Once in a while, it’s fun to change up your game.  Several weeks ago we had a terrific workshop with Laurel McBrine on impasto or palette-knife painting.  She had me at “no medium needed” and “no brushes to clean.”   I had brought along a digital of one of my favourite cliff faces.  Yes, I am aware that other, more normal, folks have favourite shoes or vacation spots or desserts.  I have favourite cliffs, some of which I have already painted (see “Bay Bulls” 1 through 4 on my gallery website) and a great many more which I am just dying to paint.  I visit this particular cliff on a regular basis, in all seasons, but had never gotten around to painting it until now.

Even though it is probably limestone and subject to constant change, I think of my cliff as “Rock of Ages” and get all fluttery whenever we paddle past it.  So during that workshop I hauled out my reference shot and a cradled wood panel and went for it. 

Working impasto is a bit like mud wrestling  — sloppy but fun as hell (I imagine…).  You load up the knife with a pile of pigment and toggle back and forth between control and chaos.  Woo Hoo!

A hunk of my ancient wisdom rests on the knowledge that everything has its price.   To start, this love child cost me a good pair of leather gloves because there was half a pound of quicksilver pigment on her by end of the day and I had to get her home.  And while I may have noticed that I had used ten times the usual amount of pigment, I failed to translate that into drying time, especially when there is no alkyd to speed up the process.  Good luck trying to find a dust-free dog-hair-free storage around here these days!  Three weeks later, the surface is dry to the touch but I imagine that centuries will pass before the painting dries thoroughly.

​Don’t care.  This was too much fun to miss.  And if we ever decide to clone Theodore, there is a mother lode of hair to work with.

It occurred to me today as, on my hands and knees, I washed the squashed blueberries off the kitchen floor, that housework is only noticeable in its absence; had he visited here, Hamlet would have said "more honoured in the breach than in the observance."   My Beloved can live in perfect harmony with a pile of clothes on the chair, the detritus of a fly-tying marathon on the hardwood in his study, and every species of footwear scattered (sometimes in pairs) throughout the three floors.  His version of "unbearable mess" would be more likely constituted by a calculus lesson which is imperfectly clear.  However, as one who is plagued by mostly visual disturbances, I have not reached that state of nirvana where they don't bother me, despite my best efforts to ignore them and paint.  Housework is the hag that rides me.  

​This would be fine if I were wed to Spartan simplicity.  I read about one woman, an engineer, who decades ago constructed her entire household to be washable:  a flick of the switch and the house transformed into what must have been an early version of an automatic carwash.  Even granting that one could handle the issue of where to be during a wintertime wash cycle,  I think this approach still unlikely in the average home.  Slippery, for one thing. And even as one who likes stainless steel, I can't imagine a home populated by cool metal, without a range of colours and textures.  Most of us hyper-visuals (aka artists) particularly love the change of seasons. Right now the coming of winter is making me crave the warmth of glowing surfaces, hand-woven rugs, and the fireplace alight.  These seasonal adjustments will arrive slowly, as I fit my mind around the end of autumn.  Stuff will go away and different stuff will emerge.  All will need dusting.

​Even the paintings which conjure warm spaces will re-emerge.  After all, one can't spend one's entire life under a bed.

Believe it or not, I have tried for my whole life to blend in.  For example,  I had no previous plan to score on our own basket when I found myself in possession of the basketball during a high-school game,  Nor did I choose the turquoise Volvo.  And I had absolutely no intention of marrying someone that much younger.

The only arena in which I unerringly blend is on the canvas.  I cannot stop myself and I am not alone in this, as artist friends have uttered the same plaint.  This unfortunately means that we cannot be true Canadian artists.  John David Anderson, a talented painter in the Group of Seven tradition,  gave a wonderful workshop several weeks ago in which he stressed brush-strokes - loaded brush, short strokes, and definition.  I honestly gave it my best shot, but it was hopeless.  I cannot resist lengthening the stroke and blurring the difference.

Thus it came about that my version of the subject matter (remote snowbank sculpted by the wind and lit by daylight)  entailed so much colour-morphing that not only the season but the hour was unclear.  I had wandered away down a colour path of my own choosing.  John's wry critique was "Congratulations, Z'Anne:  the tones are well integrated but you've painted a night scene."  

See?   I might argue that it was more like dusk but that is splitting hairs.  He was so bang on that we all burst into laughter.  Oh, well.  Back to the blending primer.  

But while we're on the subject of Canadian Impressionism, I've been enjoying the huge new overview by Prakash, which my brother gave me for Christmas.  One of my favourite painters is Clarence Gagnon, especially his later work.  Have a look at the painting of the ice harvest with the red-blanketed horse (ice harvesting was a favourite subject)  if you want to see colour, composition, and life!  Notice lack of blending.

Less than a week ago, we were snowshoeing, albeit in heavy and granulated snow.  To my delight, I spotted the scene I had photographed and painted years ago  (see the linked website zannekeele.com by using the tab above -  "Find my Website" - and look at the banner.  I recognized it only because the time of year was the same and the water was that particular green-gold characteristic of the river in late winter.  Although I had flipped the right-left orientation so that the two paintings that were inspired that day would work as a pair, those leaning trees framed by that water were unmistakeable.  I read somewhere yesterday that one theory about the human love of film and television is that they remind us of moving water.  The writer didn't question the underlying assumption;  I would ask, why are bodies of water so hypnotic? I think that it is the shimmering colour produced by sunlight penetrating to the river bottom and being reflected back;  The sunnier the day and the lighter the substrate, the more brilliant the colours. In this sense all transparent media, whether water, glass, watercolour or glaze oil, behave the same.

This month I have been experimenting with alla prima painting.  Certainly, it is less labour-intensive than Renaissance-style glazing, which takes many days and at least six layers.    The pay-off at the end is the addition of final transparent glazes over lighter sections, which almost immediately light up and glow. On the other hand, alla prima painters like Richard Schmid, Elizabeth Robbins and David Lefel produce luscious results.    They paint mainly opaquely and more thickly in a gestural way, using excellent drawing and a mastery of colour to pull it off.  Most importantly, of course, they finish a painting in one go.      

So.... how to combine the virtues of both?

I'm experimenting this weekend with a swan whom I photographed in early winter at the lake.  I painted her yesterday over a longish day (which almost necessitated a nap in the middle), but opted to undershoot some of the areas so that I could glaze them later. Today the painting was mainly dry so I was able to glaze the blue shadows on her chest and flank into deeper values and I detailed the reflection a bit too.  

Sorta alla prima?

After successfully procrastinating for three days, I ran out of excuses not to begin my first alla prima painting.  To be sure, since Elizabeth Robbins' workshop, there were a number of puzzle pieces to assemble before touchiing brush to canvas:  I had reread my notes, had purchased a fan brush and several colours which were not in my palette, and had oil-primed a canvas, in this case a birch panel. As I wrote several weeks ago, the cupboards were also plundered for interesting vases and fabrics and I had staged some still life tableaux.

Even with all that preparation, it took forever just to lay out the palette;  I had drawn the line at any paint containing heavy metals (cadmiums and cobalts) so substitutes had to be found or mixed.  And then there was the mathematical terror which every artist knows:  one blank canvas plus one dry brush equals nothing.

Four hours later, I had a rough but LOOSE still life.  The time between start and finish was fraught with regret:  Why on earth had I chosen a reflective gold bowl?  And why compound the challenge by then placing said bowl on a figured tapestry? Am I delusional?  

Anyway, I soldiered through and barely took a breath for the next four hours.  It's still highly reflective so the background will be quieter but I want to detail the roses a bit more.  Most importantly, the leaves definitely need work;  I was loath to spend the prince's ransom that viridian demands but my creative mixing produced too sharp a green.   I also moved the position of the leaves several times so that needs to be sorted out.  That said, I'm satisfied with the lack of over-working as well as the reflection and the overall feel.

Now it's back to the cupboards in search of more fodder!  Stay tuned.

Day One:  Those of you who know me well will not be surprised to hear me admit that I have a tendency to become overstimulated.  

When my physics prof at university started on the far left with e=mc2 and four blackboards later had derived one of Newton's laws of motion, I was so impressed that I couldn't sleep that night.  Years later, when another professor, this time a Hassidic rabbi, lit up the lecture hall with an equally brilliant exploration of comparative theology, again, no sleep.  

And here I sit now, practically vibrating from a day with the luminous Elizabeth Robbins, who painted not one but TWO superb oil still lifes today in a workshop, all the while wielding her brush with a light touch not unlike the effortless way Yoyo Ma holds his bow. The word "gob-smacked" must have been invented for just such an occasion.  I was transfixed.  In the afterglow, drunk with excitement, I stagger around the house, set up spotlights, transpose today's notes, edit the digitals, and google artists whom Elizabeth has recommended.  I suspect there will be lots of time throughout the night to think and plan.  Teeny bit overstimulated.
 
Day Two:  Yes, sleep would have been preferable, but the long night did give me time to think through how I could set up a similar studio still life arrangement.  After climbing onto the kitchen counter multiple times to fish out old but beautiful crockery from the top shelf and digging through the linen closet for interesting textiles, I rigged up a light/shadow box and started arranging flowers.  Fifty-some shots later, the roses were totally ragged and so was I.  But Step One is done.

What I really want to work towards is looser painting.  I'm quite a "tight" painter, I admit.  The only time my florals were completely "loose" was after eye surgery (I had to wait to have a new prescription before I could even order glasses), and I compounded the reduced control by choosing watercolour on yupo "paper."  This is one of my favourites from that period, long gone in a charity auction.