Precarious
Precarious
24″ x 24″ oil on canvas
This is my fourth painting based on images and impressions from my recent trip to New Mexico. I was quite taken with the beautiful architecture, some of it dating from the 1700s, and the gorgeous warm tones and soft edges of adobe structures against a clear blue sky.
This still life, the model for my painting, was created by artist Georgia O’Keeffe and still sits in her Abiquiu home. It’s in a kind of alcove leading to a courtyard.
You may be familiar with the fact that Ms. O’Keeffe included animal skulls in many of her paintings, most found in her walks in the desert near her home. I think those paintings are probably as iconic as her flower paintings in their own way.
She was also an avid collector of stones, which I did not know. They were arranged all over her home and studio. One of them appears in this painting.
Anyway I thought I would give her arrangement a try myself, and this is the result. The palette I used was even more limited than the last three works because there is no blue, and the light was more diffuse. Limiting a palette makes it challenging to create enough variety in tone and texture to keep the image from turning to mud. (For those interested, I used burnt umber, burnt sienna, cadmium orange, cadmium yellow, Payne’s gray, mars black, titanium white, and a bit of radiant white at the end to pump up the light on the bone.)
Now, I’m hoping it dries in time to hang during my November show at the gallery I belong to.
It’s gonna be close.
10/28/2022 @ 8:12 pm
Wonderful work!
10/28/2022 @ 9:49 pm
Hi Suzanne! Nice to see you here among many of our old friends!
10/28/2022 @ 9:00 pm
It’s interesting … both jarring, and calming. Beautiful!
10/28/2022 @ 9:50 pm
Thanks for coming by and commenting, Kate. 🙂
10/29/2022 @ 10:16 am
This is very interesting. Your knowledge of detail blows my mind. Thank you for sharing. I hope you’ll be a ble to display this at yourart show. Great piece of work!
10/29/2022 @ 11:51 am
Thanks, Doris. It’s drying pretty quickly so I’m optimistic!
10/29/2022 @ 10:25 am
Does your title pertain to your subject or does it pertain to your process in producing this fine example of your artistic skills and creative imagination?
10/29/2022 @ 11:57 am
Haha! Great two-part question, Ron. There are two answers.
The real-life still life in Abiquiu is discreetly wired place. I liked the idea that while the post is stable, the small stone and the skull require help. For the painting, deciding not to include the armature makes it seem unstable and I wanted that to be a part of the composition.
Every painting I do goes through an “I hate it” stage, usually about three quarters of the way through, and this one was no exception. I have to fight the temptation to wipe it all off and start again- or abandon it.
Painting, for me, is a precarious process.
10/29/2022 @ 10:58 am
Great detail.
A skull on Halloween seems like good timing, too.
10/29/2022 @ 11:58 am
It was just serendipity but it works!
10/29/2022 @ 4:31 pm
I’m enjoying the splitty log detail with subtle color shift left to right.
10/29/2022 @ 11:11 pm
Thank you, Miz GH. Nice to see you here!
10/30/2022 @ 3:34 pm
Alan emailed to say you’re blogging here again, and it’s interesting to read your thoughts abt the paintings…on IG it’s just pix.
I just now wrote a note to myself to dm you a photo I took of O’Keeffe’s well-worn navy blue Keds c1960…you can see the impression of her toes and heels in the innersoles.
Yeah, also a fangrl 🙂
10/30/2022 @ 3:56 pm
Oh, I’d like to see those Keds!!!
One of the biggest thrills for me was seeing O’Keeffe’s studio space at Abiquiu. It was very stark and open, one side all windows to the landscape. It had a sink an some accoutrements for making a meal. Really a wonderful space to work without interruption.
There was a little bed tucked into one corner, and an adjoining powder room/closet.
Hanging in that little room (which we were not allowed to enter, just peek into) was that iconic black coat-dress she wore in many of the photographs of her. It made me gasp to see it in person.
And no, I didn’t get a picture. Dang it.
I’ll just have to go back!
10/30/2022 @ 4:41 pm
There are photos of that studio window, so dreamy. And unexpectedly tidy!
I hear you abt the black coat. Did you touch it? The exhibit the sneakers were in also had a display of her clothes. She was apparently a fashionista, but only for garments she designed. Everything was neutral colors or black. Multiple tunics had this intense smocking around the neck and bodices that she did herself…teeny exquisite perfect stitches. She had a look and knew exactly how to get it, learned to sew because she couldn’t find the look available commercially.
And since we’re gossiping on Alan’s dime, there were Stieglitz photos of her galore in that exhibit, nothing that we’ve never seen, but also photos taken by other photographers. There’s one taken by Tony Vaccaro, of her sitting in the backseat of a car, holding up a slice of swiss cheese and peeking through a hole. She looks impish and playful, not stern or fierce as she does in many photos, and relieved of the sensuality that Stieglitz focused on. There’s sense of her as real, rather than myth.
You’d have loved that exhibit, it was a traveling show, came to Boston and Brooklyn and a handful of other museums. There must be a catalog if you’re interested.
10/30/2022 @ 7:38 pm
Nope, I didn’t touch the coat, because
a. the docent was watching me like a hawk, and
b. I would have had to lean pretty far in to get a hand on
The following day, we went down to Santa Fe to the O’Keeffe museum, which was pretty small but had a great exhibit of little-seen photographs, many by people other than Stieglitz. Very interesting. I definitely got more of a feel for her as a real person rather than just as a Stieglitz creation. Some of her own student artwork was there, too. One piece in particular was fun to see- a still life in Pointillist style.
10/31/2022 @ 2:47 pm
Re: docent supervision. Maybe they profile women with paint under their fingernails and/or jeans who eye the coat just a little too long
What a treat to see her kid art! Kid art typically offers evidence of what we become preoccupied with as artists later on. A friend whose day job is illustrating monster movie posters made meticulous monster drawings when he was little. I drew birds in colored pencil. Am wondering if you drew flowers?
10/31/2022 @ 3:54 pm
I do remember drawing all the time when I was little, but it mostly horses. I was obsessed. I didn’t get to ride one until I was about 11 or 12. After that I wasn’t so thrilled any more. And began drawing lots of different things. Probably a wise choice. I still do a lot of drawing but mostly as workups for paintings, and the occasional complete pencil drawing. I like to keep a hand in.
Your birds and other critters are fabulous!
10/31/2022 @ 6:13 pm
The piling looks like it comes from a pier, so it seems like an oddly nautical visual reference. I may be the only person here who looks at those horns and wonder how they sound.
10/31/2022 @ 7:18 pm
Funny, I never equated the post with a nautical piling, but I can certainly see what you mean. I like that thought- it keeps the image just that much more off center.
Okay, now I’m wondering about the sound too. It was such a quiet place.
10/31/2022 @ 11:32 pm
Mine was a shofar reference
11/01/2022 @ 11:48 am
That’s what I thought you were referring to.
11/01/2022 @ 12:33 am
Cool dialouge surge. Along with reflections about your painting: ram rack upon fence post; exquisite, too, the way the stone glints that weathered honed post top and split of time. Traveller espies the remnant ram: looksee: off the ground freed of tumbleweed — always that silent desert night, those high noon moments of pure white light, hot booted hikers refreshed with canvass canteened water. A station, a watch, an observer of meteroic contrails.
This dormant English Major was compelled to reference ‘pointillist’ finally comping synonyms: ‘chromoluminarism’ as well as ‘divisionist’ … DOT COM I say! Can’t live with it nor without dot com it.
11/01/2022 @ 11:57 am
JP: perhaps one of the most famous examples of Pointillism is the painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”; Georges Seurat. Seurat was inspired by scientific studies on light and color and their optical effects. (You probably saw it when you looked up the term)
It was just so surprising to see O’Keeffe’s example. but she was in art school less than 20 years after Seurat completed his piece. It would have been a new and exciting genre that art professors could use to teach the optical effects of color and value. I’m just guessing here, though.
11/01/2022 @ 1:53 pm
‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’ – Georges Seurat, has a similar ‘sounding’ or ambience with Claude Monet’s, ‘The Beach at Trouville’ … my due diligence ‘point and click’ search reveals creation dates. Monet’s was 1870…. And Seurat’s: 1886. Easels on the beach indeed! Toes in the sand no doubt!
07/04/2023 @ 12:27 pm
åå
HVIS jeg gjorde det
godhet dere!
Dårlig som han doble hockeystaver🎶