Beautiful Memorial Day weekend, leisurely breakfast at the kitchen table, spotting a bird flitting away from the weeping cherry next door. Just had to do a quick celebratory iPad painting of the tree — now decked out in its full greens, beautifully offset by the juicy dark shadows under the flowing branches. Have a good, peaceful and remembering weekend.
Weeping Cherry. original iPad painting.
I had fun painting color and value studies during a recent workshop with Maggie Siner, one of my favorite artists. None is a finished work but each represents a lesson learned or knowledge deepened — the whole point of workshops.
Red Kettle. oil. 2014.
The first exercise, above, demonstrated that an effective image can be made with a few simple shapes, painted in colors and values that show how the planes change within the composition. We also practiced how to mix yummy, true colors, testing their accuracy with a palette knife extended toward the target area of the still life set-up. And then, most fun of all, we got to slather our thick, juicy, correctly mixed paint all over our simple shapes with our palette knives, as if we were icing a cake. Yum.
Here’s an iPad painting of the Carousel at Glen Echo Park — a well tended Dentzel creation from 1921. I worked to photograph it in some motion a couple of years ago and tried to preserve that feeling in this digital version.
Here’s something colorful and fun — a painting I did awhile back, based on a photo I took at a meaningful and festive bat mitzvah last year. Remembering that happy occasion and the many dancing feet celebrating that evening puts a big smile on my face.
Our feet are happy now! Oil on canvas.
A perfect antidote to the winter blahs that crept in along with the rain, sleet and snow we’ve had yesterday and today, right?
Post-show doldrums are a great time to share insights from prior workshops. Several of us ‘7 Palettes’ have been sharing new color mixing techniques this week. Here’s what I passed along from the fabulous Terry Miura workshop my sister Ceci and I attended awhile back.
Here’s a glimpse of Terry’s palette:
Terry Miura’s Limited Palette
And here are insights about painting the figure using a limited earth-tone palette:
Here’s Terry’s beautiful twenty minute demo!
Terry’s nude.
I’ve done a few iPad images lately — good fun while sitting around at night. I just finished a drawing with the ArtRage pencil tool of a sprinkle of fairy lilies against a background clump of ornamental grasses.
Fairy Lilies, original iPad painting, 2013, 1:1 aspect ratio
And I also had fun doing a more stylized rendition of Pat’s scarecrow standing in our garden, stopping passersby with its cuteness, but doing nothing to deter the critters from eating our veggies. Pat actually built this wooden adjustable man, based on one our son Sam had seen in a magazine and really wanted. Sam enjoyed it for years and then Will inherited it. Pat has now re-clothed it in his old duds for scarecrow duty.
And I did a quick wild fun sketch of the ballpark when Pat and I went to an Oriole’s game in Baltimore last weekend.
I’m sure you’ve been too busy to notice, but I haven’t been writing here for the last few months. I was fully occupied, painting a portrait of my dad, Jeremiah J. O’Keefe III (‘Jerry’).
Here it is, with a few words about my dad. I’ll say more about him later, as well as about the painting process that greatly resembled the ‘perils of Pauline’.
Dad at 90 in Command Central. Oil.
Dad is a decorated WWII Marine ace pilot; successful businessman; member of the MS State Legislature; two term Mayor of Biloxi, MS; lifelong Democrat with a passionate belief in the equality of all people; philanthropist, having served as a substantial donor to, and principal fundraiser for, the Walter Anderson Museum in Ocean Springs, MS and the Frank Gehry-designed Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, MS. Last but not least, he is the father of 13 children and a multitude of grand & great-grandchildren. Congrats on 90 great years, Dad!