Facing a Road Trip

Excitement was building to pitch level to attend The Art of the Portrait, the PSA’s annual spring conference spanning four days in D.C. A buffet line of world famous portraitists would impart their skills, original paintings would be offered in an affordable range, portrait painters would nearly finish a painting of a live model, and different-styles would be demonstrated along with lively teachers sharing–well, for a portrait artist–it’s like dying and going to heaven. And yes, there’s even a Sunday inspirational hour, thanks to Gordon Wetmore who began this before he died and left it as his legacy.

For me, an additional joy was watching the demonstration given by Mary Whyte, a watercolor portrait artist, since I work in both oil and watercolor media. We left early Thursday morning with a picnic lunch. The trip was easy, and we pulled off at the Virginia state line’s welcome center. We pulled out gourmet sandwiches on German rye and sourdough bread fixed by my travel companion and husband, Sandy. Boiled eggs, pickles, and Scottish shortbread finished it off. We were wrapping everything up when I heard someone yell my name. Now Smithfield, yes, but the Virginia state line? Turns out this was a Classmate and she was antiquing to Pennsylvania with her husband. An interlude of surprise.

At the Hyatt Regency, we were checked in and escorted to fourth floor, conscious of needing all my energy for the exciting but grueling days ahead. I chilled a little, then attended the inaugural event of each year, the Paint-Off, where fifteen artists surrounded five models and raced to finish a painting of one of them. The crowd gathered in seated units in front of a model plus three artists, and watched. Or we migrated to another station and watched another three artists perform. In transit, we might move closer to take pictures. Only once did a lady near me cry, “Down in front!” to a man who stood over 6′ who blocked the view in front of the rest of us. What you learn and see in this marathon is incredible. Like I told a volunteer at the end, you have to afford this conference–it’s worth five years’ worth of the very best courses. In the supplies line, we were exchanging impressions of museums in Holland with a participant who had come from there. I talked to Californians, Illinoisans, several from the South, New Jersey, Australia, and the young man I had sat next to at last year’s banquet from Estonia who won another prize this year.

When time was called on the Paint-Off, the paintings were spirited off to a room where a silent auction extended throughout the conference, followed by a brief skirmish at the end so the highest bidder could take them home. All during the regularly scheduled programming, the art supply vendors sold top-line products, and in my first break, I located a new brush I’d seen on line, the “comber,” which gives fantastic hair lines. I got one in three different sizes. Also, art books were sold in a separate line–books you really can’t get elsewhere, sometimes. Once you’d paid and picked up your purchase, you might drop by to see a sculptor or painter in the middle of a demonstration. Lunchtime was not for lunch–I never eat when I go–it was for standing in line to get your portfolio critiqued, or laying out your portfolio in a dedicated room to garner comments. Or for lining up behind authors to get them to sign their book you just bought.

Or you could visit the sanctuary of the top 21 Portrait Finalists, study them, photograph them, pick your favorite, and vote. This year the best prize and the people’s choice was the same artist. Besides these features, a drawing was held for Hughes Easel, and smaller merchandise awards were drawn by the individual vendors. If you could possibly squeeze it in, you got to meet your state ambassador, get your photo taken as an alumni, and if lucky, drink a cup of coffee or eat a banana upstairs or drink a coffee outside on the street at Panerra Bread which looked a part of the hotel, but wasn’t.

Friday night’s special event was the sale of 6 x 9 originals done by former prize winners and PSA faculty. I got my choice, by one of my very favorite artists, Bart Lindstrom, although I didn’t realize at the time I had his. I had taken his workshops last year and learned a lot from him. On Saturday night, the gala banquet featured yummy food, a noted guest speaker, networking, and the presentation of the awards to thunderous applause. I’m already friends with several fellow painters from our table.

We attended the scheduled top artists’ demo sessions as they painted models from life using the atelier sight-size method. Half the screen we saw was filled with the art in progress, the other half, the model’s face in the same position. As the artist moved and painted, sometimes explaining what they did, we watched. Questions, questions: why was that yellow, why that pink? And bit by bit as they progressed, we saw the subject evolve before our eyes. In one presentation, we watched two artists at the same time. By the finish, the likenesses were there, but the products were entirely different. We watched Mary Whyte whose oversized watercolor work recently showed in a SC Museum and who challenged me last year to take the plunge into larger paintings, paint her personal model.

Thanks to Mary, I now have 10 sheets of 300-pound 40 x 60 watercolor paper. My subjects and themes are similar to hers as well, the working person, and I do have an invitation to pursue a proposed exhibit three years out which I now can begin to start projecting. Of course after seeing demonstrations galore, you were just itching to do one yourself, and the artist in you was screaming, I want to try it. So of course when they offered a participatory drawing session from a model, I attended it with my clipboard, grey-blue paper, pencils, and charcoals, and was happy with what I turned out in an hour and a half.

Daniel Greene’s Palette

We watched a two and a half hour demonstration by renowned portrait artist Daniel Greene using his famous palette of colors, and saw the model before him emerge onto his canvas. We watched two artists race side by side to produce likenesses of a model, and in spite of their very different products, the end result was they both looked like the model.We listened to a panel of artists which included Raymond Kinstler tell about their experiences like his of painting notables like Kathryn Hepburn and other high-dollar clients. I took a special session with Virgil Elliott about archival properties of paints and solvents, and he showed us his charts of colors left in the sun for several years to demonstrate how lightfast certain ones were or weren’t so that we could make choices that would benefit our clients from our decisions, and merit our reputation for giving the best fine art has to offer. Jennifer Welty gave us tips based on setting up visits to her clients to photograph children in their best settings. She particularly liked spots where light streamed through windows. She, Virgil, and Paul Newton from Australia discussed the most enduring poses and how to enhance portraits with professional lighting. Jennifer showed us her travel case of equipment for on-the-site lighting. Paul set up his lighting with a class model and showed us how he used reflectors. At the same time, other specialists were helping six other groups/subject areas.

Absorbing all the information available in this event was like drinking water out of a fire hose, but I never tired from the exposure. My brain just shut down from overload at night. After the conference was over, I enjoyed studying excellent portraits in the National Portrait Gallery, a bus trip ordered up by PSA. The amazing way the wetness of the eye was caught was a standard at one point in the history of portrait painting, and the colors exceptional. But like all good things, one’s saturation even of this happens after 2-1/2 hours—you simply cannot absorb a fraction of what you see in one trip—and so we migrated to the garden café for a coffee and treat before heading back through the cherry trees a-bloom in Washington, D.C.

I kept up pretty darn well for an over-taxed, ADHD, dyslexic, readjusting my schedule every whipstitch and keeping up with my junk. That is until the very end, when I thought I had made a transfer to my husband that didn’t happen. My portfolio went missing. I bugged the lovely hotel staff and finally after an afternoon, night, and morning of not knowing, found out the PSA’s on-the-ball staff had loaded it with their equipment and taken it back with them. I had left it leaning on the back of a chair. I teased Christine Egnoski that I hoped they wouldn’t pay me not to come back next year. Because if I can, I surely will return for more next year in Atlanta. See more pictures on the trip and event @ http://www.pinterest.com/joartis/joining-top-portrait-artists-in-dc/

KERR ARTS & CULTURAL CENTER, Kerrville, TX, April 1—April 27, 2014 37th Annual Exhibition, Southern Watercolor Society

When I got the news that my painting had been one of 80 paintings selected by Linda Doll, president of the National Watercolor Society, out of close to 500 entries to the Southern Watercolor Society’s 37th Annual Exhibition, we immediately decided we had to visit it in Kerrville. This had become almost a tradition for us with SW, when another painting of mine was picked for the Louisiana show and we went. The Southern Watercolor Society is a large regional consisting of 18 states plus Washington, D.C. I’ve been in several, and am a signature member.

My husband and I got off just a little past 4 a.m. on Friday and headed for Fayetteville Airport–from Fayetteville to Atlanta to Austin, to rental car agency, to road trip. By late lunchtime, we were already in the Texas Hill country, looking at the beautiful Texas Bluebonnets and fields of wildflowers my granddaughter would have loved in between natural limestone walls. We made frequent stops to see interesting sights, seeing names we recognized and those we didn’t, like Whataburger. A main stop was at Johnson City, Lyndon B. Johnson’s childhood hometown where we viewed a museum of his life in short, and hustled on to the LBJ Ranch. That was still in the outskirts of Johnson City by Texas calculations and held the Texas White House, as President Johnson’s home had been dubbed. We added ourselves onto a tour through the house, and tried to imagine heads of state sitting and eating there. While quite nice, it was certainly not pretentious in any way, and the “cabinet meetings” were held out under a stupendously gorgeous live oak.

Of greatest note was the high technology present in every room–three TVs, each tuned simultaneously to a major tv network which LBJ watched continually and phoned the network chief if he heard anything said about him he didn’t like. Evidently we had just missed Obama’s visit for the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Civil Rights Summit that LBJ had passed in 1964. Of note in the 60’s house décor were Lady Bird’s predilections for yellow countertops in the kitchen and landscape wallpaper in the dining room minus any cowboys or cattle.

We rode around the ranch, stopped to look at cactus–it was my first ever visit to Texas–and Bessie and the clumps of cows sitting in the shade of a tree. We visited the Sauer-Beckman Living History Farm, a reproduction of the historic farmstead of pioneers who lived a century ago, where they still make sausage, shear sheep, can, etc. We saw luxurious stretches of LBJ’s Ranch before heading for our Holiday Inn Express for the night at Kerrville, Texas, and a–you guessed it–3-inch steak at the local steakhouse. Our 20-hour day slammed us into bed and sleep.

Next day, bright and early, we headed for the Kerr Arts and Cultural Center in downtown Kerrville which is known for its art and folk festivals. The KACC has hosted NWS and AWS traveling exhibits a number of times. Kerrville has other local arts organizations; Museum of Western Arts, Hill Country Arts Foundation, Symphony of the Hills, Playhouse 2000, plus several galleries.

The gallery was showstopper beautiful, as you can tell from the photos, and we excitedly entered and located Crab-Net, placed spot-on, right between what turned out to be the Silver Medallion Winner and the Gold Medallion Winner. I knew the Silver Medallion winner, Dean Mitchell, the artist to Crab-Net’s left, from picking him up at the airport in Raleigh with Watercolor Society of North Carolina Board Members to take him to one of our shows. I bought his book at the time, which he autographed, and I absolutely love his work, and was honored to hang next to him. From the very outset I noticed what a cohesive show Linda had juried, even though she had included what she later said were “the best paintings from each genre–realistic, abstract, photo-realist, etc.”

The catalogue of all our paintings denoting the winners is yet to be published, so perhaps I will give you a little follow-up, then. The prizes were not announced until the very last at the later reception, and the signs appointed then, and photographs from the official photographer made then. I’m looking forward to seeing the one she made of me next to my love, Crab-Net .

The paintings at this show were “some of the best painters in the U.S. today,” claimed Linda Doll, National Watercolor Society President, the chosen juror for the show at the demonstration before the gallery opening. She shared other comments and remarks about the show. She said that her bias was in favor of creativity and simplicity, that the ones she picked were the ones that when she walked away from them, she could not forget. She said that this show was made up of awesome paintings and was equal in every way to a show from National Watercolor Society or American Watercolor Society, that these paintings were the best of the best.

Linda demonstrated her technique for toning paper, painting a multi-colored grey as a grisaille (an underlayer; see https://joriginals.net/paint-with-unfair-advantage/), and then adding the flesh tones and darker shadows. She uses only three colors–the primaries, of course, but the blue is the printer’s choice of blue, cyan. She has only four values in her paintings–high, local, shade, and shadow. When Linda would finish a passage on a prepared paper, she dropped it on the floor. As an abstract painter, she produced beautiful realistic works. Linda was most informative and I know those who took her week-long course before the show profited greatly, judging from enthusiastic comments from ladies near me.

From the demo I waited on the steps of the Center for my ride, and we joined the attending members of the club to YO Ranch Restaurant and enjoyed another Texas meal where we sat next to North Carolinians, would you believe. Linda Pelc presided over a SW meeting and I promised to look into a venue for the Southern Watercolor for an upcoming year’s show. Linda Pelc also had a painting in the show.

Exhausted, we left the show for the home of my husband’s best friend since early corporate days with SEI, then through IBM years–and his wife, Lynn. We enjoyed a wonderful meal eating delicious Mexican food at a favorite restaurant of theirs, catching up on WWII mementos and  airplanes and other interesting topics. Back at home, David showed us his helmets from all over, and other memorabilia collected at antique sales. I made friends with their shy black kitty who decided she liked pawing at me through the stair banister rails. We slept like babies, were treated like king and queen to a delicious egg and toast and coffee breakfast, walked their acres and fearfully tried to forget scorpions frequented their grounds. We saw the dry creek bed–drought time–and all the various tree houses and retaining walls for water, etc., that David had built with wood and wonderfully prevalent limestone. Almost all the rocks held fossils in them. I took a picture of the painting David and Lynn owned of mine hanging over their chair in the living room.

About mid-day, we said good-byes and headed for my husband’s cousin’s who lived not far away, in Dripping Springs. From there we traveled an hour to meet Donna’s sister Chris at Olive Garden and the cousins caught up and made promises to share photographs. We talked into the evening, but Donna had to work next day, so we sank gratefully into bed and were awakened to loud thunderclaps and pouring rain, one outbreak after another, right up to the moment we had to leave for the airport. Donna had prepared wonderful fruit, awesome blueberry nut bread, coffee and again, we left the hill country sated and happy, the drive to the airport uneventful, the release from a car that wasn’t ours quick, the walk to the airport no sweat, and two jaunts home again, jiggety jog, connections made, seatmates pleasant, debarking painless. I sat next to a serviceman returning to his wife and 8-year-old daughter after a year away and got the opportunity to thank him for what he had done for all of us.

I’ll admit my Tuesday was one of the worst Mondays I’ve ever had, but the memories of my art jog to the Texas Hill Country were worth it, and I’ve been savoring them ever since. Join me at Pinterest to see more photos.

Seeing Red Is a Good Thing

‘Seeing red’ is an expression for extreme anger, and cheeks turn red with embarrassment. Red stands for the spilling of blood or fires gone wild decimating acres of timberland.

However, we see red in so many ways that red does not just evoke negative emotions. Hearts in love are typically pictured as red. Red is the heat of a fire or ‘hot’ lipstick. Red is symbolic for the blood flowing through our veins, for life itself–blue inside, but red when it appears from a cut. Red is one of the most beautiful of the fall colors for leaves.

Red shouts the return of spring in canna lilies, tulips, roses, and azaleas. The color red commands attention and speaks hope every bit as much as it says danger. Red is the language of passion.Red is a language of its own that poets speak using various names–carmine, claret, wine-red, burgundy, fire-engine red, crimson, rouge, blood red, blush, rose red, poppy red, valentine, and alizarin crimson.

When I led the Artists Anonymous sessions of creativity at Manna Church in Fayetteville, our group brain-stormed names. This exercise was fun, and opened the mind to expansive use of its faculties rather than fill-in-the-blank answers which tend to limit, control, and shut its faculties down.

One remembers the seasons by the arrival of velvety red roses. Anniversaries are commemorated with red roses. Mother’s Day is honored by the red rose you wear on Sunday if your mother is alive. I remember red poppies blooming around Mother’s Day, as well, because they filled the ground sections along I-95 enroute to Rocky Mount, NC, the route I traveled for the juried art show I entered every year. In my attempts to advance I often missed being celebrated on that day, but I remember at least one occasion of my daughter’s taking me out to eat and her meeting me upon my return…usually after returning home with my non-accepted paintings.

Red connotes health, as when we say ‘in the pink of health.’ Late summer is set off by healthy, bright red tomatoes. The delicious tomato-mayonnaise gravy on gooey white bread, a Southern treat, was so delicious just the mention of them by my North Carolina friend at Waldschloessl made me homesick. Red tomatoes were instrumental in calling me home from our Youth with a Mission service in foreign countries surrounding Germany and Austria.

When fall comes, its beauty seems always measured by leaves turning to lustrous shades of red to herald in that season. My early primary family went on fall vacations to the mountains, in particular, Mt. Pilot of Andy Griffin fame, where my father grew up. Our eyes feasted on the view of leaves ever more glorious the higher we climbed. I collect leaves. Even now I have batches of leaves at my studio, waiting for the still life muse to prompt me to leap, set them up and create a new painting. Leaves have occupied some ten or more of my paintings in both oil and watercolor. Two of my red leaf paintings are in Cary, NC. I doodle leaves, as well.

At Christmas, the memory of my father-in-law’s greenhouse filled with rows on rows of red poinsettias he grew to sell fill the season with an aura of his generosity and his permanence. This was one of those things he always did, regular as rain. At some point he would tell us each to come pick one or two out for our Christmas decorations, a major part of our Christmas, his gift to each of us. Red poinsettias just are Christmas, along with all the other red Christmas decorations.

Really, I never realized until I started writing this article how many seasons use red. Add to the aforementioned: one bright red valentine in February. Not getting any shiny red hearts hurts the Charlie Brown’s among us. Then there is the red of heritage. My McAlester strain is characterized by a bright red tartan.

Recently I read an article that claimed sales on red lipstick rose to new heights in a down-turned economy. An odd claim at first, it makes absolute sense. If a woman doesn’t have much to spend to make herself look good, then she buys what gives the most pizzazz for the penny. Red will certainly do that: just thinking about buying red lipstick at the drug store makes my hope surge. Just the other day as I bought the makeup I had forgotten to take with me on my trip to my granddaughter’s, I saw a shade of red lipstick I couldn’t resist. That reminded me of the time I taught Sunday School at a church in Massachusetts, my pastor called me in to ask me not to wear a shade ‘quite so red’ for my internship from divinity school.

Then there is the red carpet treatment one gets as a special favor, such as the runway for celebrities. Maybe I should do more paintings in red. The color certainly seems to sell them. One of my favorites was of red poinsettias floating in deep blue, “Herald,” which was juried into the Durham Arts Council’s annual exhibit by a D.C. major juror, a curator for the Phillips Collection. It sold in Harnett County. One red leaf painting  hangs in Cary and another in the complex of buildings that is SAS Institute, Cary, NC, one of the largest privately owned businesses in the U.S. I believe the elephant-sized painting of bubbles that hangs in the insurance building in Raleigh sports a lot of reds. Just for fun, I’ll include samples of sold and unsold paintings with red in them.

One of my students who branched out to take a weekend course in Raleigh was told that in her beach scenes, one should never paint a walker wearing any red apparel. Tell that to some of the greats in museums, right? I suppose the taboo of today shows you ‘know’ what and who the current trendsetters are. Telling most artists not to paint something red is more than likely, however, just to make them see redder. Which reminds me of another way of seeing red–Spanish bullfighters waving the red scarf in front of the bull to make him charge. It definitely inflames the eye!

There’s a little bit of red in my most recent commissioned portrait, in the plaid of the little boy’s shirt. I changed his sweatshirt top to the plaid shirt in other pictures, and it ‘made’ the picture, my client said. Along with capturing his essence, which is what his mother claimed the painting did. In another article we’ll examine all the different red paints, which ones are reliable, and which ones we are told to avoid. Right now, I need to rest my eyes on a little gray.

Colby Lost in Art

Teaching art isn’t always about imparting knowledge. Take my lovely little granddaughter for an example. Was she born loving art with art-loving genes? I don’t know the answer to that, and it could start an endless theoretical debate which might be fun. Maybe it would give evidence in support of jumpstarting an experimental course in art within the school’s educational system. But the significance I’m about to share with you would be lost.

Teaching art, I believe, is a prospect of catching the fire. Fire comes often from a mentor. Art is caught, not taught, if you would like a catch phrase. My granddaughter, Colby, lives three and a half hours away. Whenever I see her, whether she comes here, or I go there, she starts off asking me, “Gemma, we go your art studio?” She just won’t let up until she has the response she wants or is confronted with the impossibility of having it. Whatever it takes in driving time, she’s up for it.

My daughter-in-law Christy tells me how she pauses before a painting of mine they have hanging and starts talking about it, about the pops of color. She asks questions of color and design seemingly advanced for one so young. She loves going with me to art exhibits, and at my most recent one-person show in Elizabeth City, NC, at Floor2Ceiling Design LLP, she sat with the adults for a–hold onto your socks–3-hour course in watercolor painting. Plus, she helped me set up for an adult course in watercolor I was teaching, possibly becoming my youngest art intern at 5 years of age. Asked in class what the primary colors are, Colby sang them out. Asked what mixing two colors produced, she chimed in with the answer. What’s the secret? Art is exciting for her. It’s a land of Oz.

Before that course of mine at one of the Watercolor Society of NC, Colby attended with me at what must have been a boring show for kids, but was a fabulous presentation by the judge for the annual exhibit of WSNC held at the Arts of the Albemarle where I keep a continuing presence in Elizabeth City. She sat through it all, coloring, wanting to get up, returning to coloring. The Friday night before she went with us on the artwalk where I first met Nick Nixon and his wife Amy which lead to my one-person show, and gallery representation. Colby was really into the whole event. If she bounced too high–well, on to the next art place, each one new, different, and exciting–usually because every one of the businesses encouraged some experimental testing of the waters.

We have re-visited the art scene several times, and she is still enthusiastic about it. Her own picture was included in a show at Floor2Ceiling, along with her sister Kimberlee’s–and of course, yours truly helped them like I do my own students from Art on Broad Atelier in Dunn.

View from the Studio

Considering which, I ask, what makes it so special? A division of j’Original’s Art Studio at 217 East Broad Street, my studio is a designed-for-nothing-but-art one which my son and I own together. (By the way, he is proud of his mother.) I have it set up with the show window front portion purposed as the gallery, full of paintings framed exquisitely, on easels, and on the walls, some up a story. The two-tiered hanging makes it look like Soho or San Francisco or Paris, I think. That’s an ambience I love. Other than having Southern light source instead of the preferred-for-artist Northern lighting, it’s perfect.

The next part you settle into visually is the teaching area, a roomy place with simple, white, six-foot folding tables arranged in an open square, with table easels set up in close to eight spots, a board on the easel, and small easels beside each big one to hold a book. I have added two standup easels and am trying to convert the student area into more of this style, the typical atelier look. Long sheets of printing paper a student gave me a pile of over 20 years ago for testing strokes, colors, and ideas cover the tables. Its set up provides an open invitation to paint or draw.

“Draw” in both senses of the word, and draw, it does. As soon as we open the door, Colby runs to her place, pulls out her comfie chair and gets started. I find her watercolor paper, and pour out the tins of watercolor colored pencils all over the table. Generosity is the operative word here. I don’t mete out 2 or 3 pencils, I pour out the pencils. Anything a child gets must excite their imagination early on, or you’ve lost your window of opportunity.

Soon she is lost in the process and down under for the duration of the morning. Concentrating? I couldn’t pull her from it if I wanted to! One morning she was busy decorating flowers, using the colors to make a border, and so I took photos of her to paint the portrait of her later. I captured not some artificial setup of a photographer, but a creative child in her native habitat, a portrait of Colby I entitled, “Colby at Art.” My framer commented on the difference in my portrait of her as he was framing the work. “You didn’t just put two or three pencils there like most artists would. The pencils are all over the place, and that’s how a child would like it!”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

My son’s family owns the painting, of course, which I entered into one of my list of major art shows. And at my studio it displayed as an example of the portrait I could create for you of your child, lost in the activity or thought most native to him or her. I love the way Colby fills and borders the page, her hair dripping down over her eyes into the left frame, her intent expression of face filling the topmost edge, her shoulder the right side, and her arm reaching forward on the bottom edge, leaving just a small opening that isn’t her. I imagine this as the childhood opening which brings in a whole delightful world of art.

A world full of welcome, opportunity, new ideas, and love–a place where students can come and go–return and learn, and test their growing skills.

Southern Watercolor Society’s 37th Annual in Kerrville, TX

“With great joy” the Southern Watercolor Society, an 18-state regional, which includes Washington, D.C., informed me they have selected Crab-Net for inclusion into their 37th Annual Exhibit to be held at the Kerr Arts and Cultural Center (KACC), in Kerrville, TX.

Linda A. Doll, aws, nws is a painter, digital photographer, graphic artist, instructor and the juror of choice for the Society’s show. A teacher of workshops and seminars throughout the US, Mexico, Canada, France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Ireland and Bali, she is President (2012-2014), a Past-President and Life Member of the National Watercolor Society, a Past Board  Member and Juror of the American Watercolor Society, and a past Board Member of Watercolor West. She is a Life Honorary Member of the Federation of Canadian Artists and an Elected Life Member of the San Diego Watercolor Society. Her paintings and drawings are included in many books and have been used by several magazines for their covers. Linda is included in many Who’s Who Publications, including Who’s Who in American Art and Who’s Who of American Women.

People and Still Life Subjects that hint at the person just outside the picture plane are Linda’s favorite painting subjects. Perhaps my Crab-Net told a tale in negative blocks of color and circular bits of string that included the people lurking just outside the net who had caught the crabs pictured inside the net. Perhaps she sensed them relishing the moment and thinking about the seafood meal to come.

In any case, this watercolor painting of N.C. blue crabs came to Linda Doll’s attention and is one of the only 80 paintings, with 5 alternates, that she picked out of 362 submissions from 18 states and D.C to form the 37th Annual Exhibition for 2014. Lucky me!  This painting, a 29 x 37, was a fun subject, product of a fun day, about a fun sea life, crab, and using a fun medium,  watercolor. For all that, it was one of the most intricate and difficult of my paintings, involving a lot of struggle in the painting. I love negative space, weaving, and the sensational  blues which reverberate in the beautiful N.C. crabs. This painting was like a weaving within a weaving. Add to it a tangle of emotional struggles which I sometimes encounter when I take professional vacations, and you have what was a life journey untangling from the crab net.

Once I began, I kept seeing emerging patterns,  so I would re-do the drawing to include the new pattern. One was the radiant vortex of the simple trap. The subject emerged enmeshed in spirals of knotted twine which revealed as many holes in the net as it did crabs. Such a simple thing, string, to outmaneuver cranky crabs. It reminds me of a recent story of a whale entangled in multiple nets that rescuers released from the string prison. A sea mammal showed undying gratitude to each rescuer in turn–such a touching display.

Crab-Net is my most recent watercolor, and has hardly been let out the door, but it did visit the Arts of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City in one of their shows. It is part of a new series of paintings I am doing that involve the sea in some aspect. I call this new series “Sea-Escapes by Joanna. ” https://joriginals.net/product-category/sea-escapes/ Sea-Escapes can take you to a pier on  a July day where the crab pots are collecting piles of crabs, fishermen are fishing, and I learn how to crab–well, kinda, sorta. And the harvest of NC blue crabs turns into one of the funniest and simultaneously most beautiful piles of color in a painting.

Measuring the crab against one slat of the pier to determine if the crab was a ‘keeper’ or a ‘throw-back-in-er’ was one of the tips I learned. And scampering away fast so a loosed crab wouldn’t pinch a toe was a newly acquired skill, as well, and could well turn into a life lesson. What I took home with me was a stomach full of delicious white crabmeat dipped in butter and my own photos to work from on a watercolor which netted me the painting, Crab-Net, white string spiraling to a vortex over a circular metal loop, holding a complexity of colors and shapes that for me are pure visual escapes.

As for me, I am fully planning on attending the exhibit, as I did a couple of times in the past when my painting was included before, enjoy the members’ luncheon, the reception ceremony where I meet members from all over who are extremely friendly and rub professional shoulders. We may even visit family and friends while we are there on April 12th. I am one of the Southern Watercolor Society’s signature members, which means I get to sign my name, and add their initials afterward, SW.

Of course I will leave my picture through the duration of the exhibit which ends April 28, at which point, I will hopefully be in Washington, D.C. at the the Portrait Society of America’s Annual Exhibition, enjoying another topnotch show that expands horizons.

Such chances don’t come every day.

Imprimatura, or Underpainting

Some painters never discover the explosive goodness of an imprimatura. They resist laying down a color opposite to the one they see. That runs counter to logic, evokes fear, speaks of time wastage. It messes with their sense of what is right. If you can’t see it, logic argues, why do it? What good is something you can’t see? Fair question, faulty answer. Because by taking this extra painting step, they would give themselves a leg up over all other artists.

By not doing so, they delete a step in the painting process which so enhances a painting, it receives an unfair advantage over any similar painting. Let’s explore the question of what good an underlayer provides. Hmmm: What value does a skeleton add?  What does the third deeper layer of skin provide? The third layer of insulated glass? For the first, it provides the form to shape the flesh hung upon it. For the second, levels to prevent burns from reaching vital organs. For glass, the doubled cost keeps out ultra-violet rays which damage fiber and fade color. It also provides the painting with a skeleton, a third layer of skin, and protects against light damage, and more.

Let’s define imprimatura. The National Gallery of Art defines imprimatura as a thin, translucent layer of color applied to the ground (the ground is the board, canvas, paper or skirt painted onto) before beginning the actual painting. The imprimatura reduces the absorbency of the ground. What does that mean? Simply spoken, it means that all that luscious color you apply to the canvas, wood, paper, or wall will not sink down into the fabric, lost, a condition referred to as ‘sunken color.’ Instead, it will happily stay up near the top on the surface to shine in all its glory.

The word ‘imprimatura’ is Italian, meaning ‘first paint layer.’ Before dabbing the canvas with the first drop of paint, a thin, transparent layer of paint known as imprimatura, is applied on the entire canvas. Usually it is done in neutral olive or earthen shades derived from raw sienna. Imprimatura helps reduce the radiant bright light on the canvas and allows the final coats to exude their true colors.

Sometimes, the National Gallery says, it is used as a middle tone for the painting itself. Another way to put that in current terms is, an imprimatura gets rid of all the white. White is confusing to the eye, and the eye needs not to be confused. Any white that returns to the canvas is then, and should be, one hundred percent intentional.

In Old Masters training, I was taught that there should not be any more than three highlights (whitest whites, or brightest brights) in any given painting. That insures a better result to any painting right away. Historically, the imprimatura is a glaze coat intended to rid the canvas of white–one sees the drawing underneath, and proceeds by blocking in thin layers of paint once the imprimatura is dry.

Even when some painting has begun, it is important to bring the progress forward slowly, painting on firstglazes, then a reasonably thick layer of paint in middle versions of the differences you see. You needn’t paint entirely flatly in this stage of roughing in the large color shapes. You help your craft by approximating what you see without slavishly breaking out the small 3-hair brushes for intense detail, as with adding highlights to the hair.  As the painting dries, you slowly and deliberately decrease your brush and stroke size, not over correcting at this point. Continue the progression of the professional process as you have laid it out, following techniques that the Old Masters have used for centuries.

This primer paint, the imprimatura, is mixed with half Liquin ™ (the masters used turpentine oil) and half turpentine. This makes contrasts between bright & dark, while preparing the canvas for further layers of paint. When applying imprimatura, it is important to know the final color scheme in advance. The base shade is then chosen for the desired color and brightness effects.

Typically, using the opposite, or complementary color to the final color, will yield pleasing results, but trial and experimentation are key to discovery. Work fast and all at once. This is no time to fuss for detail, as The mix will likely become tacky when it is laid onto canvas surfaces. Before it has turned sticky is the time to stop. When the initial layer is done in the shade of gray instead of olive, it is known as Grisaille. I Personally do both a grisaille (first) and an imprimatura over it (second).

The key purpose of imprimatura is to seal with a priming layer so that the ground becomes nonabsorbent and radiates its colors instead of sucking them up, while also providing a quality visual unity.  Imprimaturas are used in indirect paintings where the sketch and first painting are allowed to dry for further work to be done. At times, one could proceed in the opposite fashion, making  a primary draft of the desired picture on canvas and an imprimatura coat applied over it. This safely seals the sketch as a foundational layer, while the artist prepares to paint over it (my preference).

When I have worked on commission and allowed the client to see the initial stages, the imprimatura stage has confused them. I say, “it isn’t painted,” and they say, but there is green all over your canvas. How can you say it isn’t painted? Then they begin with the directions. ‘Make the rose petal whiter, take out the brown. Make it more pastel, balance with the same length on the right.’ To think of an imprimatura, think of the concept of what a photographic negative is to a photo print. The colors are opposite to what you see. This is what lends the painting depth.Using an imprimatura actually causes the colors to multiply. The painter does not have to work so laboriously to accomplish slight variations in shades; they happen naturally with succeeding layers of paint, because the paint is not entirely opaque that tops it.

While in no way a final product, customers have loved the swimmy effect of the imprimatura and wanted to buy it just that way. Not using one, in my opinion, lessens the professional quality of the finished product. Succeeding glazes build up the color gradually, from underneath.  Goya, I was told, used red as an underpainting for his faces. The Dutch masters used the olive or earth green.

Either is good, but the effects are dramatically different. The process cannot be rushed. The stages of  painting are all necessary if you want the professional product I am committed to, which I produce each time, and struggle to convince my students of their necessity.  All of my own portraits always begin with an imprimatura and a grisaille. On the portrait page, in the stationary shots, I am actually working on an imprimatura glazed over a grisaille. The other two portraits were painted using an imprimatura and grisaille, as well.

In this portrait, I did not use the grisaille, only the imprimatura.

When you begin with an imprimatura, what is unseen gives you the clear advantage.

First Steps to Fulfilling Your Destiny

Dreaming is a 100-percent effectual way to get ahead. Believe me. Nothing that I am now seeing accomplished professionally or personally would ever have happened without my first having dreamed it.

When I first began ramping up to do watercolors, I was full of fear. I must not have seemed fearful to my aunt who thought she needed to deter me from harmful activity. Long years before I had any paintings to my name, when I was pregnant with my lovely first-born daughter, my aunt said to me, “Well, I guess you won’t be able to pursue your painting now, will you?”

Add anger to dreaming, and maybe you have come upon a magic combo. I have never been so angry in all my life. I fumed, fretted, and banged doors and tables. Mean, I thought. I griped about it to my husband. Then the inherited determination from both sides  kicked in, and I thought to myself, you’ll see. To make sure I would continue, I locked in my supplies for watercolors. Watercolors dried quickly and emitted no poisonous fumes in the house that would threaten my baby. I could rely on them.

That new resolve had to be postponed due to our move to Germany, so until I had a stable base, my dream could not go forward. Once there, with house and furniture, I started on the dining room table in the middle of all the activity, because I knew I could progress in short spurts of intense activity in defying her pronouncement. I started out ever so tenuously; beginning with teeny antique bud vases filled with the miniscule violets Erika would later pick on her way home from where the bus dropped her.

At some point I began writing a poem from the experience. This has since been published in literary magazines and in an English-Russian anthology. It appears in Russian and in English. A phrase from it embellishes the book’s divider page. You can hear my anger in the ‘you say,’ I think.

“Of a Substance Strong Enough

Dreams are great, you say,  for night-time–

like wispy clouds  that disappear at noon.

But I say dreams  are spit and fiber

spun and thrown  like spider webs–

filmy filament  which sticks mid-air,

catches and holds tight enough

for you to climb, run, live  (nest your babies on)

and yet,  still make it there.”

2d Publication rights, Earth and Soul: An

Anthology of NC Poets, Kostroma, Russian/English, 2001

Crucible, Warren Wilson University and The Lyricist, Campbell University

Imagine my extreme surprise years later, when I read an article on the ballooning action of spiders. It seems airplanes encountered much difficulty running into systems of spider webs high in the sky. Spiders build webs higher than anyone would earlier have imagined possible.

It seems that spiders, especially small ones and some other creatures, propel themselves upwards with a mechanical process called ballooning, or kiting.

They spin a very fine silk, called gossamer, to lift themselves off a surface. Then they use the silk as an anchor in mid-air. This fine silk has been called ‘gossamer’ since 1325 according to the Oxford dictionary. Again, no one knew then that gossamer was derived from spiders.

After hatching, a spiderling will climb as high as it can. It then stands on raised legs with its abdomen pointed upwards, a process called ‘tiptoeing.’ Then it releases several silk threads from its abdomen which produce a triangular-shaped parachute which will carry the spider away in updrafts. Even small gusts work. They may not go very far, or they may end up in a jet stream, depending on many components, but their trip could extend into the upper atmosphere.

Sailors have reported spiders in their ship’s sails miles from land. They can live a month without food. Evidently ballooning is the main way spiders migrate to isolated islands and mountaintops. They have been found as high as 16000 feet above sea level and on the tops of mountains and can live without food for close to a month.

Even without knowing this I wrote the phrase, “Dreams are spit and fiber, spun and thrown like spiderwebs….” It is gratifying to describe how something seems and have it proved factual. The odd thing is that this was the one phrase in my poem contested by a Russian sister-city poet, the phrase, ‘spit and fiber,’ was deemed unpoetic.

It is no small wonder that one of my favorite artistic and written images is the spider web, lace, tatting, tobacco-twine-tied coverlets, and fishing nets. My most recently finished painting is Crab-Net, with beautiful North Carolina blue crabs caught in the holes. The entire painting, done in watercolor, is accomplished in the negative, a painting process thought very difficult by most painters. It involves seeing in the negative, and painting the holes is also the largest kingpin step in the discipline of using the right-brained creative process. Only the space between the threads is painted because in transparent watercolor, one must leave the white of the paper showing to create the white. Another painting, “Dockside,” uses a net as a portrait background for an old sailor. A third painting has a net background with a harpoon, “Sea-Lit, the Sperm Whale Era.”

About seven years ago, I began leading creativity courses from my business j’Originals Art & Teaching Studio, and through a local church. I had just finished reading Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way, in which we were encouraged to write three pages of unedited, stream of consciousness prose first thing in a day in a journal. We signed a contract with ourselves that committed to three months of seriously trying these things out. We agreed to make a ‘date’ with ourselves once a week to do something that our artistic child would love to do, all by ourselves. There was a creed and a prayer that we repeated for strength.

The purpose of the whole process was to make ourselves our own best friend, to bring ourselves to where we could trust ourselves. I began the experiment which I now cannot live without. After these seven years of more or less consistently doing this (I have around 30 journals to show for it or perhaps I’d better not show), I have learned its truth. What you dream, happens. Julia Cameron calls this ‘serendipity.’ Besides having the joy of that happening, I have learned that what you hate and journal, you can give up in minutes.

In short, this process recreated for me the means for ‘ballooning,’ for ‘tiptoeing,’ for reaching upwards and outwards from your gut, having faith, for trusting what or who comes in off the street, and for catching the updrafts of my dreams. # # #

A Deadly Provenance

Just how important is art?

Would you die for a piece of art? This was what a very select group of men fighting in the military were asked. Their answer to this question put them into the team, or barred them from it. The willingness to die for art determined the group of seven men commissioned by the Allies in World War II.

This thesis forms the guts of the box office movie hit, “The Monuments Men,” that my husband and I just saw. This movie boasted top actors George Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Jean Dujardin, and Bill Murray. Based on the raw truths of history of one of its greatest treasure hunts, the film is an action drama focusing on an unlikely World War II platoon and an unlikely task offered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Their mission was to enter Germany to rescue art masterpieces from Nazi thieves and return them to their rightful owners.

I don’t know about you, but we are suckers for movies with Nazi themes. I had already done miles of research about stolen Nazi art for my gothic romance novel, A Deadly Provenance. I knew about stolen art. What I hadn’t remembered was how Nazis burnt and destroyed fantastic art in the name of censorship.

Within the time frame of this novel, 1973-1977 in the Cold War span of time, where had all the Nazis gone? Thirty years after WWII ended we might have thought they all died out or received enlightenment. Not only were they not dead, but that they survived and landed in high places of influence in Germany is a major premise of my fiction work, A Deadly Provenance. American Southerner Lexi and ethnic German hero Jon (German/Russian) know this from page one of my gripper-romance. Nazis brought secrets to stay open secrets between the newly married partners, a fact which festered and threatened their marriage and their lives.

Cultured savages, you could call these Nazis. Their idea might be closer to Nietzsche’s Uebermensch, portrayed excellently in the movie, “The Monuments’ Men.” Superior people for whom morals are weaknesses are capable of anything, and Lexi and Jon had something they wanted. Their castle was also a great place to keep current caches hidden. And whatever Jon and Lexi own is also up for grabs, as it could well increase the treasure base of the Nazi movement internationally, but Lexi and Jon will keep them from that at all costs. Or die trying.

This book is about the danger of acquired wealth. It is about belonging in a world of foreigners, trusting yourself when everyone has let you down. It is about maneuvering skillfully in unfamiliar territory. It is a saga of finding hidden treasure that catapults you into a world of intrigue. It is about priceless antiques that could be relics and could activate church and government empires, not to mention every crime syndicate in the world. It is about learning that death is not a far-fetched thought at all.

And it is about love.

It is about a past so debilitating that in its aftermath, relationships do not thrive, and barely survive. From Germany’s hills to snow peaks of Austria, Lexi and Jon ski in and out of love. She concludes that she must save herself.

Schloss Enzian, high above the quaint town of Allmannshausen, forms the fictional home for this contemporary novel in the classic Gothic style. It features an isolated setting and heroine Alexandra (Lexi) stalked by ghosts and enemies. Enemies multiply as evil tries to envelope her. Spiraling forces peak to overcome her. Lexi and Jon together uncover inherited art and literary mysteries of a millennium and more, and this draws international plots and spies into the maelstrom. In the style of Rebecca of Daphne du Maurier fame, wedded bliss turns to estrangement. This happens after the hero escorts his new wife to his castle nest of family intrigue. The marriage flounders and the hero Johann (Jon)’s motives and character turn questionable to Lexi. The relationship winds in and out of trust. Her need should unite them, but turns into a wedge instead.

A blessed object newly found—a cross—turns into a harbinger of death. Handicapped, Lexi’s vision for helping abused women emerges as a passion expressed through her art. Achieving international acclaim as a sculptress, she lends support to an art show that benefits abused women. Together with her friend the Baroness, the pair are car-chasing, Nazi-facing women who channel fear into creative action. She searches out the provenance of an ancient manuscript and the ornate cross from her mother-in-law’s Russian past. Lexi rises from one difficulty slung at her to another. Finally she, with the cross Jon gave her impulsively, maneuvers to a surprising end.

Jon rises to the occasion as well and slays a few demons. Concluding that circumstances are not friends after it is almost too late, they agree that only commitment slays the demons of abandonment and betrayal. Lexi and Jon eventually confess that the real killers are threats to individual choice, faith, and yes, to  culture and art. They elevate the expression of art to a necessity for a free and unbought soul. They realize they must divest themselves of treasures that can turn into weighty baggage.

Will they live happily ever after? That is the question, for sure…..

_____

A Deadly Provenance draws on NC author’s international experience for her novel. In her past, she and her husband worked with a group helping indigenous peoples in Soviet Russia and the Iron Curtain countries that were oppressed. From nine years of residency in Germany, traveling back and forth to the USSR and Soviet-bloc countries, she tapped into their knowledge base of life abroad and their experience of danger at every hand to write her novel. She lives with her husband Sandy on the Cape Fear River, and their grown children and grandchildren live not far away.

There comes a time in the life of every artist when she needs a shake-up.

When a still life no longer thrills, landscapes bore, and faces no longer challenge, a power surge is needed.

Sea-Escapes is that power surge, a series jump started when my website manager Jim Gruber shared the most beautiful photographs of surfs on the web that I had ever seen. In fact, I had never seen surfs at all, in photos or out, if one could believe that of an N.C. native who grew up visiting Carolina beach for summer vacations.

All I’d ever seen of seascapes were paintings of water breaking over rocks, boats a-float or being sunk at sea, or what I would call beach landscapes containing three flat parallel lines where sky met sea and waves broke in orderly rows from my perch on the sand.

Imagine my artist’s eye overcome by the sheer novelty of form in these surfing photos. I had no idea the water shaped itself into such weird and wonderful contortions, random sprays and splashes. I was amazed at the new shapes water took on, fascinated by the compositions anything but straight-lined.

Embryonic curls screamed abandon, enthusiasm. Their wildness erased the dust from the everyday objects I had worked at painting, infused the mundane, picayune with fairy dust, and spiked the ho-hum out of a day’s routine.

I never saw the ocean act up in such ways–the wind, tides and water forces from below causing funnels, tunnels, gigantic waves, circular sweeps of water turning in on themselves, cascading down a line or from high overhead, and shorelines viewed through a bull’s eye opening.

Surges of color followed the unexpected forms, color almost unnatural in its intensity—neon greens, yellows, golds, snowy whites and baby blues, purples, blue-blacks, reds and carmines—the range stymies the mind. I mean, everyone knows water is blue or blue-green or aqua, right? Wrong. Light changes everything.

Viewing surf photographs inland was a real trip in itself.

An ardent surfer originally from California, Jim’s descriptions of bone-breaking experiences as a surfer horrified me, while his love of the ocean re-sparked my own fascination with beach life and nostalgic scenes of my earlier beach vacations.

So from another shore, the tide washed in with its mystique, its loud, crashing noises, and its calming effects. The sea sucked me out to it, made me break my routine, escape the ordinary.

Escape. There was that word again. Escape to the sea.

Some of my happiest memories were of playing in the sunshine as a child, digging my toes into white beach sand, swimming in sea waters, building sandcastles with a plastic bucket, walking the pilgrimage along water’s edge in the hot sun and in the raging sunset. What child hasn’t had the sound of the sea introduced to her and magically reverberate in a conch shell held up to her ear? Even dead shells have memory.

Some families are mountain vacationers, some beach, but we were both—split equally between the two. Our small family grew when we convened at the beach and met extended family. From collecting arrowheads in the fields at home to collecting conch shells on the beach, the switch was effortless.

The shells’ delicate pastel colors contrasted with the electric colors the sea took on in different light, the raw intensity of the green, the blue, and the mixing patterns.

My twin loves in painting, composition and color, met with a fierce attraction in the sea and birthed the new series. Instead of Seascapes as a genre, we have Joanna McKethan Sea-Escapes. My eye joined the forms of emergent shells to raging sea, and the colors of a fairly extensive collection of shells of mine coalesced with surf photos.

I introduced a single, small shell, a microcosm, back to the macrocosm in which it grew: Mother Sea.

So the first painting, “Sea’s Restless Eve,” shows the water spilling over an uplifted shell in blacks, phthalocyanine blues and red sunset colors.

“Castaway Shell” lies beached in yellows and golds, the folds of water still surrounding it, not quite able to completely let it go, the impastos sticking out to catch the light, the antique tones of Old Masters’ colors deepening shadow areas to pop the light and the stepping-stone spires of the shell.

‘Seascapes’ is the painting term used for a depiction of the sea.

But the series includes more than seascapes or my shell-and-sea idea which will yield similar paintings to the two just mentioned. Sea-Escapes can create a salty trail back to land where a former whale oil container, an antique from the days of harvesting sperm whales was found, and so, the painting of an antique, a harpoon and a net, “Sperm Whale Antique”  becomes a historical commentary on a way of life and a movement to save the whales.

Sea-Escapes can mean an old man sitting beside the sea on a porch with a net hanging behind him, as in the watercolor, “Dockside.”  Sea-Escapes can take you to a pier with me where the crab pots are catching piles of crabs, and I learn how to crab on one of the most fun days of hard labor I’ve done in years. And the harvest of NC blue crabs turns into one of the funniest and simultaneously most beautiful piles of color in a painting I have yet to experience: “Crab-Net.”

Measuring the crab against one slat of the pier to determine if the crab was a ‘keeper’ or a ‘throw-back-in-er’ was one of the tips I learned.

And scampering away fast so a loosed crab wouldn’t pinch a toe was a newly learned skill, as well. What I took home with me was a stomach full of delicious white crabmeat dipped in butter and my own photos to work from on a watercolor, Crab-Net, which netted me a painting of white string spiraling to a vortex and holding a complexity of colors and shapes that for me are pure visual escapes.

Single shells have always inspired me, and I have painted some 40-50 small shells in watercolors and oils that have sold or that I have given as presents to special people on special occasions.

What lies ahead for the series? Why, foreign Sea-Escapes will emerge as a sub-series, and sunsets at the beach, another; boats, of course, and boat wheels, maybe even birds, and rusty nails, anchors, what not. It is a series designed for fun.

I don’t anticipate strapping myself to the prow of a boat like Turner, the famous English watercolorist, did in order to paint an impending storm. Nor can I see myself with a 500-pound mega-expensive camera strapped around these painting shoulders to take surfing shots like ‘real’ artists are supposed to do to generate their own ‘source’ material.

So I’m left with detective work, extrapolating and blending, learning the nature of surfs by multiple views and though generated visions of what is possible.

However, Sea-Escapes promise to keep me and my viewers in the salty sea waters, yielding hours of pleasurable sensations, evoking the wonderful memories of vacation days and family fun.

Welcome to my world. Color that looks wet, air smelling salty, and subjects designed to bring the escape home with you as far inland as you need to travel.

The time had come. The last strokes had been administered and were all dry to the touch.

My professional adult student had asked me to show her how I did a finishing glossy coat over the painting. I am not talking about the final varnish coat at this point, because I was a little afraid of using one due to the floppiness of the ground, the loose hanging, sewn canvas. Varnish can yellow and go brittle on you.

The method I was taught to use was with Liquin TM by my mentor Thomas Buechner, now deceased. Depending on the degree of gloss you wished your painting to have, you mixed turpentine with the gel medium and brushed it over the surface. This gives a similar effect to that achieved by oiling out which uses linseed oil. This substance I had already determined by my contact with Portrait Society of America to avoid, as the top chemist in the country had commented on the rigidity of the linseed oil medium, a rigidity which increased over time as the drying of the oils continued over the years.

This was an effect to be avoided at all costs as it causes cracking. So in proportions of approximately half-half, I mixed the two substances in a bubble gum container and applied the mix to the painting, under the watchful eye of my master student, who kept pointing out any dry spots that tried to hide as I painted it on. That whole process took an approximate hour, and was left to cure out until the next day. The difference in the look was astounding, similar to that of oiling out because it calls any pigment to the surface that had begun to sink into the ground or canvas, thereby turning duller. It added a sheen, but a matte sheen. Had I wanted shinier, I would have used no thinner solvent.

That day The Daily Record arrived to take a photograph of the painting and that was published in color in order to draw people to the Cotton Festival in Dunn, an event which probably brought in 200-some-plus visitors to see it.

My photographers came to take a picture of it that would then form the base for my annual Christmas card.

My client had a dowel rod made for the rod pocket at the top out of acacia wood, in the red tones, or burnt sienna tones of the lions’ manes, with carved wooden finials at the end, all beautifully finished.

the artist’s copy of the original one that hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C.

Peter Paul Rubens’ original work which hangs in Washington, D.C.

And this, folks is the tail end of the story.

At the present writing, Daniel was rolled up on the sidewalk inside a protective sheet and delivered to the client’s house where it now hangs. Overtures have been made to the National Gallery for news purposes. I am about to send out my Christmas cards. My client is thinking about a new project to busy me. And I have begun my next portrait commission.