Posted by Birgit Zipser on September 28th, 2009
20 x 30 cm detail from ‘Longing for Pondicherry’, Linen on wood, 70 x100 cm, in progress
Hanneke van Oosterhout just emailed me a detail from her latest painting showing a watermelon resting in an earthenware bowl. When I first discovered Hanneke, she was painting roses. I am able to admire one of them because it graces my dining room. Hanneke’s painting shows a yellow rose standing in streaming water while stretching upwards, both lovely and powerfully, with one of its leaves fluttering downwards. more… »
Posted by Birgit Zipser on September 12th, 2009
Art supply companies sell pre-stretched canvases, wood and hardboard panels with only a limited number of dimensions. Standard width/length ratios are 1 x 1, 1 x 2, 2 x 3, 3 x 4 and 4 x 5. If I want to use a photograph of my camera as a motif, a 2 x 3 panel would be the most suitable to represent the full picture. Musing on dimensions, the golden ratio came to mind – 1 x 1.618 – easy to remember because 1.6 km equal a mile.
Here is a photograph cropped to fit the golden ratio with respect to width and length:
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Posted by Birgit Zipser on August 21st, 2009
The depiction of waves is a cherished painterly activity. Here is one of my studies depicting double waves.
SBD080709, 16 x 12 in, 41 x 31 cm; oil on board
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Posted by June Underwood on August 17th, 2009
In a few months, I’ll be back in Nevada, tackling the Amargosa Playa again. This time I want to do a set of painted panels, five 5×5 foot ones (25 horizontal feet). I have various notions of how this might work out in paint, but will have to wait until I get there to see what actually happens. I also want to do something similar in textiles, perhaps only some preliminary image making, saving stitching for when I return to Portland. But I am mulling over both projects in my mind, trying to think how I might work them.
I just read a blog entry (dated August 17) by Jenny Bowker, who is an art colleague who works in quilted textiles. She tackled the same kind of landscape and had the same kind of hopes about what she might evoke, with some additions that the Amargosa doesn’t have: the presence of a handsome driver and some marvelous land forms. Her blog entry, which finishes with the photo of her textile work, is worth reading for sheer pleasure. But it makes me somewhat nervous about my ambitions.
Here’s the photo of Jenny’s artwork, which won a prize at the Canberra quilt exhibit and, I’m sure, will be seen often at other places around the globe.
Jenny Bowker, Sandstorm over the White Desert, about life size (see her blog entry for scale)
And here is an photo or two of what I will be facing, again
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Posted by June Underwood on August 10th, 2009
Some of you already know that I’ve been copying Emily Carr paintings for the last week or so, attempting to understand more fully how she does forests and trees.
Emily Carr, Cedar Sanctuary, 38 x 26″, Oil on paper, 1942
I’ve learned a lot through this exercise [ including the rule that I must paint-over or otherwise destroy the copies I’ve made before someone comes into the studio and exclaims with pleasure over them. Such an exclamation forces me to admit that what the complimenter is seeing is a copy, causing embarassment all round.] Carr’s finding of shapes in the complexity, of making color within the shapes, and of “draping” her branches are all valuable for my own art-making thoughts.
However, during this process, I had other kinds of questions occur.
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Posted by Birgit Zipser on August 8th, 2009
What came to mind is ‘das Unvollendigte’, translated into English as ‘the Unfinished’. Below are three paintings that I worked on off and on since the spring.
The first one is a view from a Pierce Stocking Drive dune.
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12×16, oil on board.
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Posted by Birgit Zipser on August 4th, 2009
To learn about fluid dynamics and how to depict it, I will now use this picture as a motif for painting:
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