Hollyhocks, Echinacea, Lilies, Daisies, and Queen Anne's Lace Code #121515 S 12x12

Let's end the year with a lovely flower painting! 

I first make a panel by cutting the hardboard into the size I want then sealing the panel with GAC 100.  I apply two coats of gesso to the front and back sides of the panel.  Then I tint the panel with a napthol crimson red acrylic paint.   Using alizarin crimson and cerulean oil paints thinned with cold pressed linseed oil, I sketch the initial drawing on the panel staying very loose with the drawing.  This preliminary sketch is used to place where I want the flowers and pool and birdbath to go and the basic structure of the painting.

I start with the darkest darks of the background trees and the foreground space.  I also pop in the pure reds and pinks of the flowers.

I have a rubber tipped implement -- looks kinda like an eraser tip -- to loosely add branches and tendrils.  I also put in the birdbath.  I work back and forth between the foreground and background as well as all over the entire surface at the same time.

Flowers are added and then pushed back or painted over and even painted out, in an ongoing "back and forth" play throughout the entire surface.

The finished painting, "Hollyhocks, Echinacea, Lilies, Daisies, and Queen Anne's Lace" next to a gold fish pool.  Oil on panel, 12" x 12", c. 2015. Code #121515 S 12x1.  SOLD.

I want to wish you a Happy New Year and many blessings in 2016!  I appreciate you very much!  You are the reason I continue to paint and create beautiful artwork to enrich our living spaces and lives!  Thank you for your interest and support over the years!  I plan to make 2016 the best year ever with more fabulous paintings!

Please be sure to sign up for my email newsletter in the upper right box so you can get a once a week email with new paintings in progress and also when they become available as well as upcoming shows, news, specials, info about classes and workshops, tools and gear, and fun insights into the life of an artist.  Thanks!

Cheers,

Charlene

Dad in Brown County

Loren Marsh on the front porch of his cabin in Brown County, Indiana, 1946-48.

Blog updated 12-22-15.

At a family gathering this past weekend, my sister gave me a packet of photos that had been stashed in our uncle's barn.  At first she tried to tell me this picture with our Dad was from the Philippines during WW II but I knew right away from the log cabin, the trees and the hills in the background that it was from my home, Brown County!  I was very excited to find this photo of my Dad, Loren Charles Marsh, sitting on the front porch of his Brown County cabin where he lived while attending law school one county over in Bloomington, Indiana.  Despite the numbers "44" written on the back, the photo must have been taken sometime between 1946 and 1948.

I got this email from my brother with updated and corrected information:

Hi Charlene,

1.  Dad tried to join the Navy after Pearl Harbor, but was rejected due to eye sight.  He graduated from University of Chicago in June, 1942 and was drafted into the Army after that.  He was not considered I-A.   I think he was I-B because of his vision.

2. He taught radar, which was secret and highly classified, in Norfolk, Virginia his first two years.  He told me that the army forgot about his classification sometime in 1943 or 1944 and shipped him to New Guinea and then the Philippines.   He said when they were at sea, they had to be very quiet and keep all the lights out.  Dad said he should have stopped smoking and used the cigarettes to start a laundry. He said he could have made a lot of money.  <<Side note:  Mom wouldn't marry a smoker so Dad quit before they got married.>>

3.  Dad did have appendicitis in the army.   I think it was around 1944.  I'm pretty sure he was not sent home.

4.  He also told me he got one combat star as he was on an island that had action on the other side.  I think I have it and some of his other WWII stuff.  In a soldier's parents' homes, a blue star was displayed for active duty and a gold star for a son killed in action.

5.  There were 16,000,000 men from the US in WWII and 250,000 were killed, which is around 1400 per week or 5600 per month.   Obviously, this was not advertised widely.   Grandma and Grandpa were very worried about Dad being killed in the war.

6.  He also told me that generally the Marines would go in first and the Army followed.  If the Army saw action, that meant the Marines were losing.

7.  He returned in January,1946.  He said he returned to the "world" by sailing under the Golden Gate bridge in SF.   He said the first thing he drank was milk and it was great.   Of course he had a beer after that.   He said it took months to get everyone out of the army.  After he landed in CA, he took a train home to Indiana.

8.  After he returned, he signed up for the GI bill, was admitted to IU Law School and went 2 1/2 years, graduating in 1948.  After graduation he returned to Muncie, met Mom, got married, started a law practice, and had us.

8.  As you may know, I have videos of Grandpa discussing WWI and Dad discussing WWII.  I need to get them edited, maybe with John Marsh's help.

9.  Dad died in 2007 and is buried at Butler, a military cemetery in Springfield, IL, dating back to the Civil War.

P.S.  Dad's favorite poet was JW Riley and artist TC Steele.

James Whitcomb Riley (October 7, 1849 – July 22, 1916)

Theodore Clement Steele (September 11, 1847 – July 24, 1926)

Love, Keith

Dad would speak fondly of his time in the Brown County Art Colony where he enjoyed hob nobbing with the artists and seemed to be particularly fond of Jack (Georges) LaChance.  He also knew Marie Goth, V.J. Cariani, and C. Curry Bohm, among others.  I am very proud to continue the legacy of Brown County artists that my Dad always spoke so highly of and was thrilled to be a part of in the hay day of the 1940's.  As far as I know, this is the only picture of him in Brown County during this time period.  I do not know who took the picture.

Loren Marsh in either New Guinea or the Philippines during World War II.

Sometimes I wonder if Dad retreated to Brown County to decompress after the war.  Commuting to Bloomington every day could not have been easy back then given the bad roads and distance and winter weather.

My Dad was a gentle, kind, friendly, sensitive soul so it doesn't surprise me to see all the photos of him socializing with the indigenous peoples and even holding their babies.  Growing up, whenever I would hear people disparage and joke about cut throat lawyers, I was always a bit mystified because my Dad, a lawyer, was such a good guy with more integrity in his pinky finger than most people have in their whole body! And it wasn't just a naive, starry eyed daughter's opinion.  Many folks have come to me in later years to tell me what a great guy my Dad was and all the wonderful things he did to help them.

If anyone has any additional information or corrections please contact me.  I plan to update this blog as I get new information.  

Please be sure to sign up for my email list (top right of this blog) or at www.CharleneMarsh.com to get updated info about shows, new paintings, exclusive offers when new paintings are available, work in progress, and fun stories like this one. 

Thanks for reading!  Happy Trails and Merry Christmas! 

Charlene

Poppies 112215 S 12x12

Poppies

I start the painting on a panel tinted with naphthol crimson and sketch the basic elements using a brush dipped in linseed oil and a cerulean and magenta mix.  I use a very limited palette when I paint and will cover that in another blog.

I paint 99% with a palette knife once the initial sketch is drawn.  The knife is great for mixing colors and applying the paint to the panel.  The panel provides a sturdy support for the vigorous knife work. 

I paint in the dark shapes first then the bright pure color of the flowers.

I cover the entire support with the basic colors and values before I go back in with details and fine tuning.

I add the final details and pull out any foreground elements.  The final painting:  Poppies, #112215 S 12x12, oil on panel.

Arts in the Park Grant

I am really excited to announce that I have been awarded a $3000 Arts in the Park grant by the Indiana Arts Commission and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, in celebration of Indiana's bicentennial in 2016.  Here is the summary of my proposed project:  

"The artist will backpack oil painting supplies into the forest in all four seasons to paint "en plein air" in the Brown County State Park to capture the spirit and beauty of the forest. The artist will demonstrate to and engage with the public while working to raise awareness of fine art and the natural environment. The artist plans to create four, plein air oil paintings, one in each season of the year.  The artist will use social media to promote the events and engage the public."

I plan to keep you updated with the progress of the paintings and grant project as we go along.  Stay tuned!

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Thanks so much for checking in!

Happy trails!

Charlene

P.S.  I love to hear from you so leave a comment if you like. 

 

Emily Carr's Trees

I have just discovered Emily Carr, whose painting "Forest Interior" just sold at auction for $200,000. Carr, an artist who painted the forest of Canada, lived from 1871 to 1945.  Considered "eccentric", she determined her own path at total odds with the Victorian times in which she lived, hiking deep into the forest to paint.  At one point, she became so discouraged with the lack of interest in her work, that she almost quit painting but, after connecting with a couple members of the Group of Seven, she was reinvigorated to keep painting her beloved trees until her death.   

The following is from this website:
http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/canadian/Emily-Carr.html 
 
Untitled (Forest Interior Black and Grey) - c.1930   by Emily Carr 

The facts: Emily Carr, born in 1871 in Victoria, B.C., studied art in England and was a competent watercolorist (instruction in oils being reserved for men). She made a meager living teaching art classes, renting rooms out in her house, and taking care of people's dogs, but her passion was for the wild--the vast primeval forests and Indian civilization vanishing around her. She studied painting (oils this time) in pre-World War I France, discovered Impressionism and the Fauves, returned home and really painted, to the horror of the critics (see above). Like most independent women, she was seen as eccentric, and ignored.  She finally achieved national (if not local) recognition when, at 57, she was invited to show her work in the National Gallery in Ottawa, where a critic declared her art "as big as Canada itself." (Emily was "thrilled purple.") After two heart attacks and a stroke, she kept on painting, saying, "Don't pickle me away as done!" She died in 1945.

Emily Carr's Trees
Emily Carr experienced an ecstatic identification with the spirit of nature, particularly as she found it in British Columbia. There the cool, gray climate, the proximity of water and most particularly the presence of trees offered her endless opportunity for artistic reflection and growth. 

To speak of Emily Carr's trees is to seize on the central subject of her work, both as metaphor and form. Like a great axis mundi, the tree centers and grounds most of her paintings. And as a mythico-ritual subject in Carr's work, the tree corresponds in importance to the centerpost often present in her paintings of the homes of native peoples in the Pacific Northwest. 

In 1935 Carr spoke before a literary society in Victoria about her art, a talk later published as "The Something Plus in a Work of Art." That "something," Carr explained, was what characterized great works of art - a kind of spiritual connection between the artist and an ideal. It was a connection that echoed Plato as well as the transcendentalists, whom she quoted. But it was more. Carr also brought the Japanese concept of Sei Do into her definition: "the transfusion into the work of the felt nature of the thing to be painted." Like Georgia O'Keeffe, Carr was receptive to principles and practices of Asian art. Carr's influences were received via other artists, particularly Mark Tobey, whose advice and teaching she had sought a few years earlier. 

The felt nature of the thing - its essence, its distinguishing core. For a painter whose chief subject was trees, Sei Do was treeness, and the expression of it her life's work. Carr had begun to discover its power very early in her career, when she animated trees in a 1905 political cartoon for a Victoria weekly periodical. Captioned "The Inartistic Alderman and the Realistic Nightmare," the cartoon was accompanied by the following poem:
"Ye ghosts of all the dear old trees, The oak, the elm, the ash, Nightly those gentlemen go tease, Who hew you down like trash."
 
Carr, it seems, had already seen the dangers posed by unrestrained tree cutting, a cause she would champion all her life. Trees, she suggests, possess a life of their own and should not be wantonly felled. It was an idea that was rarely popular in British Columbia, where the logging industry yearly consumed ever more of the virgin forests. Cartooning could not hold Carr's interest for long; she was after something more deeply expressive in the forest. In 1934 she chastised herself for flagging in her work: "I am hedging, not facing the problem before me how to express the forest - pretending I must do this and that first ... but the other should come first; it's my job."
By that time Carr had spent years investigating the forest, absorbing all she could of tree existence. Her journals are full of her communion with trees, her admiration of them, and, ultimately, her close identification with them. Because Carr wrote so much about her life and her artistic struggle - unlike O'Keeffe - we can more readily see how she projected her feelings onto trees. Typical are her remarks "Trees are so much more sensible than people, steadier and more enduring" and "I ought to stick to nature because I love trees better than people." The latter statement echoes that of O'Keeffe to her friend Hartley. 

In their paintings of trees both Carr and O'Keeffe made transcriptions from visual experience, and each artist searched out rhythmic patterning and movement within arboreal structure, although there is no evidence that either painter knew the other's work before 1930. Both often cropped trees, and both made much of the negative spaces between branches. Carr's work in the 1920S usually stayed closer to gritty, palpable realism, while O'Keeffe's toyed with space and pressed toward decorative abstraction. The differences are significant.
In 1930 Carr's and O'Keeffe's interest in trees intersected. That spring Carr visited New York, where, in the company of Arthur Lismer, an acquaintance who was a member of the Group of Seven, she sought out new painting. At An American Place a number of O'Keeffe's paintings were still on exhibit from her annual show. Most were based on her previous summer's visit to Taos, including The Lawrence Tree. Carr and O'Keeffe apparently discussed the painting at some length, during which O'Keeffe related the work's connection both to her experience at the Lawrence cabin and to Lawrence's passage about the great pine in St Mawr. Apparently these ideas lingered in Carr's mind, for later that year she copied Lawrence's description into her journal, though with a qualifying comment: "It's clever, but it's not my sentiments nor my idea of pines, not our north ones anyhow. I wish I could express what I feel about ours, but so far it's only a feel and I have not put it into words." 

More information on the Group of Seven: 
http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/canadian/The-Group-of-Seven.html 

The Forest Lover,  a novel written by Susan Vreeland about Emily Carr's life follows the rebel Canadian painter into the British Columbia wilderness. 

Thanks for reading!  

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Magic Lilies and Hollyhocks 112415 S 12x12

As the days grow shorter and  grayer and the nights grow longer and colder,  I thought it would be nice to paint a cheery, summer, flower scene to remind us of warmer, lighter days that will return.

I start with a sketch made with a brush dipped in a mix of magenta and cerulean blue.  Then I start by mixing some deep, rich greens, blocking in the darkest darks using a palette knife to both mix the colors and apply the paint.

Then I block in the colors and values over the entire panel.  I block in a goldfish pool in the lower right area and lay out where hollyhocks rise in the back.  Magic lilies appear in the pumpkin patch.
 

 
Once I have the basic blocks of shapes and colors I go into the details and fine tuning.  Queen Anne's Lace and marigolds dance across the surface and details added to the overflowing flowers.  I pull out any shapes that need to sit in front of other background shapes.  Here is the finished painting, "Magic Lilies and Hollyhocks", oil on panel, 12" x 12", 112415 S 12x12:  
 

Thanks for checking in and following my artistic journey!

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Happy Trails! 

Charlene

Enchanted Forest Sunset Snow

We had our first snowfall of the season yesterday!  At times, big, fluffy, thick flakes fell covering the ground but it was too warm for the snow to stick too long.  Because it is the firearms deer hunting season, I do not go out to paint in the woods although I still go out for a daily hike.  I keep Kendra on a leash so everyone stays safe, including the deer which she can flush out for the hunters.

To commemorate the first snow of the season, I want to share the creation of this little painting.  I love these sunset scenes in the snowy forest and never tire of painting them.  They are hard and rare to capture on location, "en plein air", so I like to re-capture that energy back in the studio.  The peace and beauty of the forest is unsurpassed at that twilight hour!

As usual, I start by blocking in the darks first.  Then add the snow with the blue sky, turning peach, reflecting off of it.  Then I block in the sky.

At this point, I start to add the trees.  First the major trees then the smaller ones and branches criss-crossing the landscape.  You can see where background elements cross over foreground elements as I work the entire surface.  I add the reflection in the water on the creek.

I make sure to pull out the foreground trees and branches from the background so they sit forward.  Here is the finished painting:

"Sunset in the Snowy Forest", oil on panel, 6" x 8", #111015 s 6x8 no1

Thanks for tuning in!  Happy Trails!

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Warm regards,

Charlene