Process:
First a note about the “Featured Image” – the pieces of the drawings varying from off-white to light coffee or tea brown are from the Codex Atlanticus, found here https://codex-atlanticus.ambrosiana.it/#/. The map pieces would be selections from a Google Earth map.
The text reminds me of the Raiders of the Lost Arc film when there was a “leap from the lion’s head” onto a [maybe] stone plinth that happened to be invisible until dust was blown on it giving it form. The start of making something need not be so dramatic, but ultimately it is giving form to the invisible (or if not invisible at first unseen but in mind(s)), it is a leap, and it takes faith in an art medium, and one’s training, knowledge and sensibilities, and faith all will pull together. Finally, like in the film, faith the movement forward, the direction (the making) will be a good step.
Knowing Color:
The first three photos below were made from life, in a field and woods in Tamworth, New Hampshire, in a workshop with Michael Doyle.
Color swatches like this are suggested to learn colors, and for reference. The first oil class I took was with Eleanor Mikus at Cornell University – also an outdoor painting class – and she had us make a color wheel and color swatches as well.
Michael Price who works exclusively in mineral pigments, has made many color swatches of mineral pigments, and his studies can be seen in his books. For Mineral Pigments, Kremer Pigments also sells swatches of pigments prepared in specific binders.
Sketches can be made from life, or from works in the same media, or other media.
Here is the beginning of an oil painting that is now complete, though at the time made, not considered completed. If I make a second, or third, I would hope to paint outdoors as before, however, to also use this original work as a reference. It is painted outdoors using earth and mineral pigments, and made after taking a workshop with M. Price. I am still happy with it. The horizontal tree has dropped to the ground.
The painting on glass below was made using reference drawings made on paper. As a first painting on glass, painted in the studio of E. Robbins with her paints in a workshop with her, it was an exploration in the medium though possibly intended as a completed painting. The three little lines on the left, were a reminder for me of three lines of light once seen in the sky on the other side of the same field.
