SUSPENDED

When you make a mistake in real life, it is sometimes difficult to mop up. And it’s nearly impossible to extricate from some choices one makes. It can take years to set things right.

But . . . with painting, If you don’t like a color you just applied, well, just paint over it with a new color. It’s as if that icky color choice never happened. I love this about painting. 

I recently spent entire days painting a large (for me) painting – 18” x 24” I believe it was. The scene was a rock wall which contains a hanging/suspended pothole beneath what we call a “pour-off” -- a late afternoon scene with big shadows. I called it SUSPENDED. This is from a sketch I did on the way to Zebra Slot Canyon here on the Grand Staircase. As I painted and painted, I had to keep painting over areas – mopping up. As an exercise, a learning experience, it was quite grand. However, when I could fix on it no more, I realized the thing did NOT hang together as one whole piece. A more professional statement would be that it “lacked unity.” See what you think:

SUSPENDED
Acrylic Mixed Media  at 18" x 24" by Rae Ellen Lee

Almost without hesitation, I got out my utility knife and a scissors and cut up the offending canvas into small pieces -- none larger than 5" x 7". Quality and quantity were increased with a few slices of the knife, a few quick snips with the scissors. Other problems in life should be so quickly resolved. Oh, there were new needs to be met – sizing, adding a raven or a tree or two, finding appropriate frames, etc. Here are 5 pieces I consider finished. I'm "resolving" 2 more (one of them with the feature that looks like a lizard's head). I’m rather pleased with the results.  These are highly textured (with layers of tissue) and sport a sheen of metallic gold. They look better in person, but you can get an idea from these images: 

"Tree Shadow" **SOLD**
5" x 7" Acrylic Mixed Media
by Rae Ellen Lee

"Look! It's a plane." **SOLD**
4" x 6" Acrylic Mixed Media
by Rae Ellen Lee

Pinion Pine on Red
4" x 6" Acrylic Mixed Media
by Rae Ellen Lee

Canyon Shadows
6" x 6" Acrylic Mixed Media
by Rae Ellen Lee

Canyon Colors **SOLD**
4" x 4" Acrylic Mixed Media
by Rae Ellen Lee

MONET IN MONTANA

For a 4-H club project when I was a 12 or 13, I raised a sheep named Hoppy. At the time we had a goat with two kids, and the kids would stand on top of Hoppy. She didn’t mind. I really like sheep, so I intend to paint them often. In this particular painting, I make reference to a Monet work titled “The Turkeys at Montgeron, 1877,” which I saw a few years ago in a Paris art museum. I also love the Gravelly Range in Southwest Montana, where I had photographed a sheepherder’s wagon near Black Butte (the neck of an old volcano) in the 1980s. OK, so I decided to arrange sheep in the approximate location of Monet’s turkeys, and instead of a chateau at the top of the painting I placed the sheepherder’s wagon. The piece is 20” x 24” on a pre-used canvas, which provided interesting textures. I tried making the grasses the same color as Monet’s, but ended up using a palette knife to scumble lighter colors over the green-blue. And, of course, every band of sheep deserves a good guard dog, so I placed Sudsie in the scene. There’s an “accidental” quality to the piece. This is also the first painting of mine that I actually L-O-V-E.

Monet's painting is 5'8" x 5'8"

MONET IN MONTANA, 

20" x 24" Mixed Media on Canvas

by Rae Ellen Lee

Work in progress. Too much green-blue.

THE WATCHER, LITTLE SPENCER FLAT

As a hiker living in a town surrounded by the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, I’ve wandered for miles with friends on Spencer Flat east of Escalante, UT. The little painting below is from a sketch of the curious hoodoo that is strikingly evident as you drive the Old Sheffield Road (which most call the Spencer Flat Road). On an outing with Sudsie, I sketched the hoodoo from the north, where it appears to be watching the whole vast area. Most people view the feature from the road – a viewpoint that usually elicits comments about condoms. For texture, I adhered crumpled tissue to the rock formations with acrylic medium. After that dried, I wielded a small palette knife to brush on paint colors – striving for bursts of color harmony using complimentaries. By experimenting, maybe I’ll discover my painting voice. Now to work on the other 12 paintings I’ve started!

4.5" x 4.5" Acrylic on Wood Panel

ONE WOMAN PAINTS HER LIFE

One way to tell if you’re an artist is to ask yourself this: Do you actually make art or do you just buy art materials and wait until you find your quote painting voice? Do you start paintings and never finishing them? For instance, with six unfinished canvases leaning on each other in the corner, I started a trip-tick and splashed gaudy-colors on each large canvas, having decided that was my new style. Anyway, the instructor had said, Just cover the canvas quick, so you can get over the Blank Canvas Syndrome. After that workshop I added those unfinished paintings to the pile because I had discovered a new style that struck me as quote the one for me. Which required that I buy several palette knives and a trowel, and not those cheap plastic ones, either, because you can’t make good art with inferior materials. That was six years and eight painting styles ago.

To regain some self-respect, I scanned my years of sketches on flickr.com, only to later read a comment that said they were “tighty-assed,” if you can you believe that. So I started painting a giant ghost crab to show them, whoever it was, that I can too paint loose and fresh yet intriguing stuff, and there it sits in the corner -- the only readable thing being the creature’s eyestalks watching my back all the time as I sit at the computer studying the works of other artists and making lists of new materials to add to my collection of oil pastels, soft pastels, guoache, water colors, acrylics and every medium Golden promotes at those demonstrations, as well as glass for making monoprints on rice paper not to mention tools to carve images in linoleum to make one-of-a-kind linocuts in black and white, and new canvases of varying sizes, now that I own a new French easel. Then last fall my artist friend, Lorna Libert, suggested that I might like to paint with oil paints. So I showed up at one of her workshops in Bellingham, Washington, with a bag of oil paints and I’ll be darned if I didn’t complete three small paintings. Just like that. And I haven’t stopped painting since. No more excuses. 

To celebrate turning seventy, in 2015 I vow to paint seventy paintings of places I’ve been and things I’ve done. I will finally use up all those art materials. 

I'll be painting 70 images from the past 70 years (1945 - 2015), but they won't be done in
chronological order. My first posting is from a fave set of hoodoos out on the Grand Staircase-Escalante
National Monument, east of Escalante, UT, where I live. After loosely sketching the forms,
I used acrylic medium to adhere crumpled tissue to add texture.

The first colors were jarring and one of my artist friends suggested I tone things down a bit,
so I did that and added foreground interest.

The Doll Men, 18" x 24", Acrylic on Canvas

 In this photo of the finished project, the colors appear slightly duller than they actually are. My to-do list includes mastering the art of photographing my paintings.