Sweet Girl from our Portrait Group

Lexus' parents named her after the car. She doesn't mind the name and it seems to suit her. She is a very classy and adult-looking 14 year old. Painted at the Hyter Group in Toledo. We meet on Saturday mornings to paint or draw from the live model at the corner of Hill and Holland Sylvania in a former school building.

12" x 9" oil on linen

On My Easel This Week: Honoring Those Who Fight For Us

There's precious little a person like me can do when to defend herself, let alone her country, so I have great respect for the brave men and women who serve in  our military. Especially now, when the world is a more dangerous place than it has been since the attacks on 9-11.

Every year a division of the local VFW Auxiliary chooses to honor local families by presenting the families of those serving in the military with blue starts. The mothers of soldiers who have died get a gold star. The ceremony is meaningful; filled with bagpipe music, tearful ballads and an honor guard.

I do oil paintings of the deceased soldiers and I present them at the end of the ceremony. These are tough paintings to do. You have to divorce yourself from the circumstances while you look at the reference photos of smiling young men who are hugging their girlfriends or hiking up a mountain with their favorite dog. The trouble is you know these young men will never hike or hug again and it's hard to accept that. As hard as it is for you to accept it's a thousand times harder on their family and friends.

So I try to create a painting that honors the soldier and will provide some sort of comfort to the family. Oil portraits last hundreds of years so the painting is likely to become an heirloom. The soldier whose life too early will become a legend in the history of his family. He's a hero, and while we don't worship our heroes we do recognize their valor and the courage it takes to put yourself out there in harm's way.

This year we are honoring two soldiers. I started the under-paintings this week and I hope to finish the paintings next week.

Joseph Lilly and Steven Stevens

Composition and Simple Subjects

I teach a few art classes and workshops every year so I am always trying to come up with "easy" ways to approach simple subjects. I use these exercises for the first class to give everyone a bit of confidence. It's my firm opinion that a painter with confidence and a big brush will create a better painting than a hesitant painter with a small brush (or any size brush).

Fruits and other organic subjects are deceptively simple subjects. I still have these pears because we haven't munched our way through them yet and I never get tired of doing still life paintings. So I set up another composition using my favorite fruit and did a quick 45 minute study this morning. It was important to be able to paint this quickly because I want the students to be able to start and finish their piece in one 2 hour session. I usually give them a photograph of the finished painting so they can see how my version turned out and a choice of photographs of the still life set up. I begin the class with a 15 minute demonstration on how to approach the painting, leaving them with a couple hours to do their piece.

The first class in this session starts Tuesday, October 2 at the Bryan Community Center on Buffalo Road in Bryan, Ohio. Classes will be held from 6-8:30 PM for four consecutive Tuesdays. Contact Cindy Rau at crau@cityofbryan.net to register for the classes or obtain more information. This is an oil or acrylic class and there is a $30 supply fee payable to me the first night of class.

Perfect Pears

6" x 6"

Sometimes I will check the composition using the "THRESHOLD" function

in Photoshop, which reduces the values to black and white and creates a simulated ink drawing.

If the black areas match my initial block in I know I have

remained faithful to the initial concept. I was pretty close with this one.

Channeling Kincade

Channeling Thomas Kincade...OK, maybe not exactly, but whenever I am presented with painting something as pretty as Carol's house and gardens, I think of Kincade. I don't dislike the recently deceased and seemingly troubled artist, as so many artists profess to. I actually liked a lot of his earlier pieces and I have a plein air book written by him that was given to me by my cousin. It has some extraordinary work in it. He started out doing plein air and painting from life. This is why his fantasy garden paintings have so much depth and realism in them. I mean, you know they can't be THAT pretty, but they're still realistic to the point where they COULD be! It's the whole commercialism and "painted reproductions" that left me shaking my head in disgust. People were fooled into thinking they had an original when it was just a printed canvas with some paint added to it. His death just proved another theory of mine I like to think is true: great wealth acquired too easily does not buy happiness. I would rather paint 100 paintings and sell them for $100 each than spend one week managing a business venture that offered copie of my paintings on clocks, teacups, toilet seats etc. You get the picture. The fun is in the doing.

Carol commissioned me to paint her house and surrounding area. It's a non-traditional painting in the sense that it is the BACK of her house. She has a pool, which can be seen with that tiny bit of blue beyond the entrance. She has flowers and statues and lovely trees. It was a challenge to find a place to stand that could really take in everything.

I began with a plein air painting in the late afternoon and took lots of photographs of the plants and architecture because I knew I couldn't finish it in one session and I would need the references to add the detail. The tree is right in the middle of the yard and it's right in the middle of my painting too so it was a challenge to break that unwritten rule of composition and make it work. But I think I did OK.

Carol's Paradise

Painting Pears Again

I had a few minutes this morning so I decided to paint some more pears. They are a favorite around here. (Both to paint and to eat).

I try to limit the time to an hour for these small pieces, both as a challenge for myself and to keep from overworking them.

Pears with  Dutch Pitcher