I am thrilled to present my Spring 2018 collection of flower paintings named after women, including a few ancestors. Many of these little gems will be hung in the Bear River Artworks Gallery, opening May 18, 2018 Continue reading
As I prepare for a solo painting show in Bear River April 15 – 23, my 1st step is to create a colour archive of all my acrylics.
There are so many ways to approach creating a body of work for an exhibition. I have to tell you that my head space up until late December was far away from painting. Our elderly cat was very sick. She’s quite a bit better, but time is catching up with her. She is such a sweet kitty, it’s hard to see her age. And, like the rest of you, I was and am still distracted and distressed by the political scene south of the border. Continue reading
Wherever You Go, There You Are is the title of a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn (son-in-law of activist Howard Zinn). The book is about practicing mindfulness through meditation.
Buddhism and cognitive therapists teach us that our interior dialogues are always present, chattering to us in every situation.
So what does this have to do with painting? Continue reading
This painting was an exercise in combining a calligraphic type of line with my usual broad brush strokes. Continue reading
“I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.” – Claude Monet
I just came back from a painting journey to Brier Island. The ocean and meadows were fabulous to experience.. and to paint. Still I couldn’t wait to come home to enjoy the rest of the iris and lupin season. 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
It is a wonderful feeling to see the fruits of my labour on display in a gorgeous gallery. Sharing the experience with a fellow painter is better still!
Susan Geddes and I hung our paintings and hoped that people would come out to see them. The place was hopping during our opening and it was wonderful for both of us to share our visual view of the world with old and new friends. Thank you for being part of it – in person at the gallery or right now, virtually.
You can still see the paintings daily in Annapolis Royal (closed Mondays)until November 23rd at ArtsPlace at 396 St. George Street. I’ll be there on Saturday Nov 15th from 1-3 pm.
Tulips are a favorite flower (are they ALL my favorites??) This oil painting went through quite a few versions until I arrived at this final one. You can see my progress here.
As attached as I am to that tulip painting, in this moment “Earthly Delights” (below) is my favorite of the show. I think it has an under-water quality and has a depth to it that I don’t usually use.
I started it in the spring using poured acrylic inks in the background. When the lilies bloomed in summer, I added them and in the fall the last ‘poser’ was a brilliant orange Chinese lantern. So really, I painted all the flowers in the bouquet as they bloomed. It represents, to me, the entire flowering cycle, hence the title.
I can’t help myself. I keep planting lilies and I keep painting them too. I was a little inventive with the colours “In a Field of Lilies”. I WISH there was a blue lily. This painting inspired me to plant a new, deep maroon lily this fall. I think they are one of the happiest flowers in the garden. With their heads in the air they are true optimists.
These are 8″ x 10″ paintings I started at the Historic Gardens in Annapolis and finished in my studio. I got to make full use of the sgraffito style that I like to play with.
I also painted lilies and other flowers using acrylic inks and paint on paper and then adhered it all to boards. These are 12″ x 12″ and are another reminder of summer. I enjoyed combining drawing and painting here.
My artist – friend Susan Geddes flew in from Victoria BC to share this show with me. I love her use of colour and texture. Her paintings have a dreamy, ethereal quality to them as well.
Stop in this week and see her work — and mine. Details about the show are at the bottom of this post.
The painting on my easel that day was this one of lupins. They are still blooming on the edges of our property and their arrival every year is stunning.
I love the shapes of the pods and the intensity of the purple colour. Although I usually paint outside in front of my subject, this canvas was so large and it was more practical to work in the studio with samples of lupins posing in empty wine bottles.
The article in the newspaper had wonderful quotes from friends who live here and are very happy to have the opportunity to explore their cultural side in a beautiful corner of Canada.
It’s been raining here for a few days so it was wonderful to see the sun today. It is lovely to go outside again to capture this sumach scene in front of our house.
Just like painting other plant out of doors, the time to capture this brilliant display of colour is just a few short weeks.
I narrowed my pallet of Golden fluid acrylics down to yellow, green-gold, purple, pyrole red, and a cerulean blue mixed with white.
I can’t wait to work on this tomorrow and to finish another Sumach painting that I started ‘in season’ last fall and is waiting to be finished this week.
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.
Here is a slide show of some of my paintings from the past 2 years. Enjoy! Continue reading
A very special Christmas surprise for me this year was opening the newspaper to read this article about my painting process. Thank you to Heather Killen and the Annapolis Spectator! Continue reading
I have created a website as a display for my large finished paintings. It is a ‘work in progress’ and I think you will like the feature that rearranges the images when you click on a tag at the top of the page. For instance, clicking on ‘landscape’ brings up all the landscape paintings. Continue reading
I am showing a selection of paintings of my garden at the ARTsPlace Gallery in Annapolis Royal starting today. It’s a great feeling to see my work on display in such a sun-filled space. Continue reading
I have a little art show coming up in a few weeks at the Arts Council in Annapolis Royal and I am moving around my garden painting the September flowers for the show. Continue reading
This past weekend I painted up a storm in the Historic Gardens in Annapolis Royal. The event, Paint the Town, is an annual fundraiser for the Annapolis Regional Community Arts Council (ARCAC). The resulting silent auction of hundreds of paintings, sculpture and blacksmithing that are created also benefits the 75 participating artists. 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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| Charcoal sketch of field patterns. |
It’s absolutely gorgeous outside right now. There is a thick blanket of snow covering the fields, and the hills. With all the leaves gone it is really easy to see through the trees to the hills on the other side of the river. What I see is long stripes of trees that border fields, slashed diagonally by roads that wind their way down the hills.
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| Looking from the Annapolis side towards Riverview Road. |
The colors now are so muted that it is a challenge for a color-loving painter like me to actually paint that scene in a monochromatic way. in fact it would be easier for me to use brilliant colors to depict the snow scenes around me–but I want to try an abstracted approach using muted colors.
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| Acrylic on canvas. |
I start with charcoal drawings to get a sense of the shapes in the distance.
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| Charcoal sketch of snow scene. |
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| Larry is immersed in creating a pendant and is listening with me to a podcast from This American Life about the fictitiousness of money, starring the Federal Reserve. |
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| Melted crayon on paper and charcoal. |
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| These canvases are 16″ x 16″. I’m using fluid acrylics mixed with matt medium. This one was my favorite as far as the intensity of colour. |
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| This was my favorite of the 3 canvases as far as paint texture goes. |
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| Canvases drying on my new cushioned mats. (I stand when I paint). |
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| The studio is like a giant playroom for Larry and me. |
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| This is my favorite small painting in my sunflowers series. |
Sunflowers are so cheerful looking and their energy truly radiates. I knew when we moved here that they would be part of my vegetable garden, but I wasn’t counting on the birds to do the planting for me!
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| I couldn’t get over the multiple seed-heads – neither could the birds 😉 |
This past summer was our second year of gardening in this location. (Read our other blog “Our Bear River Adventure” for the saga of moving to Bear River and finding our dream-come-true house.) Last spring as I was preparing the beds for planting, I noticed little sunflower seedlings sprouting up. I had left the previous year’s sunflowers standing in the ground so the birds could finish off the seeds.
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| Painting Detail. |
A few of those seeds wintered over and the resulting sunflowers were either 15 feet tall, or short and squat with multiple flowers on them….they didn’t look like the parent plants. Maybe some bird seed got into the mix too? When they were at their peak last summer, I brought some into the studio to paint.
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| Detail of Sunflower painting on canvas by Flora Doehler. |
I painted these on canvas using Golden fluid acrylics and matte medium. I paint with brushes and I use a scraping method called sgraffito.
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| “Reaching”. Acrylic on canvas by Flora Doehler. |
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| Painting by Flora Doehler. |
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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. |
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| Bringing flowers into the studio and onto the canvas. |
The lupins and iris are blooming and there is a riot of colour outside. I wait every year for this short time – the three week window when iris are in bloom so that I can paint them. Since moving to our house in Nova Scotia a year ago, I am now blessed with hundreds of lupin that ring our garden and our yard and bloom at the very same time as the iris. I am spending each day with my brushes painting these beauties with fluid acrylics.
I am approaching them using more realism than I usually do. I want to really learn and feel the shapes of the petals so that I can know how a Siberian iris is shaped. How a Siberian iris feels. In the past, I grew bearded iris, but last summer, a friend gave me several dozen clumps of iris that are now blooming all over our property!
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| One year ago, I planted all these iris clumps everywhere! |
Their grape colour is delightful and I am using dioxazine purple, ultramarine blue, gold green, hansa yellow medium and a touch of quinacridone violet in these paintings. The paint is Golden fluid acrylics. They are my favorites because of the intense colours and ease of use.
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| Painting detail. |
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| Painting available at Green Willow Studio. |
I am also working on some small canvasses to prep for the Farmer’s and Artist’s Market that is starting up this Sunday in Bear River.
This means I am working to two deadlines: the iris bloom time and the market one! It’s a race that I am quite enjoying!
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| Several days of rain and humidity have brought out all the iris. These are bearded iris. |
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| Starting a painting. |
I like to paint from life, which means painting on location or with the thing that’s being painted actually present. Painting from photos just isn’t nearly as satisfying for me because I can’t get as close to my subject as I would like to. You see, not only do I like what happens when paint goes on a surface – the explosion of color and movement of the brush over the canvas or paper and the mixing of colors, I very much enjoy looking at my subject and really, meditating on it.
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| This Peony is stunning and so is the shadow. The scent is also out-of-this-world! |
If I’m outside I can listen to the sounds around me of birds singing or the sound of the wind rustling leaves or grasses blowing in the wind. I enjoy the smell of the air and the fragrances of the earth and plants.
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| These 12′ tall hollyhocks were so inspiring and called out to be painted. |
I like to watch shadows flit across a field when clouds move across the sun. I enjoy the many shades of green in the landscape. Painting becomes a truly sensual experience.
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| The painting is 3 feet high and was started on location and finished in the studio. |
If I can’t go outside because of cold weather or rain, I can still set up a still life and paint indoors. In that case I am often examining flowers close-up and checking out the petals and the shapes of the blooms. When I lived in the city it was possible to buy fresh flowers, even in the winter, for a very low price. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case for me here in Bear River. Fresh flowers are very expensive and the choices are quite limited.
Last summer I had a flower subscription with Cheryl Stone of Bear River Blooms. Every week Cheryl would deliver a fabulous bouquet to the studio complete with vase. Cheryl grows the flowers herself and will cut for you a totally custom-made bouquet.
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| Flowers by Bear River Blooms |
Cheryl would call me in advance to find out what my colour choices were and ask what type of flower I preferred. Talk about being pampered! I wasn’t able to paint all the beautiful bouquets she delivered but I did take photos and now I am printing some of them out to use as inspiration for my new paintings. It’s certainly not like working from the original bouquet but because I staged the photos in the first place with a painterly composition in mind, it’s the next best thing.
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| This was one of my favorite bouquets last summer. |
I love peonies, in part, because they remind me of my dear mother and my grandmother – two wonderful, clever and witty women who passed on their love of flowers and of gardening to me. What I also like about this photo are the colours. The contrast of the lime green in the lupines with the dark pink of the peony are very appealing. Red and green are complementary colors which I like to use in my paintings. I decided to use that pale lime green as the ground or the background for the canvas.
Here is a video of my first approach to painting this bouquet. It morphed quite a bit until I felt OK with the results.
When I work on a new painting, I do so as long as it gives me pleasure. If I start feeling like I don’t know where to go next or I feel a sense of frustration, I stop. It is possible to look at the same piece of work on different days and feel different levels of satisfaction with it. Sometimes the only way to know the next step with a painting is to put it away and to work on something else.
This week I returned to the painting and was so excited about working on it, that I thought of different ways to express “peony” and started 2 more paintings!
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| Last Summer”. 30″ x 36″, acrylic (sold) |
This painting, inspired by Cheryl’s flowers has inspired more paintings from me. And inspired is a wonderful state to be in.
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| Painting detail. |
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| Cloud in Bear River East |
After painting exclusively with watercolours for years, I had discovered fluid acrylics and found them to be a logical extension of wet-in-wet watercolours. Fluid acrylics have both the translucency and brilliance of watercolours with the advantage of the flexibility of acrylic. I was so excited about this and I think that energy came through in the painting.
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| Into the Light (sold) |
It is interesting to me how much more I get out of the flowers knowing they were lovingly grown by someone I know. If you get a chance to go to the Annapolis Farmer’s Market, stop by Cheryl’s booth and buy some old-fashioned blooms that last forever.
