Paradise Beach....

 A beach area where my wife and I sat to do paintings.  The location is along Lake Superior and north of Grand Portage, Minnesota.  It is actually located on an Indian Reservation even though it is a drive off from the highway. The sand is different here as the beach is made up of many small rocks and not sand. The land that projects out is next to an island where seagulls hatch new birds.  The painting is done is pastel and was done mostly on the site. I think I tweaked it a little when back in the studio.  I have been digging through my past paintings and realized that I have not photographed  many of them.  I took shots of 12 new items just this morning.  I am glad I have the originals and that I can take shots of them for the net.

Rock Painting

 

I have painted on rocks for a long time.  Most of them were scenes of the North Shore, Minnesota.  There were usually light houses sitting on the rocks and the presentations were pretty flat.  This rock is a painting of a large rock formation that would sit along the Lake Superior.  The rock textures are painted on there with enhancement of some of the natural texture of the rock. 

This is a side view of the rock showing its natural surface.  The painting was in progress when I took this photo.

I added a larger sea gull after I took this shot.  Painting birds on the rocks really requires them to be more impressionistic, globs of paint that resemble a sea gull. 

While I painted on the rock I had to lean it on another rock to be able to paint the bottom of it.

This is the back side of the rock showing how it looked before I started.  My wife and I use to sit along the North Shore and paint the shoreline of the North Shore. I had plenty of memory resource to create the painting that I did on the front side of this rock.  The rocks along the shore are made up of iron ore. If I didn't mention it before, these rocks were collected in the areas all along the shore from Duluth to Grand Marais. 

This is an example of the pastel painting that I did along the north shore.

Long Lost Artwork by Me....

 I painted this back in 1990.  I gifted it to my oldest brother and his wife for their 25th wedding anniversary.  I remembered it but did not take a photo of it back then.. I saw a video of my brother's house a week ago and saw the painting.  What a trip back into time that was.  I asked my brother to take a photo and send it to me.   I found this photo of the stairs in a New Mexico magazine to imitate.  I then added a pot from the native American division done by potters.  The one has the feather pattern on it.  The other is a pottery piece that I had made for a college class.  As an artist I have improved a lot in 32 years. I do still admire this though and appreciate my composition and use of color in the piece.  When I say it was a lost piece it really should say it was just forgotten.

Female Duck....

 I painted this many years ago.  It is the male wood duck.  I painted it from looking at a smaller reference photo from a magazine.  Today I found a photo of the female of this kind which I have never seen before now.  If I have seen the female at a natural wildlife installation at out state fair I guess I didn't know the female.

I am borrowing this from the  net and I don't see who took the photo.  If I knew I would be glad to credit them for it. The female has a nice set of blue feathers on its side wings. I guess I was never curious about the female as I am so amazed at seeing the coloring of the male's feathers.

Two More Barn Paintings

These are unedited photos of two paintings that I did quite a few years ago.  The owner of them sent me the shots and I didn't have any way of editing them into better presentations.

 The woman who hired me to paint them has willed them to her son and he was sharing them with me. I had forgotten what they looked like as I had not taken any photos of them back then.

Lost Artwork on a Barn Door.....

A painting that I did on a barn door for a customer. I had the photo of this stowed away and just found it yesterday as I was sorting photos. It must have been twenty years ago when I painted it. I have moved now to a different town and live about four miles away from the person who bought it. This kind of painting is similar and yet the surface makes it difficult. The surface is so rough that it you can't paint smoothly without doing many coats of oil paint. I do know that I am a better artist now and I kind of grin to the artificial landscape.

More Art from my Past.....

There are so m any areas along the shoreline of Lake Superior that look just like this. This is a watercolor that I started on location and then finished it in the studio. In the studio, I am able to rewet areas and blot off any excess paint areas.  Blotting it helps to add values that show light better. I see by the painting’s signature that I painted this in 1989 or our very first trip around the lake and also Lake Michigan.

Along Superior there is a state park called Gooseberry Falls.  The falls are wonderful but if you head further down the road in the park you get to see wonderful rock cliffs.  My wife and I sat along here many different years to paint pictures.  This one painting was done in oil pastel.  The seagulls were difficult for me and I think I ended up painting them on there with acrylic paint. I wasn’t so good at capturing the seagull.  I can see that this was created in 1993.

Shovel Point also is along the north shore road next to Lake Superior.  The area in which we painted was a difficult location for us to navigate. We could sit down there to work but we had to step from one large rock to another.  This was painted in oil pastel also like the one painting above.  The projection of rock is a beautiful one and is so much larger that what I depicted.  As a person, you can follow a trail out to that larger point.  The trees are proportions to the size of the rock formation. Today I am probably too old to be able to get down to the location in which to paint at the spot again. I didn’t sign it as oil pastel is hard to use when writing the name.

Digging out old stuff.....

Grand Marias has a natural harbor with two light houses it. The oil pastel painting is one that I did many years ago. Probably 20 years or more.  It reality, it is an unfinished painting by me.  The thing that bothers me is the cropping of it after the photograph real does make it have a more finished quality. We would work along the shoreline for a week and then have to head back to Iowa.  I have a lot of work the just never got the refined finish that I would do if I could. Summer vacation never lasted long enough and the work that wasn’t finished is still in portfolios as if they were vacation photos of the week.

Pastel or watercolor is better for plain air work for me.  I like to capture all the light that is projected because of the sun and Lake Superior. It can almost be too bright for painting as the colors look different than with strong light. I like seeing the pastel washed out colors of what was really seen along the shore line.

This paintings looks good enough to frame. I know that it was done in oil pastel. a stick of oil color that reminds me of a grease pencil. The area is near Split Rock light house where there is a park ground area adjacent to the shoreline of Lake Superior.

As I continue to explore paintings of my past, I am thinking it will inspire to get back to painting new works now.  I am retired from teaching now but still have lots of odds and ends to do because we recently moved to a newer home.