Painting Figments and Fairytales
A bit Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a bit House of the Rising Sun
I've got two for you today, and a bonus. First, the figment and fairy tale, two paintings that I completed in 2020. One is on my wall, and the other on the wall of a friend. Maybe. (I mean, you can give a hostess gift, but you can't control where it ends up! Hopefully, where someone will see it. Like in the living room! Or maybe the bathroom. Hmm. Better than the basement or a closet, I guess.)
This one on my living room wall, placed strategically near a lamp ( the title is Hacienda of the Rising Sun for obvious reasons) started out as a line across a canvas. I prepare my canvases with a rough wash of acrylic mustard color, so the white isn't quite as in your face taunting you to try to paint something on the blank cold canvas. (Really, that's how it feels. Daunting stuff.)
So I loaded up my paintbrush and drew the line that ended up being the mountain outline and the side and roof edges of the 'hacienda.' Unfortunately I didn't take a photo of that line, but I remember it well. I spent HOURS trying to see the rest of the painting to go with that line. The challenge was figuring out what I could make from the line and then picking colors, shadows and lights that made sense. I overpainted this one, definitely. Over and OVER. But it still has one of my favorite spots, that little line of green next to the purple green in the shadow of the mountain. Whenever I do something like that, I end up having NO IDEA how it happened. A happy accident. But at least I knew enough to LEAVE it.
Where it started, and two middle shots. Hmm. I really wanted that tree in the foreground to cover up some of that fluorescent green, as you can see from the top photo. Maybe I shouldn't have added in the branch shadows on the wall. Sigh. But I digress.
On one of my trips back to Germany, I bought a gorgeous antique photography book and decided it would be fun to paint and colorize some of them.
In my eternal optimism, I thought it was a great chance to pick and mix colors and figure out what works. And, more importantly, what doesn't. My end product was a bit, um, colorful, and I added in some snow colored mountains on either side to shore up some egregious mistakes. So it ended as more Chitty Chitty Bang Bang perfect world than the actual pretty little area near Austria. Here are the takes and final result. It's very, umm, fairy tale. Coincidentally, I LOVE fairy tales.
This one ended up with a good friend Erik in West Virginia who hosted us for a week of vacation during the COVID year of no overseas travel. Instead of eating wurst and schnitzel, our normal repast in October, we sat on his front porch and looked at the view - the mountains, his chicken coop, sweet dog Petey and our beer and wine glasses on the rail. Great way to decompress. His house is a large pine cabin, and I think this ended up next to his German cuckoo clock - perfect since we travelled around Germany together when all of us were stationed there. Or maybe it migrated to the bathroom. Or basement!
I am fortunate - married couple friends of ours PREFER my more colorful landscapes. I don't think they were pulling my leg, because they saw all of them and picked this super colorful Regensburg one for their house. Jennifer said she liked cheerful landscapes and they were really hard to find. She hung this one in the alcove of her kitchen and it DID suit. Jennifer and Mike were also neighbors in Germany, when we lived about an hour and a half from this exact spot.
Hmm, should have had better lighting for that last shot. Oh, well. Now this little painting is in Texas. So far, I have paintings with friends in Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Canada and California. I need to give some to our friends in Germany and New Zealand, I guess, then I can claim to be an international artist. Or does that mean I PAINT in all of those countries. Because that would be even more fun!