Day in the Life of an Artist: Painting Completed

Happy Monday!After about a month or 2 I finally completed a challenging painting with a bottle and sauce server with a checkered and red cloth! I am pretty happy how it turned out. It being a dreary day in Denver it was a perfect day to paint.

Photo Still Life reference taken and set-up myself 2010

Checkered Still Life Oil on Canvas 18x24 Fall 2010

Doing the reflection alone was challenging by using a closeup of the silver design to work on the reflections. Working on drapery or cloth requires a lot of detail based on how the light hits it in the various spots. Onward to my next project as I keep plugging away.

Book Review: Eat Pray Love

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I loved Eat Pray Love and I decided to read it first before seeing the movie, which I have not seen yet. It's a great read that could be a life changing experience if I wanted it to be. She starts off in Italy to enjoy a carefree time and food. It was helping me to slowly but surely relearn to appreciate food again. She experiences different people in Italy and decides not to get involved with men while there. She describes it as being a diverse penninsula with every city with different characteristics. Then she goes to India for another 4 months at a meditation place where you have to be qualified to come to for intense and devotional meditation. Then to Indonesia for balance and she meet and falls in love with a Brazilian there. While she's in Indonesia she practices meditation with an old medicine man.



The writing and the descriptions of the scenery is just spectacular. It was perfect timing for me to read this going through a divorce myself and trying to find myself again. Even on her travels Liz goes through the emotions and growing pains of her spiritual growth as she naturally brings herself on her travels around the world. I wish I could afford to get away for a year for soul searching but many of us like me can do a lot of this at home too. I recommend it to anyone who would like to learn to live in the moment and quiet the mind which can be a challenge. It's an entertaining read with some humor and the human condition interwoven. Great stuff to think about although not a bible to refer back to by doing what she does since we're all different, but an inspiration.



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Day in the Life of an Artist: Different color tones

Another day of painting and I'm more energetic today, because it's slightly warmer and not rainy like yesterday. I plugged away some more on the checkered cloth and it still needs a little polishing. There are many different tones going on there. Very light, Light, mid, dark, and darker. I mixed various colors like; pink, blues (different shades), purples and yellows. It's because the light hits in various spots throughout the subject and everything you look at. In painting there is hardly anything with a solid color except the background.

I spent another good five hours working more on the checkered cloth and getting started on the red cloth.

The colors I got for the red cloth are the following:

Light: Cadmium red light + Cadmium Orange+ White (adding more white while painting)
Midtone: Cadmium red light+ Sienna+ white
Dark:    Cadmium red deep+ Sienna + Utramarine Blue
The next challenge is the silver gravy pitcher- so coming attractions is what I will mix to make the silver , which is like water making reflections as well as adding more white.

Day in the Life of an Artist: Working on checkered still life

It was a rainy morning and I thought it would be a rainy day but the sun was coming out this afternoon although it was cold. It was a day to start on a new and challenging project. I thought it would be fun to work on a checkered cloth since it's dramatic and could be fun to paint. All I worked on today was the cloth since there was a lot of detail and different colors on the white although it's not plain white. My instructor insisted that we don't use just white on our paintings.

With the detail involved I have to make sure my hand was not shaky as I'm doing detail work. I started at 1:30 and finished about 4:30ish and it was only that portion of the painting. I used the smaller pallette paper since I was only doing that cloth.

I promised myself that I would finish filling in the cloth for now and sharpen it up tomorrow no matter how long it takes.

It still has a very long way to go. I should do hiatus' more often, it's nice painting on my own without an instructor looking over my shoulder while I paint. I will keep posting the progress of this painting as I go along discussing color.

Confessions of a Fast Eater

After being married to a ex-marine who eats fast, I have almost lost my appreciation for food, as much as I enjoy and savor it. Once again I was wolfing down my dinner tonight like there was a big urgency for it to be eaten and be done and over with. I'm now reading Eat Pray Love (a full review will follow), and I just finished the first third when she's in Italy. She describes how she enjoys the food thoroughly taking in the flavors. Before my ex's influence, I ate somewhat slowly because I wanted to enjoy the food and now I have to relearn to eat slower again. The only time I eat slower is if I'm in a conversation with others, and ceasing to fully appreciate the food in front of me. I seem to have taken eating as more out of necessity than pleasure. We all tend to forget about enjoying the simple things with our on the go and rushed lifestyles.

The habit of speed eating was also influenced by my half hour lunches at work and that is a time when you have to eat fast to not spend the whole half hour eating. It may be understandable in the military when they have to run on many things on little time. I remember my best friend growing up saying that "I eat because I have to, not because I like to". She is entitled to her opinion but I was appalled by it because I assumed that just because I enjoy food, I thought everybody else had to too. I was sixteen when she made that statement and I already traveled a few states and been out of the country once and got to sample various foods from other cultures and developed an appreciation for food. I enjoyed helping friends out at dinner parties, not just for the extra dough but to watch and be inspired by other's style of cooking. That's what inspired me to read Gourmet magazine when I was 19-20; I even bought  it too and read through the complicated recipes,in college. I bought copies of it during my year stint at Keystone Resort in Colorado, not only to thumb through recipes , but for appearances, to appear classier than those ski bums I was living among. My cooking magazine of choice these days is Cooking Light, they have easy 20 minute recipes in the back that I've tried but I wolfed them down with urgency even on a relaxing evening at home. It's going to take some time to experiment with various foods again and get myself out of this food and eating rut and enjoy food again. Most of all make that pleasurable and every moment pleasurable, after all we live once.

Day in the Life of an Artist: Part III Shopping for still life props

Me being queen procrastinater I put off painting at Sloan's Lake doing landscapes, being a perfect weather day for it. That's just as well since the leaves on the trees are still mostly green since it's been a very warm start for the fall. I went over to Hobby Lobby and they had a sale on fabrics, so I bought a yard or 2 of some colors which I think will work for still life props.

These were 30% off a yard and added up to $27 plus tax, I will have fun with these.

The best part is going to ARC which is down the street from my apartment and I don't know why I didn't stop in there sooner, but it was a busy store today. Why it was busy it was 50% off colored label merchandise and Brick Brac shopping couldn't be any more fun! Check out all these finds which came together for $20!

They insisted I box them although I told them I was just going up the street.

It's going to be fun to put a scene together and turn them into painting, my creative juices are flowing! I recommend that to any artist!

Last but not least my latest piece of work where I walked you through the process!

Carousel the musical

I remember for my sister's 10th birthday , my mom took a bunch of her friends and I to the Country Dinner Playhouse to see Carousel. The score was beautiful and the carousel itself was only shown at the beginning of the musical. At the time I was only sixteen with the lack of experience with men and relationships and clueless about the moral of this play. The score was beautiful although the storyline was very sad and It sounded like the story of my life.

The story takes place in a New England fishing village.The musical starts off with a young millworker who gets on a carousel with her friend and meets a barker on a carousel, falls in love quickly and marries him. The night she meets him , Julie Jordan and her friend Carrie Pipperidge talk about Mr. Snow who Carrie is seeing, an ambitious fisherman.On the other hand, Billy Bigelow the carousel barker is a drifter who lacks money and ambition and falls for the innocent Julie Jordon. He fits the description of an abusive man, whose a smooth talker, cocky, and charming. It is revealed shortly into the story that he hits her, but she takes it and says that it was his frustration over not being able to find work. She stands by him anyway despite the treatment, but that was the 19th century, but if it was the 21st century she had the option of leaving him. Julie gets pregnant with his child shortly thereafter and they are staying at her cousin Nettie's spa and hardly have a dime to support the both of them. In order to make money to support Julie and the child their expecting he takes the easy way out and gets involved in a robbery that goes wrong and ends tragically. She raises the daughter Louise on her own and the girl becomes troubled herself and Billy takes a day back on earth to redeem himself.Billy talks to his daughter and tries to give her a star that he stole, but she refuses it. Julie steps out, takes the star, and she feels Billy's presence and he sings "If I loved you" to her. She still loved him 15 years after his passing.  He comes back an extra day for her graduation and sings along "You'll Never Walk Alone" with the rest of the company.

I've been with several Billy Bigelows in my life and I can see how they can prey on innocent women. They are very bold and slick in order to get women. They come across as the Alpha males who can be very dominating with their charm to draw women in. Women who come across as vulnerable, pretty, and innocent are easy targets. Even though they may lack education they are smart on picking up the subtle cues. I've done research on abusive men and they are very charming at times and ugly other times and that's the cycle that keep their partners hooked and that's what Julie Jordon was hooked on with Billy. Whenever the men I was with put me down with words I thought that was out of love and caring which the opposite was true. Julie Jordon came into it with lack of experience and no self esteem at the time. I was looking back and reading about this musical as I was thinking about those classic Rogers and Hammerstein musicals that I was exposed to growing up and this was the one I could relate to the most since I been there although I was not physically beaten. Billy Bigelow was an inappropriate man in society who was not a hero to anyone and targeted an innocent girl like Julie Jordon who had a lot of potential and a future ahead of her. If I was to rewrite this play I would have showed Julie moving on remarrying a nice man since she was young enough to do so and have a good life. The musical covered issues like domestic violence which was taboo in the '40's and '50's. In my opinion I would not let young children see this until their older and understand the messages in the musical.