Changing spaces (again)

I mentioned in one of my recent posts that we are in the planning stages with a builder to build a new studio at our new residence. It's coming along-- I'm excited! 😃  But given that we are just in the permit stage, I know enough about building an art studio to know that it will be a while yet before that dream becomes a reality.  Meanwhile, it will be important to save some money to help pay for the new digs. Sooo, I'm giving up my rental space and yet again, moving my studio. 

This time I will attempt to work once more in the house. I feel like we have rearranged our house so many times in the year that we have lived here, that it's comical. So what's one or two times more, in the scheme of things? The room I've cleared out for my little temporary studio has been a catch-all room; a mud room, a temporary guest bedroom, and eventually it will be my office.  It has a door that leads to the back screened porch and faces the site of the future studio. It sits a bit away from the rest of the house, and is just down the hallway from the garage. So in some ways,  the location is ideal for a little painting space.  

What's not ideal though, at ALL, is the lighting. This room is very, very dark, which is why I never thought to use it previously for a home studio. What's changed since we moved to Ashland though,  is the easel light, shown below (installed on my Sorg easel, with an unfinished painting.) 

The light is one by Revelite, which I learned of from seeing postings raving about it in several of my friends' Facebook feeds. Revelite makes traditional picture lights for lighting artwork, but also these work lights designed to work with artist's easels. They are slim profile, adjustable LED bulbs, with a high color rendering (CRI), purportedly, of over 90. 

I purchased the 36" light. I will admit I was sweating bullets when I ordered this thing because while I was "pretty sure" this light would work with my easel, I still harassed Revelite's customer service for a few weeks with a barrage of inquisitive emails.  It was, after all, a very expensive light. And it carried a hefty restocking fee in the event it needed to be returned.  Luckily, though, the light mounted to my easel without an issue, and I am really pleased with the quality of the light it provides to my painting surface. 

Above is my new home-based  temporary studio! Although I still think I need more light for the room, at least I have lit the most important parts of my workspace in order to get the job done.  I've lit the palette area with a standing Ott-lite for now, but as you can see this is a very cold, bluish light compared to the warmer but still very clean easel light (which I prefer.) I am still working on a better solution to this problem, because putting different lighting on my painting and palette will likely be problematic. 

If this little space is looking quite neat, it's because the rest of my supplies (frames, equipment, paintings, etc) are stashed in a million different places throughout my house,  with even more still at the rental space. All of that stuff will need to be moved out and consolidated and organized by the end of August, so aside from painting and splashing in the water with the kiddo, you can guess how I will be spending a good part of the rest of my summer! 

Sunset Sail

Ever since my last blog posting, we have had rain, rain, rain. Needless to say, it thwarted many of my open days where I would have otherwise painted outside. The up side is that I finished the large 30x40" sunset painting I had started a while back, the progress of which I present to you now:

"Sunset Sail", Oil on linen, 30x40"

Coastal Shimmer

This has been the strangest winter. One week we have blizzards and the next tornadoes. Given all of this chaos it seems a very good idea to just cozy up in a warm studio and work out some ideas on some larger canvases. Granted, I'm still not painting on an enormous scale, but this 24x36" is the largest I've done in a while.

"Coastal Shimmer", Oil on linen, 24x36" ©Jennifer E Young

I kept the composition fairly simple. I wanted to see what I could do with brushwork and color to create the drama that I felt from the interplay of the sky and the dancing light on the water. This painting unfolded over a number of sessions and the paint is quite thick. I am currently searching for a way to be more expressive and less literal in my work. It is so, so much easier said than done! I am constantly fighting with my inner nature to control, to spell things out. My heart reaches for more expression, even abstraction; but my head still clings to realism. Somewhere in that conceptual arc lies my voice. I've been feeling around for it, and grazed against it a few times, but I still don't quite have it in my grasp. Nevertheless I did enjoy this painting. It's different than what I imagined it would be, but not in a bad way. And it's already given me some ideas about how I want to approach the next one. Onward ho!

Large Hatteras Island Painting -complete!

Here is the final version of the painting I have been working on for the past week or so:

"Path to the Sea" Oil on Gallery Wrapped Canvas, 30x40" ©Jennifer Young

I had such a good time painting this piece I didn't want it to end. The  several prior studies I did of this subject (most of them on location) really helped to inform me about color choices and brushwork, and also, more importantly, they brought back the strong emotional connection I have with the subject. I felt like I was on vacation all over again. Don't get me wrong, this was work, too, but it is this kind of view that I see on summer vacations to the Outer Banks  when I step out on the deck in the morning to sip my first cup of coffee. For me it recalls a time to let all the cares go and just relax!

Progress on the large Hatteras painting

Here are a few progress shots on the Hatteras Island Dunes painting I last blogged about:

Work in progress landscape painting by Jennifer E. Young

Work in progress landscape painting by Jennifer E. Young

Work in progress landscape painting by Jennifer E. Young

Though I am trying hard to address the picture as a whole, it is some kind of work just getting the canvas covered. I have been painting pretty small lately so I am kind of shocked at the amount of paint I'm mixing and using. I think this is especially true because I'm not used to using such an absorbent surface.

In the process of working solely from my painted studies, I've noticed that one of the main reasons I love the smaller alla prima pieces is the amount of broken color in the painting. Color is laid next to color, sometimes within the same stroke, and brush strokes aren't overly licked or blended. The result is that you can achieve a really fresh look with the little ones. It's not impossible to do this with the larger paintings, but you do have to really work wet-into-wet the whole time, and start loading on the paint to get that kind of effect. To have that kind of expectation with a painting of this size may very well be an exercise in futility, especially since I am not able to paint on it every day. On the other hand it is really impossible to replicate stroke-for-stroke what I have done in the smaller studies, as the brush size-to-canvas ratio would mean I'd likely have to turn to using house paint brushes!

So with these "reality checks" in mind, I am still striving to capture that fresh, breezy, beachy essence, even if the nature of this beast is very different from the original. I find myself working more background to foreground on the bigger paintings (rather than strictly dark to light) in order to keep the paint surface workable. Nevertheless, I am saving most of the lightest highlights toward the end because they are the most opaque and have the thickest application.