Raging River Bridge No.1008E, version 4

Raging River Bridge No. 1008E, version 4.
Acrylic on canvas. 16" x 20".
(sold)

I thought this was not finished, but I needed to hand it over to fill a space on a wall for a while and hoped to return to it later and make some adjustments.That never happened.

A winter view of the bridge, standing upstream on the southeast bank, with the bridge framed by moss covered maples and a western red cedar. The river is running fast and full, with most of the interesting rocks submerged.
I was interested in working with the different textures, and getting more practice on trees. The trees are still not coming across to me. They all feel stiff, awkward and a little cartoonish, so its clear I am still not interpreting the forms correctly.

When I cover the stand of maples on the left, I like the painting better. The perspective and sense of depth improves. The problem may be that the mossy maples are the same color and intensity as the trees further back, which flattens the visual plane.
So either the distant trees need to be adjusted by toning down the contrast and intensity, or the maples in front need to be changed. Maybe shifting to a more blue-based green relating to the sword ferns would pull them forward more.

Cat 60

Cat 60; itchy cat on the bed.
Acrylic on canvas. 11" x 14".

This is Lizzy scratching an itch on her chin.

On this painting I set two parameters:
1). Use only the three primary colors (yellow, red and blue),  plus white and black; and
2). Use only a large brush to paint with.

The purpose of this was to force myself to expand color mixing, and think more about using brush strokes advantageously.

   Looking over the paintings I have produced over the past couple years, a couple things are beginning to stand out. I concluded I'm over-using color straight from the tube and under-utilizing mixed colors.
The works I feel are most successful are ones where I used a more limited palette.

   Using only the three colors really stumped me in places, as I have become very reliant on grabbing the nearest tube of relevant color and adjusting that as needed. Theoretically I should be able to produce any color needed using the primaries, but I was surprised at how clumsy I was at color mixing. I had to purchase a tube of black, as I never use it. As it turned out, I only used it once to mix with yellow to produce a green.
I found the mixed greens disappointing, and could not produce a decent brown- just a dull, muddy brown. I ended up layering several colors to emulate a brown tone.

  Far more difficult was to use only a large brush. I had to go out and purchase a large brush, as everything I had on hand was pretty small if not outright tiny. My old large hog bristle brushes are so worn down that they are no longer useable to apply paint. They work pretty well as scrubbers, though.
Trying to work with this giant brush was comical. I had a very difficult time with areas where I would normally be using a #0 size. In the end I had to cheat and use a smaller #2 bright for the tight detail areas, and still being a far larger size than what I'd normally use, felt very clumsy. I couldn't figure out how to hold the brush at first, but got the hang of it after a while.

Cat 59

Cat 59: CopodeLeite.
Acrylic on canvas. 11" x 14".
(sold)

This is the same cat as in #57 and 58. She has very complex coloring and markings, which I'm having a challenging time trying to emulate and/or express.

Earlier in the course of this painting, the gold colored bed sheets were so saturated and intense that the cat nearly disappeared in spite of bumping up the contrast in an attempt to balance it. Although intrigued with the vibrating warm colors, I ended up scrubbing out and wiping off most of the yellows and dropping the intensity by adding grays and purples until the background color calmed down.

This is a shot sent of CopodeLeite with her pictures, which finally arrived after a very long trip:

Cat 58

Cat 58: CopodeLeite.
Acrylic on canvas. 11" x 14".
(sold)

Cat 58 was an interesting challenge- the photo I worked with had the background buildings brightly lit and the cat in nearly total shadow with its eyes closed.
So I made some modifications to put the face in light, and opened up the eyes. I referenced several other shots of the same cat taken at different angles to attempt to get it reasonably correct. I'll never really know, as nothing exists for a direct comparison.

I ended up changing the color of the table cloth and the curtains in the background building. I wanted the table cloth to compliment the eyes so that went through a succession of blues.
The color of the curtains in the back have changed numerous times. The colors in the photo seemed to fight a little with the overall tone.

At one point the cat became so hard edged that it had taken on the same concrete look of the buildings. Which might be an interesting direction, but not what I was after for this.
I suspect the problem is that I became too focused on the the buildings in the background and the cat became almost secondary.

Cat 57

Cat 57: CopodeLeite.
Acrylic on canvas. 14" x 11".
(sold)

CopodeLeite was found in a forest as a tiny white kitten only hours old. Later she developed tortie coloration with tabby markings, and very intense cobalt blue eyes. Maybe some Siamese ancestry? She is a beautiful cat, living in an apartment in Rio de Janiero.
The relaxed, odalisque pose appealed to me, especially with the closed eye and the folded ear. A lot of personality coming through.

At one point I had  a good deal of fussy detail in the foreground, including striped sheets, but that proved to be so distracting that the cat was getting lost, so it was simplified to suggestions of folds and shadows.

Cat 56

Cat 56, Lizzy in the chair by the wood stove.
Acrylic on canvas. 14" x 11".
(sold)

It's been below freezing for the past week, and getting progressively colder each day. Approaching the single digits at night, we are running the wood stove pretty much non-stop now.
Lizzy has abandoned the heating pad in preference for the overstuffed chair near the wood stove. She only leaves it to eat or do her business.

Having done a similar painting of her in this chair I decided to reinvent her as a gray cat to make it more interesting for myself to work on.
I wanted to include the wood stove in the picture, and had to figure out how to paint fire. Its going to take more experimenting to figure out how to achieve that intense glow of the burning logs; dropping the adjacent color saturation and values helped, but didn't produce the glow I wanted to see.

This painting was about impossible to get an accurate shot of. I kept getting an intense reflection off the surface in the dark areas, and depending on how I angled the canvas, odd looking areas of blues or reds. Adjusting the white balance on the camera as well as different lighting produced various results, but none that really nailed it.

Cat 55

(Above- the painting reworked a few years later... )

Cat 55, Oscar in the corner
Acrylic on canvas. 14" x 11".

While visiting with my mother the other day, Oscar wandered into the room, parked himself in a corner, and made a big production of grooming while peering at us from a safe distance. He never looks directly at anyone- just stares at an invisible point slightly to the side or through you. Maybe he has a vision problem. More likely he is not comfortable making direct eye contact with these relative strangers invading his space.

I liked the twisting angle of his body against the straight lines of the walls and floor. Getting the odd angles of his torso to read correctly was a challenge, and I ended up having to reposition the size, angle and details of the head several times and make subsequent adjustments to the surrounding torso before it looked plausible to me.
In retrospect, I wish I had pulled back and allowed more room for the walls and floor to emphasize the empty, personal space around him. I'm still not sure that I like the saturated yellow wall, but when I cover it up the painting goes a bit flat for me.