You know a painting has truly become part of a new home when all the members of the family come to appreciate it. Well, the horses, dogs and birds may not have an opinion about my Bed of Ghosts as of yet but Zinky clearly has good taste. Thanks for sharing Audrey!
Yes, it feels every bit as good as I thought it might to have a painting hanging in the Triton! It’s such well regarded museum with a beautiful exhibition space and to have Feathers hanging alongside the works of so many of my piers made me feel truly at home! Thanks to friends and family who came out to share this evening with me – you’re the best!
First place was awarded to two artists this year (I know both of them!) Cuong Nguyen (who also won the painting competition last time ’round and is so good they might just devote a wing to him) and Holly Van Hart (who just joined the Los Gatos Museums Gallery). They each get a solo show!
In fact, the Gallery was very well represented with nine member artists in the show. In addition to Holly and me, there was David Stonesifer (with two pieces), Donna Orme, Will Maller, Ed Lucey, Ellen Howard, Linda Smythe, and Joan Harvey.
Artists I know and love, Jaya King (two pieces), Mei-Ying Dell’Aquila, Teresa Ruzzo and Brigitte Curt were also included. So much really interesting work – I need to go back for a better look!
Proud to be hanging on this wall as you enter with with Jaya King and Cuong Nguyen!
Talking with Chief Curator Preston Metcalf about my project plans for 2014.
Cuong with his first place winning Portrait of Paul as Leonardo.
Holly Van Hart in front of her painting Possibilities Abound.
Jaya King with her moving paintings in the upper left and lower right (see below)
Jaya’s Little Silver Bullet from a Pretty Blue Gun.
Joan Harvey with her painting Endless Summer.
I met the artist, Vincent Liu who painted Kung Pao Chicken hanging in the upper left and chatted with Linda Smythe who painted Pretty in Pink.
With the boys.
With the girls
I first met Pam Prentice, a Bay Area blogger at one of my Open Studios.
Here’s the newest little rose out of studio and how it came together.
This little rose reminds me of one of the ones made from frosting!
Day 1
It’s so good to be back in the studio! Summer vacation is drawing to a close and all that intense holiday travel is still fresh in my mind. It seems only appropriate to work on something that’s loaded with nostalgia for the Annapolis Valley from which I’ve just returned.
This great image it based on yet another fabulous photograph by my dear friend (and novelist) Christy Ann Conlin, Sparkle Face. Her son called the flowers “deadly of the valley”after their poisonous reputation, all the warnings have paid off!
I love the band of cows running around the deco pitcher in which she placed great handfuls of lily of the valley. I thought it would be fun to paint cows in the pasture beyond the pitcher as well, so I went out to Santa Cruz and snapped a bunch of pictures of cows (same kind as Nova Scotian cows) and placed them in the composition.
And here I’ve used photoshop to plan my preferred placement of the cows, it’s fun to move my herd around the field.
One thing to be careful of when you are working from multiple sources (Christy Ann’s photo of the vase and my photos of cows in the pasture) is that your light source remains unified. I realized that my sources did not match up at all and it seemed easier to modify the lighting on the pitcher and flowers that on the cows. I’ll have to work on that some more tomorrow and try to figure out what I want to do in the foreground. Perhaps I’ll give the suggestion of lace for texture, although part of me wants to put in a big wet nose or furry ear. Suggestions?
Day 2
I decided to work on the star of the show today, those lovely lily of the valley. They symbolize purity and a return to happiness in the Victorian floriography, which I think is perfect for the spirit of this painting. Humbling though, when you’re working with a small brush, you can see the whole day dissolve away without a lot to show for it! Here I’m trying to capture the specific look and character of these little cheerful little flowers but struggling to keep it painterly – I don’t want it to end up looking like a tole painting!
Day 3
Okay, so I’m not blowing myself away with my progress on this painting but I’ve been shuttling kids to and from camp and practicing yoga and then there was that day at the beach….. ah well, school starts next week and my excuses will come to an end. Today I worked on building up the bouquet, refining the cow border and the volume of the pitcher. Maybe this time next week I’ll be shopping for a frame!
Day 4
Today I worked on the foreground. I was excited to use the beautiful vintage pinwheel lace that I had picked up at an auction in Nova Scotia years ago as inspiration. It not only complements the lacy feel of the flowers and adds a soft pattern to move the eye around the composition but it is a human web of sorts.
I knew that my foreground object should bare some direct relationship to either the cows or the flowers and after much thought I decided to go with some kind of scissors or knife to add a sharp contrast to the sweetness of the pastoral and domestic scene without seeming out of context. I thought it also symbolized cutting life short (the darker side of picking flowers and raising cattle) in a very subtle way. So after looking at a lot of old clippers and pruners and horn handled knives, I chose a great beat up pair of grass shears and painted them into the lower right hand corner where their open blades would lead your eye back to the pitcher and leave a gentle sense of menace.
Unfortunately, after I painted them in, I realized that they were actually over a foot long and would look more like this Photoshopped image in relation to the little bouquet. It’s a pity because I really fell in love them, the rust, the flaking enamel, the perfect colors, so much so that I was willing to overlook that they’re overkill for picking the delicate lily of the valley that slip away with a gentle tug. Didn’t bother me. However, I do draw the line when it comes to scale.
There are a lot of exquisite Victorian gardening scissors I could consider, but I think there’s enough sweetness in this painting already. I might try out these wrapped Japanese ones tomorrow, they’re worn and their not too big or too small. Could they be just right?
Many Days Later
The daily progress was so imperceptible, I gave up on shooting it until I’d finished. It’s so hard keep up the spirit and flow of a piece when your working time is broken up with other commitments and obligations! Finally, I reached a point where I felt there was a consistency to the brushwork and lighting, More of the cows actually show on the right but the photo crops them out. Time to MOOve on!
Marie Cameron with her painting, Bed of Ghosts
Bed of Ghosts, found it’s way to a new home in the Santa Cruz Mountains this weekend – a surprise birthday present from husband to wife! It’s always exciting to me when a painting finds the perfect place it’s supposed to be. I’ll miss these little fawns but look forward to continuing to work with this theme: the startling glimpse of the surreal and vulnerable white in the dark and dormant woods – a ghost deer or an albino redwood, they both make for a haunting image. The albino deer make for such easy targets in the wild sadly, and if the internet is any judge, a desirable trophy for certain hunters (the one that I was lucky enough to see in the Sierras lived in a gated community). I hear there are albino redwoods nearby and I’d love to see them too although the conservationists are understandably guarding their locations closely. I will continue to paint their improbable beauty from a distance.
Is painting a portrait so different from painting a flower of a tree? Isn’t it all just color and lines and angles? Perhaps this is so for some figure painting but when it comes to portraits there is heightened question of likeness, emotion, expression and character and maybe all of this can be said of a twisted old pine but we are not hardwired to conifers, our neurons light up for people.
I like a portrait that engages the viewer, that can convey who they are or what they’re feeling through their posture, expression and most of all through the eyes. In Blue Corset the direct gaze is the key to the painting and everything else, the vibrant colors, patterns, textures and style, the busy out of focus bulletin board in the background and the intriguing tattoo are all there to give a glimpse at what might lie behind those eyes.
It’s good to be back in the studio painting again now that the holidays are over!
Here I am working on another vista from Point Lobos. In this one I’m interested in the crescent shape that is formed in the corner in the upper right, it seems a welcome contrast to all the lines and angles, much like the contrast between the vegetation and the stone. I really enjoy how the swath of blue ocean seems to bleed down the rest of the painting.
I only had a few hours to work on this painting before breaking for yoga and a sand mandala ceremony on compassion but I feel it’s a good start. It was moving to watch Lama Ngawang sweep up his intricate and painstaking art into a pile while speaking on the nature of attachment and how nothing is permanent.
Abalone and Float found a new home today!
It was lovely meeting Kristen and Isabella as they came to my studio to pick up the painting, I really enjoy getting a sense of who my clients are and how they relate to the art. I hope they also enjoyed getting to know me in the context of my studio and how I work. We spoke of my motivation in painting abalone, which beyond trying to capture their iridescence and texture, is a love of the marine environment and a commentary on its over harvesting. Kristen knew abalone from growing up in the Bay Area, San Francisco and Santa Cruz. “I even know the smell of it” she pointed out, the comment poignantly underlying her intimacy with abalone and how evocative it is for her. Abalone symbolizes place for her, a piece of California she can take with her any where in the world.
Abalone and Float oil on canvas by Marie Cameron 2008.
I hope to capture the precarious nature of life on the margins of land and sea in this painting I began last Friday. I’m using one of the many photographs I took in the summer of the cypresses in Point Lobos as inspiration. It’s just so stunning to see these lone trees clinging to sheer rock face, pummeled by the Pacific! I like how the tree is dwarfed by the massive outcropping of rock on which it clings, rock which has been stripped nearly bare by the ocean. It’s almost a portrait of a landscape in which the skin and muscle has been pulled away to reveal the skeletal structure. Although the cypress symbolizes death and mourning, here I think it is a metaphor for perseverance.
I have lots of must dos and should dos on my agenda. Too many musts and shoulds can stifle creativity and I really needed to do something just on a whim. On Friday I took out a convex canvas I had kicking about the studio and knew it would be a great match for the heartsease paperweight I had photographed earlier this fall (sometimes you don’t even know you want to paint something until you photograph it). Here’s how it’s coming along.
I love how the paperweight has trapped the flowers in time.
These heartsease ( aka pansies or violas) symbolize thoughts.
Even more than a painting, a paperweight captures a moment.
Printer’s out of ink – I had to access photo from the computer.
I’ve painted in the outlines of the flowers and leaves to establish shapes and flow.
I’ve begun to fill in segments of the flowers and back ground.
I try to develop the reflections to help create the illusion of a glass dome.
Developing richness and detail.
Fine tuning those reflections.
Each painting takes its own path. Some paintings effortlessly appear as you draw your paint across the canvas with your brush. Not so often. More frequently you need to do more than just show up. Usually it’s a process of really looking, laying down what you think you see and then really looking again. Sometimes you need to rethink your approach and paint over or scrape off or even toss out and start again. Mostly you need to be brave enough to push yourself and patient enough to let it all unfold.
Marie Cameron’s Monterey Cypress, Point Lobos commission oil on canvas 2012
When my paintings went off for exhibition at Breathe there was a huge vacuum created in my home and studio, and you know how nature feels about that, well me too – we abhor it!
It didn’t long for me to tire of all those empty nails and hooks everywhere, and soon enough they all were hung with elaborate vintage frames teasing me with all the endless possibilities of my next new project. Before I knew it the summer had flown by busy as I was with commissions and exhibitions. Now the paintings have returned and displaced those empty frames which are themselves a sort of vacuum and they too long to be filled.
Oh, did I mention that I acquired a casket? I’ll be filling that too, not in a morbid way but with a florilegia flourish.
Watch as I whip up a little 8″ x 8″ Cherry Blossom Cluster painting. You can follow as I lay down values, layer hues, drop in details and edit out the background.
