City nights

This is the painting (16 x 20) that I have put on my February newsletter - fresh off the easel!  I'm working on a series of "city nights" paintings because it is an interesting challenge . I enjoy looking at other artists' city scenes and city night scenes so I want to see what I can bring to this subject area. For mine, I prefer to be at street level - not high up- and have people in the scenes. To me. there is something a little eerie to a deserted street scene. Buildings fading into darkness have a certain mystery and I love reflections of all types. I start with a dark blue" imprimatura ", or base coat. First I sketch in the scene with transparent white, put in some of the darkest darks (no actual black was used in this) and then start building up in layers. It takes some time to build up the effects so that it becomes a painting and not a photo-copy. Sometimes people want to know just where the scene was - but I don't this this is really important - it can be anywhere the viewer visualizes it to be so that the viewer's experiences become part of the enjoyment. I'm giving this series all "time" titles so I'm calling this one "Five Forty-five" - closer to home than "Five-fifteen" when everyone as just leaving their offices. in my mind, the story is that they have bought something at the store with the unclear (deliberately) sign and are now going home with it. I know what I had them buy - and why- but someone else can bring their own story to this. What's your story?

Poppy Patch

This is the painting that I started as a demonstration for a senior's group. I worked out the composition ahead of time and outlined the poppies so that I would have time to do a bit of actual painting. Thirty or forty minutes is not long for a painting! They all thought it looked like a bit of a mess to start with. Then I painted a loose green "wash" over everything that was not a poppy head and they were surprised to see the poppy shapes jump out. I got a little bit of "beginning" pinks and reds in and a little variation in the greens before we ran out of time. I promised I would post the finished painting on my blog. Alas! the blog has been neglected and not much was done on this painting. I haven't been all together idle - there were two figure-painting weekends and some weeding and tidying in the garden. However, I have now finished it. This is the third painting inspired by the poppies in the community garden kitty-corner from Choices on 57th. "Poppies by the Fence" was the first (and I used that for a Christmas card) and then there is one just called "Poppies" which is California yellow-orange poppies and now this one. Maybe more yet. They are nice to paint because the planting is quite random. I don't grow any in my garden as they wouldn't really fit with my other plantings. Somehow, that makes it all the easier to appreciate them elsewhere. I worked from my own photographs but did a bit of rearranging. A few years ago I had fun with extreme close-ups of flowers but right now I'm enjoying the "pattern" effect of a group of flower heads. We'll see what the next inspiration is!