Painting, Gardens and Jam

Our first crop of arugula has turned into a fluttering cloud of white blossoms, like a flock of little cabbage moths, levitating next to the hose reel. I need to put in another crop of spinach, (maybe some malabar spinach for hot weather?) and a new block of carrots. The boys have been so excited about our first round of carrots at this house that they have been pulling them as little finger sized snacks and munching them before they get any chance to get big and hearty. Love that delicious, culinary impatience.  Need to remind myself that they do indeed love things that are good them, in addition to the pizza and chips that magnet all kids right in. I tend to blow the negatives bigger and discount the positives and end up with a nicely lopsided view of what really happened with my kids.

The whole house smells amazing tonight. I just batch cooked some apple muffins to put in the freezer (flour and sugar free!) so that those junk food loving boys have something sweet to grab for a snack. There is also a second big pan full of cherry plum jam bubbling away in the back burner. It smells tangy sweet and I have added just the right amount of sweetener to leave it zippy in the back of the mouth but still sweet in the front. Love me some sweet tart flavors. The first batch was made with greener plums that were still pretty firm but had all fallen anyway. This round, the plums were all making big cranberry colored splats on the sidewalk when they fell, finding ones that were still whole and hadn't squished on impact was the trickiest part. They have more natural sugars this time and when you pop them in your mouth raw, the skin slips off and leaves you with a big juicy mouthful. So delicious!

I haven't been painting so much this week but, I am chewing on a couple of ideas and am hoping that the long weekend will be a chance to pull out my brushes and sit in the sunshine and drip some art out through my fingertips. Recently, I saw the good friend who spoke painting prophetically into my life and convinced me that I was a painter when I thought I loved art but only knew how to draw. I am so grateful for her insistent warmth and pushing.

 So much happy that this habit bloomed out in my life and I had a time when I shared art days with her. She still lives in New England and I had a quick breakfast with her while we were in town, its so amazing to see my art on her wall and come home to see hers on mine and know that we have entered each other's lives and flavored each other's world's so sparklingly. Good friends are the type who make you a better person for their having been in your life. She qualifies.

Learning Art Failure

We are trapped indoors. There is a chill, dull rain pelting down and the wind is roaring over the top of our hill, dropping limbs, tipping over the rose trellis and driving all six of our poor hens to huddle damply in a clump in their coop. The boys aren't really trapped, truth be told...just me. I sit indoors and keep the washer and dryer going, towels at the ready, tea on tap while the boys play war in raging drizzle. Nothing like bone chilling cold, brisk wind and sideways rain to make you feel like playing survival, making knives out of sticks and living on a perpetual hunted march. I hang damp hoodies and jackets up, peel wet socks off and re-mop the muddy kitchen tile. We skipped math homework today. There was too much war. Its hard for me to interrupt their imaginative play, especially when they are all playing happily. We'll do double math tomorrow to make up for it. I promise.

Today we did manage to get some art time in. Wednesday is our art day. We are studying one artist at a time, learning a little art history (we just finished Matisse) and trying out the techniques of the greats. Today I painted a nature journal still-life of three bumblebees I found in the basement. I balanced Baby Pom on my lap and we spread watercolors and brushes and papers with dripping art all over the table. It makes me really happy to see how much the boys love to dabble in creating.

Dee is a perfectionist extreme and although excited to dabble and very pleased when something comes out the right way he really falls to sobbing pieces when he can't paint something the way he meant to. We all get that feeling. I am stumbling over teaching him to accept his flaws, love the process and figure out how to let go of the perfect result. I have some ideas: let him see me be artistically reckless and mess stuff up.

But his own inner criticism is so strong. I'm not sure how to soften his feelings, allow to be unhappy with his creation and be honest about his reaction but not be swept under by it. Raising boys is tricky. I want feelers so bad but I see the danger of allowing them to be ragers or pouty depressives whenever the spirit moves. Anyone have any tips about how to walk these mommy lines?

I keep drinking more tea and holding him when he cries and trying to understand and manage his angry. I do the same things for myself with just as reliable a result. Sometimes tea and a little self hug will do the trick and sometimes I cry and rage until I can't sleep at night. This is the real trick about parenthood, right? Teaching your children things that you can see they need to know....but you never really learned yourself. Physician heal thyself. The good news is that, at least some small percentage of the time, living childhood next to your kids for the second time does teach you things you never really got and gives you chances upon chances at things you never realized you totally missed the first time around. I love being a grown-up.

Peek In My Portfolio

It's been quite a while since I talked about my painting, but don't worry, that's not because I've quit! It's just because summer is insane and I forget to share. I am also having a little bit a lull right now because our painting group is on a kind of holiday for a few weeks but I fully expect to continue painting as soon as I get the chance. I thought I'd do a little bit of painting outside of our meetings while we were all adjourned but I am amazed to discover that I have done none. Zip. Ah well...I'm growing big juicy tomatoes and thinking fondly of my brushes.
Here's the latest stuff I've painted, right before our recent break.

Part of the Grand Teton Range, I forget which peak.

This painting and the next three I painted while were on our family vacation this summer out at Yellowstone. I took my brush roll, my paintbox and a small portable watercolor block and painted using a little water in a soda bottle with a cap, whenever the group (we were with a family reunion) had a moment of downtime. It worked beautifully and was really exhilerating, some of the first in-situ work I've done. Another great thing about it was that it forced me to work quickly. I tend to get really caught up in all the slow, picky details of paintings and sometimes overwork things as a result. I'd like to become more quick and suggestive. These paintings were step in that direction.

We stopped for a picnic lunch at this lake and I painted while everyone else finished eating after I was done.

This tree was outside my cabin window and I sat at a desk and painted it one morning while the sun got warm and bright.

This IS the cabin window. Really hard to paint the fog on the windows, the light in the drapes and the shape of the log walls.

This is right around the corner from our house, I stopped the car to look at these amazing tree full of red berries a couple of times before I realized that I needed to paint them.

The above painting was another realy fun experiment in "looseness" as an artist. I worked on all those houses and the stone wall and the angles and geometry and then I took my brush with that bulls-eye red paint and I splattered the berries on those trees! EEP! It was kind of scary and super fun and it just happened to work.

This is one of my really classic-style landscapes. This wonderful tree arches over the little harbor on the lake where my in-laws live.

This painting was really fun too, kind of classic and I really struggled to make it feel like it had depth instead of just feeling flat. I love the colors...that bang of orange on the kayak and all that grey-blue next to it with the sun hitting all those gold/greens at the top. This painting feels like a moment I want to be in.

I love how this painting turned out. The glass jars, 3D effect of all those rows and the peach slices floating inside the containers as well as the metallic lids were a huge challenge but also a major triumph.

 Just as I was starting the canned peaches painting above, and just finishing the apricots in a bucket, below, a fellow painter friend wandered past and casually noted that they were companion works. How funny is it that here I was, painting this golden fruit sequentially and I hadn't even noticed that they "went together." Interesting the themes that develop.

This frame is a sort of goldy-orange metal frame, sleek and simple to counter-balance the sort of country feel of the painting and help it stay more versitile while playing on the same color themes. Love that gold ring of matting he put around the painting.

And now a little framing report. I have a wonderful, creative, kind and very expensive framer. I love, love, love his work but I seriously need to start selling some stuff to afford suiting up many more of my pieces. I thought I'd show you how a few of my most recent paintings ended up looking when he'd had his turn with them.

This painting was framed in a deep shadow-box style frame, and would look great with a small light shining on it to make the sunset scene glow. The colors washed out funny here but you get a view of the thick, chunky frame.

Here's how the painting actually looks. Pretty cool, eh?

And then this last one, which is now actually hanging on the wall in my kitchen! Hooray! I was surprised but pleased when he framed it in a big thick white frame. It's a bit hard to see on the white wall but it is a lovely maybe inch and half to two inch thick edge, and the matting is a big thick white cut on an angle around the painting. He made a pretty small little floral watercolor that could have felt like an afterthough into a much more dramatic, weighty piece.

So, that's what I've got at the moment. I can't wait to update again soon. I hope I'll have all kinds of lovely things to share in two shakes. This whole "taking breaks" thing is getting to me.

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Forget-me-nots and Ice Storms

I am not sure what the weather is doing outside right now as it is dark and I'm avoiding looking out the windows. It is after all doing it whether I notice or not. The weather man says we're getting an ice-storm just now and that we can expect to be covered in a glistening layer by morning. Here's hoping we don't lose our power.

That's a car.

This afternoon we starting getting a little spitting of fine, sleety rain and the world became very grey indeed. There are waist high snow banks and narrowed driving spaces on every street in town and some places they have taken to hiring front end loaders to come pile the snow in mega-heaps, mountains of ice balls and snow so high that that they will still be melting in April and May, far past when we usually have any sign of winter. It is a different year altogether, no question. I was asking some elderly neighbors the other day about their weather memories and I heard resoundingly that this winter has brought more snow, and more frequent storms than anything they can remember. Pretty darn impressive.

A street I run down when I exercise...not too far from our front door.

The bonus to this much grey, icky weather and the snowbound conditions are the cozy indoor times we're having. We are having long discussions about how different machines work, "Today Mommy lets talk about what makes a snowplow go and then tomorrow I want to hear about how a washing machine works." (That's Ru.) and we're also having snug fires in the fireplace, lots of storytime (We finished the first Little House book...EEP! I need to quickly find a copy of Little House on The Prairie which I thought I already had but didn't.) and I have been keeping up on the housework fairly well which is a big deal.

Happy boys, sledding.

Yes, and there has been some painting. I bought an easel so that I can set up serious shop in the studio/sunroom and today I gave it a trial run. I think as long as I crank all the appropriate bolts tight enough it is super fun and very helpful and I kind of like the active feel of standing while I paint as opposed to sitting at a table which, I didn't expect. Fun to notice these little things.

Messy studio, happy painter.

Most of my paintings are at the framer's because I'm having a few things framed and I accidentally left everything there while I was at it so, I have only two recent things to show you this time. Long time no share on the painting front so once my new display-ables are back I'll share more.

A rocky ocean shore we saw in California with me and Ru on the right side.

Forget-me-nots....also a California scene...flowers in the gardens one of the Missions we visited.

A and I are taking a drawing class together, on Monday nights for the next 10 weeks and I am very excited to see what we learn there and will hopefully have some drawings to share soon. Hooray creation!