Chinoiserie Triptych

This triptych was inspired by a painting by John Waterhouse of The
Lady of Shallot, although I didn't realize it at the time. Years ago I had
a reproduction of that painting on my wall because I thought it was really
wonderful. Years later I did this. This is acually the second one I have done,
because the first one was never returned by an unscrupulous art dealer in
California. Yes, that is the life of an artist. I never got any money for the
painting, and I never even got the painting back, so that I could enjoy it myself.
So, I decided to do another, similar one. It was at that time when I was looking
casually through my daughter's book of John Waterhouse paintings and spotted
the exact same pose - facing in the other direction- of the Lady of Shalott! It is
funny how the mind stores things away. Some of them are identified clearly
day to day, and others dwell in this more dream-like, design-oriented (if you are
an artist, I suppose) area. I guess I accessed that area without realizing it.
The two palest yellow vertical strips are for the gold-leafed mat that a potential
framer would construct to go around this painting. It was done on board in oils,
and oil glazes, and will be mounted on wood.                                                                                SOLD

Bearded Iris

I keep all of my gouache, and gouache/watercolor paintings in Canson watercolor
paper spiral-bound notebooks. I have been doing this for about ten years. I like the paper,
because it doesn't wrikle very much, as long as I confine my composition to a fairly
small area, and it also takes the Cotman watercolors - which I like to combine with
my Caran d'ache gouache paints - very well. Sometimes, if I know I am gong to use
a lot of watercoor in a piece, I will use Liftng Preparation first and allow that to dry
before I start working. That makes it easier to remove any color I may want to. Of
course, this is not essential when working with gouache, because it is opaque, and
you can paint over anything, but sometimes you may want a more transparent area
in your work. I also really enjoy working with the new watercolor canvas that came
out a couple of years ago. You can do virtually anything on that - for watercolorists
it's a dream because it is really easy to life from. As long as you keep your compositions
very small - which mine are, just naturally - you don't need to do any preparation. But,
if you want to use a whole sheet, you need to stretch it just like a piece of regular watercolor
paper, or it will buckle and wrinkle on you. This can be most upsetting. - If you look at my
piece above, you can see that I used both opaque and transparent paint. I particularly like
the curled petal on the bottom right that is very lavendar with a highlight. Then, there is
a semi-transparent wash behind that, that really emphasizes the solidity of the curled petal.
I like the colors in this piece.                                                                                          BID

Black and White Chalk Drawing (after Robert Barret (?))

I have to say that I really like this drawing. The funny thing is, I don't even really remember doing it.
It's in a notebook I have of some rather strange, smooth gray paper, that I think may have been made
out of recycled paper, because there are tiny flecks of barely visible color in it that actually show up
more in a photograph than to the naked eye. Here I am using a very time-honored technique - a mid-
tone paper paired with black and white chalk or pencils. One could also use sepia, sanguine, really
any dark color that would serve to represent the shadowed areas of the form. That is the whole point
really, of using the toned paper with these materials. The toned paper functions as the mid-tones, or
evenly-illuminated parts of the body, the white expresses strong illumination, and the dark pencil renders
the form with more detail and shadows of different values, the degree to which it is developed is really
a function of the artist's style. Having said all that, what I really like about this drawing is the lines. BID