m. p i l g r i m (art)

The week between Christmas and New Years' my Patrone and I took a trip to Hawaii.  I love the water, and I love being in  the water, and so we had scheduled a scuba diving lesson, one of the things still on my bucket list. However, it was canceled because of a "rough, wintery day". In Hawaii.  This means, I've figure out, that it's cloudy and the wind is blowing.  Now, I've always shied away from painting water, especially waves. It just looks difficult. I took this picture from "flat island" or Popoi Island.   It's a tiny island, barely a dot even on a close up on Google Earth. We had kayaked out there in a rented kayak in choppy seas and wandered around on it.   My reference photo: Flat Island in Hawaii In taking this picture, I stood for quite some time trying to capture a large splash made by the choppy seas.   It didn't work. Every time I turned my back, BIG SPLASH. When I turned around, the best I got was the one above.  Nevertheless, ...

In November a couple weeks ago, I was going to go out with Himself, my Patrone, for a hike and a paint. Himself is the one that I married after my first master's degree, and a decade  after my mother warned me to get a job that pays .  However, it was too breezy.  Some plein air painters would say, "that's what happens with painting outside," but I'm still too new to the genre to pull it off. So, I opened up an old ipad that I've repurposed into a reference photo repository to find something worth painting, (this is a pretty genius way to access reference photos, because you can pinch in to see details and isolate color) and came up with this image from Crescent Moon State Park, near Sedona.  .   I frequently begin my initial blocking in, and many of the later stages, without my glasses on.   I do this when painting out of door, as well.  It helps me to focus on the big shapes, and to ignore that anxiety that arises when I'm missing out on de...

  Badly planned, rapidly done. My first SP in oil.   You'll notice that I ran out of space. Did I say badly planned? I didn't plan it at all.  Where'd my chin go? Where? Rapidly done, on a 6x6 canvas board. I may yet poke at it to get rid of the darks around my nose.