Thursday, January 30, 2020

January 29, 2020 - A New Year, Two Views

All images are photographed late in the evening for posting the same night we paint them.  We strive to reproduce the color of the paintings here as close to our originals as we can, but some variation is probable.  The paintings are labeled with our initials preceding the date label and title.  The date label is Month/Day/Order Painted. 

All of these paintings can be purchased on our website.  This link will take you to the page where they're posted... Salt Marsh Studios.


Dottie's Day

Yesterday was our last "Mom's Day Out" of the painting month.  It has been a bit of a struggle getting her there and back and trying to paint too.  If our daylight lasted a little longer, it would be so much easier but by the time we get her picked up and home, we really just have time for one painting or if all the planets align ...two. All of that means, we have to get two done while she is at the senior center.  Sometimes that works well, sometimes it doesn't.  Yesterday, not so much.  Because she has no sense of her own time anymore, she doesn't have any sense that anyone else does either.  When we get there to pick her up, she's never ready and it always reminds me of trying to get my kids to preschool years ago.  It is a battle trying to constantly refocus and reorient her in the right direction..... get in the truck! :) This always pushes our time out, which on studio days isn't much of a problem but this month every moment counts and the loss of an extra 20 or 30 minutes can sometimes mean just one painting or a hurried second.  That was our day yesterday.  But mom was happy with her day and that is the silver lining.  


DTL - 1/29/1 - Moon River Study
The sky was beautiful and moody by the time we got out to paint.  Crazy, smoky blues, purples and yellows.  I was wishing we had all day to paint it.
The first two paintings of the day were tough.  I have been working on oil primed linen for the last week and a half and ran out of it yesterday.  So I pulled out the primed hardboard to paint on.  Evidently my brain is not as flexible as I thought!  It is amazing how you can get so used to painting on one surface in a weeks time that you completely forget how to work on another. (Mom and I may need adjoining rooms in the Alzheimers unit)  It was a struggle from the beginning. This primer takes paint so completely different than the oil primed.  It literally felt like it was just sucking the paint in and flattening it out.  Then the second layer of paint just sat on top like sticky slime.  Sounds great doesn't it? Aaaaaaugh! Marshes need to have a certain feel to them, they need to feel like grass... not a parking lot and it felt like the paint was setting up like a parking lot.  I finally got a little softness to this one but it took more time than it should and that's where the struggle with the second painting set in. 


DTL - 1/29/2 - Into The Distance
By the time I got to this painting, I only had an hour to paint before we had to leave and pick up mom.  The dramatic reflections in the water, that I set out to paint, disappeared halfway through blocking my painting in and I had to go from memory.  About 3/4 of the way through this painting, I remembered that to have any success with this hardboard in the weeks past, I had been using completely different brushes (which of course, I no longer had in my backpack) and Galkyd.  Then it all made sense... that feeling of clunkiness that I had been fighting had been from using the wrong brushes and not using medium.  As this month has progressed, I have eliminated any type of medium (other than Gamsol to wet my brush) from my paintbox.  I've enjoyed just painting simply with paint.  This surface needs medium to help make it workable.    I would have liked about another 30 minutes to work on this one, now that I figured out what I was finally doing wrong, but it was pickup time for mom.


DTL - 1/29/3 - Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
After we got mom home and we ate a little lunch, it started to rain... not in the forecast but it is rare that they get the weather completely right around here.  We nixed our other painting spot in favor of the bridge and set up under it, with the truck turned sideways to block the cold wind.  Directly in front of me was a nice stand of trees against that dark sky with a great little sand path winding through the marsh.  I found a linen panel.. not oil primed but not primed with the same primer that is on the hardboard.  It sort of feels somewhere in the middle.  I enjoyed painting this one.  The colors of the grasses and trees were dark and rich in the stormy light.  About halfway through the painting, the skies began to clear, but as quickly as a bright patch of sky would appear, another gray cloud would cover it.  That is where the title comes from :). That Neil Sedaka song my mom loved when  I was a child kept running through my mind. Or, what little was left of my mind, after the day's struggle. :)




Marc's Day

Due to a computer malfunction, all of the writing on my post this morning, has disappeared. We have to go paint... First two are acrylics, last one is an oil painting.  I wrote a bunch about that, but in short I returned to using the oil paints in the afternoon, but will be taking the acrylics back out today.  Sorry for not saying more here, but after 30 minutes of writing being lost, that's all I can say about it... grrrrrrrrr!!!!


MH - 1/29/1 - Soft Flow


MH - 1/29/2 - Distant Light


MH - 1/29/3 - Moving On

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