Shades of Grey

I am enticed by all the flower catalogs that come in the mail and I do my best to resist buying anything. I know all to well that not many plants will survive the weather or the animals here on the mountainside. But last fall, I couldn't resist the "Reblooming Irises" offered by Brecks. I was anxious all spring to see what flowers would appear. So far, only two of the six plants have bloomed. The earliest was completely white and so pretty. I have to admit, I was hoping for something with more color, since painting white flowers is still intimidating to me. Anything "white" is basically every color but white because of the light reflections and shadows. I took a lot of photos, hoping to get something I felt inspired to paint.

I hesitated over the challenge, but decided to dig in. I experimented with mixing ivory black, yellow ochre and white to get a nice warm grey, as suggested by Helen Van Wyk. This looked pretty good, but when I added some alizarin crimson to get cool shadows, it just seemed a bit pink. The principle is to add cool violets to yellows to get nice shadows. My next attempt I tried dioxazine purple instead of the alizarin crimson and that seemed better. Although, when I was near completion I had the feeling that it just looked too purple and basically awful. Jeff confirmed the too much purple part, so I took heart and added back some more yellow ochre and burnt sienna, which is in the yellow family.

This is the odd thing about painting. Often, it will look like such a failure because it doesn't match what I had in mind. Sometimes if I will just take a break and come back with the idea of judging what is there, not what I think should be there, the painting will magically transform from a complete mess in my mind to something that is not that bad. I definitely had that happen this time and only within a few minutes. I was disappointed because I thought it was so ugly I wasn't going to be able to put it on the blog. When I decided to just judge at it as itself, it suddenly looked much better. It does look different than I imagined, but I will leave it up to you to judge!

Alla Prima

In the spirit of trying different painting techniques, I wanted to try "alla prima" which is an Italian phrase that means "at the outset" or as we would say, "all at once". No underpainting, no preliminary drawing, just putting down the "shapes, tones and colors in one opaque application", as Helen Van Wyk describes it.

I had tried this before with oil paints and ended up with a mess. This time, I chose a subject I have painted before, a pink columbine and I followed Helen's directions exactly. First, prime the canvas gray so it is better to judge the color on. Sketch the placement of the image using paint. Put in the main body tones of the subject. (Not the extreme lights or darks.) Know where you light is coming from and paint the background from light to dark accordingly. Surprisingly, the dark side is where the light is coming from. Add light tones. Know where your focal point is and don't detract from it with extra fussy details elsewhere in the painting. Add dark tones and then the final highlights. Be sure you have layered and overlapped your shapes so that things in the foreground look like they belong there. Piece of cake...

Five hours later I had a pretty good little painting. I was hoping for two hours since my canvas was only 4" x 5", but size doesn't seem to matter when you are learning.

I will now share the amazing answer of what happens when you mix Alizarin Crimson and Viridian Green. I was sure I would get some weird brown, but it was the loveliest shade of purple gray. The color mixing principle I was using was to get the shadow tone of a pink flower by adding it's color complement, green. You can see this color on the pink petals of the columbine. I love learning new things that surprise me and I think I will try this style of painting again.

Jeff's Corner: What? Size doesn't matter??!!

Trying A Different Path

We have had a very wet and cold spring here at 8,500 ft. Amidst the gray and sometimes snowy days, the brave daffodils showed their pretty faces and I felt the definite itch to paint them. I decided to try a different approach and try to capture the concept of their boldness to bloom in such bad weather without my usual careful drawing and reference photos.

I chose an 8 x 10 canvas and decided to use acrylic paints because I wanted the quick drying time, so I could change the painting more easily as I painted. I struggled with getting the look of seeing the flowers through a wet window and in getting the sense of form to the flowers.

After some thought, I felt I needed a refresher course in basic value study. I found my copy of Helen Van Wyck's book on painting flowers and and went to work on a tiny 2 and 1/2 x 3 inch canvas to study on. She is so good at explaining body tone, body shadow, cast shadow, reflected light and highlights. I had forgotten her great color mixing ideas. Mainly adding the complement to get lively shadows and highlights. A little Alizarin Crimson added to the Cadmium Yellow made my dull shadows look so much more alive.

Feeling more confident, I decided to try another tiny canvas with oils. I didn't do a refined drawing, but I did get a bit stuck and had to get one of my photos out to get the placement of the shadows right. Even Helen was painting from actual flower arrangements, so it is good to have reference. I just want to learn how to not need it so much, and that will just have to take practice.

Does anyone have any guesses what fabulous color you get when you combine Alizarin Crimson with Viridian Green? I will share the amazing answer with you in the next Blog post!

Jeff Corner: My guess is Alizaridian!

Illumination

When we were visiting the church of St. Nicholas in Demre, I thought some of the decorative work in the stone and frescoes reminded me of Celtic designs. I had learned about the famous Book of Kells when I studied art history in college. The intricate Celtic knotwork combined with Christian iconography was very memorable to me. I had even tried my hand at creating some of my own Celtic designs a few years ago. I didn't expect to see artwork that reminded me of that style in Turkey.

Beautiful!

Ink on paper, © Tina M Welter 2005

 

 

I chose these to show the design elements simplified.

I haven't discovered the exact connection, but I did read that the tradition of ornamenting books was something that passed down from Egyptians, to Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and then of course Constantine, who made Christianity legal in 325 A.D. in Turkey. By the early fifth century, the religion had spread to Ireland. The Book of Kells was decorated by Columban monks sometime in the late eighth or ninth century. They may have been located in Iona, a small island in the inner Hebrides, off the western coast of Scotland. This island was known as a center for Celtic Christianity.

Church of St. Nicholas, Demre

Church of St. Nicholas, Demre

Church of St. Nicholas, Demre

Church of St. Nicholas, Demre

I don't know if the decorative work I saw in Turkey had any connection to the later work by the Celtic monks, but they certainly took the style to a new and extremely elegant art form.

Jeff's Corner: St. Nicholas knows if you've been "knotty" or nice!

It's All In The Details

Sometimes I just felt I couldn't take in the whole effect of some of the ancient city ruins we went to. When I realized this, I set a new goal for myself, namely "focus on the details". I wasn't sure how this would play out, but eventually I began to recognize patterns and could get very excited when I found something new.

The cities that had a lot of Roman and Greek influence: Ephesus, Hierapolis, Pergamon and Patara had similiar column styles, square details from the ceilings, the human figure carved in a certain way. I photographed any detail that caught my eye.

I found the carving detail along this "sacred way".

Entrance to the library.

detail from an arch.

One morning when we were seeing Asklepion, the ancient medical center, which is just outside Pergamon, I saw a pattern I hadn't noticed before. I got a photo and moved on. Later that day, we were at the "Red Basilica", which didn't look like much at first since the marble covering was long gone and only the red brick core still stands. There were mostly only marble pieces left, but as I was looking, I realized some of these "details" looked very Egyptian, and the detail on the dress of one of the figures was the same as the detail I had seen earlier at Asklepion! What was going on?

Marble fragments in the foreground.

lower half, back view of her dress.

Top half, with dress bodice.

detail on the dress

We found a plaque that explained that the name "Red Basilica" was a bit misleading. It had originally been built as a second century AD temple to the trinity of Egyptian gods: Serapis, Harpokrates, and Isis. It had been converted into a basilica by the Byzantines. It was one of the seven churches addressed by St. John in the Book of Revelation. He referred to it as home of the "throne of the devil", perhaps he was referring to the Egyptian cult that still had it's followers! We had no idea. I was thrilled to see a little piece of design that had found it's way through time. Does anyone else see how this design has surfaced in our day? Maybe it is just me... tell me what you see.

Jeff's corner: Jeff is headed for New York, but if he has any comments I will post them.

The Chimera Are Real!

Did anyone else read the "Wind in The Door" by Madeleine L'Engle? The Chimera were fantastic beasts, but I always wanted to see one...

Hittite Chimera

We spent the last week on the warm south coast with the orange and lemon trees. The apartment we rented in Kas was lovely and had a great view of the Mediterranean Sea. It was a small town and it helped to be out of the hustle of the big city.

Kas, Turkey

From there we could make day trips to Myra (Demre), which is where St. Nicholas was Bishop and Patara, the Roman city where he was born.

Patara

St. Nicholas

 We climbed up to a Byzantine castle located on a mountain top and admired the strategic view. And we sunned ourselves on Kaputas beach. Jeff was brave enough to get in the coolish water on the spring equinox!

Strategic view from Byzantine Castle at Dereagzi.

Kaputas Beach

 The most surprising day was taking a tram to the top of Mt. Olympos or Tehtali Dag, depending on if you are Greek or Turkish and saw the snow.

View from Mount Olimpos or Tehtali

 After the tram ride, we drove down to sea level again and went looking for Chimera. The ancient sailors thought it was the fiery beast trapped under the mountain. We had a nice trail to hike, but steep, and as we came out of the forest, there were the flames coming from the ground!

Chimera at Olimpos

Of course there is the sensible explanation of methane gas finding it's way to the surface. I prefer the "eternal flame" that the Greeks here used to light their torch for the Anatolian Olympic games, and the best of all, the Chimera.

Jeff's Corner: I wanted to see an R.O.U.S. !

Driving Like Crazy in Turkey

Hello from Izmir! Finally, a computer where there is not a fee to use it. We are staying at the Hilton, which is lovely and helps the culture shock, but it is in the heart of downtown and driving here is rather difficult.

We flew into Istanbul six hours later than planned because we missed our flight in France, because they had to bus us to the other side of the terminal to get to our flight. It would have been much nicer to have walked on the connecting walkway that was indicated on the map. Apparently, it is no longer in use.

Medusa Head.  Roman cistern, underground- Istanbul, Turkey

Arriving in Istanbul at eleven p.m. was probably better than at the five p.m. rush, but after taking an hour to rent our car, we were driving around pretty tired and not understanding a thing about the road signage system....if there IS one. It took us two and a half hours before we finally found our Hilton at three thirty a.m. Nerves were a bit frayed. Instead of sight seeing the next day as planned, we slept all day. We chose to stay at Hilton because Jeff had all kinds of free points to use, but it is definitely not our style to deal with the big cities, even when we are home.

Madonna and Child, mosaic.  Ayasophia church

Central Dome. 

Beautiful Mosaic made with real gold leaf.

We took a taxi to go see the Ayasophia in town the next day. A beautiful church that had been the largest enclosed architectural space in it's day; before St. Peters in Rome was built. The mosaics of the Madonna and Child, and Christ were so delicate, I thought they were paintings. We walked around the Blue Mosque, but didn't make it inside because the long afternoon prayers were in session and we needed to get back to check out of the hotel. Quite powerful to be there with the call to prayer and the faithful going inside to worship.

Ayasophia church balcony

I will try to add pictures next time. We saw Gallipoli and Troy yesterday and Ephesus today, believe me, I have pictures!

The entrance to Troy ll city.

Columns at Ephesus.

The library at Ephesus.

Jeff's Corner: I will never complain about driving in New York again!