This week is busy in the best way possible. The art show opening was amazing. It was great to share my paintings with interested art lovers, artists and collectors. 5 6 7 paintings sold! This and the week’s conversations with interested visitors are a validation of all the work I put into this show. Continue reading
Step into my studio and let me show you an easy way to create a new painting using collage and paint. Text of the tutorial follows. Continue reading
Earlier this year I was invited to paint a door for a fundraiser for the Yarmouth, Nova Scotia branch of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.
At the time I was swamped with painting my musician series and I almost turned down this opportunity. I thought I could be practical and adapt one of my photographs or an existing painting or drawing for the project. That would save time, right? Easy and fast, right? #famouslastwords Continue reading
Right now, I’m headed outside to paint iris and lupins. Here is a repost of a blog I made in 2010 about painting at this time of year. I will try today to express the emotional connection I feel for iris as I did in this painting.
There were gorgeous, large bearded irises in my grandmother’s garden over 50 years ago. My mother transplanted some to her garden and eventually I had them in my garden. They moved ½ way across the continent with us when we came to Nova Scotia and are blooming like never before.
I know my mom and my grandmother would have loved the yellow variety that I’ve added to the ancestral iris. And I know they would have loved the wild purple, pink and white lupins that grow like weeds here and especially at our place.
I want to show you how I painted and drew these flowers using fluid acrylics over a base of wet matt medium and I’ve made a tutorial for you about this. Enjoy!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkxtefZipCM&feature=player_embedded#!]
I paint from life and in early June, the lupins and iris are in bloom here in Nova Scotia. I brought some into the studio and placed them in wine bottles so that I could have good close-up examples of the lupin in the distance. Although I prefer to paint on location, at this time of year the black flies are biting, so I paint inside.
I started this painting applying watered-down acrylic on a primed canvas. I wanted to achieve a soft, wet in wet watercolour effect.
When that dried, I applied a thick coating of matt medium over the entire canvas and then painted into it with my fluid acrylic paints. I keep them in sealed plastic containers in a muffin tin. That way they are always ready to use.
I try to limit my palette to five colours or fewer because it creates a better colour harmony in the painting. I paint with nylon brushes and I also use a rubber-tipped scraper to draw shapes into the painting.
I dip the scraper into my paint and draw with it much like dipping a pen into ink. I like the calligraphy effects that I can get by pushing the paint away and creating a line and a texture.
If the medium gets too tacky, I moisten it with a spray of water. The water also makes the paint run which adds an interesting softening effect to the work.
As long as the medium is moist, the painting can be worked on and the scraping will reveal the colours underneath.
I love iris and I deliberately choose purple and yellow because they are complementary colours and they make the painting vibrate.
Although I have an easel, I painted this on the floor because otherwise the entire painting would drip and run if I placed it upright. That’s because I have a coating of wet matt medium on the canvas and that is the tip or secret that I am sharing with you.
I came across this quite by accident and now I almost always paint with acrylic this way. For one, it delays the drying period, which I like; but the biggest advantage is that I can create all kinds of textures and linear marks in the painting by pushing away the colour with a scraping tool and revealing the layer of colour or canvas underneath.
I bought a gorgeous yellow iris at a plant sale this spring and I wanted to make it the focal point in this painting. Unfortunately, by the time I painted this, it had finished blooming, but I used my huge purple bearded iris as reference. That’s the beauty of being the painter. You can change the colours of anything in your painting to suit your mood!
Check list for this painting:
Golden fluid acrylics
Rubber tipped scraper
Matt medium
Spray water bottle
Ancestral flowers
This last month my morning walk through the village and lanes is dotted with clumps of asters growing in the ditches. They are shades of lilac, purple and a few rare deep fuchsia blooms.With their happy yellow centers, they seem to burst out all over our field beyond the studio. I don’t remember seeing as many of them other years and I’m not sure what was different about our weather this year to encourage them.
I picked a big bouquet of these wild flowers and brought them into the studio to paint.
I started with a rough sketch of the flowers using a thick acrylic marker.
I am intrigued with the effects of clear acrylic mediums and paint on canvas. Some painters like to mix acrylic paint or inks into medium to create a transparency. I like to cover my canvas with medium and then paint into the wet surface and I usually use a thin matt medium to do this. But often that medium dries too fast. So, I’ve been using gel medium more and more which is thicker and takes longer to dry.It also lets the paint lie on top of the gel…but you must gently drag the paint brush across the canvas and try to just touch the surface once! Go in with confidence!
The thick gel has the added bonus of showing every brushstoke which is apparent in this painting.
Next, I painted in a yellow background. I liked the colour harmony of the yellow with the blues and violets.
At this point I felt that I needed to ground the painting so I added a subtle horizon line and slightly darkened the space underneath the line.
I haven’t used this much white paint for a very long time, and I like the results. It really illustrates the airiness and delicate nature of the wild asters that I’ve been enjoying for weeks.
For now, this painting is available at my studio. Let me know if you are interested in purchasing it. I ship worldwide.
Update June 30, 2014
I decided the painting needed more depth so I applied a thin coat of transparent acrylic ink to parts of the painting to give it some depth and definition.
This summer we’ve had very hot weather which made painting difficult. Acrylic paintings I worked on dried faster than I wanted them to. So, I’ve been using gel mediums that are formulated to slow down the drying time of acrylic paint. This allows me a longer time to apply the paint and to draw into my work revealing the canvas underneath.
Let me show you the steps I take.
First I paint the medium on the entire canvas. I used a combination of a pouring medium from Golden Acrylics and a thicker one from Liquitex. For the background colour I dripped Liquitex inks into the medium.
Then I blended the ink into the gel with a brush. This will be the background and will help to unify the painting.
Next, I studied my reference materials…in this case flowers from my garden that have bravely weathered this summer’s drought!
Then, using broad strokes, I painted a suggestion of flowers onto the canvas.
I try to lay in the colour with single strokes. This way, the gel allows every brushstroke to show. I like the freshness of painting this way.
Sometimes I put two colours on the brush to add to the surprise and spontaneity of the brush stroke. I mostly paint with Golden Fluid Acrylics and I keep them in small plastic containers.
Finally, I draw the scene using a rubber tipped shaper. This technique is called sgraffito. I add a few more colours and at this point it is a push and pull effort. I try to keep the freshness of the colours as well as building up a contrast and creating a pattern of colour that goes through the entire painting.
I can only get this effect by using gels and the slower drying mediums/gels allow me to work for several hours on the painting.
I am happy with my result. It totally reflects the joy I felt in looking at my garden flowers on a hot day in August.
Last summer I made this time lapse video of painting a watercolour using a ‘wet-in-wet‘ approach. That means painting onto wet, cotton paper using wet paint!
Today I added a voice-over to the video. The sound isn’t great because I didn’t use a microphone – just the built in one in my imac. Still, if you crank up the sound, I think you’ll be able to hear it OK. Continue reading
I have a strong need to paint from life so wintertime here is a real challenge for me! It is a great feeling to be present with a living flower and to sense the life force of it. Sometimes I paint from photographs I’ve taken, but it’s not as satisfying an experience. Continue reading
Occasionally I’ll read an article about some old Masters painting that was x-rayed to reveal another painting underneath. The writer will seem amazed and surprised by this. Oh, if those writers only knew how common this is for painters! Continue reading
In my continuing attempt to deal with unfinished paintings, I came across one of an amarylis flower from last spring that lacked the energy that I found in that beautiful bloom. I loved the reds and I felt attached to the colours in the painting, but not the outcome. Continue reading
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| Rust on linen and photo transfer by Flora Doehler. |
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| Iron nails that are more than 100 years old. |
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| Rusty nails, hooks and buckles. |
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| Rusted pieces laid out on poly cotton and silk. |
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| Vinegar dissolves rust. |
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| My art room smelled like a fish and chips store for a few days! |
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| Thankfully this old stove of ours missed the dumpster. |
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| Rust dyed canvas from rusted stove pipe.
Why this experimentation with rust dying? I am working on a piece for a show here called “Pirates and Outcasts”. This art show will be part of a Bear River Winter Carnival event. Both are wonderful opportunities to have fun in February.
I have been working with an image transfer as well. It’s an abstracted photo of young men sailing to this new world in the early 1930s. These men were in their 20s and are probably all dead now. One of them was my father although this isn’t a portrait of him per se. In the piece I create, I want to suggest the impermanence of all our situations as well as suggesting that immigrants are both casting out and are outcasts.
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| In the Begonia Garden by Flora Doehler, 2010. 8″ x 8″ |
This past weekend I joined over 70 artists to ‘Paint the Town’ in Annapolis Royal. This annual fundraiser for the local Arts Council is a great opportunity for artists to show and sell their work and for collectors to watch artists at work and to buy art at reasonable prices.
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| If you are curious about the contents of my painting kit, click on the photo and read the notes at Flickr. |
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| The Artist entry fee is $12. |
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| Surrounded by happy flowers. |
Wonderful until I realized that I’d forgotten to bring containers for my paint water!! I finished my treat and headed for the recyling bin where I found plastic juice containers! My sharp knife soon transformed them into water jars and it was smooth sailing after that.
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| This was my largest painting. I used up all my matt medium on it. |
My Sunday problem was that I ran out of matt medium! It’s an essential part of my kit because I use it to get the scratching-in effect in my paintings. I searched out other artists in the park and was given some by artist Shannon Bell and when that ran out, a bottle of the stuff from Louise Baker, an artist with a love of colour who lives in Halifax. Thank you Louise and Shannon!!!
Here are the paintings I did in the Victorian Garden until the sun drove me away. (Click on the images to enlarge them.)
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| The challenge here was to edit the elements down to make sense of the scene in a painting. |
They were visiting from Montreal and I told them about the silent auction. They later lost out on the bids for 2 of my pieces, but found their way to our studio the next day where they bought 2 paintings that I had been working on in my garden. Here is one of them:
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| Nicotiana in garden chez moi. |
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| The Pond sketch on 9″ x 12″ watercolour paper. ( The paper is actually white) |
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| Acrylic paint brushed into damp paper. |
It was an exciting weekend on many levels – wonderful to meet painters, wonderful to have such a positive response to my work, wonderful to create in such an inspiring setting. And, wonderful to earn some money too which was just as well because our house water situation was failing while I painted.
See you next year at Paint the Town!
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| photo courtesy of Trish Fry, Annapolis Royal Historic Gardens. |
While my main form of artistic expression is painting, working with textiles has a big appeal for me too.
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| Playing with fabric and fibres in the studio. |
At different times in my life I have woven, screen printed on fabric and sewed with appliqué.
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| Hand woven cotton warp. |
My approach to textile work is very similar to painting. In both cases I use strong colour; I enjoy lots of texture and I use the interplay of light and dark and complementary colors.
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| Fabric painted with acrylic, printed with bubble wrap. |
Many, many well-known painters have worked in this medium. Last spring in Los Angeles I saw some beautiful paper appliqués by Matisse in the museum there that inspired me to sew this little bag.
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| Cotton, arctic fleece, netting and ribbon. |
My daughter Emily is an animator and I am inspired by how she integrates her animation sensibilities into her sewing.
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| Emily designs, sews and paints dolls and creatures. |
Another source of inspiration for me is artist’s blogs and sites on the Internet. I check the daily blog of my friend and fellow painter Barbara Muir. I love her use of colour and we had many shows together in Toronto. Her persistence at writing a daily blog about painting inspires me to create and make better use of all the precious time I have.
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| Barbara drew me while we talked on Skype! |
Recently I came across the site of Susan Sorrell, a fiber artist. Her work excites me because of her bold use of color and texture. I signed up for an online class with her called Personal Symbols — who could resist signing up for a course with the name like that!
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| Susan Sorrell’s work. |
Susan has been teaching for a number of years and the course comes with PDF handouts with lots of photographs. She has a forum on the Internet for the class where participants can show and tell their progress. I haven’t used the exact materials on her list. I’m adapting what I already have. Susan suggests painting fabric dye on interfacing fiber, but I’m using canvas and watered-down acrylics.
The assignments use a combination of drawing, painting and sewing which is quite exciting for me to combine.
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| Combining symbols. |
There are at least three assignments connected to each of the six lessos. Ingeniously she had each of us draw and make up some of our own symbols.
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| My Symbols. |
In the following image I have cut out and combined some of my symbols. The fabric is cotton and I ironed a stitch witchery product to the back of the cloth before I cut the pieces out. In this way the pieces stuck down when ironed. Then I embellished it with buttons and beads.
I would like to try some of these techniques in acrylic on a large canvas. It’s nice to know that it’s possible to take a course online and to feel so inspired by it and by the links to images and blogs and websites of other participants.
Susan Sorrell offers quite a few different online courses. Her enthusiasm comes across loud and clear and I would recommend any of her courses. She also hosts a monthly chat with people in the creative arts and that is quite inspiring too.
The course is opening a new world for me…a truly virtual community of people combining paint and fabric and a passion for creativity.
