Creating Art Without Time Travel

Since I have been working on landscapes for the past several weeks, it's obviously time  to talk about a still life again. This one isn't in an art show; I just am fond of it. It isn't perfect; I would do the wood table in a different way if I had a TARDIS* and could go back and rewrite time. But that would mean crossing my own time stream, which would blow up a third of the universe, so it will have to stay as it is. I can't change it now because the picture is already in a frame.

Doing a still life with glass is not as hard as it seems.    

Making the glass bud vase seem transparent was the primary temptation, er, I mean challenge in this one. People get scared at just the mention of painting a clear object with the background showing through. They shouldn't: mostly you just blur whatever's behind the glass and throw in some highlights and a reflection or three and you're there.

Still life with glass vase.

I gave the background some texture by cross hatching with pastel pencils, and by smudging the parts where it would show through the vase introduced a sense of the glass's smoothness.

The importance of the pastel painting's background

I made the background lighter in tone on the right hand side in order to balance the dark shadow cast by the vase. The background is dark on the upper part so the red rose would look more prominent. The heavy highlight on the nearest edge of the vase leads your eye up to the rose, and corrects what might otherwise be a very strong tendency pulling the viewer's eye to the left. And besides, highlights are cool. The lighter area in the middle of the vase's shadow is the light source shining through the glass, and is also meant to correct the pull to the left.

Was I thinking about all of this while making the picture? Of course not. Don't ever believe art teachers when they tell you the artist thought of all this before they started painting. The painter is just fixing the mistakes he makes while doing the project. The successful works are as much a product of luck as of anything else. You never see the stuff that doesn't work.

*if you are not a fan of Doctor Who... well you just should be.

Upgrades in the New Model

Was it last year's model or this year's?

The picture below is similar to one currently in a show. It has a tarnished piece of copperware, a dark background, and a copper spout curved toward the right side of the piece.

I went looking for a scan of the one in the show and found this. But it didn't seem right. Then I remembered the piece in the current show was completed at the last minute before another show several months back and there hadn't been time to scan it before it was framed.

Sure enough I checked the picture on my website, and it showed a similar, but better painting, and yes it was in a frame.

So what was this one? An earlier experiment concerned with the same themes which went in a different direction and then got pushed (literally) to the back of the closet. I did a newer version honing in on the same obsessions and forgot about the earlier one.

An artist's obsessions

What obsessions? Well, I love the look and feel of copper and the reflections created by other objects on it. The faint hint of tarnish on the short watering can later became a big spot of tarnish on a tall watering can. The wine bottle made it in again because I just thought I could do a better job with it, and the candle stick snuck into the right hand side of the newer version to echo the tarnish blotch of the taller watering. The red cloth got unfolded because it seemed too busy in the earlier piece.

Still, I had forgotten that I did the earlier painting. Possibly the little disappointments hung around in the back of my head for the rest of the year, and got a redesign at the end of it. They do it with cars every fall, why not with paintings?

Paul has a Still Life in an Art Show

You'll want to see this in person!

Go visit it at the Carriage Barn until October 3rd. It's the Member Show for the New Canaan Society for the Arts and if you click on the link you'll get an idea of the space and the hours. Drive in either driveway of the magnificent estate owned by the town and you'll find the carriage barn next to the powerhouse theatre and both are to the left when facing Waveny mansion. The artist members all get to enter one piece at no charge and no commission so the art can be very affordable. So do your walls a favor and go pick up some fine original art today!

Going from Drawing to Painting

Vermont view

Here is a sketch or study and the pastel painting developed from it and the photo taken at the location. Personally I like the drawing a bit better than the painting. Still, the two shouldn't be set in opposition to each other.

I've been drawing all my life, so that part comes more easily to me. Nonetheless, the challenges presented by the painting are much more involved, and I haven't been doing pastels for nearly so long.

Vermont view with river

Adapting to the Art Medium 

The drawing had to be adapted to a different size and shape, and all the squiggles and shortcuts used in the drawing just don't work in a color format. The painting would look like a confused mess.

I made the river the central motif of the painting, which meant the details of the foliage had to be throttled back, so as not to draw the viewer's eye in too many directions. The tree branches in the top left corner were reversed, so to speak. Since the painting format was more nearly square, I needed the branches to point upwards, so the design would seem more evenly weighted.

The Art of Balance

I wanted to show the sky, which the foliage was obscuring. The colors of the distant horizon fascinated me, and I wanted the river to direct the eye to them. The clouds also needed to be more prominent, to justify the shadows cast on the forests in the middle distance.

The evergreen on the right hand side side was played up, so the whole piece would be properly balanced, and to make the river the center of attention. Unlike the foliage on the left, the evergreen branches point to the river, where I wanted people to look, so they would be drawn to the eerie colors in the far distance. 

What differences do you find between the two?

Sometimes You Need a Redo

The original version of this landscape pastel of a Colorado Blue Spruce in Connecticut was done in a looser style. You can see it in a previous post of mine. I painted over it to see how a smoother version would look. I don't really like either one. Someday the more successful aspects of each edition may be incorporated into a larger scale pastel painting. 

Sometimes a piece of artwork can only be fixed by completely starting over. I do best with a redo when I'm in a patient mood, and have thought about the problems for a while. 

Pond in the Woods

The pastel landscape painting here depicts a pond located in Devil's Den preserve in either Weston or Redding, CT, or maybe both. It's hard to tell from the research I did online using my iPad app by Google. It seems the genius code warriors who wrote the Google maps app on my iPad didn't include any town borderlines, so your guess is as good as mine.

Fall foliage, wind-blown pond in a Paul Creedon pastel.

Anyway, I chose this fall landscape scene with colorful foliage and pond because I had absolutely no idea how it could be done at first.

After much struggling I eventually got the foliage right in the top left-hand quadrant, or in any event as right as I was going to get it at the time. Then the time came to work on the water.

How to Depict the Wind Blowing on the Water

The next problem was to how to depict the wind blowing on the water of the pond. After a couple of attempts at doing it the way the books told me to do it, (and failing in a truly spectacular fashion), I discarded everything I had ever learned about pastel painting, grabbed a fistful of pastel pencils, and started scribbling. The bottom left hand corner came out right on the first try.

Using Layers of Pastel Sprayed with Fixative

The bottom right-hand portion didn't work out so easily. There are around 7 or eight layers of utterly horrible stuff under what you now see, and each try was sprayed with fixative and worked over again. The last version of the pastel finally got me where I wanted to go.

If you have looked at the still life paintings on this website you may have noticed they tend heavily toward a representational approach. The above painting is the most abstract I have done thus far, and was harder to do than any 9 put of 10 of the other paintings. A friend from college days looked at it, and said it looked more real than reality. 

Thoughts on Trees

Really, this week's blog is more of a horticultural essay than something about art. It's too bad for you readers who happen across this art blog, but it does suggest why some landscape subjects are chosen over others for my pastel painting. 

Blue Spruce 1 by Paul Creedon, pastel artist

The blue spruce in this pastel landscape can be found on the Norwalk, CT Green, which was established over 250 years ago, and I feel is the most beautiful section of the city.

Trees as landscape subjects

I chose this tree as a subject because my father planted two similar blue spruce trees in front of our house before I was born and they eventually reached a height equivalent to three to four stories high. They caught a spruce blight, which meant my Dad had to spray poison on them early every spring to keep them alive. Unfortunately the stuff turned the trees green, but the new growth came in blue. 

If you look closely at the painting you can see some green behind the outermost blue growth. I guess the disease is still around, and the city has to treat the trees to keep them alive. There seem to be very few blue spruce left in New England, as far as I can tell. 

The tree in Norwalk sparked a memory, and I painted a recollection of my childhood, and a reminder of my late father.

So, that's an example of why some pictures come to be, and others which could be as nice or nicer, never see the light of day. 

The Challenge of Finding Good Art Materials

Finding art materials that I like is a real challenge.

I like a certain kind of Pastel Paper. My favorite local art store stopped carrying it.

I purchased 10 holders for my NuPastel chalks. The holders were too big. I solved the problem by wrapping paper around the chalks and shoving them in to the holders.

Now the store no longer carries the holders.

I got around this by buying some pencil extenders and switching to Conte chalks which are slightly smaller than NuPastels. I persuaded the new chalks to fit into the new holders. Of course the art supply store carried tons of NuPastels which can be bought individually in a myriad of colors. The Conte chalks could only be bought in sets, forcing me to take colors I don't need.

Fixing a Pastel 

I have found that Blue Label fixative is by far the best and sells at a very nice price point.

You guessed it. No longer at the local art store (which is the only decent one in the area.)

I am going to try Windsor and Newton. The replacement offered for the Blue Label was over twice the price and was not "workable" fixative. I haven't found any use for non workable fixative. Fixative can deaden the color of a pastel, making it necessary to able to draw or paint over it. So to avoid mud I always use workable.

By the way, I never buy Krylon Fixative. I learned the hard way what multiple sprayings of the stuff tends to do. The result is something like a piece of sandpaper rolled up into a ball. You can't flatten it afterward because it will crack.

Why don't I just move to France, where you can get decent art supplies? Believe me, I've thought about  it, but with the European economic situation and the availability of online shopping (see links above), I'll make do here in Connecticut!