This is a scene from a large house in Sersale that appears to be abandoned. Two years ago, my cousin Peppino Talarico told me that the Talarico family owned this house many years ago. During my latest visit, my tour guides let me peek inside. How lucky could I get? There was this amazing jar standing on the landing.
Many years ago, these jars were used to store water. Now the few that are left are collector’s items, bringing great prices on Italy’s ebay. Since I couldn’t take it home with me, I painted it.
This painting measures 10 1/2″ x 12″ and it is for sale for $200. All proceeds of this sale go to conservation charities, dedicated to preserving endangered species.
On April 1st I am participating in a huge social experiment called the A to Z challenge. Over 1200 bloggers including yours truly, will be blogging 26 separate days with subjects beginning with something that starts with A on April the 1st and finally ending in Z at the end of the month. Some of the other contestants are poets, some are writers, some do movie reviews, and of course, me; I promise you a painting or a drawing every day with an interesting story behind it. Some of the letters are harder than others, (E is killing me) but I promise you a colorful bit of eye candy on every single post.
Something this large in the blogosphere takes a lot of help, so I am listing (below) the team leaders. All of them have great blogs (and they’re all different) so I can’t really predict what you will find if you click on any of them. But it will be interesting for sure.
He’s waited for what seems like his whole life for her. He just knows if they were together, it would be magic, paradise. They would sing, dance, have beautiful children, they’d own a beautiful car and a big house. But she’s not ready to settle down with him. So he just keeps waiting.
I enjoyed the first google maps “virtual plein aire” painting I did so much that I decided to do another one. This time, I searched a long time to try and find an older neighborhood. Most of Japan is extremely modern, clean lines, grey square framed homes over perfect streets, after a while, I am disappointed to say, one city looked a lot like another. Except for Kyoto. Kyoto has preserved some of the older neighborhoods, narrow winding streets with open fruit stands and lots of interesting stuff to see. There are still standing today, lots of buildings with wood fronts, odd shapes and lots of bamboo screens. On this street I found a dental clinic. This unusual clinic building had a rounded roof and a flying saucer looking lookout on the top; I decided I would paint THIS street because if I was walking down that street, I would be captivated by the scene. This 14 x20 inch watercolor painting is for sale at auction on the Daily Paint Works website, all proceeds go to Japan relief. I hope you like it.
This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend a painting workshop put on by Stella Canfield. Stella’s vibrant use of color and motion intrigued me and after attending one of her demonstrations I decided I needed to go to her workshop.
That morning it was raining out and I spied three women walking along Beacon Avenue’s wonderful green median all carrying umbrellas, so I rolled down my window and took a picture of them with my cell phone. They were all wondering what the heck I was doing, so I turned around and came back and told them how cute they all looked, they were the perfect Seattle scene. And I took another photo.
Armed with this photo and many others that I have taken during my travels over the years, I loaded my car with art supplies and not enough food and drove off to Daniel Smith, my absolute favorite Art Supply store, which happens to be 4 miles from my house.
The class was friendly, many of the attendees had taken a workshop from Stella before. She talked a lot about the elements of design (light, composition, and 5 other elements) and her method for producing a nice painting. Then she gave us a demonstration, she painted a boat in some water. I was not impressed with her reference photo, I would never have chosen it for a subject, but by the time she was done, (which didn’t take very long) she had a beautiful luminous painting of a boat on water..
She gave us an exercise, just paint. Just put colors down on paper. Don’t think about it. The results are here:
As I mentioned earlier, I have a treasure trove of photos that I have taken in the last few years, many of which I had hoped I could turn into a painting. But they are too scary for me, so I have never attempted to paint them yet. I took a couple of those along, and this street scene from Napoli, Italia is the first one I tried to paint at the workshop.
Stella is a great coach, she comes in and gives you great suggestions for how a painting can be improved. I would recommend her class to anyone interested in watercolors. She shares my opinion that anything you do to the paper is fair game, including scraping, scratching and scrubbing. As long as there is paper left, it counts. All of the paintings displayed here are very large for me, 15″ x 22″
