Today’s Maryland edition of the Washington Post showcases our new Kentlands Exhibit in its Going Out Guide. Congrats to Nancy Butler on the use of her beautiful painting, Difficult Run, to represent the work of the Seven Palettes! Come see this lovely exhibit anytime through September 5th.
Those of you in the Washington, DC area will have several opportunities to check out the iPad as a tool for making art during the next few months.
There will be manageable 2 1/2 hour workshops during which you can get a good feel for ‘what’s the big deal about iPad art’; ‘what if I don’t know anything about iPads’; or ‘what if I don’t know how to draw a straight line!’
And then, if you want to learn more, we offer a couple of day-long workshops during which you can explore some of the details of the intuitive ArtRage app for the iPad.
Here are some of the many uses you can make of ArtRage on the iPad (click image to enlarge):
Last week I taught a one day iPad art workshop to a number of local artists in Lafayette LA and then attended a three-day workshop in watercolor journaling held by Don Getz and organized by my sister Ceci. Another sister, Mercedes, participated in much of the fun, including the iPad session. Since I was so close to home, Ceci and I swung over to Biloxi afterward to visit our dad and his wife and more brothers and sisters.
As for making art while out-of-town, I didn’t paint while teaching. And it was so cold and windy during the plein air workshop that I didn’t do anything of note then either. In fact, after a couple of watercolor/ink drawings, I resorted to my iPad to get something — anything — down before my hands went numb. Though everything is unfinished, I’ll show you the state of play (along with a few photos of what we were memorializing) so you can get a flavor for the beauty of Cajun country. Teaser: we painted the St. John Cathedral Oak, the third largest live oak in the country.
In memoriam.
Remembering those lost in Sandy Hook. An iPad painting, based on a photograph of our beautiful Mississippi Gulf Coast, by my niece, Bridgette O’Keefe Lovelace.
With our two sons and their families, Pat and I spent a peaceful, beautiful and family-ful Thanksgiving in an 100 yr old adobe casa in Santa Fe. Max enjoyed sitting on the casa’s retro-fitted baseboard heating strips and charming everyone in sight. The rest of us enjoyed strolling around the lovely downtown area, hiking in the Bandelier National Monument, eating Southwestern cuisine and soaking up the art and culture.
While we were there, I painted an iPad image of the kiva fireplace in the casa. And since returning, have roughed out an image of the cliffs, fronted by trees, at Bandelier.
the kiva in the casa
Bandelier vista
I feel much less comfortable using the ArtRage watercolor brush (and oil painting tools) than I do with chalk, pen, pencil & paint roller. So I’ve been trying to trudge up the learning curve in watercolor. Here are my two most recent efforts:
A flamenco dancer I photographed during our trip to Cuba last Spring:
Dancing in Havana
And a scene from Glen Echo Park, based on a photograph I took a couple of years ago:
Cuddle Up at Glen Echo Park during a Cloudy Sunset
Yesterday, my husband and I got a bit lost in the wilds of Virginia after taking my cousin to the airport. (We’re Marylanders — Virginia is terra incognito to us!) While we meandered toward home, I doodled an imaginary Fall landscape, using the ArtRage chalk tool to capture the beautiful colors we saw.
Fall Fantasy
Here are some other doodles, made last week while trying to dip a toe into the watercolor tool. As you can tell, I’m not ‘swimming’ yet. Ick.
The Belly Dancer – Back View
The pale pears
Some dear art buddies and I attended a landscape workshop at Deep Creek Lake last weekend, taught by Walt Bartman and managed by his wonderful wife Robyn. The entire group produced some lovely paintings and starts on paintings of the spectacular Fall foliage.
Here are a few of our works:
I love to use art apps to record color sketches quickly, whether sitting by a lovely scene or whipping by in the passenger seat of a car. Photos just don’t ‘cut it’ for this type of use. The camera does not capture colors accurately — at least without time-consuming gyrations. Hauling out paints and nailing the right color note on the fly is also improbable.
With an art app, all you have to do is select the right color from a comprehensive array at your fingertips. Here are several palettes from which I can dial the desired color, swipe it on the screen, and adjust intensity/opacity as desired. The slideshow also includes a few color notations made to capture relative colors, instead of a specific scene.
The Kensington Armory/Town Hall is the site of my third show over Labor Day weekend. The hours are noon to 4 pm Saturday and Sunday, and 9:30 am to 4:30 pm on Labor Day. There will be a public reception Saturday evening from 6:00-7:30 pm.
For this exhibit, I plan to hang four framed paintings and show 10-12 matted originals and possibly prints of recent iPad images in a nearby rack. The slide show below gives a sense of these works — but they look much better ‘in person’. Come see them!