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.

Cat 54

Cat 54, Shitz on the porch railing.
Acrylic on canvas. 14" x 11".
(sold)

After working with all the strait-from-the-tube bright colors, I needed to work on something more subdued.

This is Shitz, (aka "Shitty Kitty"), a cat I lived with years ago. Her unfortunate name came about as a kitten, not always choosing to use the litter box to do her business. She eventually outgrew that problem, but the lousy name stuck. In her senior years she developed diabetes and had to endure daily insulin injections.
Back then it was less risky to let the cats spend time outside and she spent a lot of time on the front porch. Now I have too many predators around, driven in closer as their habitats are taken over by nearby developments.

In spite of her cranky stare, she had a quiet, amiable personality. A little shy.

I never did get around to buying a tube of black paint, so I started with a red ground, and applied alternate layers of blue, green and umber until it was built up to a dark mass. The difficulty was to get an accurate shot- the camera wants to lean the colors towards either red or blue and I couldn't get the shot to read correctly as a photo. The colors seem to separate in the photo, instead of the eye blending them. It might be a perception thing that can't be resolved.
This was as close as I could get to how it really looks. Its pretty close.

Cat 53

Cat 53, Oscar on the quilt.
Acrylic on canvas. 11" x 14".

I was looking at this painting 3 years later in 2016, and had to make some changes. The original (below, left) had enough perspective problems in the quilt pattern, that it had to go- I could not tolerate looking at the strange alignments. Too bad, because I liked the idea of it. The overall composition was unfortunate in placing the cat so close to the right edge of the canvas, with the legs and tail all positioned the same distance to the edge. If I were to do this over I would shift the cat well to the left.
Actually, I think I would pick a less awkward pose. This one was really odd.
There were also some proportion issues and angles within the form of the cat that I attempted to correct. And finally, the intense saturation in all the colors was a bit much. It would be okay for the quilt to be saturated and bright, but not the cat.

2013: Oscar never really makes direct eye contact. He stares at a spot behind your head. Or through you, as if you were transparent.
When interrupted, he freezes and stares for a few seconds before resuming his activity.

He has interesting reflections of colors on his white areas. I also like all the angles going on, but wish I had given more thought to the quilt patterns, instead of winging it as I went. I ended up having to spend a lot of time repainting some areas, because the pattern alignment didn't make sense.

Cat 52

(above: rework 3 years later)

Cat 52, Oscar on the bed
Acrylic on canvas. 11" x 14".

This has got to be the "girliest" looking  piece I have ever done.

The woman who moved into the room my father had occupied came with a large senior cat named Oscar. She has arranged and decorated the room very differently from how my father had it set up, which makes it a bit easier for me to visit there. The room looks quite feminine now and Oscar, weighing in at 19 pounds, looks a bit incongruous lounging on her pink coverlet. So much for Oscar's tough guy image.

This was an interesting challenge with all the bright, saturated colors. Initially I had left the patterns very loose, but that looked odd with the cat being detailed, and I ended up going all fussy with the quilt.
I liked all the angles and the concentrated patches of color on the left, and the visual relief of the more solid area on the right. Initially, the image was very flat with the saturated colors, and adding darker areas didn't help to establish much depth. The solution was to tone down some bright areas by mixing gray into the colors. The broad area of pink did not incorporate in until I thought to add some yellow into it, which finally pulled it together.
I tend to isolate colors which can result in a fragmented, disjointed appearance. Integrating the colors gives much better unity.

Raging River Bridge No.1008E, version 3

Raging River Bridge No. 1008E, version 3.
Acrylic on canvas. 16" x 20".

Another view of the bridge, standing downstream on the north west shore, looking up at the bridge with a lot of interesting reflections bouncing off the water, illuminating the underside of the bridge. To get this shot I had to slide down a steep clay hillside off the end of the bridge, and walk through a dry creek bed. Later I discovered I had been tramping on private property. Oops.

This time I tried drawing my guidelines on the canvas using a medium blue dry pastel, and this worked well. Any lines I didn't want were "erased" by brushing over them with a dry brush. The rest of the lines disappeared as I applied thin washes of paint.

I thought my focus would continue to be the trees, but the reflections bouncing all over were too enticing.
I will probably fiddle with this a bit more after I step away from it for a while. There are areas I think are weak and need to be resolved- some of the reflections around the large boulders aren't reading correctly to me; some of the boulders need to be tweeked and the stand of alders in the distance are disappointing.  They are just too vague.

Raging River Bridge No.1008E, version 2

Raging River Bridge No. 1008E, version 2.
Acrylic on canvas. 11" x 14".

Another view of the bridge, standing on the south upstream side, down on the river bed. The water level is very low this time of year, exposing rocks. Some of the rocks were clearly cut and set in place, others are naturally occurring, worn smooth from the action of the water.

On this painting I made a point of putting away all the smaller detail brushes I normally reach for, and started with relatively large, coarse brushes. I had a couple objectives. I want to improve my skill rendering trees and foliage in a more convincing manner, and push to work "looser", making use of directional brush strokes.

While the photo I took looked fine, I found this a difficult composition to work with. The centered bridge immediately dominated the canvas. At one point I had a lot of detail on the bridge mass, but found that created a discord with the rest of the image. It did not make sense to have extreme detail on an object further back. In the end I scrubbed most of it out and let it go soft focus again. I'm afraid I ended up overworking everything, and it lost some spontaneity.

I am pleased with the handling of the trees and foliage. These are looking softer and more impressionistic than previous attempts.
I'm dissapointed with how I handled the rocks in the foreground, but at a loss at what to change.