Jan 20, 2013

Lovejoy News for January 15th




In the late morning the neighborhood is shrouded in bright sliver. Not a single crow is seen or heard along twentieth. There are sparrows, a jay, distant birds with long tails and one, lone hummingbird singing from the top of a tree just past Johnson.

Jan 11, 2013

Lovejoy News for January 7th





Winter disguises itself in a balmy dusk. I leave home without a hat and pedal past the crows, still in the tree tops along 20th. One shifts a soft black shoulder against the fading sky. 

Along Balch creek the water cannot contain its joyful reminiscence of summer and the rocks sigh underneath. The space between trees goes black.

Jan 8, 2013

Five Trees



The second coat of gesso is drying on several pieces of plywood on my apartment floor and I finally feel ready to start a series. I love this painting above but the paper warped while I was making it so I am less motivated to keep working on it. It is not as abstract as I imagined when I started working from the sketch below but I like the implied realism. I used generalized memories of the place to fill in the background, which simplifies the landscape.
I've been photographing work lately, it is a bit of a headache since I am not a photographer and have no idea where my computer screen exists in the realm of color accuracy. I feel like I am flying a jet blindly and possibly wasting a lot of time when I could be painting.



Jan 1, 2013

Love Poem for the Spanish Chestnut Grove



I have been a wimp about sketching out in the cold this winter. Maybe I've just been distracted with holidays and not sleeping well, but either way...I haven't kept up with making treescapes. When I decided to paint tree love poems the obvious thing to do was to get out old sketches to work from. Old sketches are perfect because I don't have enough of a memory of what I was looking at to get caught up in making it true-to-life. Instead I can focus on making a good painting out of the feeling of the sketch.

I love this painting, it is one of those pieces that reassure me that what I'm working towards as an artist is actually happening. I want to work on it a bit more but thought sharing it would be a fun way to start the new year. I have an overwhelming stack of sketches that I want to turn into paintings, I will have to make a trip to the lumber store tomorrow for plywood and get going on them. It's tempting to count tree love poems as part of the 100 treescapes but I think they should be separate, even if it takes me years to finish the treescapes because I have so many poems to paint.