Nicholas Egon Jainschigg Paintings

Day 26

2012-03-11T20:41:00.001-07:00

Oh, boy, sometimes things are just irredeemable. I like the way peppers look with the smooth, almost car-like finish and seductively curved surfaces, but I think that should probably have cued me in to NOT PAINT ONE. Smooth, shiny, curvy surfaces are not hard to paint, precisely, but they require real attention to detail, something that's really tough to do in a half-hour study. So....yes, it's an attempt at a pepper. Bleah.

Day 25

2012-02-22T22:53:00.000-08:00

White on white. A color scheme first proposed by James McNeill Whistler, but somehow I don't suppose he ever ate a clove of garlic in his life. He might have, though, on his continental travels. Personally, I love garlic, although I don't go so far in poeticizing it as the "stinking rose" folks. I just eat it. Lots of it. It's getting harder and harder to find the American variety around here, though, as it's being forced out by the sharper Chinese variety in the supermarkets. I love Chinese garlic in Asian recipes like Laab and so on, but it doesn't roast as sweetly as the California bulbs, to my taste. Still, they're all beautiful to paint and the papery coats are just gorgeous. In this one, I got really into laying the white on thickly to capture the soft highlights of the bulb. OK, now I've made myself hungry.....

Day 24

2012-02-17T14:57:00.000-08:00

Well, it's a bit of a wrench.

Day 23

2012-02-16T09:52:00.000-08:00

To quote the great philosopher Don Hertzfeldt, "I...am a banana!" I love the color yellow, primarily because it seems to cheer me up, speaking as it does of things I like: Spring, Fall, and tropical fruit. Yellow is also a pain in the butt to shade, since you really have to keep a close eye on the color temperature of the shading as you go. Too warm, and it looks "glowy", too cool and it gets sort of dead and moldy looking. In these pieces recently, I've been using up a tube of Hansa Yellow Light as my base yellow color. It's not my favorite yellow, since its tinting strength is relatively weak, but it sure makes you think when painting, which is always a good thing when doing exercises like this.

Day 22

2012-02-15T21:28:00.000-08:00

The onions again. I'm beginning to feel that I'm winning.

Day 21

2012-02-10T23:53:00.000-08:00

A painting of a poppy from last Summer. I miss Summer and I love poppies, so it was just sheer self-indulgence to paint this. It's also a lot of fun to use knife techniques to suggest various textures. I still feel like it's cheating, but it does get effective results.

Day 20

2012-02-09T21:44:00.000-08:00

Mangoes are wonderful. Besides being vividly colored and beautifully shaped, they make me think of the tropics--much appreciated in Winter. I'm finding that I'm turning into more of a painter than a draw-er. My previous dailies seem to be more like colored drawings to me than the current bunch. I'm not doing anything consciously different, but I think that my spatial perception has shifted oddly toward a more "solid" direction.

I've always held Velasquez's painting in very high regard, particularly his study/portrait of Juan de Pareja. If you look closely (and I have) there are no lines in the piece--it's all planes and splotches of color (to use the scientific terminology). I'd love it if some of that mojo rubbed off on me.

Day 19

2012-02-09T21:35:00.000-08:00

More onions. I'm not sure why they're resisting me. I may have to eat them.

Day 18

2012-02-06T21:04:00.000-08:00

Some onions. My old friends, those onions. Turning on me a bit. I wasn't aware of it, but the practice of painting larger has changed my approach to painting in a way that I couldn't have predicted--some surface effects are harder to get, partially because I'm more concerned with flow and mass, the two big elements of landscape paintings. I won't say I'm trying to paint onions like landscapes, but there's definitely different aspects of the onion structure leaping out at me now. I'm still trying to put my finger on it, but I think it has to do with trying to get the tactile quality down in priority over the visual. If I turned into Lucian Freud, I'd probably be happy about it. Fat chance.

Day 17

2012-02-06T20:57:00.000-08:00

Another bug, and I'm back to 8 X 10. The scanning and combining of scans for the 9 X 12 was just getting too much. Maybe if I had a honking big scanner it would be easier, but....

I love painting iridescence and now that I'm once again thinking of painting a really big fantasy subject (for myself, of course) I'm thinking of armor again--articulation, shine, effectiveness and so forth. It's just an inkling of an idea along with a dozn others, but I've got this twelve by eight foot canvas in my studio just begging for an epic subject....

I've also been thinking a bit about the old "rule" of art that you should paint your highlights opaque and your shadows transparently. Mostly thinking about what a crock it is. If you're doing a huge painting that you're trying to get done in a hurry because your royal client is tapping his or her foot in the outer hall (metaphorically speaking) transparent shadows are great because you can cover big areas and you have less to worry about in terms of covering previously painted stuff. In other words, it's quick and pretty good, but to claim that it's the 'only way to get luminous shadows' is complete twaddle. When you really look into shadows you see that beyond the basic color they've also got a ton of reflected lights and variations and those are almost impossible to get transparently. Luminous shadows are the result of getting the apparent shades and edges right, whether opaque or not. It just takes more effort to get opaque shadows right, but when it works, it's a lot more luminous than a badly applied transparent shadow.

Day 16

2012-02-05T00:06:00.000-08:00

A nest, one of my favorites. Another exercise in composition.

Day 15

2012-02-03T22:21:00.000-08:00

A whelk shell from the collection. I'm getting terribly interested in subtlety, a luxury hardly available to the working illustrator and thus not something I spent much time on earlier in my career. In particular, I'm getting interested in how closely related tones can lend the appearance of all sorts of interesting natural phenomena; chiefly skin but also including such things as peach skin and the dusty but rich tones of a dry shell.

I was lucky enough to run into a colleague of mine a few days ago, Kathy Speranza. She was working on a portrait using a traditional pre-mixed portraiture palette sometimes known as the Reilly palette. I'd heard of it and been somewhat curious about it, but the labor of preparation always seemed somewhat daunting and extraneous to me, especially as I paint so few portraits. So it was a real pleasure to finally see it in action, and I begin to see its virtues. In particular, as Kathy said, it makes it very easy to lay down tones very close in value but differing in degree of warmth--the real key to getting flesh to look like flesh. I've been investigating this phenomenon as regards the Tonalist landscape artists, but it was fascinating to see how widely applicable it is, and I hope to make some real headway with the landscapes as I proceed.

In the meantime, a dry and dusty whelk is a laboratory in miniature. It also serves as an object lesson in keeping your brushes clean, as I was just scrubbing in a bit of background with a brush that turned out to be contaminated with yellow when my alarm went off and it was time to stop.

Day 14

2012-02-02T23:34:00.000-08:00

This one's pretty funny--a pine-cone. A very simple form, but visually defined by great complexity. I figured I'd give a try to painting it with the knife. Of course, it all started to go pear-shaped almost immediately. I ended up having a lot of fun applying the paint like cake icing. Ugly, ugly image, but really fun to paint. What does that remind me of?

Day 13

2012-02-02T23:29:00.001-08:00

Another sky, some light stanchions.

Day 12

2012-02-02T23:27:00.000-08:00

Some sketches of skies. Mostly over Providence, rather than the marsh. I think there's something in the air there that makes the skies more regularly interesting. It used to be so quite literally--metals from all the jewelry foundries were all through the air and made sunsets very vivid. Nowadays, with the Clean Air Act and all, it's probably safer to breathe but a lot less pretty.

Marsh Sunset

2012-01-31T20:09:00.000-08:00

I think it's done. It's been on my easel silently berating me for about a year, since
I abandoned it after a one-day lay in to establish the color and composition. It's a pretty simple idea, but because of that a little scary to pull off. Sunsets are of course gorgeous, but it's far too easy to get all dewy-eyed about them and make pretty work. This is also the first larger piece I've completed since the Costa Rica Road Cut, and I really, really, really didn't want to step backward from that approach.

Mostly what this is about is how the foliage in the marsh reflects the sky. That's a little tough to see in the full light of day, but obvious in dimmer light. I was surprised, though, by just how much it reflects. My color mixtures for the ground are essentially the same as for the sky, just shifted a little darker, except where it's really reflective (the water, the sand).

I also had fun with painting the sky. Mostly I try to stay with opaque colors since I change my compositions so much as I go along, working transparently would really inhibit me. I needed a transparent effect of red in the sky, though, since the color really isn't mixable otherwise. I used to make my glazes by just adding a ton of medium to a transparent color and applying it like a stain. I've learned that this is wrong-headed (thanks, Rob!) and so I did the glaze a bit differently this time. I started by laying down a thin coat of my oil/chalk medium, then putting a stroke of full-strength Alizarin Crimson across the lower sky (slightly scary, but fun), and then rubbing it with rags and the heel of my hand until it was the right shade. It's a great way to apply color--physically fun, but also really controllable and the color result is somehow richer than that obtained by thinning the paint chemically. A game-changer for me.

Day 11

2012-01-30T23:05:00.000-08:00

Oddly, when I picked this painting up for scanning I was thinking "another dud", but find that after photographing it (another still wet picture) I find I rather like it. I have a suspicion that it may be because it was painted from a photograph, and photography is its natural metier. Usually I'll use the photography as a sort of mnemonic device to try to paint more or less as the original scene appeared, but in this case I was too intrigued by the dark and light areas of the trees and foliage and kept the value contrasts of the photograph. This gives it a slightly stark and tawdry appearance in the original, but works nicely in reproduction.

This is a painting of a beautiful eroded pool near Rincon de la Vieja, Costa Rica. The water is from the volcano and is actually that color from all the dissolved copper(?) salts. Quite safe to swim in, but I don't know if I'd drink it. There are cases of blonde and naturally light-haired people ending up with green hair from copper-rich water, but it takes quite some time to end up in the hair follicles.

Day 10

2012-01-29T19:02:00.000-08:00

The parking lot behind my studio on a foggy, snowy evening (last year), and also a sort of homage to Isaak Levitan. I believe, along with Levitan, that what matters in landscape is not entirely what is there, but rather what you think/feel about it. Practically anything can be beautiful, however humble or prosaic it is, provided you see it as such. After all, it's all sort of a miracle, isn't it?

Day 9

2012-01-29T17:23:00.000-08:00

Just a shell, but I kinda like the way it came out. I've been having a little difficulty with the colors I'm using in that the particular manufacturer's Burnt Sienna is slightly different from the Utrecht Burnt Sienna I commonly use. This means that it's difficult or impossible to achieve a truly neutral dark tone, hence my slightly bluish background colors. A stopped clock is right twice a day, however, and this particular shell has a color scheme eminently suited to the Burnt Sienna I'm using, in particular for the dusty purple spirals on the shell, a mixture of Sienna, Ultramarine and white. Mostly done with brushes, but with a few scrubby bits with knife thrown in at the end to try to capture the scratched, chalky suface of this old shell.

Day 8

2012-01-27T22:44:00.000-08:00

This painting and the previous one were photographed with my phone (thanks, Apple!) and then straightened out and color corrected in Photoshop. This one is a small bird's nest, painted almost entirely with knife. Since I'm painting 9 X 12 I'm getting more interested in dealing with the placement of the subjects on the board, always something I like dealing with in my more finished work, but something difficult to indulge at the small scale of 8 X 10 boards. Although 9 X 12 is only slightly larger, it does provide a big enough stage to position smaller subjects away from the center and to attempt to deal with the white space around them. I've left the minimum of edges on the pieces to remind me to scan the pieces when they're dry enough and replace these place-holder images.

Day 7

2012-01-27T22:37:00.000-08:00

I've been painting away, but unfortunately my studio is so chilly that it takes thickly applied oils more than a week to dry enough to lay on a flatbed scanner, even when I add drying alkyd mediums to them to speed the process. Back when I illustrated on a more regular basis, I used to use alkyd paints for a few colors, notably white which is usually used in the thickest passages of paint. This would pretty much ensure that the painting would be dry enough to ship within a day or two. Unfortunately, I don't have any immediately around so I'm using plain old oil white. I'm going to have to lay in a supply unless the weather turns markedly warmer soon.

This is a painting of another geode, a larger chunk this time. More crystals, more facets, more transparency over transparency.

Day 6

2012-01-25T21:39:00.000-08:00

*sigh* The first dud, I think. A beautiful chunk of geode, with fascinating, long, opalescent crystals that fade from warm colors at the base to cooler ones at the tips. Unfortunately they're so long that the strokes needed to delineate them leave lots of opportunity to mess up the colors, the lines, or the layering. I managed to do all of that....

Day 5

2012-01-24T20:14:00.000-08:00

The back half of the geode. Technically, I suppose it's the less interesting side, but it's vastly harder to paint. This one is 9 "X 12"as I've temproarily run short of 8" X 10" boards. It's kind of fun to paint a little larger, as it's more along the lines of the larger stuff I've been doing at my studio.

Day 4

2012-01-23T19:30:00.000-08:00

A geode I have around the studio. I love the way geodes look, and I love the idea that bland-looking rocks can be split open to reveal such neat crystals. This was painted with my usual palette, using Ultramarine and Cadmium Red (hue) as the violet and using a slightly green-biased mixture of red and Permanent Green for the base rock.

I'm posting a little earlier than my usual midnight/1 AM because I have a terrible, verminous cold that won't even let me paint--my nose is running so much I'm sure I'd forget and blow my nose with a painting rag and end up all sorts of different colors. Agh, just means I'll have to paint two tomorrow.

Day 3

2012-01-22T20:29:00.000-08:00

Another "simple" subject--a bottle. I thought this would be an easy warm up , especially as I had a neutral gray background to make the highlights easy to pick out. As usual, reality is never easy, but this was fun to paint and I let myself use the knife,as well. One of the fun things I've learned a lot about in doing the dailies and the big paintings is the contrasts between lost and found edges. Lost edges are a blast, and absolutely necessary for painting flesh and almost anything rounded. Since I hate the slick look that comes from using smoothing brushes to lose edges, I'm getting pretty good at softening edges through the application of similar colors next to one another. It's also possible to get softer edges with the careful balance of stiffer mediums (like Weber's Res-N-Gel) and more flowing ones (like M.Graham's Walnut Oil Alkyd). Basically, the flowing medium leaves the brush more easily, for flowing lines, and the stiffer mediums stay where they are put in a most pleasing way.

Day 2

2012-01-21T23:03:00.000-08:00

It's funny. I never cease finding new ways to get in my own way. I had a lot of fun painting the turnip the day before, with brushes and painting knife, so naturally I felt vaguely guilty about it. "It's too easy...too fun...The knife makes it simple to contrast softer strokes with harder...it's got to be wrong." So, naturally, I had to paint the turnip again, just brushes. I did cover the board I'm using as a table with primer, so as to make a neutral ground where I don't have to keep worrying about painting wood grain, just to make that aspect a little easier. The result doesn't give me a headache or anything, but I wish it had some crisper bits.

Daily Paintings, Series 2, Day 1

2012-01-20T21:06:00.000-08:00

Some years ago I started a series of daily painting exercises intended to loosen up my painting style and get me over the fear of really working with oil paint. It worked, and I ended up painting 600 of them. The rules were I could paint anything I wanted as long as I painted for only a half hour, by kitchen timer. The alarm went off, the brush went down, no exceptions.The point was that a half hour is an ideal time to paint if you want to keep from getting scared. If you do a half hour painting and it's good, well, it's a source of pride. If you do one and it's awful, well, what do you expect from a mere half hour?

I stopped doing them regularly a couple of years ago after I dislocated my shoulder and was forced to take time off. Getting back into it was hard. Nevertheless, I've missed doing them, both because of the fact that they keep teaching me things and because it's sort of nice to have a pictorial diary or as I like to think of it, a snail-trail left behind my daily existence.

Anyhow, this is the first of a new series. Same rules. This one is of a turnip I had a yen to paint because it was such a still-life vegetable. Painted in my usual limited palette of five colors plus white--Burnt Sienna, Ultramarine, Cadmium Red Hue, Cadmium Yellow Hue, and Permanent Green, all from Utrecht this time. I prefer the "hue" colors to the real cadmiums because they're somewhat more translucent, allowing for a greater range of manipulations (in my way of working). I used a brush for most of the painting, but added a few swipes of the painting knife at the end to establish the stubs of the leaves.

One Hundred Acre Cove

2012-01-12T19:07:00.000-08:00

A small study of Hundred Acre Cove in Seekonk, Massachusetts. 16" X 12", oil on panel. I've been driving by this marsh for years, but it's a bit of a pain to get off the highway and paint it, so in the end I just decided to paint from one of the photos I've taken from the car.

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Paint Storage

2011-12-31T15:10:00.000-08:00

I hadn't thought of posting something as basic as this, but several people have commented on the paint storage system I use in my studio, and since I haven't seen it anywhere else I thought people might find it useful. Basically, I just got tired of having my paint tubes festering in drawers, getting gummy from leaking oil and impossible to find when I needed them. The "system" such as it is, is just hanging the tubes up on readily-available "handbag clips" (technically "Binder Clips" so you can Google them) so you can see all the tubes at once and tell what's there.I have a couple of them--one a shallow box, and the other just a board with nails to hang the tubes from. I attached a couple of picture hangers to make it possible to hang the boards and reposition them if necessary, although I suppose you could just screw the things into the wall (or just drive nails onto the wall if your landlord is a tolerant type). As you can see the method is cheap, easy, and really adaptable. The clips come in several sizes for different paint tube sizes, and it's easy to use the tubes while they're attached. Hope this is useful!

A Dream Fulfilled....

2011-12-05T19:54:00.000-08:00

OK, if you're like me, you love hanging out in graveyards. They're quiet, often beautiful places with sometimes moving, sometimes extravagant artwork and epitaphs all over. This past weekend, we spent some time in the Catskills region with some friends, and naturally our agenda included hiking around in the local graveyard, a more than usually gorgeous one in a striking hillside setting.

Now, if you're like me you also can't resist having a look through the little ventilation holes in or next to the doors of the picturesque family crypts that graveyards often have. I'm always curious about how the dear departed are disposed around the place--on shelves, in boxes, in boxes within boxes....all neat, squared off, and looking recently dusted, most of them. In fact, until now I haven't had the luck to find one looking less than well-maintained. Diligence, however has paid off.

Decaying wood and metal coffins? Check.
Stove-in or open parts of the coffins? Check.
Somewhat jumbled arrangement looking like the bearers left in a hurry on account of vampires/revenants? Check!
Visible bones and friable bits? Check, check and mate!

Anyhow, if you're like me you couldn't resist using your powerful little miniature flashlight and iPhone camera to record the scene for possible use in a future illustration or something. At the very least to record the fact that after thirty or forty years of hanging around graveyards, you finally found a crypt that had a worse housekeeper than you.

OK, you're not like me, but here's the photos.

My shirt--Up Now!

2011-11-29T23:11:00.000-08:00

That is to say November 30th, since some of you may work for employers discontinuing email in favor of Tweets.

As some of you may know, I got asked to do a design for an art project by a Netherlandish T-shirt company and I rolled out an idea I'd been contemplating for a while: the Indulgences. The design and the Indulgence are attached, in case you're someone who's been within three or so meters of me in the last decade and I haven't explained it to you, in detail, with hand-waving and visual aids.

In any event, the day of its exposure draws nigh, and for those of you curious about the design, or for those of you with a spare $499.00 (Shipping Included) for a T-shirt of unparalleled artistry, or for those of you curious about what sort of being might actually contemplate the outlay of $499.00 for a T-shirt of any degree of artistry up to and surpassing Michelangelic if it didn't contain sufficient DNA evidence to guarantee a hefty out-of-court settlement,may I direct your browser to:

http://sequoiatees.com/

Road Cut, Costa Rica

2011-08-05T23:34:00.000-07:00

I'm lucky enough to have friends in Costa Rica that I can go pester from time to time. To be honest, I find the landscape there completely overwhelming. Everything is very different from the New England landscape that seems to have gotten into my fingers. The air is a different color, the vegetation has a different texture and color, the sky is different, the land undulates weirdly....

I've tried some ambitious paintings already, with mixed results--other people like them as I did too, at first, but now they make me cringe. This is the first that's got me thinking i can maybe do this. Mostly, I think I understand the vegetable textures now. The only way I was able to do it was by limiting my approach to a small subject: in this case a roadside somewhere. I don't know where, because I just shot photos out the car window whenever we drove anywhere.

I like the idea of approaching landscape painting like that. As artists, we're supposed to bring something of ourselves to the subject, but I tend to think that if the subject is too grand, it's more than a little overwhelming. Does my opinion of Yosemite Valley really matter? I don't know that my opinion of this roadside matters much, either, but I thought it had a certain rugged charm.

Day 622

2011-07-30T10:20:00.000-07:00

Out in the fields surrounding the marsh are a number of dead or moribund trees, mostly covered with vines to the extent that it's difficult to tell whether they're alive or dead, and what id vine and what is tree. It's an interesting challenge to paint, since they lack even the structure of trees to give them organization. In this case, I tried painting them almost like crayon-scribble, by laying down thick paint on top of the thinly scrubbed in sky and then cutting back into it with the handle-end of the brush..

Day 621

2011-07-28T22:04:00.001-07:00

Another hiatus.I'm truly sorry. Not for your agonies, dear reader, but for the fact that I've gotten out of practice with the dailies once again. A vacation to collect more landscape material, and a strong desire to get back into multi-day painting while the Summer lasts has derailed me. I have every intention of getting back to it--in fact, I'm commissioning a table to hold still life setups, but that will have to wait until I have some semblance of money. Until then...

...another view of Jacobs Point. The rill that flows into the bay there offers some fun high-contrast lighting effects.

Day 620

2011-06-01T21:35:00.000-07:00

The marsh, again. Late summer.

Day 619

2011-05-26T20:55:00.000-07:00

The outlet of a small stream that runs through Jacobs Point. There are often geese or, in the winter, brant hanging out there. It made a nice blue streak through the gray gravel.

Day 618

2011-05-26T20:24:00.000-07:00

Onions....*sob*.

Day 617

2011-05-10T19:21:00.000-07:00

Another gray day on the marsh.

Day 616

2011-05-08T10:37:00.000-07:00

Póas was the first volcano I ever saw. It's in Costa Rica; a little north of San Jose, the capital. This is a painting of the bottom of the crater and the acidified lake at its center. The landscape there is an amazing gray desert of ash and lava rock, broken by slashes of vivid color caused by mineral salts dissolved in the water and evaporated out on the rocks. The effect is rather like a charcoal drawing with splashes of gouache color on it.

Day 615

2011-05-03T22:36:00.000-07:00

From Summer to Winter. I dislike the cold, but love what it does to light and form.

Day 614

2011-05-03T22:34:00.000-07:00

More onions, this time painted on a 9X12 board. I'm getting much more interested in varieties of negative space and how white changes in a mixture of daylight and artificial light.

Day 613

2011-05-01T11:00:00.000-07:00

Another late-afternoon marsh.

Day 612

2011-05-01T10:59:00.000-07:00

What can follow bottles? More onions!

Day 611

2011-05-01T10:58:00.000-07:00

Bottles again. Trying to keep the paint thicker so that soft transitions are simpler.

Day 610

2011-04-29T15:56:00.000-07:00

Another image of Jacobs Point, this time looking offshore from the marsh. Less a landscape than a seascape, but still I love the light. I'm still not sure why it happens, but sometimes a simple Ultramarine blue/white mixture can appear more like a Cobalt blue effect. I think it may be the green from the foliage that shift the Ultramarine away from the violet end of the spectrum where it naturally lies.

Day 609

2011-04-29T15:52:00.000-07:00

Bottles....onions....Why not bottles AND onions?

Day 608

2011-04-28T13:55:00.001-07:00

Glass bottles are always fun. This was the first time painting them under the soft, white light of the studio windows. The shadows were so soft it was difficult to paint.

Day 607

2011-04-28T13:53:00.000-07:00

I like painting onions almost as much as I like eating them. This was painted in the big studio. There's something about working in there that makes me more aware of the necessity for planning the areas around the subject matter, hence the more nuanced use of white-space.

I'm looking into getting a stand made to hold my still-life setups and my computer for when I use it as a slide-projector. I'm looking forward to being able to make still-life setups with different colored backdrops and different lightings.

Day 605, 606

2011-04-26T18:13:00.000-07:00

A couple of studies of Queen Anne's Lace and Mexican glass. I love the cobalt rim on the glass, and the way the Queen Anne's Lace flower forms a soft, fuzzy basket with a few sharp accents that define its shape. I'm perpetually interested in the mysterious way we perceive so much of reality--as a sort of blur with small areas of focus. If you try to paint things all in focus, the effect is naive, or at best resembles a Northern Renaissance painting. Those were supposed to represent the world as seen through the eyes of God: everything seen with perfect clarity at all times. Optically, we only see sharp things when there is sufficient contrast, which varies across the field of view. The area where we actually perceive things at their highest level of detail, the fovea, accounts for an area the size of a quarter held at arms' length in our field of view. To capture this optical effect, much of a picture can be painted with soft edges with only a few accents. The trick is to get the accents right, hence the studies.

I painted these a few months ago, as I'm playing catch-up with posting. Since then, I broke the glass when I bumped the painting stand, so these paintings serve as a sort of memento.

Day 604

2011-04-25T19:43:00.000-07:00

From a photo of a local pond. Swans look quite gorgeous for such evil-tempered creatures. Did you know that swans can break your arm?

Ordinarily, I avoid painting things that can break my arm, unless they're paying me a lot of money for a portrait.

Day 603

2011-04-21T22:48:00.000-07:00

Sort of a study for Jacobs Point August. Trying to get a feel for greens. Green is such a fun color to work with. Our eyes are physiologically adapted to see a broader range of colors as "green" than any other color, so there's a concomitantly larger number of mixtures required to keep reasonably faithful to reality. I love the variety of greens you can get from yellow/brown mixtures with blue, and almost never use green from a tube except to dull down reds and warm colors.

Day 602

2011-04-20T21:19:00.000-07:00

Another "almost". I love the color and the way the horizontal direction of late-afternoon light changes the appearance of prosaic subjects. There's a graveyard across the street from my house that dates to the 1700's. It's well maintained and mowed and the newer sections are cleared from a stand of scrub, leading to the occurrence of a smooth, personality-free lawn dotted with gravestones right next to a wildly overgrown copse of trees. When the sun is low, it shines into the trees and allows you to get a really clear idea of the dimensionality of the space, rather than seeing it merely as a scrim or backdrop. This was an attempt to capture that. I like the upper portion, but it doesn't relate at all as I'd intended to the lower, so I think this will require a larger and more considered version.

Day 601

2011-04-20T05:52:00.000-07:00

And sometimes they don't work. Still.

I've been looking at the pine trees belonging to a neighbor, and how they catch the light toward sunset. The contrast between the sienna of the illuminated branches and needles and the greeny-black of the shaded ones is pretty striking, in a low-key kind of way. This sketch isn't, but sometime I'll get it.

Day 600

2011-04-17T20:13:00.000-07:00

Just fooling around with some of the same reference photos as for the painting of Jacobs Point. The point of this study was trying to figure out how sunshine can light up warm tones while leaving cool tones relatively unaffected. It's not as though it's narrow-bandwidth light and only illuminates warm colors, but it acts that way sometimes. As in the Jacobs Point painting, I tried to make most of the colors in the picture a little more cool/neutral than they might otherwise have been. It's funny how making things wishy-washy in most of a picture can have the opposite effect on the overall composition.

Olsen's Yard, November

2011-04-15T07:50:00.000-07:00

The newest larger landscape. It's of a friend's yard in Wakefield, RI, painted from photographs I took a couple of autumns ago. I'm loving the 4' X 2' panoramic format and have prepared quite a few canvases at those dimensions.

This is the first larger painting to try to deal with my new obsession: the subtle dimensional color of scrub plants, such as you see along highways, vacant lots and yard verges. The original point of this picture was the way the vivid yellow of those last few leaves provided a sort of depth-cueing for the subtler tones of the wood. I approached this by trying to build up paint and scrape it back repeatedly to add an organic dimension to color. The paint ended up being really thick, at least for me.

I was surprised when, midway through the painting, I realized that the broken lawn-chair was going to have to be a focus. Otherwise, the picture would become too "floaty" and oddly flat. It serves the same purpose as the little yellow flower in the blue Jacobs Point image. It's a little jarring, but the picture sort of revolves around it.

I was also surprised by how, at the end when I was adding the yellow leaves, I didn't have to use the very vivid yellow paint I'd planned. I'd been adding violet tones throughout the image since the beginning, in order to provide an optical contrast for the eventual leaves, and figured I'd be using cadmium yellow light for the bulk of them. As it turned out, cadmium was too intense and I had to tone it back to yellow ochre plus white with just a touch of cadmium in places.

Day 599

2011-04-14T20:34:00.000-07:00

More winter. It's a lot of fun to scratch back into paint. It's also a lot of fun to figure out where/how you want to have some areas of focus and contrast in an otherwise relatively soft construction. Most of the effort here was in setting things up for the line of branches and bare shrubs across the middle.

The reference for this piece (what? You think I'll paint outdoors in freezing sleet?) was gathered on a day when I was trying out my new neoprene, waterproof hunting boots. The only thing I hunt is a better lighting setup, but it also leads to a lot of time spent standing relatively still in water with ice on it. This day I got some great shots by simply wading up the bed of the little river in this image. It allowed me to see angles that were previously inaccessible and also avoided messing things up with footprints in the snow.

Of course, I got overconfident and tried it on another little stream and almost sank above my boot-tops in mud and silt. It took until almost dark to extricate myself without losing my boots or falling over.

Day 598

2011-04-14T15:54:00.000-07:00

I'm finally reviving my daily work. Well, twisting my own arm to revive the daily work.

I've got a bunch of paintings produced over the last year or so that were done under the daily painting rules I'd established, but where I just couldn't bring myself to deal with the problems of getting them posted. Hence this blog. Hence still having to force myself to get started on doing the dailies again. I'm hoping to accomplish this by scanning and posting the older work, getting back into the rhythm, and getting my home studio (gutted by my move to the outside studio) back into shape for painting, at least on a small scale.

So....winter. Snow. I loathe them as the objects of shoveling, coldness, wet feet, and general annoyance. Unfortunately I love them as a source of imagery. Falling snow is better than fog for emphasizing the dimensionality of landscape. This is a painting of the same four or five trees I tend to return to in Jacobs Point marsh, only with snow and semi-frozen surface slush all over the ground.

I've been looking a lot at the work of John Henry Twachtman, in particular his winter landscapes. I have always loved his painting Arques la Bataille, from the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY, but lately I've become enamored of his later paintings of winter scenes. I love the way he manages to dial down the detail and contrast while not removing the focus. The paintings also feel...crunchy, in the way snow does. I'm sure it has to do with the spare, dry way he applies the paint (so different from the way he does in Arques la Bataille) and it's something I want to understand better. Hence the daily.

Levitan Again

2011-04-01T19:34:00.000-07:00

Today I got up early to get another look at the Levitan show. Rather than circle through the pretty parts of town, I thought I'd save some time by cutting across on the main drags:Valovaya Ulitsa and Zhitnaya Ulitsa (it seems that "Ul" is short for "ulitsa" or "street", as in "Ulitsa Sezam" or "Sesame Street"). When traveling, everything is picturesque and engaging, so it was a nice walk in a light snowstorm.

I got there a little early, and there was already a crowd at the doors. Queueing up doesn't seem something we Slavs naturally do, at least without all the training I've received, so there was quite a mass of people at the door. I don't think it's an ill-natured thing, at least in most cases it seems to be an opportunity to chat while milling about, ever closer to the door.

On the second trip through, Levitan is as amazing as ever, or moreso. Everyone in the crowd was taking pictures, so I snuck a couple of HDRI images with my iPhone to try to record his impasto.

I was also able to confirm that one picture I'd hoped to see--a farmer plowing his field--had been removed for some reason. Darn. Have to schedule another trip ;-).

After the show crowded up, I went upstairs to the sadly deserted Russian Art of the 20th Century galleries, a sort of rogues gallery of appalling state-approved abstraction, Socialist Realism, various sculptures exhorting one to something or other and some really bodacious nudes, symbolizing "wheat", or "socialist youth" or something. I didn't particularly care. There was one really juicy portrait of a worker that I very much admired, especially in comparison to advertising art which it's equivalent to. I've uploaded a full-resolution shot for your enjoyment.

The standouts were work by Tatlin, much of which was reconstructed because it had been broken up (*sigh*) , a small collection of nicely done animal carvings, and some Kandinsky posters. Here's a link to a much more detailed and knowledgeable description of the galleries than my own from The Moscow News.

After that, I went to the Tretyakov Gallery proper to see the older art. The roomful of Repins and the roomful of Serovs were delightful--technically wonderful, with great narrative power (in the Repins) and an ability to flatter without seeming obviously to do so (with the Serovs). There was also a roomful of Shishkin's landscapes. I'm ambivalent on him--he's technically superb, and his sense of light and structure in a forested space is spectacular, but he veers a little sentimental for my taste. When I see his work, I'm reminded of Currier & Ives prints.

There were a number of beautiful landscapes whose painters I couldn't note due to my lack of Cyrillic, but I'm definitely going to look for them online. Among the painters whose work I really loved and whose names I could puzzle out: Vasily Vereshchagin, Lev Lvovic Kamenev, and Vasiliy D. Polenov. Russian art history doesn't dovetail perfectly with Western art history, so there's a lot of interesting archaisms and prefigurings in there, and I'm definitely going to keep researching. Google has the Tretyakov as part of their gallery view service now, so I can visit whenever I want.

A couple of canvases by Aivazofsky were fun (he's tacky, but revels in it delightfully) and some giant historicals and fantasy pieces by Victor Vasnetsov rounded out the day for me. The icons were much larger than I'd thought, and utterly spectacular, but I don't know enough to comment on anything but their design elements, which were strikingly modern. A lot of the rest of the work left me feeling as though trapped in the older areas of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: too many sweet, sweet children and dark, stone faced patriarchs and matriarchs all slightly out of drawing or oddly proportioned.

Back home tomorrow. I can't wait to come back here.

Location:Шлюзовая наб.,Moscow,Russia

Wunderkammers and Kremlin

2011-03-24T13:44:00.000-07:00

After a slightly debilitating morning of the all-too-well-known gastric effects of travel, I decided that my limited time here would not be well-spent lying in bed and moaning. I had decided to see the Moscow University Museum of Zoology, and walk back to my hotel via the Kremlin and Red Square. To save time, I took the Metro, only naturally in the wrong direction. After a short wander in the equivalent of Queens, New York when you're trying to get to Lincoln Center, I figured it out and went back the right way.

I love old science museums. I pretty much love all science museums, but the closer they get to a wunderkammer, the happier I am. I grew up near the American Museum of Natural History, before the big makeover began, so when I think of museums I think of dim, echoing halls (mostly echoing with kids) and the tar-colored skeletons of dinosaurs looming in the gloom. I think it definitely put adults off, which was part of the appeal. To see a bit of the old museum, check out "Journey To The Beginning of Time", a Czech SF(?) film. I loved that movie as a kid, especially because I also knew the little cave that the kids go into in order to go back in time. Nowadays, I'd just like to go back in time to meet Zdenek Burian.

The Moscow University Museum of Zoology is an old museum. It dates from 1791, and is gorgeous, inside and out. It's full of what are now considered downers in museums--lots of slightly startled looking taxidermy, formaldehyded things from seas, lakes and intestinal crevices, large dusty cabinets and the smell of mothballs. In short, heaven.

The main hall depicted on the site is beautiful. My Russian is nonexistent, so I couldn't ask who did the murals. After buying my ticket (100 rubles~3 dollars) I was informed by the very nice and patient lady upstairs that I needed another ticket to take photos. And I needed to take photos. As you see.

I have ideas about why museums like this are so appealing, at least to people like me. There's a quality about them of incompleteness--of exploration needing to be done. Modern museums are spectacular shows of what has been figured out and accomplished, but they're entertaining, not provoking. The information is often laid out as a fait accompli. Old museums lay out what was brought back with an attempt at showmanship, but it's worn thin and seems more carny barker than James Cameron. It's allowing the viewer to imagine: what was this individual like? What was its life like in the wild? What sort of person collected it? Stuffed it? The process is there, not swaddled by video and interactive displays.

Another reason I love them is that they seem to share my brain's pack rat sensibilities--things are often where they are because of an odd shape or color, not rigorous systemization. Systemization was the word here, though, but of the organizational and dry kind that's easily disregarded. A cabinet of raptors could as well be together because they look cool as because of their genetic and cladistic similarities.

I walked back via a series of wrong assumptions of where I was along Kalashny Per (must look up what Per stands for) into the Vodzvizhenka Ul (note to self: look up Ul, too). Going as far afield as the Itar Tass news agency. The Kremlin was quite recognizable when I got there, though, even discounting the heavy police presence. I took my obligatory picture in front of St. Basil's cathedral.

Then across the bridge on the B. Yakimanka Ul, which I could swear featured in a Bourne movie, and a longish but now familiar walk home.

Location:Шлюзовая наб.,Moscow,Russia

Levitan At Last

2011-03-19T14:36:00.000-07:00

I got to the Levitan show today, and it was spectacular. Slight mess-up as I went to the State Tretyakov Gallery, only to find it was a kilometer or two away in the Tretyakov MODERN. It wouldn't be a problem, but Moscow is so difficult to walk in. The streets are nice, but cars are parked everywhere and very densely, so you're constantly having to cross the street just to continue your walk.

There's also a lot of ice around now, and people seem to put up sections of chain and gating almost at random, excluding pedestrians from some stretches of sidewalk. I assume it's for keeping people out from under falling icicles or off icy walks, but it could just be cantankerousness. So walking is slow and arduous, but it was well worth it, and quite a beautiful day for a walk. I got to see the Peter The Great monument, which is quite a piece of work, I must say. There was also a floating karaoke bar moored right nearby.

Needless to say, the Levitan exhibit was beautiful. Despite the mid-sixties eyesore quality of the building (I think the Soviet mid-sixties architecture may be worse than US mid-sixties architecture, but I couldn't swear to it) the exhibition was excellently presented and thoughtfully laid out in roughly chronological order.

I was thoroughly surprised by the work, despite having two large volumes on his paintings. For one thing, some of the work I thought was large was small and vice versa. For another, his handling of paint and color are extraordinary. He mixes and switches between transparent and opaque, thick and fluid with total virtuosity. Some paintings I could have sworn had pen lines in them, but also had equally thin but heavily impasted white lines in them. My guess is he used a rigging brush, but it's just a guess.

My favorites in the original would be the painting of flooded shacks (I have to be descriptive since I don't read Russian) and the painting "The Gulley" (the title was on the frame in English!) although it's very uninspiring in reproduction, and the one of fern leaves. And "A Quiet Abode", and the mill dam, and the morning mist, and.... and the only one I was disappointed with was "Above Eternal Peace", one of his showpieces. At the scale it was done, I thought it lacked subtlety and came off didactic, a bit WPA-ish. The study for it was wonderful, though.

When I went back that Saturday, I did shoot a couple of angled shots with my phone in order to try to capture some of the impasto and glazing. I'm including them here for ease of comparison. The good, on-square images of his work are scanned from the catalog and cleaned up by me based on what I remember the originals as being like.

In general, his color was richer and details crisper than I'd thought. A few of the little studies, like the fallen leaves, were just jaw-dropping. It's about 10 cm on its long edge.

Photography was not permitted, but I had to document that I was there, so I made a few "phone calls"with the iPhone. That's the mill dam in the background with a disapproving Russian lady.

After I left the show, I found myself in a strange little park next door to the museum. It's a sculpture garden where they're collecting all the old Soviet sculpture that nobody wants around any more. It seems a popular place for moms and nannies to give the kids an airing. It's a very surreal place, a little Ozymandias-like.

Well, Made It!

2011-03-14T19:31:00.000-07:00

As you may be able to tell from the "Location" blip below, I'm in Moscow. Actually, I just got back, but since I don't like to post when I'm away, I just wrote these notes using the Blogger App on my phone and am posting them now. Why, you ask, would someone go to Moscow in the end of winter, knowing no Russian, or even how to decipher Cyrillic? Because a once-in-a-lifetime show of the work of Isaac Levitan is up until the 20th of March at the Tretyakov Gallery. I just adore Levitan's work, even though I've only known of him in any depth for about a year. There's only one hard to find but soon-to-be-reprinted book on him in English, but I have two in Russian with great plates.

Levitan's best known work is the "Vladimirka Road". If you Google it, there's a decent reproduction on the page. It's in the show, and I can't wait to see it.

I haven't seen the show yet, though. An all night flight and an all night allergy attack, whether from airplane air or something in my meal saw to that. I did manage to navigate the scrum at passport control and the municipal bus from the airport to the metro just fine, and the metro in Moscow is very similar to the New York subway, only cleaner, with prettier and far more ornate stations. It smells like home, though--damp, diesel fumes, and people, aahhhhhh....I didn't quite have the nerve yet to go full tourist and haul out the camera, but I guess I will. By the way, the rumor of the Moscow metro having international multi-language signage is overblown. The signs are sometimes there, mostly near the entrance, but not at all apparent from the platform, so listen for your stop. They seem to announce well and clearly. "Paveletskaya" isn't too far off from how it's really pronounced .

First impression of Moscow and it's surroundings is really great. The highway in from the airport is lined with birch trees, many of them bent nearly double (snow?). The city so far reminds me of Boston, same mix of old and new, same casual regard of parking rules, same endless construction. It's also impossible to give street directions non- verbally without a lot of hand waving and even shoulder and hip swinging--nothing is rectilinear for very long.

Tomorrow, I walk to the Tretyakov, see a bit of the city and finally see some Levitan originals.

Location:Шлюзовая наб.,Moscow,Russia

Studio Lighting

2011-02-21T19:57:00.000-08:00

I was thrilled to move into my studio last year, but just as quickly dismayed by having to adjust to a totally different lighting arrangement from my long-time home studio. Since the natural light at home was so lousy, I'd gotten quite used to doing all of my work under artificial light. For the last few years it has been a four-bar fluorescent troffer of the kind used in suspended ceilings, only in my case I found that by hanging it at a 45-degree angle over my easel and putting in two warm and two cool fluorescent bulbs, it cast a reasonably even, reasonably bright and shadow-free glow over my work.

The new studio, by contrast, has high ceilings and absolutely enormous windows--facing South. During the Summer, these windows cast a great light since the sun is high in the sky and the light beams barely enter the room. During the Winter when the sun is low, though, the light enters practically horizontally all day, making for bright and dark patches that are impossible to paint through, and then the days are so very short that without some artificial light, painting time is unnaturally (or is that naturally) short.

This required two separate solutions. The first was to sling up muslin curtains over the windows to diffuse the sunlight and make the light more even. The curtains had to be single-layered and with as few waves and weaves in them as possible, as these would create areas of greater and lesser shadow. My solution was to get large sheets of inexpensive white photographers' backdrop muslin and support them with lengths of PVC pipe from Home Depot. The muslin arrived with two sides hemmed for slipping over pole supports, so I slipped them over the PVC pipe and tacked them in place with hot-melt glue. To allow for raising and lowering them, I attached rings to the ends of the PVC pipe with stainless steel pipe clamps/straps, and tied them to lengths of marine rigging cord. I climbed a ladder and drove large screw-eyes into the ceiling and attached pulleys to them with clip-locking carabiners. Attached to the wall near the floor are cleats that I can tie off the cord with, allowing me to raise or lower the muslin to any height.

Of course,having muslin over the windows only lowers the light-level even more if it's a cloudy day, so I needed to add some artificial light to the mix. Hence the light stanchion. A friend recommended I look into large-format fluorescent lighting for photographers' studios. It was gorgeous, but at well over $2,000 just to start, it was beyond my pocketbook. Besides, cameras need much pickier light than eyes, in my opinion. Film will get a color cast to it, as will digital CCDs at the drop of a hat. The human eye, by contrast, is much more forgiving. I've done reasonably accurate paintings under colored light. As long as the palette and the easel are under the same light, you can muddle through some pretty extreme situations.

This light stand is made to cast a big amount of decent, glare-free and shadeless light on a large surface with little falloff. And it was relatively cheap. As you can see, it's a portable basketball net, of the kind used in driveways across the world, to which I've bolted (or actually asked someone to bolt--I'm emphatically not a handy person. You know the expression, "Measure twice, cut once?" Well, I measure twice, then cut a hole in my thumb.) two two-bar, 96" fluorescent fixtures, making for a total of four eight-foot fluorescent tubes. The base is filled with play-sand, so it's very stable and has wheels so it can be moved around with reasonable care. Total cost, under $400 for materials, low power consumption, and with the right bulbs it casts a bright light large enough to evenly illuminate an 8' X 6' canvas. Yes, I'm planning an 8' X 6' painting. Three, in fact.

As you can see, the standard UL-Approved lighting junctions are mounted to the back, and the clear backstop barely blocks any window light in the daytime. As an addition, it can be raised and lowered considerably if needed, although the lowest setting seems to work best for me at the moment.

As to the bulbs, you have to be a little careful with fluorescents. The most common ones are somewhat cold, but their big drawback comes from the fact that they artificially boost a few narrow ranges of the color spectrum, which can selectively throw off your colors. I got around this in my previous setup by having two bulbs each of warm and cool, and their overlapping spectra cast a pretty good light. I found to my horror that they don't make 96" fluorescents in "warm", so I did a little research and found that what I needed to get were bulbs with a high "CRI" or Color Rendering Index. These are specially constructed to have a good balance across the whole spectrum and are used for industrial color matching. The bulbs I'm using have a CRI of 94 (out of 100), but I understand that out there are some with CRIs of up to 98. The important part of the number is the distance-from-100 part (or so I hear), meaning that a 98 is three times better than a 94, not just a few percentage-points better. Nevertheless, between natural light part of the day and reasonably accurate, bright and even light the rest of the time, I'm pretty happy with the arrangement.

Jacobs Point-March

2011-02-17T22:30:00.000-08:00

Late winter is the most black-and-white time in the marsh. Pretty much everything you see is shriveled, bleached, blackened and broken, and most of the snow is gone so it's harder to see the sky color in shadows. In any event, the sky around here is usually gray, so it doesn't add a lot of vivid color, either.

As such, you really get to see the mix of land and water and what the constant erosion and rebuilding does. That's why this painting is so linear--I just liked the way the "S" curve of the channel got foreshortened into a sort of arrowhead swoop. I was particularly happy with the way I got the distant strip a barely-remaining snow: one stroke of a painting knife. Sometimes it just works. Most of the time it doesn't and you have to do it over and over until it's right, but when it just works you have to just be grateful and leave it the heck alone.

I thought for sure I had a larger image of this one, but it looks like I'll have to make one. I'll post it as an amendment later on. One of the tougher things about working big is that I have to concern myself more with issues of lighting and documenting the work. It's relatively simple to light a small painting well--even a desk-lamp will do. You can also document a piece by just slapping it on your scanner (when dry, of course). With larger pictures, though, there's significant fall-off if the only light is from above, as by ceiling fixtures and so forth. This means that the lower portions of the picture may be in less illumination than the upper portions, leading you to mistakenly paint them lighter to "go" with the upper bits. This goes both for painting and for photographing the work. This is why artists have for years loved working under the fabled "north light".

True north light can only be obtained by having skylights that face the unobstructed north of the sky, with no admixture of the other directions and no objects like trees or buildings in the field of view to reflect back their colors. This way the light is even throughout the day (you never get beams of light directly from the sun), and slightly cool from the sky or cloud reflection and transmission. Since daylight is so much brighter than most lamps (a fact hidden from us by the adaptability of our eyes) it also experiences much less falloff over distance than artificial light and hence illuminates even large work relatively evenly, depending on the size of the window letting it in.

My studio has south-facing windows, so I've had to make a few adjustments both to the windows and the lighting to get things to a comfortable level for me. You can see these adaptations in my "About Me" picture, but (teaser) I'll go into them in detail on my next post.

Jacobs Point-August

2011-02-16T21:46:00.000-08:00

I'm going to be posting my way through a small backlog of completed paintings, while getting set up (mentally and equipment-wise) to resume my daily oil exercises. This one is the most recent completed landscape, again Jacobs Point. I miss warm weather.

This one was painted on a really rough-woven hemp canvas from HempTraders.com. I love painting on heavy canvas, but my slightly frugal soul rebels at paying upwards of $70 US per yard for linen. Hemp canvas is nearly as strong as linen and is only about $15 US per yard. Its staple, or average fiber length, is about 20 cm as opposed to linen's 25-150 cm. Cotton, by contrast, maxes out at about 6 cm. Supposedly Titian liked hemp canvas for his larger works and I'm happy to follow in those footsteps. I prefer to mount my canvas on board in any case, since I tend to abuse the canvas and really dislike it if it gets flabby during the painting process.

This was also the first larger piece I've painted using the linseed oil/chalk medium that I've come to favor. I'd read about it from several sources, notably Francisco Pacheco's "Art of Painting", but it's gone into pretty thoroughly on Tad Spurgeon's site. Even though I've got a larger, airier studio now I still prefer to paint without stinking up the joint, and the medium also does such wonderful things to the paint that I'd favor it in any case. Basically, it's just a mixture of linseed oil and powdered chalk or marble, and you can vary the quantities to vary the thickness and flow. It also adds a stringiness to the paint that I love, similar to the behavior of white lead. Add to that the fact that its translucency allows for some delightful color effects and I'm hooked. Of course, it works best with linseed oil that you've refined yourself. Yes, I'm geeky enough to refine my own linseed oil now. Honest, it's better. Really.

These trees form a nearly straight line out toward the end of Jacobs Point. I assume they rooted in that way because of a ridge of drier land, perhaps originally a sand bar. I've got reference photos of them in all weather, including a notable day when I had to wade out in a Winter floodtide to take the pictures (no outdoor sketching that day). Standing near knee-deep in brackish water with a thin rime of ice on top was a bit of a trial, but I found that if I stayed reasonably still, the water that had overflowed the tops of my boots warmed up nicely. That was the day I resolved to buy a good pair of tall neoprene hunting boots, suitable for long walks in low temperatures and waterproof to their tops. Mine are by Kamik and very, very toasty.

First Post, And an Explanation

2011-02-16T07:53:00.000-08:00

First off, welcome to my blog. I've had a website for years (www.nickjainschigg.org) but after a number of changes to the software I used to build it and the aging of the overall design, I've decided to relegate it to an archive and continue to post my work here. Yes, that is my real name. It sometimes strikes even me as somewhat preposterous. In the unlikely event that I learn PHP, MySQL, XHTML and the rest of the alphabet salad that makes up contemporary Web-design, I suppose I may redesign that space, but in the meantime....

I've Been Working on Landscapes

The area I live in has a lot of salt-marshes, and I've become enthralled with painting them. One in particular, Jacobs Point (no apostrophe) seems to take a lot of my attention. Perhaps because it's a nature preserve, perhaps because it's so conveniently close, but it's also gorgeous. I've done a number of paintings of the place, and have plans for many more. I've settled on a standard dimension for the pieces, too--two feet by four. The panoramic proportion seems to suit my sense of landscape design. I suppose it's because, growing up as I did in New York City, the broad view was always both rare and exotic, confined to such things as Central Park, Riverside Park, tall buildings with large windows, and Summer vacations.

This one is called Jacobs Point-September, and was inspired by the way the different types of grass brown over at different speeds, and by the way the few trees out at the end of the point cast long shadows over the marsh in late afternoon. This clump of phragmites reeds caught the light quite dramatically. The Warren Land Trust has been trying to return the Point to its original plant species by increasing the salt-water flow through the marsh. This will push the freshwater reeds back closer to the mainland and rather extensively reorder the painting possibilities of the place. At the moment the reeds, being so tall, create backdrops, walls and curtains that restrict the space in interesting ways. I'm looking forward to seeing how the local spartina grasses affect the overall look. I can only presume (and hope) that they regain some of the appearance that Martin Johnson Heade painted in his saltmarsh pieces, notably Newburyport Meadows.