The Mural is Finished!

The studio is looking a little crowded. I can't wait to see this piece hung at Macrina in Belltown this week. 

Applying the Leaf

As I work on the mural I make lots of changes. The smudges will be covered with copper. 

Applying the copper leaf is a messy process. And as the weather warms up I have to use baby powder on my hands so the leaf won't stick to my sweaty fingers and tear apart.

Once the leaf is applied I burnish it with a cloth. Then I can paint small details on top.

Huckleberry likes the goldfinches. 

Here is a glimpse of the process of painting the second panel of the mural. Henry helped me to carry the very heavy panels outside to the alley where we laid them on the ground. I then painted the second panel with black paint.

This mural is nine feet across. All the red will be covered with copper leaf as you see in the test area that is all shiny from reflecting the sky.

It's a new mural! This will be 9 feet square so I am working in three panels. It's for Macrina Bakery in Belltown and will show a wheat field with sunflowers and other grains and flowers. I have chosen the unusual perspective of someone lying in a field looking at the sky so all the giant stalks are towering above us.

I am using pure copper leaf and all the terracotta colour will be covered with it. Here is my test area. I'm so excited. My favourite glimpse of large pieces like this is when I turn the studio lights out at the end of the day and the shining metal leaf glows in the darkness, reflecting ambient light.

As part of my research on wheat I found the wonderful work of Australian Margaret Senior who painted plant diseases. She is worth a google. 

In a Mood for Murals

Today I am beginning a new mural using metallic leaf. To get in the mood I'm looking at some murals I made a while ago. This one of a pear tree is at Macrina Bakery headquarters in Sodo, Seattle.

This mural of a grove of Arbutus trees was commissioned for a private residence.

Crazy Paintings by Amazing Women.

I just got back from another visit to Jordan where I teach art in the Ghor es Safi to women from farming families. It is always a bit of a crazy time - introducing artistic concepts like value, hue, texture and expressive brushwork to women with no previous exposure to art. It doesn't help that my fifty words of Arabic can't convey ideas very well.  Just when I start to feel that I am barking up the wrong tree, or just barking mad, we produce amazing things like these market bags. It helps that several of the women in my group have very good sewing skills.  

We love mixing colours and the results are joyful. Even the side panels on these bags are pretty.

 

The bags will be marketed to hotel gift shops in Jordan and also at the weekly craft fair in Amman. If you are on Rainbow street in May and June come and look for Nofeh and her craft stall.

I like this photo because it shows the community aspect of art making in our workshops. Two women work on the same painting. As with the rest of their lives in their small farming town, community comes first. And it is important that the women can bring their children to the classes. Otherwise, as is the case in the rest of the world, they might not be able to come at all.

Urban Farming in Amman

A small plein air painting I made while sitting on the roof at ACOR in Amman. Looking north from the city in amongst the bulldozed rubble, wild dogs and apartment buildings there are fields of spring grains - probably wheat. 

A Message If You Own One of My Paintings

Hi. If you are one of the wonderful people who have bought a painting on clay board from me in the past you may now be noticing that it has lost some of its shine. I am only just learning about this issue and how easy it is to fix it. If you would like me to varnish it for you free of charge please let me know. It really makes the colors glow and is worth the effort. (Clayboard is very smooth and hard, unlike canvas)  Leave a comment here or email me. The varnishing takes about five minutes. If you would like to mail the piece to me it will take a little while to dry before I can mail it back. Hey maybe this is a good excuse for a studio visit. Come on by I would love to see you!

A Magical Place

This is a reworking of a painting I made a couple of years ago. It is inspired by Tonkin Beach at Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island - a place that feels like a dream of peace and safety. The foxgloves  are a bit of danger - and such is life.

St Martin/Sint Maarten

What an amazing treat to visit a Caribbean island. I took a couple of mornings to paint these plein air studies but the rest of the time was spent on the beach. It was a dream.

A Show in Lynwood

Hi. I have an exhibition in Lynwood Convention Center which opened tonight. If you were among the dear people who went to the opening expecting to find me there and not finding me there...I apologize. I got lost driving through Shoreline but eventually made it to the opening to meet some wonderful people. If you left before I got a chance to see you, please let me know so that I can aplogize in person and maybe we'll meet up some other night when I have consulted a map more closely.

Heart of Darkness

As I visited Full Circle Farm last fall to paint outdoor studies my strongest emotional impression of the farm was of sunshiny peace and shady chaos.

Farms need sunshine and cleared land for crops to grow. But Full Circle and many of the organic farms of the Snoqualmie Valley have protected and restored forested areas too. This painting shows Griffin Creek which is the restored salmon stream that runs through the farm. Unlike vegetables, salmon need shade and the overhanging trees, dead snags and tangle of underbush provide cool hiding places. It is quite wonderful.

And yet I am personally drawn to the sunny cultivated fields more than the wild and shady woodland. I wonder why. As I painted this I thought about the things this landscape symbolizes in my life. I thought about civilization vs wilderness. Culture vs savagery. And control vs surrender. I love the gentleness and peace of a managed environment. But I appreciate that my character also needs the unbridled - just as the earth needs its wilderness.

I might call this piece "Wild at Heart" though it isn't quite right. "Full Circle Farm" might be best. It is oil on canvas and measures 24x48 inches.

Ribbon Seals

A ribbon seal was spotted in Seattle last month. They usually live in Alaska so I had never heard of them.

A little Photoshopping put them into a landscape. Some day I'll do a series about animals of the arctic, though I'm afraid it might be sad. I worry about climate change. (I know I should stop flying) Here is something I painted a couple of years ago about how the melting arctic weighs on my mind. It's called Polar Ice Cap. I try to laugh at myself...

Two Workshops in Eastern Washington

In February I'll be teaching two workshops at Confluence Gallery in Twisp, WA. On Friday, 17th February, I'll do a session called "Sketch Your Pet" where we'll learn how to sketch our pets using pencil, pen and ink and a lighthearted watercolor wash. We'll work from photographs showing several different action poses.

Then I'll do a two day weekend workshop called "Fantastic Fur. Expressive Eyes. Paint a Portrait of Your Pet in Oils." We'll learn basic oil painting techniques including how to mix colors and control our brush work to paint fluffy and clumpy fur and to capture the shine in our pet's eyes. Please contact the folks at Confluence if you are interested in joining us.

I'm going to buy chains for my car to make sure I can get over the mountain pass!

Teaching Landscapes

I taught some beginner landscape classes while I was in Jordan. Here we are using my laptop to look at pictures of date palms. Some of the women in the group like to work at a table while others are happy on the floor with me. Since meals are eaten on the floor everyone is comfortable sitting like this. No yoga mats required!

Not too bad for first try protoptypes! We'll keep working on our landscape painting when I go back in April. And eventually we'll be good enough to paint en plein air in the beautiful landscape surrounding the town.

Teaching Art in Jordan

The women's society building in Jordan where I teach art has been painted pink! You can't miss it.

We chose to work outside in the garden while we used oil paints. 

Here are the self portraits we painted.

We made out paintings into bags. The women in the project have been sewing for years and can turn a painting into a bag very quickly. For the lining of the bags we used our own naturally dyed cotton. We have been dyeing for years too, experimenting with local sources of colour - usually mud and iron based.

We looked at the work of the painter Mark Rothko for inspiration. Also the work of Helen Frankenthaler who sadly passed away the same week.