More Mission Churches

 

San Antonia de Pudra in Questa

I am painting a new round of missions this week and am at the matching drawings to available canvas and cradled board. With the canvas other sizes and shapes can always be stretched. So in addition to the two new churches I have sketched I was looking back through some of my earlier missions to see if there is one I want to re-do maybe larger. The one above is 12 x 12 by it is a very impressive mission and would look wonderful say 14 x 14. And maybe on the square instead of diagonal.

Basking in the Sun

This was always one of my favorites and like the one above it sold quite quickly. And I think I would like to do it larger and on the square. Or is it the diagonal that makes it intriguing?

Gentle Night

I redid the top mission in a night scene and I rather liked it at night. It too sold quickly. Another that sold very fast was my first larger church. I used to do all my missions in a smaller format but Hot was 16 x 20 I believe. I have never done a night version of this church. Nor does it, and the ones above,  have sheep which have become an increasing signature of my missions.

I think it is very important for all artists to photograph their work And to keep their sketches. It is very good to look back at your work from time to time if for no other reason but to mark your progress. Looking at these paintings above I see where my style has grown and my technique improved and if the subject is worthy they why not repaint them. Monet did water lilies over and over. Time to delve through the flat file for the sketches of these works and give them more consideration.

Poetic Journey - Dreaming of Spring

Too Close To The Sun

Here in the midst of winter facing a huge storm from the Pacific it is not realistic to think of warm canyons and spring days but that is where my head is at. Yesterday I escaped to sit in a warm hot tub following exercise at the Taos Spa and totally missed my intentions to write a poem for this week's Poetic Journey. So Poem Hunter again to the rescue. If you are enduring winter hope this warms your heart.

Spring, the Sweet Spring

Spring, the sweet spring, is the year's pleasant king,
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

The palm and may make country houses gay,
Lambs frisk and play, the shepherds pipe all day,
And we hear aye birds tune this merry lay:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,
Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit,
In every street these tunes our ears do greet:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to witta-woo!

Thomas Nashe

More poems from Thomas Nashe 

 Nicholas V at Intelliblog

RD at Shore Life


And if you have a poem for us please post a comment with your link. Thank you.

Window on the Past

Window on the Past

20 x 16 Mixed Media on Canvas

This is really one of those is this really done photographs. It still amazes me that what I fail to see in the canvas I can see in a photograph of the canvas. Or casually passing it over the next few days. So it will sit up in my studio and be looked at and ignored and tweaked some more no doubt. One needs some distance from a subject I have worked up close and personal with for a few days.

I will debate and fret a little. And come to the point of putting the final coatings on it. This seems to happen more when it is a departure from usual subject or a larger than normal canvas. While this period drags on I will be working on the other canvas I have not finished.

I have done a picture of Rainbow Bridge before and am striving for a different look this time. I believe it is time to close the portfolio on the picture of the previous rendition. I think college art classes taught me too well how to copy.

Things I do between paintings

Malachite Necklace with silver cross and accents

Thought I would post my latest re-creation. I say re-creation because the cross was made by a Native American craftsman and once hung on a silver chain. And the necklace was a gift and included a weird assortment of bead shapes and gold plated beads.

Malachite is suppose to bring you wealth or money and the necklace was given to me by a friend that wished to bring me abundance. I just never wore it much. It hung funny. And the cross would not slip over the bigger beads in the necklace. Besides it was silver and the necklace had gold in it - not that I don't frequently mix metals. I was between knitting projects while watching a couple DVD's and decided to redo this necklace. Which brings me to where I began with jewelry making.

It was and still is in my estimation a hobby but as I agreed to go with my jeweler friend, Jessica Duke, to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show it dawned on me that perhaps I was getting rather deep into this whole business to call it a hobby much longer. I find myself setting limits. I certainly do not want to spend a fortune to be able to solder and cast, but I love the metal bending and cold join approach. And I find creating beaded necklaces (or re-creating them) very relaxing. Come summer I may add some necklaces to my things for sale in my studio. Mostly to fund my hobby.

Oh, BTW, I also made the horse sculpture I am using as a prop. Sculpture is also something I do between paintings.

Poetic Journey - Snow

Silence

I awake in the predawn dark

And know the snow falling outside

By its very silence

I lie there and listen

To the absolute stillness

Hearing only the snow.

There is silence

About snow

Not only does it creep like fog

on pussy paws

But it hushes the world

With its whisper.

I tiptoe down the stairs

Playing at this silent game

But were I to stomp

Would there be a sound

Or would it be sucked

Into the silence.

The world is muffled

Both in sound

And color

All swallowed up by weightless flakes

Like the foot prints

That vanish as they are left.

To know snow

Is to know nothing

And yet everything

By its very absence

Beneath the snow

Ssshhhhh.

(c) J. Binford-Bell  -- January 2010

The Poetic Journey is open for your additions. If you have a poem you love or one you have written please leave a comment with your url or link. We are a multi-blog event.

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Shore Life

I Have Been Painting Finally

Artist at Work January 15, 2010

I have so many of these pictures of my work table with paintings in progress that I have decided to start labeling them with dates. This is my first such picture for the new year.

As those frequent readers of Creative Journey know I generally work on anywhere from four to six canvases at a time of varying sizes. This is due in part to drying time for the liquid watercolors on canvas. But the paintings will share the same palate and ergo be a "set." I don't sell them in groups but I have had customers buy them in a group because they go so well together. These all share the same colors of blues which in this run includes cobalt blue. Not a blue I have used before a lot but it seems to be very good for the type of clear winter skies we are currently having here.

And these are all canyon pictures. Next round is churches. I am working on the sketches and transfer of drawings to platform while I am waiting for paint to dry. The drying period is particularly important for poured blue skies. There is masking to be removed and the next round of color is laid up close to the edge of sky. If the sky is even a bit damp it smears with removal of masking and leeches into the canyon walls.

In any group of paintings I am working on there are those that get out in front of the others. And it is generally the smaller ones. These two canvases below are 10 x 18, a relatively new size for me. I have worked that size vertically in my paintings Of the Valley and Spider Rock.

Mesa Arch and Landscape Arch

The painters of old were very fond of doing studies. These were generally smaller works on cheaper materials to study a new color combination or subject. With the market very good at this time for smaller works to fit on walls if not within budgets a study might as well be a painting. But if they don't work I simply take off the canvas and re-stretch new canvas on the bars.

In the first picture there is a framed watercolor on the left shelf which was one of my first water color renditions of Landscape Arch. I have it out to provide a perspective to the new version on the right in the lower picture. I have also done Mesa Arch before but when I was working more in browns and grays. I currently really like where this one is going but there is a lot of white to be filled in still ergo a lot of room to mess it up.

The higher center painting in the opening photograph is the painting I am doing of the sketch with the face in the arch posted here before. Meant to be a self portrait but we will see how honest I am about that.

My Roots - You have come a long way, Baby

Cities of Gold

Watercolor and Ink on paper

At lunch Tuesday with my artist friends Katherine McDermott, Jennifer Cavan, and Julia Margaret we chatted about our roots and the directions we had taken to arrive where we were. Not that where we are is the final destination. Artists should continue to grow though there are any number that achieved a degree of success and then froze their style at that point. But most artists continue to explore their limits and so there is a progression of styles.

When I was majoring in art at the University of New Mexico I fell in love with watercolor. Oil smelled and was impossible to get out from under fingernails, pastel became this colorful dust cloud that followed me about, and acrylics just never would do what I wanted them to do. It was not in their nature.

After college my day jobs got in the way of my art and I transferred to photography as a creative form of expression. And textiles. But I still dabbled in watercolor creating art for my own apartments and houses. But when I returned to New Mexico and my creative life I by happenstance fell into making masks and did that as a profitable business for 15 years. Until the summer of 2006 when a falling garden shovel almost totally severed my little finger of my right hand. Pins and cast and physical therapy sidelined my 3-D work which definitely required two hands. And so I painted. First with my left hand and then tentatively with my right as the casts got smaller.

The above traditional watercolor with the addition of ink as the Chinese do is still one of my favorite works. I keep it on my wall at the top of the stairs to see it daily. It is a mile post in the development of my current style. It shows the love of my cliffs and canyons and the beginning of color for the sake of light: portraying a scene as you remember it.

It would be interesting to take the sketch for this piece and do it again on canvas in the style I have since developed.