Webster Art

I recently enlarged a 12 x 16 plein air oil to a 24 x 36 inch painting. I liked the unhurried studio experience so much I painted it again on canvas, but with a palette knife. It’s so nice to work at my leisure in the studio. There’s time to sort out form, lighting, and color choices. Painting plein air is lovely, the views are captivating and being outdoors is wonderful. And capturing that view over the course of 3 hours is very satisfying.

Tourists are always hiking by and taking photos of me working. I may be deluded…but from my perspective, cameras are cheating. Nevertheless, there are always problems working plein air due to the sun racing across the sky and the resulting movement of shadows.

In the studio, I can take the flawed plein air painting and fix it’s problems. I have my iPhone photos of where the shadows were, and my painting showing my interpretation of the colors. Cameras can’t begin to capture the colors my eye sees and imagines. I choose colors almost randomly. For example, my thought process might go like this:

Hmm, the drawing looks accurate, now what color am I going to paint all that white snow? It can’t all be shades of light blue or grey, that doesn’t look right. There is blown dirt on that snow, and some of the brown gray rock is wet from snow drainage, while some is bone dry and sand polished. If I can’t mix that exact color, would another color of the same value work?

An old saying in portraiture is: “Any color will work if the value is correct”. An example is a portrait painted with very wild colors. Meaning the flesh tones are barely seen, having been replaced with purples, greens,blues, you name it. But when you take a photo and convert it to gray scale (black and white), the portrait looks like normal skin. The values are correct, just not the hues. And this is where the art comes in. I have, on a good day, a gift for color.

I finished the two 36 inch mountain paintings and then faced the challenge of framing. I’d never framed anything that big. They were not only large “over the fireplace” style paintings, but they were on two inch deep canvas stretcher bars. My moulding from home depot is 3/4 inch deep. I needed moulding 2.5 inches deep.

Off to Lowes I went to get 24 feet of .75 x 2.5″ pine. I built the frame but my son’s borrowed miter saw is out of adjustment. I had up to 0.125 inch gaps at the joints. That meant week joints so I put triangles in the corners, along with the strainer pieces. The strainer is what the painting sits on, or “floats” in the frame.

The painting fit with a relatively accurate 0.25 inch gap all the way around. But then I began the nightmare of varnishing the frame. On my smaller frames I simply paint them with acrylic paint and gold leaf. But these deserved a piano gloss varnish…being so large and hopefully expensive. I got some Minwax Polyshades Stain + Poly in Satin – Espresso color. OMG, that stuff is a nightmare!

I painted it on very carefully, wiping down the drips and oozes repeatedly as it dried. Two hours later, the paint film had experienced some kind of weird gravity ooze. Forming ugly drips. It looked like a 7 year old had varnished the frame.

I sanded the bad paint off. But my 21 year old sander wasn’t cutting it. I bought a new velcro style corded Dewalt. So much faster and better! I painted it again even more carefully and it dripped again. I sanded it off again. For my third coat I used a rub on Danish Oil. That went on nicely, no drips. But it was’t the “coffee” stain color I wanted, even after two coats. For the third coat, I mixed in a bunch of black artist oil paint. I used about a 3 inch bead of Ivory Black in one quarter cup.

Finally I got the shade and varnish I wanted, but it dried like an oil painting…as in slow. Plus the darn thing was super heavy since this first one is painted on a canvas glued to a cradled board, not just canvas alone. Before starting the next frame I looked at youtube and found other frame makers were using half inch board, and they glued the strainer to the frame before cutting it in the miter saw. In theory this makes a strong frame since you are chopping through an “L” shape and it gets glued + nailed, in two dimensions…the side, and the bottom strainer piece. But the saw was still out of alignment and my miters were awful. I was able to patch it with putty…but jeez, I am such a bad carpenter.

To wrap up this overly long blog entry…I took the two framed monsters up to my gallery at the mountain. I thought he’d flip over this new work. I was so excited after two weeks of full time artist labor. I was like, rah, rah, this is going to be awesome! I was dreaming about them selling for a grand each.

But when I walked in and asked him if he wanted to see some new work, he replied that he had no more wall space and hadn’t sold my last oil painting. It was still hanging on his wall. Basically…”nah, I’m good, but keep painting, those are great”. He did give me some good feedback, preferring the knife painting the most, and said my frames were just right. He likes the floater style.

After that I realized I’d been taking my art too seriously. At the end of the day, it’s just a hobby, like Sue and her perfect yard. She loves to tinker out there, watering and pulling weeds. She doesn’t try to sell her hobby. It gives her satisfaction and that is enough. So I started making leather hats. I’ve made four so far using a youtube tutorial. I’m not a bad hat maker.