Winter Bounty - Progress

Here is the next layer I added today to Winter Bounty.

I continued to work transparently in the darks, and midtone areas (i.e., the wood tones on the back of the bench table). Here are the colors I used:

• Ultramarine blue + Burnt umber + Viridian for the painted surface of the bench table
• Transparent Oxide Orange + Burnt Siena+ Burnt umber for most of the wood surface on bench back and mushroom drawer pull
• Cadmium orange + Yellow ochre added to the basic wood tone mixture for the lighter areas, including touches of Unbleached titanium + cerulean blue for a few of the lightest and coolest spots (yes, these mixtures have body and were no longer very transparent!)
• Ultramarine blue + Burnt umber + Alizarin crimson for the crow
• Vermillion for the ribbon
• Unbleached titanium + cerulean blue + Transparent Orange oxide for shadow areas on the skates

I am having fun working on this one... I think it is my attachment to the crow. I think about his brief life... what he saw, what brought him down.

Up until recently, I kept Salem, my taxidermied crow, in a studio window, sort of gazing out. One day I noticed one of the (very many) crows who frequent our yard was perched on the roof of our first floor, looking up and into the window where Salem rested. I wondered if he "recognized" one of his fellows...? The very next day, I looked out the window and saw two crows, perched on the first floor roof, just as the one had been the day before, both looking into the window, apparently at Salem! I fancied that they were lotting a rescue mission... and although I was tempted to follow the drama, I decided to move Salem so he was no longer visible, worrying my local crow friends that there was one of them, imprisoned by the same woman who put apples and corn out for them.

More to come after this layer dries.

WIP: Winter Bounty

I have started this still life this past weekend. I had been wanting to do another painting using my precious taxidermy crow, but needed to have "the right" composition. For quite a while I did not have an inspired idea... then I got two! This is one of them...

The arrangement is set up on a green painted nineteenth century bench table (the table top flips up to form a back, with the drawer shelf forming a bench when the table top is not needed). The crow stands on the bench next to a pair of ice skates on the crow's left. (I used a clear glass jar to help hold him upright). On his right is a cast-off scarf. Above the crow is a red ribbon that cascades down over the flipped table top, and there is a note tacked to the underside of the flipped top.

The note is actually a 19th century handwritten posting of bounty to be awarded for dead starlings and crows turned in to the Philadelphia authority. I found the bounty facsimile on the internet and printed it out on cream colored paper.

The photos here show the initial underpainting, done in raw umber with highlights wiped out, on the 30" x 24" linen canvas.

Another image shows the bounty notice I printed out, and the final image shows the local color painting phase, on my easel with the studio life set up in the background.

Here are the colors I used for this first color phase:

Yellow Ochre

Burnt Umber

Burnt Sienna

Transparent Red Oxide

Alizarin Crimson

Ultramarine Blue

Viridian

I expect to have this layer dry and able to accept the next phase by this weekend... and will post my progress at that point!

Companions II

This is a painting I completed just about one year ago. I had just moved to cape cod and was enjoying the winter, but somewhat lonesome without my husband, Kurt, who was still back in NY readying our house there for sale.

Two months ago, I submitted this painting to a call for works put out by an Art/Literature/Photography Journal called The Whitefish Review (www.WhitefishReview.org). It has, I am pleased to say, been included in their most recent publication (volume 4, issue 2). Here is more about the story of this painting and how it came to be:

The piece was inspired by an old photo, taken on a vacation out west, which had included a tour of an abandoned 1880s town. One of the toured rooms impressed me, with its forsaken antique sewing machine and frayed wallpaper hinting of better times. Like all my work, Companions II was painted in a realistic style that draws on my studies in atelier painting techniques. I looked at the room from which I drew inspiration for the painting, I was filled with a sense of competing influences: The room had vestiges of a sanctuary (the faded, peeling wallpaper was delicate and charming in its day, carefully selected, no doubt). The sewing machine, a dear acquisition, was used with skill and self-reliance. But now, in its abandonment, the room exuded a sense of emptiness, isolation and desolation. It was these tensions that drew me to the setting.

As I reflected on these tensions, I "saw" a woman - the woman whose room it had been. Perhaps myself (as a matter of fact, I had received a sewing machine as a going-to-high-school present, and had worked used it in my bedroom). It is her sewing machine... and her closet with but one garment hanging in it. The door is absent from the closet... and with it the separation in the passage of time (between the woman's past and her present and future) has been removed. She may have only one useful garment from her past: is that enough to attire her for her future?

I placed her at the window, looking out at the world. But the window necessarily affords a narrowed view of the world - incomplete to its left and right...will she watch the world go by from this room, with its comforts and its barriers -and do nothing about it? Or will she go into the world, and outside the room?

Finally, I put a cat on the bed, gazing at the woman. The cat is another aspect of the woman - often a symbol of feminine power, this cat is ready to animate the woman in another direction, away from the window, presumably out of the room and into the world. The companion cat makes it clear that she is not alone and need not be imprisoned by her past, as long as she has accepts her integrated self.