Revenge Art

Today, as part of a "Let's Face It 2025" prequel, there was a fun lesson with Deanna Strachan-Wilson, collaging a Dia de los Muertos character. We prepped a black ground on a toned tan background, and then we were supposed to find an old painting we could cut up and use as the basis for our character. I pulled out my big stack of portrait faces and found one that was perfect for this exercise. It was painted in bright-colored inks in Deb Weiers-style, so it was a good base image, but there was another reason...

This woman is a writer and internet personality whose portrait I painted before I ever met her, simply because I found her face both beautiful and intriguing. Then, by a quirk of fate, I invited her to speak at a class I was teaching, and she misrepresented herself, lied by omission, maligned me, and continued to make rude and denigrating remarks afterwards on Twitter that riled up my class about something that wasn't true, garnering me the first bad evaluation I had ever had in my teaching career. So today, I was happy to give her black-ringed eyes, chalk white cheeks, and skull teeth. She doesn't really deserve the crown of flowers, but that's part of the costume, so I grudgingly glued them on.

I'm going to call this exercise a symbolic burying of my ire and my bad experience once and for all.

"La Cabrona," pen, watercolor, gesso, acrylic, collage papers, on tan cardboard, 9x12 inches.

A new still life

In addition to my collection of 20th Century American pottery, I also have accumulated many wall pockets over the years. A wall pocket is a vase that is flat on one side, with a hole pierced in it somewhere at the top for hanging, and you mount it on the wall and put flowers in it (if it's still waterproof—I have a couple that aren't, and dribble water down the wall if you try to use them!). My mom found some in antique stores and got me started looking for them, and then my collection far outpaced hers; when she died, I added most of hers to mine, with the result that I have about about 21 currently hanging on various walls of my house and another 35-40 in a cabinet, waiting to be hung up or swapped out. Some are Roseville or McCoy or Weller, but many of them are of Japanese origin from the 1950s-70s and are shiny ceramic in bright colors.

One of my favorites of these is a red poppy, featuring a large flower, a bud, and some stems and leaves in a stylized design. I have it hanging thematically on one small strip of living room wall next to a botanical print of poppies in a cheap IKEA frame. I love the wall pocket, but am bored with the botanical print after all these years, so I decided to make a poppy painting of my own to hang up next to it. (Or I may have to hang the pocket above the painting, because the painting is wider than the botanical print.)

I decided to use another of my Roseville vases to hold the poppies. Since it's not poppy season right now, I found a photo of some poppies in a plain glass vase, and "put them" in my Roseville one instead. This pattern is called "Bushberry," and I like it a lot, for its colors, its shape, and its whimsical adornments and "elbow" handles. Floral paintings are really supposed to be all about the flowers, but the vase fights for all the attention in this one.

I made a substrate as I have done for the past two florals by painting a board in a couple of complementary colors, stenciling it in some of the colors I intended to use in the painting, and then glazing over the stencils to drop them back so they're barely there but still give texture. In this painting I also made a more defined surface on which to "sit" the vase, although I left it vague enough that it could be wood or maybe just a painted surface.

I struggled with the background a lot this time, and went over it again and again, trying different things. I ultimately ended up liking the way the yellows go from dark gold to light yellow gold to a haze or glow before transitioning into the blue at the top. Since the poppies would be red, I decided to go with a primary color theme of red-yellow-blue, varying it a bit for the vase and adding green there and for the flower stems.

This was one of those that started out frustrating, turned ugly, and took three days of painting and re-painting all the elements to get it to a point where it suddenly gelled. I think I like it; we'll see if that lasts or if I decide to go back in!

"BushPoppies"—gesso, acrylic, stencils, pencil, matte medium, on thin birch board, 12x16 inches.

Goofing off

I started a new still life yesterday, but I'm so unhappy with almost every aspect of it that I didn't want to work on it today! So instead I'm responding to a total stranger's request.

I miss getting snail mail. I'm old enough that that used to be the only way we got birthday greetings, and I always had a whole shelf of birthday cards every October 4th, but these days the cards are few and far between; people post a greeting (some basic, some more festive) on Facebook and that's an end to it. So when I saw this request on Instagram (@colesjuliana1),
I decided to do it.

An artist who herself paints all things "pirate" as a recurring theme in her mixed-media work is turning 61 on October 17th, and said that all she wanted for her birthday was 61 pirate postcards, but she wasn't sure she had that many friends to fulfill her wish. I immediately related, so today I made a birthday greeting for Julianna Coles for her 61st birthday. Happy Birthday, Matey!

(I also happen to know three other people whose birthday is on October 17th, so maybe I'll get more ambitious and make postcards for them as well, now that I've made the one...)

"HB Matey"—pencil, watercolor, Uniball pen, gold Signo, computr printout,

on 140-lb. Fabriano watercolor paper, 5x7 inches (for mailing purposes).

The original in this palette

The portrait of Emma was a preview of the palette for this piece; and the "similar subject" is a vase of flowers. I'm still having inspiration from still life, and this time it occurred to me to include a piece from my beloved pottery collection, which is mostly Roseville, with a few pieces from McCoy and other early 20th century American pottery houses. This one is Roseville in the "Baneda" pattern, and a particular favorite of mine, both for the colors and design and for the shape. (If you are interested to see the many patterns produced by the Roseville pottery house over the decades between 1900-1950, Just Art Pottery has done a nice summary here.)

I clumped out to the backyard flower bed a couple of days ago and cut a handful of zinnias and one cluster of three little white roses, adding some lemon verbena from my herb garden for greenery/interest, and made an arrangement I thought it would be fun to paint.

 

I decided to continue creating a substrate made up of a few swooshed-on colors as a base layer, following up by using various stencils to create a leafy floral pattern. I chose shades that complemented the colors of the zinnias, which created a strong pattern, so after it was all dry, I knocked it back with a glaze of Titan Mars Pale, which is a light pink with a fleshy tint to it that I frequently use for skin tone on caucasian people.

The rendering of the vase is a lot more realistic than is the bouquet of flowers, so I'm not sure they go as well together as did the sunflowers and swashy shiny vase in my last painting. I tried putting a dividing line on this one, for table surface vs. background like I did in that painting, but it just didn't look right, so I wiped it off before it could dry and then just did a graduated fade of a pale, celery green over the surface of the bottom half of the painting, letting it merge organically with the original pink above the flowers. I also purposely left the stenciling a bit more visible on this one, because I liked how it went with and sort of extended the shapes from the branches of lemon verbena.

I needed to ground the vase somehow so it wasn't floating in the space, so I put in the cast shadow in Chromium Oxide Green, also glazed. (I'm not sure it's enough, but...I can't think what else to do.) I found it interesting that glazing over the two light colors with just the slightest shade of darker green made the underlying stenciling pop back out! Unexpected stuff happens.

I kind of wish I had sanded the board a bit after painting the first layer, because it would have made the rendering of the foliage more realistic (the roughness of the board makes that difficult to accomplish), but hey, there's always something.

This is "Baneda Vase with Zinnias," pencil and acrylics (and stenciling) on thin birch board, 12x16 inches. (The scanner cut off a bit on each side, the leaves aren't that close to the border.)

Similar subject, new palette

It seems I wasn't done with my break from portraits (or so I thought), so on Wednesday I painted a new substrate on a birch board, on Thursday I stenciled it, and on Friday I glazed over that, and did the preliminary drawing of the still life I was going to paint. But in the process, something happened that caused me to create another work.

My new palette was primarily shades of pink, and as usual I squeezed out way too much paint for the job. My teacher Emma Petitt is always commanding, "Don't waste paint!" so after finishing my substrate, I pulled out a reference photo and some watercolor paper and used the pinks to paint the underlayer of a face. On Thursday there were some colors left over from the stenciling, so I used them to create a background behind the portrait. Today I glazed over that and squeezed out tiny dabs of the five colors I needed to complete the portrait, and here she is: Emma, being goofy!

"Goofy Emma"—Pencil, acrylics, and stencils, on coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

A break? or...

I have been painting portraits now for four years almost exclusively. In the first year or two I also kept up with other stuff, working in a sketchbook and doing illustration challenges (primarily food and urban sketching), but once I enrolled in Let's Face It in, what was it, 2021? I focused exclusively on portraits and didn't deviate.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, when during the past two weeks I actually had more than a truncated impulse to paint something else. I started doing a substrate thinking it would be for a portrait, but found my inner vision picturing something else on the board, so I went looking for reference photos and made that happen.

The substrate evolved from lessons with Emma Petitt and Michael Carson—spreading around a group of somehow related colors and then stenciling over them. In this case, I chose colors that worked with my subject matter, then stenciled on top with contrasting colors, and then, after painting the picture itself, chose to almost obscure all the original background work with washes or glazes. Some of the shapes and images are still faintly there, and the mix of colors supports the primary colors of the picture, but without fighting for attention.

I was inspired to paint sunflowers by Russell, a new friend on Facebook who apparently grows a wide variety of them and posts daily pictures. So I went looking for a reference photo that would work with my already created background, and tried to keep the whole thing spontaneous and soft-looking like a Carson portrait.

This is "Vase of Sun," acrylics and stenciling on thin birch board, 12x16 inches. I don't know if it will be merely a break from painting portraits, or if I'm on a new tangent. We'll see!

Flapper anguish

My FB friend Dana has been posting a reference photo every month and challenging whoever is interested to paint it. I looked at this month's a few times, and every time I looked at that headdress I thought, Nope! But...I kept being drawn back to this photo, because what fascinated me was not the elaborate headdress but the look in her eyes and the exceedingly unkempt, worried eyebrows! It was such an anomaly, because she is dressed in this elaborate bejeweled dress, necklace, and tiara thingie, and has obviously taken some pains to wave her hair and apply makeup, and yet...those eyebrows! Maybe they just didn't pluck in those days? And the way she has them scrunched up gives her an air of anguish so at odds with the rest of her garb that it made me want to paint her.

I decided, therefore, to skip the headdress or whatever you would call it, and just give her a simple band that would hold back her hair but wouldn't distract from the expression on her face.

I was fairly happy with the face; but I made the dress too pale and the beads too dark, and then smudged them when I tried to muck with the necklace to de-emphasize its darkness, so this is a bit of a mess. But...it's been too many days since I painted, and I needed to fall back into it a bit, so Dana, here's what you get for August!

"Flapper Girl," pencil and watercolor on coldpress Fabriano, 9x12 inches.