Bobcat Finished

Looking Backwards ...
Finally finished the bobcat today.  After painting it the first time, it just did not look natural in there, so I found another photo of one and repainted it in a completely different position.  Had to make up the light a bit as the light was coming from another direction, but I'm happy with it now.

Florida bobcat

Finished most of the corrections since my last posting, and also added spider lilies in back of the bobcat.  Had to paint them rather primitively as they did not show up at a distance of 12', as that's the distance the painting will be viewed from up over an entryway.  The gallery-wrapped edges are also finished.  Need to smooth out the sky color and water color/ripples, add some dead or drooping palm fronds on the palms, and it will be basically done.  The new owners will come and add their edits hopefully this weekend, which I will finish asap and then my friend Greg Hills will help me deliver it with his big van.

For now, I'll turn in and look forward to seeing it afresh and in brighter natural light tomorrow morning.

Adios amante del arte!
Judy Burgarella
Blogger

A Jump Ahead

In The Interest of Time . . .

By the time I finished the first page of this blog, I realized that writing and posting would take up time that would be better spent painting.  And so a lot more has been done since my last posting, however there's lots more work to be done.  Below are some animals I recently painted in.

Pair of Sandhill Cranes

Along with this pair of sandhill cranes, I began putting in grassy areas and shrubs along the banks.  Loved painting the sandhills, hated painting the grass.  Every element has to be considered by how it will look from at least 12 feet away, as it will be hung high in an open room.  I played with darkening the sand--which looked more believable close up--however at a 12-foot distance the contrast was lost and it looked uninteresting.  So back to the drawing board.  I may add more creeping vines and dead foliage, if it doesn't interfere with contrast and values.

Below are my favorites - spoonbills.  It's a thrill to see these colorful beauties flying overhead, which I witnessed just a week ago not a mile from my house.  Their pinks seem brighter when in flight against the teal of the sky or whites of the clouds.  Since they are small and will be seen from a distance, I bumped the color up slightly.  The painting is mostly greens, browns and blue, so these little flying jewels popped the whole painting.

Spoonbills, the "Flying Jewels" of the aviary world

More trees along the River

Added Palms and trees along the river bank, along with creeping vines and bushes, trying to stay true to what is actually along the Sebastian River based on photo references.

Grasses and vines, along with water reflections were added.

Beautiful Morning Glories

I spotted these beautiful cobalt blue morning glories growing on an old stump along the railroad tracks and had to have them.  They were the most beautiful big morning glories I had ever seen.  So I came back with a hand spade to dig them up, but could not get to any of the roots, so I ended up just ripping off some of the tangled vines.  I put them in a vase of water, set them on my lanai and forgot about them.  Lo and behold, they rooted!  I planted them against a trellis archway leading to my lanai (porch) and am now waiting for my first flower.  So now I am happy to say they are memorialized in this painting.  Viewing them at at a 10-foot distance they probably won't be very impressive, but they are there anyway.  Nice addition of color with all that green.

Added encroaching foliage in the form of saw grass, lantana and grass along the foreground banks, in addition to breaking up the outer bank shore for less uniformity and more interest.  More work still has to be done on the outer bank to make it a bit more wild looking, i.e., old Florida.

Little Palm

 Added a little palm I found in one of the River pictures, however I had to paint it twice because the lighter palm fronds got lost in the river, so it has rather dark palm fronds.  I'll be painting in some vines or sawgrass growing at the base.  The blob of grass on the bottom right side was how I basically blocked in the grass areas before painting grass blades which is quite tedious.  The oak across the river needs moss also.

Twin palms

I added these twin palms on the far right side of the painting last week, and today began painting the blocked in grasses out in preparation for painting an opening in the sawgrass for a bobcat to be lurking out of.  That will be fun to paint, but tricky with the perspective seeing I have to make a dark opening in the bushes for him to contrast out of.

Whenever I'm doing a painting, when the painting is considered by me to be finished, it really isn't.  It's that time when I set it up on my kitchen counter to rest for a few days, with a clip board underneath it.  In this way I can see it with a fresh eye for a few days, and make my notes on the clip board when it passes into view as I walk by it each day.  I may notice an off-color, a needed value change, elimination of an element, etc.  Plus Bob, who is not a painter, will give his critique which I may or may not pay attention to.  He's usually right though darn it!  The size of this painting dictates the number of finishing touches, which are many.  It will not have the finished look close up like a fine art painting, but there are corrections that I will make even though most people will never notice, and there are 5 pages of them.  I divided the canvas into 4 sections--A, B, C and D, with each section being 3 feet, with blue tape.  Each section has a separate page for revision notes, with one extra page for overall consistent corrections.  Most will be minor and take little time, but there are dozens of them in total, and probably more to come as I continue painting.  Depending on what crazy unforeseen events may happen, I should have this finished in a week or so.

Well, that's all for today, I should have been painting instead of blogging, but I did work on a gem of a pelican painting today too, aside from working on the river painting.  Life is good when at this age one can be so productive and create something that will be enjoyed long after I'm gone (which I hope is none too soon!)

Judy Burgarella,
Blogger

St. Sebastian River . . . by Brush

The Saint Sebastian River, also called Sebastian Creek, is a beautiful three-pronged, mostly unspoiled, river which is a tributary of the Indian River Lagoon, west and north of the City of Sebastian, my home town.

Me and my husband Bob moved from Clinton Connecticut, and picked Sebastian after traveling around the east and west coast of Florida and realizing that this was probably the best little town on the Florida coastline.  Still believe it after 11 years.  As an artist I found no problem switching from painting fall leaves, rivers, snow and rocky beaches to painting palm trees, sandhill cranes, tropical rivers, sandy beaches and gators.  It's all good.  And now I can paint outdoors all year long, with bug spray and sunscreen.  But ah, the Saint Sebastian River, now that's a beauty I am happy to paint.  The trick to painting such a beautiful place is to stand on its banks and study it.  I have also kayaked its meandering waterways and taken many photographs of it in all kinds of light.  It is a jewel of a river, although continuously being environmentally challenged.

As an artist I soak in the beauty of all I see, be it a flower, the sky, a piece of fruit, an interesting face, and anything that involves water.  The canal in back of my home is a constant source of enjoyment and action, providing us a view of sparkling water, birds fishing, gators and turtles cutting a path in the waterway or lying on its banks, and watching as others enjoy paddling by our windows.  But the St. Sebastian River is one of my sources of what the old Florida tropics must have looked like before humans created land masses by carving culverts in the swamp and diverting all that water into canals which eventually empty into larger bodies of water or the ocean.

And so I have been commissioned to try to capture the essence of this ecosystem onto a large canvas.  An honor and a challenge it is, and herein I will document some of the progress of this creative endeavor.  Unfortunately, I decided to create this blog after I had already covered the canvas with preliminary compositions, but I think those who love Florida's environment and my artist colleagues may enjoy seeing the remainder of the progress.

At this point, the canvas is completely covered in acrylic paint, the sky having been tweaked and lightened several times.  Much of this painting is a creation of mine, using referenced photographs which I and others have taken of the Saint Sebastian River.

St. Sebastian River Painting in progreess

Below are pictures of my setup.  It is very important to have everything you need, have good lighting, and be as comfortable as possible in order to sustain your inspiration and stamina.  It helps being close to the refrigerator too!

My rolling painting stationt, very handy.

My painting supplies. Note the paint chart--which I encourage my students to create for themselves.

Below is the left side of this painting.  I am in the process of removing a palm tree which I plan to redesign to accommodate other ideas, including a row of turtles on a log on the far bank.  This oak will also be further tweaked.  The water is just roughed in and will be refined.  A close-up of the owl is shown below.

Barred Owl

Left bank with reference photos. Note removal of the palm tree. Changed my mind.

NOW YOU SEE IT ...

Left side with oak tree

NOW YOU DON'T!!

The above section has the palm tree completely deleted, and the grassy area has been lightened.  A dead branch has been added in preparation for a perched egret, at the customer's request.  Background colors have been blocked in, with more bush treaking to come.

Positioning egret on painting

Not being sure where to put an egret on the painting, and exactly what size it should be, I decided to paint one on canvas, cut it out and find just the right spot.  I have done this before in order to choose the best position for an element of a painting.  Although the spot I chose is not fully painted in, I will adjust my ideas for this area to include dark background elements in order to best contrast this white egret.  Below is the final egret painted directly on the canvas.  After placing the bird on the canvas, I drew around its template with vine charcoal so as not to have to draw it all over again.  The vine charcoal wipes off easily with a rag after the paint dries.

Permanent placement of egret in painting.

Added two slash pines behind palms. 

Slash pines are beautiful trees.  Sparse needle-leaves reveal interesting winding branch formations, with trunks of colorful plaque-like plates girdling the tree.  Fun to paint.  Beanie Backus (of A.E. Backus Gallery fame) was the best at painting these.  I would love to paint every needle and plaque with colorful contrasts, but this is a mural-type 5'x12' painting and no time to paint such detail.

Added a palm to foreground to right of oak tree.

What to do with the water.  Every reflection in the water depends on what's in the sky and what I do on the far bank of the river, and also how much of the foreground bank I choose to cover up with shrubs and trees.  Water is complicated: how deep is it, does ground show through?  Are there plants underneath? what is in the sky - clouds (white, dark or bounced with color), sunset, looming storm? Is the wind blowing, which totally changes the reflections from what's on the far bank to what's in the sky; if there is no wind than there will be a mirror reflection of the far bank, in which case the water will be almost invisible.  Is there something in the water that will make ringlets of reflections?   Water is very difficult to make up, one must have reference photos of each situation in the water.  And then still make up everything that happens to make water "beautiful" and "believable."  I will probably paint parts of this water several times before it will be both.

This painting has so many decisions to be made.  This is where an artist earns his pay: composition.  Any good artist can copy someone else's composition, colors, brushstrokes, etc., but the real test comes when you have to create the composition yourself.  If it were a perfect photograph, then half of the problems are solved.  The other half would be the painting, of which mega decisions still have to be made in order for it to be more beautiful than the photograph.  If this were just something that I could copy 100% off of someone else's painting it would have been finished by now.  So much to think about, problems to solve, perspective-contrast-light-color-animals, etc.  It is a phenomenal mental challenge which helps to keep you sharp--in a fun way.  Those who retire and then decide to learn how to paint will find their senses sharpen and their enjoyment of the world around them heightened.  Oh, and they will meet other people who are also discovering the same things happening to them in their later life.  What a gift, to find another way of "seeing, sensing and enjoying" at a time in life when these senses seem to be diminishing.

Well, that's all for now.  I will post more when time.

Judy Burgarella,
Blogger