Blooming

"Blooming", 18" x 24", oil on canvas, Lydia Johnston

Fourteen straight days of sunshine in southern Vermont, in April. Unbelievable. I don't think I can remember ever having a stretch of sunny days for this long. I have lived off the grid since 1980, depending on the sun for my electric power. I have an array of photovoltaic panels on my roof which sends power down to a set of batteries in the basement, where the power is stored. Usually we have a few sunny days and then cloudy weather. We have a backup generator for those times, particularly in the winter, when we use more power than is coming in. Never has there been a time when the batteries are fully charged day after day.

And so what seemed in mid-April to be a late start to spring, quickly changed. We went from barely any buds showing on trees, to the new leaves fully out. The daffodils and tulips and forsythia in full bloom. I always love it when the first soft colors of spring start to emerge. It always goes by quickly, but this year the time frame has been accelerated. Despite wishing that the drama of spring would unfold more slowly, the warmth and sunshine has been wonderful.

Painting Water

"Water's Edge", 12" x 16", oil on canvas, Lydia Johnston

Recently I have been working on painting water. I have a large 36" x 48" painting started last fall of a lake with ridges behind. Most of the painting is complete, but I have felt the water still needs to be developed more. So I have been painting a number of smaller canvases experimenting with different techniques for portraying the sense of water in ponds and lakes, the flatness, the reflections, the ripples, the glassiness.

Here is the first of this group of water paintings, a small study of trees surrounding a vernal pool.

Process of an Oil Painting

This painting, although relatively small, just 18" x 24", was painted during several separate sessions. I began by laying in the foreground and mid-ground and setting in the meandering stream.


in progress

While painting these parts, I developed a pounding headache and knew I wouldn't be able to complete the piece, so I roughly brushed on the upper background parts in the toned down colors I was working with, then quickly cleaned up my brushes and paints and left my studio.

My headache turned into a fever and head cold and it was two weeks before I was able to return to this painting. Often when I am working on a painting, it takes on a life of its own, dictating what is needed next. I get totally caught up in the creative process, time flies by, while the image slowly emerges.

Here, all momentum and flow was lost. So I took a digital photo of the unfinished painting and printed out a copy. The print on plain copy paper is always quite faint, but works for sketching with charcoal or pastels.



sketch

On the printout, I sketched with charcoal possibilities for finishing the composition. These sketch marks are very rough and minimal, but often enough for this purpose. I find it very helpful to sketch out different design possibilities on a printout of a painting in progress, determining how I want to proceed before committing paint to the canvas.



18" x 24", oil on canvas, Lydia Johnston

Once I decided that I would place two small trees on the far bank of the stream, I mixed up more paint and continued forward, developing the stream, adding details to the main part and finishing up the background.

Show at Simmer Grille

"Sunset Glow", 16" x 20", oil on canvas, Lydia Johnston

Many of the new small oil paintings hanging in my spring show at Simmer Grille in West Hartford, CT are not yet up on my website, so I put together a page that shows all of the paintings. Just click HERE to see all twenty-eight paintings in the show. They will be hanging through the months of March and April.