Nimrod Hall 2014

Last Spring in a web search for art classes in Central Virginia I ran across a place called Nimrod Hall.  More specifically, I found the Nimrod Hall Summer Arts Program.

Nimrod Hall is a property in Bath County Virginia that dates back to the 1700s.  At one point in its history it was a hunting lodge.  For the last century or so it has been an art colony.  It is now owned by Richmond based artist Laura Loe and her husband.

The artist workshop program has been around for a while.  Until last Summer they had only done week-long workshops, but they decided that weekend workshops would be a good way to reach more people, including those hesitant to commit to an entire week without seeing what it was like.  I signed up for a weekend workshop with Andras Bality,  also Richmond based. I was drawn to Andras’ impressionistic landscapes and believed I’d enjoy his class.  I was right!

First, Nimrod is rustic, but comfortable.  The setting is beautiful. The photo below is of the main house. It’s a large property with many buildings situated on the Cowpasture River.  The workshops include three home cooked meals a day, and the food is excellent.

Nimrod Hall

The weekend began with a demonstration by Andras on Friday evening.  Then we painted all day Saturday.  We set up a scene on the pond down by the river for our first painting.  Below is my painting from that session (14×11 oil on board).  It’s not my best work, but it was a good learning experience.  Plein Aire painting is hard, and not something I’m practiced at.  I usually paint from photographs.

Pond at Nimrod Hall 2014 sm

After we completed the first painting we were encouraged to chose another scene and paint a second painting.  Along the hillside down by the river there was a row of cabins, from a boys camp.  These were essentially in ruins, and not particularly pretty until you spent some time looking at them.  I painted the tiny painting below (8×6 oil on canvas board) and gained a real appreciation for their beauty. Laura says she’s going to try to restore these so they can be used. She has her work cut out for her.

Huts at Nimrod Hall 2014 sm

In this workshop I learned several things from Andras that I have carried forward.  First, I learned a lot about mixing color.  He taught me that colors you would least expect to use in a mix can have a profound effect.  For example, cadmium orange can be used to tone down colors without dulling them.  I also learned to mix my whole pallet at once before beginning the painting.  That doesn’t mean that you don’t continue to add and mix colors, but it gives you a broad starting point.  Finally, I learned that clouds have many different colors in them.  My engineer’s brain wants to see white and gray, but they have blue, purple, pink and many other subtle colors.  Each of these has improved my results in paintings I’ve done since the workshop.

I’ve signed up for a Watercolor Painting workshop by Purnell Pettyjohn  at Nimrod July 10 -12 this summer.  Watercolor has always been a challenge to me so I’m looking forward to becoming more comfortable with the medium.

Painted Deserts

I was born and raised on the East Coast, but I love the desert. I find it spiritual and cleansing. It’s also beautiful and therefore I’m drawn to do paintings of it.

My experience painting the desert began a while ago with a trip to Santa Fe New Mexico.  I enjoyed painting the adobe structures.  Unfortunately, I haven’t photographed any of these early paintings (which aren’t very good). If I do I’ll come back and add them.

In 2004 we went to Fountain Hills Arizona and addition to playing a lot of golf we did some hiking.  I painted this painting in 2004 from one of the photos I took on the hike.  It’s 28 x 22 oil on canvas. I liked the painting, especially the highlights and shadows in the mountains, but always felt it lacked composition.
Arizona Desert 2004 sm

In 2012 we went to Utah canyon country, which is unbelievably beautiful. I wasn’t painting much at the time, but when I started again the photos from that trip were some of my first subjects.  All three of these come from photos taken in Devil’s Garden, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Park. These are all 16 x 12 water mixable oil on canvas.

We’ll start with my least favorite of the three, the toadstools. I suppose I should skip this, but in the spirit of sharing both the good and bad in this blog I’m including it.  I didn’t really get a good 3D look here and the rocks below the toadstools never really worked.
Devils Garden Toadstools

This next painting is an arch and I like it better. I realized later that I missed an opportunity to get more highlights and shadows in the distant mountains.  The 3D effect in the arch itself is good.
Devils Garden Arch

I actually did this one on my iPad too, after I did the painting. In many ways like the iPad version better. The Procreate tools allowed for much softer shadows and features in the arch itself.  I also got better depth in those distant mountains.
Devils Garden Arch iPad

The third, and my favorite, is from a photo of a series of hoodoos on a very flat sandstone rock.  This actually looks much better in person than in this photo.  The photo flattened it out. The actual painting is very 3D.
Devils Garden Formation

I also did a watercolor study of this before I did this painting. I’m generally not very good at watercolor.  This is one of my better attempts at the medium.  Devils Garden Formation (WC)

iPad Art

I’m a big fan of my iPad. I’m always looking for new ways to put it to use, and drawing on it seemed like a possibility.  From my early iPad days I purchased apps like Brushes and Sketchbook Pro. More recently I got Procreate.  Mostly, I would tinker around with them but I’d get frustrated before getting too far.

Last spring I took a four-hour class through Falls Church Arts from Bobbi Pratte.  Bobbi is a wonderful landscape artist and I’m going to take an afternoon painting class from her in May. I’m looking forward to learning a lot.

In the class we experimented with Zen Brush, Sketch Club and Brushes.  After we’d done some experimenting with each Bobbi gave us each a photo of a flower and we “painted” them using Sketch Club.  I got a good start but ran out of time and had to finish my painting after class. The most important thing I learned was to use lots of layers! Below is my iris.
Iris

I was pleased with the results and since then II have gone on to do several more iPad “paintings”. Some have been studies that I did in conjunction with actual paintings, but others I just did for fun.  I will save the studies to discuss with the associated paintings.

Mostly I use Procreate.  I’m more comfortable with that than Sketch Club. I have tried several types of stylus — my favorite for painting on the iPad is the Sensu Solo.

As you know, I’m a big fan of butterflies, so I needed to try that out. Here is my monarch on pink pansies.
Butterfly

After some time of not doing much iPad art I was worried I’d lose my knack, so I took on something pretty challenging.  I drew the post office building from Nimrod Hall.  (Nimrod Hall is an art retreat in Bath County VA.  We’ll talk about that in a future post)
Nimrod PO

Finally, what’s really fun is that most of the apps record your brush strokes (mistakes and all) and you can play them back as a movie.  Below is the movie showing the strokes involved in me drawing the butterfly.  It’s 3 minutes and 16 seconds long.

Green Show at Falls Church Arts

Two of my submissions to the upcoming Green Show at Falls Church Arts have been accepted. The interpretation of “green” is left up to the artist.  I chose landscapes, although one of them is not very green.  I also consider my paintings to be eco-friendly because I use water mixable oils.

The first I painted last Spring.  It’s a view from the Devil’s Knob overlook in Wintergreen where everything was green and the red buds were blooming.

3 Ridges Spring sm

The second is a painting I did a few months ago from a photo I took on the Skyline Drive in the Fall of 2013.

Autumn on the Skyline Drive 2014 sm

The show is at Art Space in Falls Church located at 410 South Maple Avenue, Falls Church, VA 22046.   It opens on February 12th and I plan to attend the opening night reception.  It runs through March 8th.

Classes with Jean Barrett and My First Show

Around the time I got serious about starting to paint again I met my friend Dede Haas for drinks.  I knew Dede through my networking activities while I was running my company.  She is a consultant to technology companies specializing in channel sales, but she took a couple of years off while back to explore her love of photography. Her work is fabulous. Dede also lives near me and when we met she told me I should get involved with Falls Church Arts.

I decided to enroll in a class taught by Jean Marie Barrett called painting from the inside out. The premise was painting scenes looking out through windows and doors.  It was a fun and challenging class and served the purpose of getting me back into painting again.  Painting with Jean also served to build my confidence. Whenever I would cower in my lack of ability she would simply tell me I had the skills to do something and I should just do it.

I painted two paintings in that class.  Interestingly enough, they were both from photos taken at Il Casale di Mele on a trip to Umbria Italy a few years ago.  The first one is looking out the kitchen window.  That’s my friend Sophie at the counter.  This was my first painting in the class.  In my opinion it’s not very good, but it did serve to get me back into practice.
Sophie at Il Casale di Mele sm

The second piece I did is one of my best paintings ever.  I’m not sure I would have even attempted it if it had not been for the confidence Jean instilled in me.  This was done from a favorite photograph from the trip looking out a huge plate glass window from the dining room into the garden.

Il Casale di Mele sm

At Jean’s suggestion, I timidly entered it into the Falls Church Arts All Members Show (Spring 2014).  It didn’t win anything, but I was quite proud.  This was my first show.

Painting Party at Mad Fox

Last night Mad Fox Brewing Company, a craft brew pub near where I live, had a painting party.  They brought in a company called Creative Mankind, who conducted a two-hour workshop where people could paint.  No painting experience was necessary.  I was curious enough to sign up.

First of all, it was very popular.  There were probably close to 50 people who had signed up.  Creative Mankind set up spots with tabletop easels, a canvas, water, brushes, and acrylic paints including black, white, and the primary colors (red, blue and yellow) on a paper plate pallet.  They also had a small photo of olives in a martini glass for each person.  Once they got us all organized they gave some instructions and we all got started.

The subject was simple enough that even beginners had good success.  We started out painting the olives, then we painted the background, and finally we painted the glass and the reflection.  Most people did pretty well as you can see from the photos.

MFBC Painting Party 1 MFBC Painting Party 2

Some people went a little off script 🙂

MFBC Painting Party 3

I love the fact that organizations like Creative Mankind are encouraging people to explore their creative side.  A good time was had by all!

Water Mixable Oils

As I said earlier posts, when I started painting I used acrylics.  They are great for beginners. You mix them with water and they clean up easily with water.  They dry fast.

I particularly liked the fact that they dry fast when I started out.  My engineer’s brain liked to paint from back to front.  (It still does but I’m working on it.)  So I’d paint the sky and the background.  Then I’d paint the things that were further away, finishing with the detailed things in the foreground.  This made sense to me.  Acrylics were great because they dried in a few minutes and I could move on to the next layer.

When I first painted with oils I realized that as convenient as fast drying paint is, it also has its downside.  You can’t blend the colors well.  You can mix colors on the pallet, but getting those soft edges by mixing with your brush once the paint is on the canvas doesn’t work well.  Because of that, oil paint became my preference.

As wonderful as oil paint is, you thin paint and clean up with with turpentine or turpenoid. Turpentine is pretty toxic. Both are smelly. For that reason, I tried to go back to acrylics when I first started painting again a couple of years ago.  This lasted less than one painting (I didn’t finish it).

I started doing some research and discovered something called water mixable-oils.  These are oil paints, but they are made with a particular kind of linseed oil that is water-soluble.  That means it can be thinned with and cleaned up with water.  My research showed that opinions vary on how these compare with traditional oils.  Some people say they behave differently.  I would agree that they are slightly different, but I think the tradeoff is worth it.  I’ve been using them for about a year now and I like them.  They dry slowly enough to mix well.  They still smell like oil paint, which is nice.  The colors are pretty consistent.

I’ve tried two brands, Windsor & Newton and W Oil.  Both are pretty good. I might have a slight preference for the Windsor & Newton. There are water-mixable linseed oil products you can buy if you like to thin with oil. You can buy several brands of water-mixable oils online at Dick Blick or Cheap Joe’s.

Classes with Jennifer

In 2002 I decided that I needed to take some basic art classes.  I was in the middle of starting my own company, so I had my hands full, but somehow I found time to sign up for a drawing class with the county adult education program.  It was called Drawing to Paint, and the teacher was Jennifer Schoechle.  I expected to do to class to learn to sketch so I could paint better.  It was quite different from what I expected, but it was very useful.

The class was based on chiaroscuro, which is the use of strong contrasts between light and dark.  We used primarily charcoal and usually began by covering the entire paper with a charcoal base and then using erasers and more charcoal to establish the lights and darks.  We also worked on perspective.  As it turns out, Jennifer was a gifted portrait painter, and chiaroscuro is a common technique in figure drawing.

While the class was very different than I expected, it was very good for me because it taught me to see contrast and value.  We also learned some basic techniques like drawing the negative space, which is sometimes very helpful, especially with composition.

I went on to take a second class through the county with Jennifer in figure drawing and painting and then a third where she had a group of students take a portrait painting class in her home.  I never imagined myself painting portraits, but it was a very good experience.  It was also my first exposure to oil painting – I had always used acrylics before that point.  Below is the portrait I painted in Jennifer’s private class.

Portrait 2002 sm

Sadly, I haven’t done anything in portrait painting since.  When I picked up my paintbrushes again in 2013 I thought I might try to take another class from her.  I looked her up and learned that she passed away in 2010 at the age of 61, far too young to lose such a gifted artist. Below is the only example I could find of Jennifer’s work on Google.

Jennifer's Portrait

Butterflies

Butterflies inspire me.  They are delicate and colorful and beautiful.  When I started painting I had some photographs of butterflies and decided they would be great subjects.  I did my very first butterfly pictures in regular acrylic paints on paper.  Acrylic was all I had and I hadn’t really explored other alternatives.  They came out well, but the acrylic paint was heavy on the paper.

Old Butterflies 2 sm Old Butterflies 1 sm

Around the same time, my sister told me about gouache.  She had done a painting for me from a trip we took together to Germany and it is gouache and pencil. I’ve always loved the look and thought the paint looked sheer and classy.  I decided to try my next butterfly in gouache.

What is so fun about painting a butterfly is getting into the patterns on the wings.  The good news is that they don’t match exactly.  If they did, my engineer’s brain would obsess about getting them to match and I’d never be able to finish the painting.  I really liked my swallowtail that I did in gouache.  I scanned it in and still use it as letterhead for my personal stationery and cards.

Old Butterflies 3 sm

A few years ago after several years of not painting at all I was struggling to get my eye and my technique back.  I decided that I needed to do some butterflies.   The good news is that there’s not a huge time commitment.  The gouache is tidy so there’s minimal set up and clean up and you can focus your time on doing the painting.  For these more recent butterflies I used gouache but did most of the black on the wings with ink.  I recently entered these in the Loving Life show (October 2014) at Falls Church Arts.  They did not win anything nor did they sell, but they got a nice spot right by the door.  I was also proud that they were selected, as this was my first curated show.

EPSON MFP image EPSON MFP image EPSON MFP image

In the beginning…

In 1998, I decided I wanted to try my hand at painting. I actually don’t recall what led me to this idea, but I tend to be a bit impulsive, so if the idea popped into my head I probably acted on it. At the time, I was a co-founder and Vice President for an Internet startup. We were still trying to figure out exactly what the company would do, so I had some free time on my hands.

I had taken art classes in high school and showed some aptitude. My older sister is an artist and I was always intimidated by my inability to keep up with her so I never pursued art outside of the classroom. I also never attempted anything as ambitious as painting with oils or acrylics.

As I said in my “about me”, I’m an engineer by training. More specifically, I’m a computer scientist — some engineers would take issue with me calling myself an engineer, but you get the idea. I’m a logical thinker and I approach problems in a specific way. Painting was no different. I went to a local craft store and bought some acrylic paints, brushes and canvas paper. I think I also bought a plastic palette that was covered and would keep paints wet for a few days. I didn’t know if I would be any good at painting so investing in actual stretched canvases seemed frivolous. I then began to experiment to see how paints worked.

I had a photograph I’d recently taken of a dogwood blossom. I decided that would be my subject. I practiced mixing colors and testing brush strokes. I wasn’t sure how to capture the background. The photo was focused on the blossom so the background was blurry. I decided to just paint it dark green with some slightly contrasting leaves. The leaves and the blossom in the foreground I painted in more detail. Interestingly enough, I ended up liking the painting, and I was encouraged to continue. I guess that’s a good thing because I now derive great pleasure from painting.

At some point later I actually had that first painting framed and gave it to my mother as a gift. Because it was on cheap canvas paper I had to have it mounted on a board. It ended up looking pretty nice as you can see from the photograph. Both digital photography and my skills at photographing paintings have improved a lot since the 1990s, but you get the idea.

First Painting

So this is how my journey from engineer to artist began and it continues…