Clearing Sky on the Outer Banks

One of my favorite times on the Outer Banks is just after a storm. The sand is a wet, deep, ochre, the surf still churns, but the clouds begin to lift and light up and eventually give way to that brilliant blue sky. This is a painting about just such a moment.

"Clearing Sky on the Outer Banks" Oil on Canvas, 30x24" (SOLD) ©Jennifer E Young

I worked on this off and on last week, though there was lots of "off" time, as my daughter and I enjoyed our final week together in "summer mode" before the start of preschool.  We sent the summer off right, with a trip to the zoo and a good deal of park and pool play as well. With all of the back to school prep though,  the home life has felt a little hectic recently. Nevertheless, we got it all done without (much of) a hitch, though I think we were both ready to return to the more normalized schedule that the fall ushers in. In a way, this painting feels a little like a metaphor for me today. The storms are (for now) behind us, and hopefully we can enjoy a nice stretch of clear skies ahead.

Little things

My painting (and posting) has been so sporadic lately that there are times when I am tempted to just announce a summer hiatus once and for all. At least this way, (I say to myself) I can engage myself fully in mothering an already active baby (who is soon to be an even more active toddler) and I won't have this anxious, "torn between two worlds" feeling when I can't make it to the easel (or produce anything noteworthy when I do). But the hubby doesn't think this is a good idea, and doubts I'd be happy with not painting at all, if even for a couple of months. He's probably right, but that still leaves me with trying to figure out how to enjoy the time I have in these two seemingly opposing life roles, without the anxiety I sometimes have that I am not doing well enough at either one. So I was taking my baby out for a stroller ride not long ago, and ran into a neighbor, who is also a mother, and happens to be a very fine artist. We have exchanged pleasantries a few times, but this was our first actual introduction and chat. We spent a good deal of time talking about the ups and downs of being both a working artist and a mother . We talked about finding the time and the peace of mind to be fully engaged in both roles, and perhaps most importantly, to enjoy the process along the way. I asked her if she felt that her work had changed as a result of having had a child.

"Oh yes!" she replied, "For quite a while I had to paint a lot smaller. "

This may sound like a punchline, but in fact, it makes a lot of sense. Before the baby, I had become accustomed to painting small in the field and using my studio work to develop my ideas and studies into larger scale works. As a landscape painter, my feeling was, why paint small landscapes inside if I can paint the same small scale from life?

But at present, plein air opportunities have been few and far between, so often it is studio work or no work at all.  While I never really paint HUGE, I have struggled with my studio sessions, as they are both shorter in length and spread farther apart. Often enough I have found myself spending a good deal of a studio session just trying to get the painting opened up enough to start working on it again...just in time to clean up!

So, it makes sense, for the next little while, to try and work on a few small things. They may not all be landscapes, (and who knows? They may not all be oil paintings) but at least I will still be doing something.

So that is my commitment to you, dear reader. I will do something instead of nothing. And furthermore, I will post it here often enough so that you know I am still alive. How's that for an inspirational statement of purpose? Sorry, but this is the best I can do right now. ;-)

Even if it's just a little thing, it will hopefully keep the creative juices flowing, and perhaps make it easier to develop some skills that need brushing up, or to experiment with various designs, compositional choices and different color palettes. In the very least, I will get the satisfaction of having finished something!

"Evening Light, Tuscany" Oil on linen, 6x12" ©Jennifer Young

Ciel Dore

Here are the final images for the French landscape painting-in-progress I've posted about recently (see the progression at this link and this one.)  As I mentioned before, at this stage in the game, my main "statement" has taken shape, so  it is all about refining the idea. It might not be evident in the previous photos, but when I returned to the easel to finish the painting, I felt that the greens in the grass and shrubs were looking a bit too light/bright and slightly too cool for the quality of the light I was aiming for. So the first thing I did was to warm all of that up to give it more of that late evening sun-kissed feeling. Next, I worked on the shape, shadows and highlights of the foreground shrubs:

Followed by some subtle shading on the pigeonniere and refining the edges of the background shrubs:

My final decisions have to do with working out the shadows and highlights in the clouds to give them form. I was really reluctant to go back into the sky because I liked so much what was going on there and I didn't want to mess with it too much. But, given the state of the rest of the painting, I felt that it really needed some further development. So I took a page from the lessons learned from my abstract expressionist art school days. Namely, that one should not hold any single portion of a painting as "too precious" if it doesn't benefit the painting as a whole. I also have made minor alterations to the shapes of some of the clouds, and warmed up the sky at the horizon, because it was feeling a bit too cool for a sky that had so much warmth in the clouds.

Here is the final. I kept the composition simple because I really decided to push the color in this piece and make this a sky painting. Since I was working from composite images and memory rather than from life, the challenge was to make the light cohesive with the drama going on in the sky. I feel like I've gotten a pretty good representation of what I set out to achieve, so I am happy with the outcome.

"Ciel Dore" (Gilded Sky) Oil on Linen, 20x24" (SOLD) Jennifer Young

Pigeonniere W.I.P. (continued)

Here are a few more progressive shots of the French landscape work-in-progress that I posted about last time. Since I have to spend a bit of time cropping, resizing, and uploading each photo, I again don't have much time to write if I also want to paint today. So let's hope the pictures will be at least a hundred words. ;-) Developing the clouds:

And the pigeonniere:

Now I will spend some time refining (working on edges, tweaking shadows, developing highlights, etc.) The challenge for me is usually at this stage--to refine/change but to still keep it fairly loose and avoid overworking. We'll see how well I do in today's studio session!

Pigeonniere W.I.P.

I am short on time today, so this post will be short on words (rare, I know!) I do have pictures to share, however, of my current 20x24" painting on the easel. The plan is for this to be a larger, more developed version of the plein air piece I did in France (shown here) with more of the sky featured. Compositional sketch:

Tonal sketch:

Sky lay-in (first go):

Ground and shrubs lay-in:

Now the fun begins! :-)