12 in 16

As this year comes to a close I have put together a review of my creative journey for 2016. From the over 60 works that I catalogued this year I selected 12 that seem to best represent the scope of my artwork over this past year. I have made some changes in my approach to making art and am overflowing with ideas and plans for continuing on this journey of creativity.

Landscape Study VIII

watercolor

6 x 6 inches

sold

I began 2016 with a continuation of my landscape theme in watercolor in this series of small studies. They were very satisifying to paint and the small format meant that I could move from one idea to the next fairly quickly.

Pink Joy

watercolor

8 x 10 inches

available from the artist

I also painted a series of flowers in watercolor. I loved painting these delightful tulips!

Oceanides

watercolor

11 x 14 inches

available from the artist

I also continued exploring my love of painting the ocean surf and slightly increased my format with a few of them.

Behind Pompano

watercolor

6 x 8 inches

available

This small painting was significant to me in that it was a scene I had attempted to paint many times and scrapped over and over again, until I got it right with this one.

Water Sky V

watercolor

11 x 14 inches

available from the artist

I completed a small series exploring the ocean and sky.

Earth Sky III

watercolor

11 x 14 inches

available at Hands Gallery

And then went on to do a related series about earth and sky.

Simple Hours

watercolor

10 x 14 inches

available at Hands Gallery

With my love of landscape I spent some time pushing the interpretation of an image in watercolor, the beginning of a desire for greater abstraction.

The View From Here

watercolor

11 x 14 inches

available

In a series based on the Raven Rocks overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway I relied more heavily on developing compositions in my sketchbook, and began working with color in a more interpretative way rather than relying on local color for my color palette.

All The Quiet Places

mixed water media

10.5 x 14 inches

available

And when Hurricane Matthew struck my beloved Edisto Island last October, I created a series of Edisto paintings, using some of the mixed media I had been experimenting with and my own interpretative color palette.

untitled (Mountain mixed I)

mixed water media

8 x 11

available from the artist

With a desire to futher explore abstraction I experimented with mixed water media on paper. Encouraged by the results I wanted to see where I could take this with acrylic paint.

Every Road Home

acrylic, graphite and Inkense on paper

8 x 11 inches

available from the artist

So with a handful of acrylic tubes I did more exploration on paper. My intent was to paint non-objectively, but mountain landscapes still showed up.

Passing Days

acrylic and graphite on paper

8 x 11 inches

available from the artist

Since doing these abstracted landscapes on paper I am in the process of continuing this series on larger cradled panels as well as having a few canvases on standby. There are other themes I plan to explore in acrylic and with this intuitive painting approach. I am eager to continue with these works in the new year to see where all of this takes me. I do plan on working with watercolor again too, and I would like to increase the scale of my watercolor paintings. Of course my sketchbook will continue to be an important part of my creative process.

As for the other parts of my creative life, I plan to continue to add designs to my Spoonflower collection. That is a process and product I find deeply satisifying. And crochet. I was busy with holiday gifts and am now making something for me, but once that is complete there will be more crocheting happening too. All of these are important parts to my creative life. And who knows? There just may be new creative adventures to take in 2017! What are your creative plans for the new year? Trying a new media or method? Wherever your creativity takes you I wish you all a very happy and art-filled new year!

100 Paintings

A brief departure from my usual Tuesday sketchbook posts to announce my goal for 2010.

100 paintings.

I know this a bold move, over ambitious perhaps, but this is my new project and starting point for the year.

It all started in October when I bought myself a set of water mixable oils. Now, you know that I am no stranger to painting in oil, even though it has been quite a long time since I put a brush to canvas. Over the past several years I have made a few attempts to paint with acrylic but just couldn't get the results I was after with that media. And not wanting the fumes and mess of oil paint I let the idea of painting go. But when I began reading about water mixable oils I was intrigued and wanted to give them a try.

I have been playing with these oil paints for a couple of months now and the process feels very comfortable and familiar. I wondered what would happen if I made 100 paintings. Where will this take me? I want to find out. I can't say whether I will actually complete 100 paintings in a year's time, but that is my goal. I will consider the goal achieved when I reach 100 paintings, even if it takes more than a year.

This past year I have been swimming in ideas, images that I wanted to explore but the drawing process slowed me down so I was becoming frustrated. But with paint the ideas flow much more quickly. I plan to keep these paintings fairly small, in a size that can be completed in one or maybe two sittings. From this body of work I hope to find inspiration for larger paintings later on.

In addition to making paintings I intend to continue with sketching and drawing. I am not placing any expectations on these activities however. I see drawing and sketching as a counterbalance to painting. For me, painting is active while drawing is meditative. Expand and contract. Like breathing in and out.

So watch this space! I will return to a Sketchbook Tuesday post next week as well as begin to post my paintings in the new year. Happy New Year everyone!

I used to paint

Maybe you knew that. When I was cleaning out the attic last week I came across some photos of my old paintings. Works I had forgotten about. I thought it might be fun to share them here.

This first is from around 1988, but I didn't keep very detailed records back then so I can only guess at the date. I was fresh out of grad school and the professor and I were living in an apartment in the heart of Cincinnati. I was into using stencils back then. I would cut out stencil shapes and repeat them on the canvas, building up layers of painted shapes. This painting was done in oil and stencils were used for the flowers and leaves. It was about 24 x 36 inches. Again, I'm going on memory because of my poor record keeping.

In 1989 we moved to North Carolina. During the summer of 1992 we took a three week train trip all around the US, stopping at various points of interest. I was in awe over the landscape of the southwest and did a series of paintings during the following year or so based on the images I had gathered from our travels. This one is in oil, 36x36 inches, inspired by the landscape of the Grand Canyon.

While on that trip we drove a rented car all around Santa Fe, New Mexico, looking for Georgia O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch. This next painting is from O'Keeffe inspired country, also in oil. It is actually the center panel of a five panel piece, each panel is 20 x 24 inches. I still have these paintings stored in our basement. The early nineties was not a great time to be doing landscapes in the academic circles I traveled in. Of course, the internet had not arrived so networking with other artists was limited by geography. And I was living in a small southern college town.

So my methods changed a bit. I brought back the stencils and combined them with landscape, making the landscape image a view through the picture plane like a view out a window. The symbols suggested some kind of added meaning, (for the sake of the 'academics') and reminded the viewer that this indeed was a painting.

These were acrylic and oil on canvas, from around 1995 - 97. The first is 20 x 18 inches and the one below is 30 x 30 inches. I would do an underpainting in acrylic, often in complementary colors, and then go back into it with oil. I also made stamps of various textures that I would use to add textured impressions on the surface. I had more success with this series. Got a few into regional and national competitions and even had local gallery representation for a while. Some sold. Some are in our basement, some I still don't want to let go.

In 1998 I stopped painting because I didn't want to be exposed to the fumes of oil paint and solvents while I was pregnant with kiddo. It wasn't until around 2006 that I even began making art again. But this time things had changed in the art world. I had a computer, and the internet. There were now communities of artists to network with from all around the world. And learning opportunities at my fingertips. I discovered that I really liked to draw. And well, you know the rest.

Color project for June

Elizabethan Gardens, Manteo NC
colored pencil in Moleskine sketchbook
©2008 Ann Thompson Nemcosky

For the month of June I have been given the gift of time. Something that is a rare commodity and always in great demand in my day-to-day activities. It comes in the form of a few hours three mornings a week while my dear hubby will be taking kiddo to her tennis lessons. Come July he's back in the classroom and I'll be on duty again from there on out. The rest of my days will chiefly be occupied with homeschool lessons (yes, we school year round - believe me, it's loads easier) and all the other stuff moms need to do. But for the next four weeks, those morning hours will be mine.

And that's what gave me an idea to do a special project, something I have wanted to do yet didn't have the time to accomplish - paint. I haven't really attempted to put paint to canvas in over nine years. Besides, I have many ideas in the works for new projects in colored pencil. I wavered over the sense of this project, to indulge myself with painting, when I could very easily fill that space of time with so many worthwhile activities. My kitchen cabinets are screaming to be scrubbed and our attic is a nightmare of clutter. Or I could continue with my colored pencil drawing projects, getting oh so much accomplished. Then I saw this post about color from Katherine Tyrell on her blog, Making a Mark.

Well, that did it. I have committed myself to a month of working in paint. I spent the day setting up a temporary "studio" in our garage, the only available space in our little mountain cottage suitable for making a mess. Since the weather is warm, working there will not be a problem, and I added a couple of clip-on lights to brighten it up. I already had a good supply of paints and brushes and a quick trip to the art supply store filled any holes I had in supplies.

Katherine Tyrell's extensive outline for her color project is very inspiring and something I will be following very closely as I dive into my paints. And my goals for this project? I would like to see if I can come away from my own personal painting workshop with a better sense of how to use color more interpretatively than representationally. When I do return to my colored pencil drawing I would like to be comfortable with a more expressive rather than a literal use of color.

I do still plan to continue with drawing in all my various sketchbooks. Whether I will share any of my paintings here remains to be seen. It all depends on how things go. Stay tuned. . .

Skies

Variably Cloudy
acrylic and oil on canvas
36 x 24 inches
copyright 1996 by Ann Thompson Nemcosky



I was still in college when I first discovered the art of John Constable. Seeing a small exhibition of his sky studies at a local museum, I was fascinated by this concept of focusing solely on sky as a subject matter and filed it away. Later, after having earned my degree, I returned to landscape as a subject and spent some time developing images of skies. The painting above is one example. (I do apologize for the poor photo though, the fish-eye effect is distracting, it's not that way in real life!) Somewhere along the way I also acquired a book of Constable's paintings, Constable by John Sunderland. Published in 1972 by Phaidon Press Limited I see from my Amazon search that this book I picked up used many years ago in a used bookstore is no longer in print. Anyway, it seemed fitting to begin my exploration of John Constable's work with the subject of sky.

John Constable, 1776-1837, was a landscape painter who held an interest in painting the truth in nature, even the precise weather of a particular time and day. In doing so he rejected those of his contemporaries in 18th century landscape painting who made generalized and idealized depictions of nature.

The American Artist Drawing Magazine Summer 2007 issue features an interesting article about John Constable's Sketchbooks. The article discusses how he carried with him pocket-sized sketchbooks in which he did graphite studies for large oil paintings. For Constable, sketchbook drawing advanced his skills as he refined his method of showing the effect of light and shadow. Yet even these small drawings show his attention to the sky as he managed to capture the quality of light at a particular time of day.

There is more concerning his interest in the quality of light that I will share later as I work on my own Constable inspired landscape drawings. But for now, I have come across an interesting correlation in the writing of Winnifred Gallagher's The Power of Place, where she states,

"Like other living things, however, our species has evolved over the millions
of years to respond to the cycles of the earth and sun with predictable
biochemical and behavioral changes. Environmentally minded scientists have
begun to question the trade-offs we unwittingly make in order to live sealed
up inside an artificially heated, cooled, and lighted world that is structured
around economic rather than biologic concerns."


And finally, I can't leave out the John Constable art project I did with my daughter a couple of years ago. We spent a year going through
Discovering Great Artists by Mary Ann Kohl, by choosing an artist to study each month and ending the month with a project in the style of that artist's work. This book is a terrific introduction into art appreciation for kids ages 4-12. We certainly had a lot of fun learning about different artists and working on the projects together!

Watercolor After John Constable
approx. 12 x 9 inches
copyright 2005 by HRN
Private Collection

"Sing a Song of Seasons!"

Color Study #10

watercolor on paper
approx. 6 x 6 inches
copyright 2007 HRN
Private Collection

In the other gardens

And all up the vale,
From the autumn bonfires
See the smoke trail!

Pleasant summer over
And all the summer flowers,
The red fire blazes,
The grey smoke towers.

Sing a song of seasons!
Something bright in all!

Flowers in the summer,
Fires in the fall!

from Autumn Fires by Robert Louis Stevenson

I have been spending the evening searching for poetry to use in our homeschool. So good for speech and memory practice, we try to study poetry often. There are many children's poetry books available, some I find at our local library, but I have also discovered some great sites online where you can browse poems by subject if you are searching for something specific. Like autumn themed poetry, for example. One such site that I often visit for poems to add to our collection is Can Teach: Songs & Poems, http://www.canteach.ca/elementary/songspoems.html. They have many poems appropriate for children conveniently listed under subject headings.

And speaking of things appropriate for children, this comes under the heading of what I wish I had known when my daughter was still a baby. Earlier this year I read Magical Child by Joseph Chilton Pearce. It this 1977 classic he discusses the stages of child development and how they relate to growth and learning. With, "The child's need is to be a child," Pearce challenges the then and still popular educational model of forcing children into learning situations before they are developmentally ready and the damage that can be done as a result. Yet his message is positive in that by examining our ideas of parenting we can see where we are and only come away better.

The image I included with this post is part of a series of color studies my daughter has been working on lately. They are all wonderfully lively and unique expressions of her response to color and form. She says that she is not trying to paint anything specific, she is just working with color in her paintings. And she has done a lot of these lately!