Watercolor Painting
Woodpeckers
Returning to one of my favorite living things, birds. They bring such joy with their songs, colorful plummage, and behavior. Nothing quite like it.
I discovered this species in the early 1960's thanks to Warner Bros. Merry Melodies cartoons. One of the lesser players with Bugs Bunny was Yosemite Sam. His cry of anger and frustration was, "Why you dirty low-down yellow-bellied sapsucker."
It took me sixty-odd years, but here they are, Mr. and Mrs. Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker (right and left). As the sun rises, the fruits of their drilling labor are on display on this Japanese White Birch tree.
I was practicing on gradient washes for skies, using a sea sponge for painting trees, and flat dry-brushing on trees so part of this piece was to apply that learning. (9" x 12" 300# Arches paper).
Lundeen Park
We moved into a rent house when we arrived in Lake Stevens in 2023 and walked in nearby Lundeen Park on the lake most days. That early fall I collected a number of fallen leaves from the sidewalk, pressed and dried them with an unknown painting in mind.
In a 2024 painting class we focused on a technique called negative painting. The process is the opposite of the normal approach of beginning a painting where you do the background layers and work your way forward to the foreground and closest details to the observer. Negative painting goes from the foreground and works backward to the final background layer.
In negative painting you begin by painting a wash (wet-on-wet) as an initial "background" on the paper...except it will become the closest layer, it being the lightest value. In the example (left) I then drew the first layer of generic leaves on that dried wash. Next I painted a layer of a slightly darker value in the negative space around the first layer of leaves. Of course, the paint must be dry before proceeding to the next layer.
I repeated the process by drawing leaf shapes as a second layer behind and underlapping the first light value layer. This is followed by painting in the negative space around these leaves with an even darker value. You continue working your way backwards in this fashion with increasingly darker values. The painting on the left here has 4 layers. The work here on this 6" x 9" piece was preparation for taking on my first large watercolor painting, entitled "Lundeen Park."
To prepare for the 16" x 24" leaf painting I made templates of the collected leaves by tracing and cutting each leaf out of cheap 140# watercolor paper with an exacto knife. I kept the original leaf samples for reference to aid painting leaf anatomy details. I worked on this painting during private lessons with Jan Powers and at home for several weeks. It was quite a bit of work and turned out quite well, providing the depth and value range that I wanted. I made the frame for it out of poplar with layered molding and an acrylic finish.
Bev's Boho Native
This organic pen and ink watercolor piece was a loose playful departure from the negative leaf paintings. You never know where you may find inspiration for art. The design is based on a fabric print shirt that a friend in our retirement community likes to wear.
It has a southwest native kind of vibe and I wanted to do something with some ink and a different palette. This would be about as far away from my background in technical drawing as I could get: Free-flowing and asymmetrical dominated by mostly warm colors with a minority of coolness and black/white for contrast. The painting was done first with the pen work added later. (6" x 9" on Arches 140# paper).
Rocks Underwater
Imagine you place your head underwater in Lake Superior and look out over the reflections of light landing on the rocks along the lake bottom, light moving as it passes through the waves of water. As you look off into the underwater distance you see light bouncing off the distant rocks and up toward the surface above. Now paint that.
I saw this photograph on someone's FaceBook page and pursued this project as a follow-up to the "Rocks Underwater," painted a few weeks earlier from the Graham book (see below). That painting was from the perspective of standing in the water of a creek and observing what lies above and below down to the stream bottom and capturing the rocks there.
Over the period of four weeks of 3-hour lessons, I did paint this. (Not counting hours of homework.) There was plenty of practice in wet-on-wet painting, trying to create the shadowy gradient of the rock edges as they curved toward the lake bottom, and the cast shadows of adjacent stones upon each other. Fortunately the reference photo was a great composition, plenty of depth and movement. It was the most challenging piece that I attempted so far, and the result did boost my painting confidence. (11" x 11" on 140 lb Arches paper).
Flower and Butterflies
Created during a Jan Powers workshop class at the Lake Stevens, WA Senior Center.
A series of washes combined with some masking, table salt and limited paint colors (pink, yellow, and gray) lead to a surprising result. Interesting how sometimes the simplest application of water and paint combine to make a pleasing, free-flowing product.
The Permanent Rose Pink color is sure an attention-grabber, especially when placed atop a neutral gray background. (8" x 8" on 140 lb Arches paper).
Rocks Underwater
This work is a practice piece for a series of private lessons with my teacher, Jan Powers, taken from the book, "The Complete Watercolorist's Essential Notebook" by Gordon MacKenzie. The technique is to imagine that the underwater portion of the painting is viewed as if looking through window blinds. After a blue wash is applied in jagged shapes to suggest water moving, the rocks and bottom are painted except where they intersect with the blue surface. You see enough of the subsurface for your eye and brain to suggest peering through the blinds. (7.5" x 9.5" on 140 lb Arches paper).
Tuscany Villa
A small vignette of the countryside in Tuscany, Italy was inspired by a photograph that I spotted on the internet.
You never know what might trigger the creative process. The attraction here was the red tile roofs and masonry walls with soft tones contrasted by the greenery atop the stone wall and Arbor Vitae trees in the background.
I bought some sea sponges recently and used them to apply the greenery on the solitary tree, along with a stippling brush technique for more detailed leaf work. (6" x 6")
Hummingbirds and Dogwood
My mother, Audrey Davis, had a leaded glass piece that hung in her kitchen window in Bella Vista, Arkansas for many years and later in the sunroom at Arkwood. The center oval was etched glass surrounded by frosted glass with a beveled glass outer border. Though a nice piece of art, the etching of birds, flowers and leaves was rather plain and you had to look closely to distinguish the details.
I researched glass painting methods and techniques and took on the challenge of painting the etched center areas. The first step was to paint a watercolor version to explore a potential color palette (left photo above). The oil based glass paint is extremely runny and required bordering all of the small paint areas with a cerne, a fine type of caulk, to control the paint. The lines were a good mimic of solder beading.
The next step was to make a small practice piece on some clear scrap glass. This was a real challenge and the arthritis in my hands was not pleased with the pressure squeezing a small tube. Controlling the rate of flow of the cerne took some multiple trials. Once I was ready to start in on the etched areas I had to work from the inner areas outward to avoid smearing the cerne, which took some time to dry. It took longer to trim up the rough areas of cerne with a safety razor blade than to apply it, especially around the small areas of the hummingbirds' outer wing margins.
The final product was worth the risk as it now looks great whether sunlight is shining through it, indirect daylight is behind it or inside light is reflected off it in the evening. I believe that mom would be pleased with the outcome and I think of her when I look at it. Thanks Audrey Jean.
Hiroshige Moonrise
While visiting old friends Bill and Carol in Madison, Wisconsin in 2019 we traveled to the Anderson Japanese Gardens in Rockford, Illinois. Beautiful place and wonderful sunny day to walk around and soak up the architecture and plantings. I purchased a small book of postcards and filed them away. Sure enough, inspiration struck in 2024 and I did some research on the artist: Hiroshige Ando.
He was a Japanese artist who walked from town to town and made sketches of everyday life in the first half of the 19th century. He turned those into woodcuts from which he made prints on paper and sold, a popular product in those times. This watercolor/pen and ink is my rendering of his view inside of a home around 1850 as the moon rises over the harbor.
It is painted on 140 lb Arches paper (5" x 8")
Cardinal
My lifelong appreciation and fascination with this glorious member of the finch family began at an early age. My grandmother, Millie Van Wert Davis, was a big fan of the cardinal and had a framed print of the male and female hanging in her home in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. Years later I acquired the print when she moved to assisted living in Arkansas, though it was a cheap copy and seriously faded by expoure to light by that time. The male had turned a muted brown with much of the leaves on the branch a pale gray. It hung in my workshop at our Arkwood homestead for a decade.
We enjoyed many years observing our local cardinal neighbors in the Ozark woods with the bright red of the males putting on a show at the feeder on snowy days. One spring day the warming sun brought us enough cardinals for a baseball game with twenty lined up on the fence waiting their turns at bat to feast on black oil sunflower seeds.
A year after moving to Lake Stevens, WA I decided to paint my own version of this scarlet beauty using the old print as a reference. The original artwork was by the naturalist John James Audubon who painted it in Louisiana in 1821 on his travels around America. Although there are none of these feathered friends in Washington, nor are there mountains in Louisiana for that matter, this rendition now hangs on our wall here. It is painted on 300 lb Arches board (8" x 10").
Behind Cabin 8
The scene is early daylight behind my Dad's favorite fishing cabin (Rivers Edge Outfitters) on Big Vermilion Lake near Souix Lookout, Ontario, Canada. It is based on a photo from my last visit on a 2015 fishing trip with him. Although he and our family fished on many a vacation, staying at other locations in the area, he really enjoyed this spot for many years. He was the consummate host and guide, really revelling in everyone else's shared experiences. He began fishing in this area based on a tip from his mailman in Mt. Vernon, Iowa in the early 1950's and dropped a line most every year until his passing in 2020.
I began this painting with preliminary drawing and inking on most of it at a watercolor workshop at ESSA in Eureka Springs in 2019. I picked it up again after moving to Washington state in 2023. I had more confidence in my watercolor work and felt that I could maybe do it justice. Plus it never hurts to have a loon in a painting.
My focus was on trying to capture the range of light values at sunrise, and reflections on the still lake surface. The result reinforced the painters' mantra: "It's all about the light." With each painting I am reminded of how much more there is to explore and learn. It is painted on 117 lb multimedia paper (8" x 11").
The View from Arkwood Cottage
This small painting is the southern view from 90 feet above the Kings River at our old Ozark homestead, Arkwood Cottage. The ten-mile view toward the hills above Berryville, Arknsas always brought pleasure no matter the time of year.
We had lived there for fifteen years before clearing a window through the trees for an internet radio signal. What a pleasant surprise! It is amazing how a perspective of space and distance calms your mind and soul. Sue was missing our place there, so I painted this for her this past Christmas.
This features only watercolor, no pen and ink work, and more wet-on-wet brush technique. The background forest and hills were my attempt to paint shapes, while the foreground is more detailed dry brush technique. It is painted on 300 lb Arches watercolor paper (4" x 5.5").
Bryarly, Texas
This work is another narrative art piece based on family geneology. Sue has been researching both sides of the family for the past 20 years or so. Several generations back, on her side in the 1800's, there was a gentleman named Captain Jack Bryarly. He apparently operated a river boat and a store in the town of Bryarly, Texas on the Red River, which borders Oklahoma.
We went on a family history research road trip in 2004 in the area around Sulphur Springs, Tx. After digging into available public records at the courthouse and library, we were able to locate where Bryarly town was, which had long ago disappeared leaving behind only a crossroads. We did manage to get the location of some Bryarly family property and set out to see what we could see. Of course, the property dscription and road names and locations did not line up, plus this was pre-iPhone and GPS. We did finally find what we believe to be the old house, after some fence and locked gate climbing, while tromping through weeds, ticks and keeping a sharp eye out for snakes and shotguns.
The abandoned property was still standing but seriously on the way out. I took a photograph through one of the window openings, peering into the darkness of a bedroom. I did the drawing and a little watercolor work on this a few years ago and let it lay, until early 2024. While recovering from a knee replacement, I resurrected it. I was emboldened by the light and dark work on "Behind Cabin 8" and began another attempt at creating a wide range of values from the very light decaying white/gray wood window sashes and siding to the dark brown metal bed frame and darker blue/black of the inner bedroom wall.
The opposite window glass, caked with years of fly specks, dust, and grime let in this eerie green glow of sunlight reflecting off the wild vegetation on the other side of the house. This created a nice hotspot to contrast with all the aged darkness. Through the glass darkly. The trumpet vine growing around the title under the painting indicates the disappearance of a town, swallowed by nature, once a lively place with Sue's ancestors. Watercolor with pen and ink on 117 lb multimedia paper (9" x 7").
PNW Baseball
Jody is a big fan of the Seattle Mariners baseball team. I enjoyed attending a game with her last summer, and watching a few on tv...hope to do many more.
This multilayered painting was a challenge. I spent quite a bit of time creating the color scheme washes in the background, using a tetrad color combination with complemetary dots of color infilling. It gives a bit of a psychadelic flavor, a tribute to Seattle's own Jimi Hendrix.
The two miniature vignettes of the nighttime Seattle Space Needle and a ferry boat out in the San Juan Islands salute key parts of the Pacific Northwest experience. The gold tridents in the corners are part of the team's celebration of a homerun in the dugout. Go Mariners!
Watercolor on 140 lb Arches paper (9" x 12").
Lizzie's Day Out
This painting is an example of narrative art, a creative path that I have taken the past few years. What story does this tell? The process began with a visit to my neighbor Nina's house across the street one summer day. She has an entire room dedicated to different types of lizards: feeding and raising them and doing school educational programs. She sent me a few photos from her Facebook page to give me some ideas for inspiration.
As I walked around Lundeen Park in Lake Stevens one day, observing the different types of plants and insects, a story popped into my head. What would it look like if a pair of her lizards had escaped their enclosure and spent the day out in the park? Surely they would be color shifting to blend into nature and be on the hunt for prey amongst the local flora. The horsetail ferns, blackberries, and a type of bindweed in the park provided a setting for the narration. Spring Azure butterflies were busy pollinating flowers. The narrative path leads to the art. (9"' x 7")
My first attempt at painting animals was a challenge demanding some practice lizard paintings before the final piece. Sometimes serendipity plays a part, too. When Nina saw the final painting she exclaimed, "You know that you painted the same lizard twice?" It turns out that the reptile on the right was the young version of the older self on the left. Not often that you get to look your younger self in the eye. So now there is a time traveling element to the story. You never know.
Siberian Iris Nouveau
I stumbled upon a book on Art Nouveau flower renderings while visiting an old friend, Bill Winfield, up in Madison, Wisconsin this spring. He has been a mentor and always fans my artistic fires.
Eugene Grasset, a noted decorative artist published a book,"La Plante et suses applications ornamentales"in the 1890's. He studied drawing, architecture, painting and sculpture before moving on to design fabrics, ceramics, and jewelry. His flower designs were for the graphic arts: posters and wallpaper. Seems we share a meandering artistic process.
The art nouveau style has always appealed to me so I saw this as an opportunity to combine watercolor and pen and ink into my own expression. I needed more practice on background watercolor washes built up in layers for effect: trying here to effectuate complementary contrast and shading. (3" x 9")
Columbine
This rendering of a columbine flower features my own take on a stained glass-like border with an inner woven fiber corner treatment. Drawing with Pen and ink is featured more here, with watercolor washes to suggest variegated light on the petals. It has a more organic, less stylized quality. This painting was done after taking a stained glass class at the Schack Art Center in Everett, WA. One medium influences another, eh monsieur Grasset? (5" x 5")
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Spicebush Delight
One of our favorite Arkansas pollinators, based on a photo from the Arkwood Cottage garden, is the Spicebush Swallowtail Butterfly, "Papilio troilus." It prefers the flowers on the native spicebush, but seems content here. (5.5" x 7")
Sometimes the bottom of butterfly wings are more striking than the top. Though the shades of blue with white margins at the tips on the top side of this swallowtail species are beautiful, I find the delicate colored markings underneath, especially with the white-spotted black body, are a good show with the tall Phlox plant.
One focus of my practice work here is the background, successive washes blending indications of plants at the wood's edge. I find it interesting how important a role the seemingly blurry backdrop plays in supporting the big colorful show in the foreground. My approach to projects in woodworking, stained glass, painting and drawing always include trying new techniques and honing the edge on existing ones. There is joy in that.
Salt Life
This beach gate was my first watercolor upon moving to Lake Stevens. It is based on a photo sent by my Ozark friend, Bill Hunter. He is a great resource for interesting things of all kinds. It was one of a series of hand-crafted gates by an artist in the British Isles.
The carved gate stiles with mortise and tenon joinery and hand made hardware appealed to my organic woodworking background. The shadow under the gate turned out differently from what I was trying to paint, but hey it's okay. The watercolor technique is a combination of wet-on-wet and wet on dry. I love the way the gate maker staged the photo to have an inviting quality: you know there's a beach just over the hill yet there is a mystery. It now hangs on the wall at my daughter Amber's home in Aransas. The unlatched gate tells the tale. Painted on 117 lb multimedia paper (6" x 8").
ESSA #1
This abstract painting was an early piece done at an ESSA workshop in 2020. It was an exercise playing with different brushes, colors and techniques, varying the amount of water and paint load on the brush and painting in a free style. A green border was added later to simulate a stained glass-like matting layer. My grandson Leo's comment was, "what is that?" (10" x 16") The frame was repurposed from a 1960's frame, refinished and mortise keyed at the corner joints.
