there, set up, did a few sketches. When I started painting I soon had rivers of sweat running down, all over. It was hot. We are not used to heat here. I know many artists live where it truly gets hot but then I usually read that they either go out at the crack of dawn or stay in a cool studio. Judging by the temperature reports coming in from folks around here, I am guessing it was in the 90-95 degree (F) range. The sand and surrounding cliffs were also radiating heat. I was sorely tempted to plunge into the ocean but did not relish the hike back through the forest and drive home in wet clothes. It might be worth taking something to swim in if I find myself heading to Short Sands in the heat!

I only lasted two hours. Which was OK as the light had changed too much to continue. I had drank all of my water and was starting to feel ill from the heat so I packed it in. I have decided that I will work on this tomorrow and try something I have been meaning to try for a while now. I think I will work on this, from memory, and push it around a bit. You can learn a lot from playing around with a painting. I meant this to be a study anyway so it is done on a canvas sheet. I might ruin the painting but that is OK. Maybe I will take pictures of the progression.

I have a BestBrella plein air umbrella which I have written about before. It is a decent plein air umbrella but it just wasn't made for coastal conditions. Most of the time it is windy or we get sudden, unpredictable gusts and gusts that change direction from one minute to the next. My BestBrella lasted two weeks before a one of those sudden gusts of wind hit me and sheared off the brass connection. They were made from a granulated rather than cast material. At the moment I have Tinkertoys holding the connections together and I only use the umbrella where I know there will be no wind, such as the last workshop I attended in the Sierra foothills. I am learning to compensate for not having my panel and palette shaded. Unfortunately, there is no shade available at Short Sands on the beach. Turning into the sun usually means putting your back to the sea, not a good idea. Any other shelters I have though of have similar drawbacks to the umbrella or will not let me see well.

Tomorrow I have an online art seminar and I will work on the painting above to see how far I can push it. I also just brought home veggies, two flats of organic peaches, a 1/2 flat of raspberries, and several local pie apples from our Farmer's Market. I will need to get them either canned or in the freezer. Life is good!

-Renee

Days 3 and 4: 30/30 challenge

© 2014, R.L. Delight, "Red Flag Morning", 6"x8",  oil on canvas panel. SOLD! Thank you!

I painted yesterday after work but I didn't feel the progress was worth posting for Day 3. Today, Day 4, is a different story. The weather conditions here can change so fast that I have signed up for email alerts and warnings so that I can be informed when I am planning my day, a shopping trip up the coast, or a day painting on the beach for example. Last night a red flag warning popped up. The red flag warning indicated a dramatic shift in the weather that creates extreme fire conditions and increases problems for existing fires. That all translates into a hot dry wind.

This morning was incredibly clear and golden so I went out to paint on the beach that fronts our little town. I went, of course, to my favorite wave painting spot at the foot of Neahkahnie mountain. Sure enough, there was a warm offshore wind from the southeast blowing the waves around. The spindrift was flying off the waves as the wind pushed them around, and the morning sun was hitting the face of the waves. The ocean colors were breathtaking. I sat for about 20 minutes watching the waves with my sketchbook in hand until I formed an idea of what I wanted to paint.

The wind was so erratic I filled my tripod bag with rocks and hung it from the tripod center to keep it from being blown over. It worked but I had to hold onto my paint brushes as the wind tried to send them flying.

When I started painting the wind was mainly from the southeast and smelled hot and dry. It would come blowing a wall of sand and I would have to duck and hold onto my hat in spite of a tightened  chin strap. There is a bit of sand from the northern Oregon coast included free of charge in this painting!

One of the hazards of plein air painting that I hadn't considered before presented itself today. There are often dead birds and other sea life on the beach. It is sad but part of the cycle of life. I had carefully placed myself upwind of a dead pelican, where I also couldn't see it. Unfortunately, the wind shifted around to the north and I would get the occasional odor of death wafting over me now and then. I toughed it out but would have to occasionally cover my nose with my arm when it got too bad.

It was a beautiful day today and I am glad I got to paint the morning waves. Tomorrow I hope to head to Short Sands in the morning.

-Renee

Day 2: Painting at Night

I worked at the store today. Usually by the time I get home, make dinner, clean up, and finally sit a bit after being on my feet all day, I don't want to move. It is even hard to get up and get ready for bed.

Today I also had to paint. At first, I didn't want to and my mind raced to find an excuse I could live with. I honestly couldn't find one I could live with. So, I got up and climbed the stairs to my studio. My mind kept saying, "I don't want to do this" or,  "you are too tired so you will probably have to wipe it off anyway." My body kept setting up to paint. It only takes a minute as I am using my plein air easel in the studio to make it easy to just move aside.

I started to paint. An interesting thing happened. My exhaustion receded, not entirely, but significantly. My mind snapped into creative problem solving mode, and my very tired feet forgot they were tired for a bit. Ahhh, much better. I ended up painting for just a little over an hour. An hour was all I was really hoping for.

I did discover that I really don't like painting at night. I much prefer the daytime.

So here is a work in progress. There is a story behind this still life which I will tell as the painting progresses. It isn't a fancy painting but will actually work as a study for a larger painting that I have in mind.

This a tiny part of the painting, which, as I mentioned above, is a work in progress. I am starting with a color block in for this one.

Day 2: WIP (work in progress for those folks who are not familiar) 1 hour 20 minutes..

Here is the first part of the story behind the still life:
The beach along the Oregon coast is a magical place. It is always changing, never the same from day to day. There is a particular beach on the Northern Oregon Coast that is, in my opinion, more magical than most. I go there a lot to paint, draw, and sometimes just hang out. There are a few creeks and small rivers that find their way to the mother sea and they carve channels into the sand on their way to rejoin the salty ocean. At one end, there is a waterfall that cascades onto the rocks, or into the waves, depending on the tides.
The sand shifts and can quickly cover a rock formation or build up into banks. It can all be washed away the next day and expose new rocks and sometimes remnants of human artifacts.
One day, near the spot where the ashes of my dog Twill are buried, the ocean left me a gift...

Both still life and story to be continued!

I work at the store again tomorrow. We shall see if it gets easier to do my stint of painting.
Please forgive any errors in the above post. I am cramming this in before hauling myself to bed.

-Renee

Twisting a 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge: Day 1

Prepping panels for painting

I am once again participating in Leslie Saeta's 30 paintings in 30 days challenge. Leslie is great at encouraging everyone to make it fun and change it to fit ones needs. I decided to do just that. First, let me back up a tiny bit before describing my challenge.

It has been a very busy summer with music, work, and painting en plein air every chance I get. The summer has been unusually sunny with very little rain for the Northern Oregon Coast. The visitors have flocked here and it has left many shopkeepers, and us employees, grateful for the customers but a bit frazzled.

Labor Day, which is today as I write this post, officially ends our summer season. The kids will be heading back to school and summer vacations are ending. Things will be slowly quieting down around here. I must admit, I am breathing a huge sigh of relief. It has been a bit too crowded and hectic for my introverted tastes.

Last September I did not participate in this challenge as I was recovering from surgery. My attempt at January's challenge did not fly as I suddenly went back to work a few days a week, to pay off the surgery bills! So here I am again.
I decided to do a few things differently this time around as I am in a different place in my drawing and painting now. Here is what I propose for myself for this challenge:

I work two days a week in a women's clothing store in our tiny little town. There are two such stores dedicated to clothing, in addition to a couple more stores that have a bit of clothing for sale, and they are both a destination for many out-of-town shoppers.
Did you catch that introvert reference? I like people, honestly, but they exhaust me and I need a lot of down time and solitude to recover after each work day. I have felt too tired to do much of anything when I get home from working at the store all day. I want to try to change that. I will not be completing and entire painting on my store work days, but I want to get into the habit of painting everyday.

So the first part of this challenge is to do just that, paint everyday even if it is for an hour. I have been building a daily drawing habit for a while and I want to continue to do that and solidify it.
The second part of this challenge is to focus on a particular skill building area. I have decided to focus on composition. I have been so busy building up skills piece by piece, that I have neglected the whole. It is time to put it all together.

A found item I won't be painting at this time, Velella,velella. A sea creature of the jellyfish persuasion.

Leslie suggests having a theme. I decided my theme is "Found". I will be using the many intriguing items that I find on the beach in various still life paintings. I am also including "found" beach scenes as I will continue to paint en plein air.

Given all of this, I probably won't have 30 completed paintings. I am not sure how many I will have. I will put any painting that I think worthy up for sale. Most of them will be small and will be $100 for the challenge month. 

I promise I won't be writing such a long post each time either! I am also asking Please, no critiques of the paintings, constructive or otherwise, at this time. They will be critiqued privately. I need the space to experiment, grow, and make a mess. I am willing to share the process but process is not perfect or perfectly finished paintings all the time. It is going to get messy!

Here is Day 1:

"Summer Green", 6"x6", oil on panel. Plein air still life, pyramid composition. Bottle, including sand, and floats found on beach. NFS

Stay tuned!
-Renee

And the winner is...

I am still here and still painting! My schedule has been a bit overstuffed so I am woefully behind. I will also blame my lack of posts a bit on my introverted nature too. I just needed to be out of touch for a while. I even cut back on posting on Facebook a bit.

This is going to be a quick post! I am just going to post the pictures of today's studies and one or two others for your viewing pleasure. I will be getting back to the storytelling over the next few posts.

First of all, the weather on the Northern Oregon coast has been stunning. I think I have forgotten what rain is like! It has been very warm but thankfully not as hot as many areas.
Here are the studies from today:

"Neahkahnie Morning", 8"x10", plein air wave study #75, oil on canvas.

It has been a while since I have painted a wave study as I have been painting other scenes. This is Wave Study #75!

"Shorty South", 8"x10", plein air study, oil on canvas

I decided to focus on Short Sands beach this summer. Short Sands is a five minute drive up the road from where I live. It is part of Oswald West State Park. It is also a well known surfing spot so there is usually surfers and dogs on the beach and in the water. It was crowded today as there are a lot of summer visitors in the area.

"Waterfall at the North End", 8"x10", plein air study, oil on linen panel

This isn't a great photo but this was painted at the end of June.

I will get busy and round up any other paintings I have done. I had a long break at the beginning of July due to work and family obligations. I was getting quite cranky from the lack of painting! It feels good to be back at work.

Finally, several months ago I announced that the wonderful people who purchased a painting before my painting workshop in May would be eligible for a drawing to win a free painting in July. Here it is the 31st of July! I went to random.org and entered in the names and randomly generated a list. The winner of a painting is my lovely and wonderful cross-the-street neighbor, Karen!

Congratulations to Karen and many thanks to all who purchased a painting.
I haven't put up any paintings for sale recently as I am working on studies and to create a body of work. I will be returning to selling paintings in the Fall and Winter!

More painting adventures to come,

-Renee

Sketching the Bones

The weather and my work schedule finally fell into harmonious synch and I got three days in a row to paint and sketch. I spent a day at Short Sands beach tackling the waterfall cliffs again. This time I went ahead and went through the new process with only slight progress. It was only that night that I realized I forgot to do one of the most important techniques, SQUINT! I know better too. My only excuse is that my head is filled with trying to remember the new process that I sort of let some of my old basics slide. Next time I will set my timer to remind me to squint every 10 minutes or so until the habit returns.
Here is the painting I did at Short Sands a couple of days ago.

© 2014 R.L. Delight, Short Sands Study- WIP, 8"x10", oil on canvas

This is essentially a block in with very little detail. It took me 2 1/2 hours. Slow going. I noticed a few issues with my subject matter. First, there is a lot of complex detail not only in the rock but the shadows, which move constantly. I did pretty good at not moving the shadow shapes around once I got them in but then I saw others I liked better. I didn't move them around but I sure wanted to make another painting. It was a bit too late to do that so I made note of the time and hope to hit it right next time.
The other issue that I need to get the hang of is coordinating the light and the tides. It isn't as easy as it sounds. This day I got there at low tide and the tide was coming in, which I wanted. One other issue I need to solve with this area is getting the underlying architecture of the cliffs. It can be challenging to see what is going on with the dramatic lighting obscuring the rock.
With that in mind I decided to go back the next day, yesterday, with my sketching pack. I keep two art packs ready to go, one is my plein air painting gear, the other contains sketching materials. I spent a couple of hours yesterday trying to get shapes and proportions down. The following sketch can be a bit tricky to read as I focused pretty much only on the cliff, not the trees and greenery above or the water and sand below.

© 2014 R.L. Delight, Short Sands Sketch, graphite on paper.

I know, it is hard to make sense of when the drawing subject is out of context but when I put it next to my Short Sands studies I have done, I can start to see the reason for the shadows and shapes.
I am obsessed with painting this area some reason. I really want to get a good painting that captures what I see and feel at this spot, and believe me, the feeling is strong. I will keep going back and painting studies until I have it down and have enough to paint a formal studio painting along with any decent plein air paintings I can get out of it. There is a lot to paint there in addition to this one area.
Today was a bit of a rest day and catching up on a few chores. However, this afternoon I went back to Devil's Cauldron to do a bit of sketching there too. We had a bit of a time constraint so I decided to sketch rather than paint. The afternoon was beautiful and I pulled out what is quickly becoming my favorite sketching materials, my water soluble graphite pencils, ArtGraf water soluble graphite in a tin, and Niji water brush. The water soluble graphite allows me to create something between a drawing and painting. I am having a lot of fun with it although I can see I need to refine the technique a bit. Here is the drawing I made at Devil's Cauldron today:

© 2014 R.L. Delight, Devil's Cauldron Sketch, water soluble graphite on paper

The values in the ocean and distant cliff behind the tree stump are way off so it is hard to tell what is going on there. I need a bit more practice with the stuff. This is the first time I used the ArtGraf tin.
I did remember to squint today!
I am also starting to consider what I want to take away from the workshop I recently took and what I want to leave behind. I am getting a good idea and I think I will know after another few sessions. More on that to come.

So now, a couple days of working at the store and then off to paint again

Summer is nearly officially upon us!
-Renee