open up

is there anything more satisfying than going to bed having finished *three* art projects?! a journal page, a Barely There book for roxanne, and a flag to hang at the green shrine tree. yeah, i had to take a picture of them...


roxanne came to visit last friday and i must not be able to talk and take pictures at the same time, because i did a lot of talking and not much picture taking. here she is ahead of me on the way to the green shrine tree. before we left to go walking we shared our recent art discoveries with each other. she told me about her workshop with nick bantock...


she gave me some stamps and showed me how to make a (small) landscape with them. you have to stand way back to see the landscapes in mine, but i still like them! we virgos love this kind of thing, hee! she also gave me a cool *old* metal tool caddy that i just remembered i forgot to photograph. we had a good time!!


the next day i walked up past the green shrine tree and checked out a part of the creek i've never really explored before. i found this tree and took about 50 pictures of it... the grain spirals around the tree...




on the back side this looked like insect asemic writing to me. i left the pic big -- click on it for the full effect!


you've gotta click on this one too... look for the tiny white dots to the right of the tree. these are very small insects about 80' above the ground, flying around. hundreds of them... what do they do up there?!


a 'forest' of horsetails... oh i love horsetails...


this one was downright ethereal.


i finally sat down to paint here. the water cascading over a rock shelf - it was one happy spot...


this moss was happy!


as i was walking away i saw this shasta lily - usually there are 3 flowers on each plant, but this one had seven. and the pods are so healthy and gorgeous. this wasn't a good year for the shasta lilies -- they came on strong but many of the buds succumbed to disease. anyway, i walked up to the road after i saw this lily so i could figure out how to get back to them next spring. and then headed back home... i went to bed early that night - i swear i think i had to rest from all of the amazement and wonder.

i'm still working in my second Barely There book. still loving working on muslin...




most of the shading of this face (and the one below) was down with portfolio watersoluble oil pastels. it's such a different effect than watercolors and i'm pretty thoroughly fascinated with it.














i've been reading 'dear theo', vincent van gogh's letters to his brother theo. oh my... so much i could say, so many passages i could quote. i've read that he sold only one painting while he was alive... and of course he only drew and painted for seven years of his brief life. for the first two of those seven years he didn't paint at all. he wanted to perfect his drawing skills before he began using color. the following words were written not long after he started to paint...

You will see that I am not afraid of a bright green or a soft blue, and the thousands of different greys, for there is scarcely any colour that is not grey -- red grey, yellow-grey, green-grey. blue-grey.

As far as I understand it, we of course perfectly agree about black in nature. Absolute black does not really exist. But like white, it is present in almost every colour, and forms the greys -- different in tone and strength; so that in nature one really sees nothing else but those tones or shades. There are but three fundamental colours, red, yellow,and blue; 'composities' are orange, green, and purple. By adding black and some white one gets the endless varieties of greys; to say, for instance, how many green-greys there are is impossible.

But the whole chemistry of colours is not more complicated than those few simple rules. And to have a clear notion of this is worth more than seventy different colours of paint, as, with those three principle colours and black and white, one can make more than seventy tones and varieties. The colourist is he who, seeing a colour in nature, knows at once how to analyze it, and to say, for instance, that green-grey is yellow with black and hardly any blue. In other words, he who knows how to find the greys of nature on his palette.

from 'dear theo', by irving stone, 1937

one complaint about 'dear theo' is that the letters have been too heavily edited by irving stone. this site claims to have his complete letters, as well as those of his mother, sister, and theo.

in contrast to the above passage, in later years vincent speaks of buying many colors of paint. i think that most of us just can't resist...

XO