Altered Images in an Alternative Universe

Lupines grow all over the Annapolis Valley, especially along the roadsides.

With my shoulders and legs sore from rototilling the garden, I headed for the studio at the end of last week to paint some of the fabulous purple lupines that grow wild around our house. I also wanted to capture the beauty of some masses of Siberian Iris that my friend Pamela gave me from among the hundreds that grow in her flower gardens.

My friend Pamela also gave me a clump of Siberian iris for my garden. She is one generous friend!

Iris represent to me my late mother and grandmother. They both grew iris and I brought some of their original rhizomes to plant here in Nova Scotia when we moved. I always think of their love of flowers when I see iris and each year for many years I’ve tried to paint their luscious shapes and colours in the short window of opportunity, for they don’t bloom for long.

These were my mother's bearded iris and before that, my grandmother's. I brought some to Bear River from our postage-stamp sized front garden in Toronto. I paint them every year.

I wanted my painting to reproduce the feeling of being outside (but without the very active black flies) so I pulled out all my vases and water jars at the studio so that I could create a garden on my table!

First I worked with watercolour in order to loosen myself up. I also love the way colour and water flow into each other and I wanted to ‘play’ with that.

I first painted some shapes with clear water and then loaded my brush with colour and randomly painted some flower shapes so that I would get 'accidental' colour bleeds into the wet spaces.

This is one of my favorite iris paintings that I’ve ever done with watercolour.

The Ancestor. watercolour by Flora Doehler, 1998. Collection of Gail Waiser.

I approached the acrylic like a wet-in-wet watercolour and tried to keep it very loose.

I sketched the flowers with watercolour crayons and then spritzed the canvas with water. Next I painted using watery acrylics. When the painting is finished, I'll fix the images by painting a mat or varnish medium over the entire canvas.

I’ve been inspired over the last year by reading artists’ blogs and online communities. There is so much creative work and exchange happening out there and it’s exciting to be able to see artwork online and to develop connections and correspondence with fellow artists all over the world, especially because I live in a tiny community that is a great distance from major galleries.

I subscribe to artist and writer Carol Wiebe’s blog called Silverspring Studio. I like Carol’s blog because it is a perfect mix of good writing and interesting articles. She writes about her own (beautiful) work as well as other artists. I have been introduced to many creative artists and websites through her descriptions.  Carol recently set up her own online community called Cracked Paper Quilts and posted an online tutorial about her use of photo software, Adobe Elements, to digitally alter and enhance her artwork. I was very inspired by the mandela-like images she developed and I tried it myself with the paintings that I’m working on as well as this photo of lupines growing here with our new house as a backdrop.

Most of our wild lupines are purple, but we also have some pink and white ones.

 I altered the colours in the photograph and experimented with some of the filters in Photoshop. To see more detail, click on the image.

If only it was this easy to change the wall colours in your house!

I photographed a section of the acrylic canvas that I’m working on. I adore the colours.

Iris and Lupines painting, detail. Flora Doehler, 2009

First I altered the image with filters found in Adobe Photoshop. I liked that pen and ink look shown here.

First I made the alterations using photoshop.

Then I quadrupled the image and flipped and/or turned the image upside down  to create the kind of image I might get when looking through a kaleidoscope.

Next I quadrupuled the altered image, flipped and turned them and reassembled them.

I am thinking of ways to use the resulting works.  I get it that altering images can be endless and addictive! It’s fun to see how colour changes can totally alter the feel of a piece. 

This detail of the iris with watercolour was next on my list.

These iris were like having graceful dancers in the studio.

I changed the colours and applied a filter in Adobe Photoshop.

I love the batik look of this altered painting.

You can view the whole set here

I wish I wasn’t so consumed right now with gardening, moving, packing, sawdust vaccuming etc because I just want to paint these gorgeous flowers while they are still in bloom.

In another month or less we’ll be moved in and then there will be another wave of blooms to do. Still, I am promising myself to clear the decks for at least 2 weeks next year during iris time.

I think this looks like a piece of fabric now.

The beauty of Adobe Photoshop is that it’s as portable as your laptop and is something to ‘play’ with after a long day of mowing lawns and pulling weeds and turning up more sod by hand. Especially when your partner is sitting beside you on the couch watching the Stanley Cup final playoff game. That’s h-o-c-k-e-y for those of you living in an alternative universe.

Painting with Oils

Some of these paints are middle aged!

About 35 years ago when I was an art student in East Berlin at the Kunsthochschule Weissensee,   I painted with oil paints. At that time, in the 1970s, it was impossible to buy acrylics in the GDR (German Democratic Republic). I suspect that  there was a shortage of raw materials that made plastics. Thus there were absolutely no plastic bags (people used cotton bags) and there was very little product packaging using plastic. It’s funny that now, 35 years later, we are trying to reduce our oil-dependancy by scaling down plastics usage.

In that land of socialism, university tuition was free and art students received a monthly stipend to live on. The rent on my little apartment was capped at 8% of my monthly stipend.

Deciding where to place the next flower.

My area of study was painting so a couple of times a year  I accompanied my teacher, Professor Wolfram Schubert , to the school store room to receive about 30 tubes of oil paint, compliments of the state.

Oil paints last a long time, so after three years I had accumulated quite a few.  I brought a lot of tubes home to Canada with me and even though I’ve given quite a few away over the years, I still have a container full of them that I brought here to Bear River with me.

I was reminded of this a while ago when I pulled them out to use as ink in printmaking.  I wondered what it was like to paint with oils compared with the acrylics that I’ve been using for the last 20 years.  

My Flowerdale tea pot. Oil painting by Flora Doehler c2006

I love the smell of linseed oil (which actually is flax seed oil!)  That’s right! The flax plant gives us linen fabric and the seeds are pressed into an oil. When it’s boiled, it becomes linseed oil. Because of the high oil content, the paint is thick and creamy like peanut butter.  In comparison, acrylic, which is plastic,  is very slippery.  Watercolor, like the name implies, is like brushing colored water over a sheet of paper. 

I have a very cheerful pot of daffodils and I wanted to create a feel in this painting of the chaos and joy and persistence of the life force that are reborn every spring.

Inspiration in a pot.

In the smaller painting I started with a pale green yellow ground.  A few months ago I bought some oil sticks and I just had to try them out!  They look like gigantic crayons but they are actually oil paint suspended in a medium that makes them a little harder than paint.  If you dip your brush into a solvent and move it over the oil stick mark on the canvas, the colors will instantly dissolve.  I enjoyed experimenting with them.

It is so different than working with acrylics- which dry extremely fast…sometimes too fast.  I had to wait several days until the oil in the paint was dry enough to paint more colors that won’t dissolve the colors that are already painted.  I have discovered an advantage to this slow dry.  Using solvents, I easily removed a section of the painting that wasn’t working for me.

Removing some paint.

I’m very happy with my finishedl daffodil painting. I like the drawn lines and the colours that are softer than I usually use. I think it has a good centre of interest.

Daffodils. Oil paint and oil stick. Flora Doehler, c. 2009

The larger painting has been more challenging. I have probably spent more time repainting a daffodil in the middle of painting than on the 2 canvases put together. I overpainted it way too many times. Finally I have just scraped and sanded and painted out that section. I’m going to wait a while to complete it because right now it feels like I’m having a power struggle with the poor flower! One day I’ll be in the studio and I’ll sneak up on it and finish it!!

Daffodils in progress.

Although switching mediums can be frustrating, I really like to mix it up because  it keeps me learning new ways to approach the subject matter. It keeps me more aware of the properties of the colours and brushes I’m using. Each new way of interpreting the beauty I see around me helps me to  better understand what I’m actually looking at. But most of all, it’s just so much fun moving from oil to acrylic to watercolour to printmaking and squeezing out a bit of the past into my present painting.

The New Vase

This winter I’ve been printmaking using easy-peasy materials.  I enjoy the high contrast and the textures that printmaking presents, and I wanted to bring that same feel to my next painting.

Inspiration comes from different places all the time.  In the case of this painting the color, the tulips, the pears, the spring season, and the friendship behind the vase all combined to inspire me.

Spontaneity.

At the grocery store the other day I bought these gorgeous tulips and some very plump, luscious, tasty beautiful pears. I have to confess that I bought the pears because of their colour.  I knew that I had to use that color in a big way in a painting!

Good enough to paint AND eat!

I decided to use the pear green as the background color.  I use Golden Fluid Acrylics for most of my acrylic painting. I like the intensity of the pigment and the fluidity. For years I painted exclusively in watercolour and the transition to painting with acrylics felt better using fluid paints.

To paint the background I squirted three colors onto my canvas – green-gold, Hansa yellow, and titan buff, I added mat medium and mixed the paint directly on the canvas for two reasons:

• it is a lot faster to mix the color on the canvas
• the resulting ground has some texture and variation

Painting the background.

I keep practicing painting with a reduced palette, because in my experience, it results in more harmony to the painting. The colours I choose  are often determined by how I feel about the colour and the given subject matter on the day that my painting starts. Some days pea green “speaks” to me, and on other days I am drawn to a coral colour. So, just to be on the safe side, this time I coated out canvases with both colours!

Coated canvasses wait to be painted.

After studying my subject matter and moving my props around for awhile; after putting on some music and making the perfect cup of tea, I sketched out my big shapes with chalk, erased some of them, moved the shapes around, added more, erased and generally played around with the composition until I felt satisfied with it. Then I captured those shapes with paint. It’s just a guide because as I get into the painting, I will still change the position of objects.

The painting objects are sketched on with chalk and then with paint.

While I’m drawing it out, I’m thinking about what colours I’ll use. For me, the subject matter is for reference only and I rarely do a literal reproduction of the exact object or colours. Although I bought the parrot tulips for their colour and shape, on painting day the red didn’t appeal to me anymore so I changed their colour.

I open up my paints, adding a dioxinine purple to the original colours that I used in the background.

My limited palette.

Even though many of my paintings appear to be still life paintings or flowers–a generic subject matter, they are all actually quite personal.

Let me explain.

Tulips represent rebirth and new beginnings to me and so does the yellow-green colour.

But the vase in this painting is what tells the real story. It is a reference to a wonderful man I worked with for many years in Toronto in adult literacy.

The final flower set up for the painting.

I could tell you a lot of things about my colleague – his sharp wit, his ability to understand complex computer concepts and explain them in non-patronizing ways to the rest of us.  I could tell you how every day at lunch he would pull out his pocket knife and carefully peel several pieces of fruit leaving behind one long coil of skin or rind. Or I could tell you about the beautiful smooth, round flat stones he had collected from Lake Ontario that littered his office.

Matt medium is smeared all over the canvas. It will dry transparent. The first bit of paint is squeezed out of the bottles onto the canvas.

But instead I will tell you that one day I found myself leaning in his office doorway and telling him about the fear and anxiety I had felt for months towards a manager at work. I started to cry and I couldn’t stop.  I didn’t know him very well and I was embarrassed at my display of emotion but at the same time I was very relieved to be able to share with him the nightmare I was feeling at work. When I returned from lunch, there was a gigantic bouquet of flowers on my desk.  I think I must have cried again!  It was such a kind gesture of support and affirmation.

It takes patience to wait for the matt medium to dry revealing the true colours.

A few weeks ago, about seven years after that episode, a beautiful vase arrived in the mail.  My friend and his partner were housecleaning and came across this vase which reminded him of my paintings. He packed it up and mailed it out here to me. Another spontaneous gesture!

Painting detail.

It feels good to have a piece of Alan’s energy here in the studio and it’s just the kind of inspiration a new painting needed.

I am happy with the painting so far, but I need to spend some more time on the flowers, and maybe the background too.

The almost-finished painting

Coming here to live in Bear River has been a rebirth and renewal of my creativity because it has given me the opportunity to spend more time painting, writing and smelling the tulips!

The perfect music helps the painting.

Here is the finished painting that will be displayed at the Flight of Fancy store in Bear River. (SOLD October, 2009)

"The Gift" $900 acrylic .

Printmaking

Daffodil print and print source.

I have always loved printmaking.  Maybe I have it in my blood.  My father was a Linotype operator and my mother was a writer and an artist who painted with oils and pastels.

The inspiration for the prints was this cheerful pot of daffodils...thanks Larry!

I am one of the few people who actually likes the smell of oil paints –but I digress.  The online course in fibre arts that I recently took used stamps in the projects so I decided to save some money and to make my own.

Pulling a proof.

The problem was I couldn’t find my woodcuts carving tools as they are either still packed away in a box somewhere or they didn’t make the trip here 18 months ago when we moved.

Print of tulips.

Something that I am learning in Bear River is how to improvise.  When people live on reduced means and are far away from stores that supply everything, they are forced to get inventive.  This kind of creativity and innovation is a skill that I didn’t develop very well growing up in the city.

Making a print using foam.

I’d like to think that the innovation is rubbing off on me now because I have figured out a great way to make a stamp for printing using readily available tools.  I’m sure this is not original — probably several hundred other people have figured it out already, but it still excites me.

Glue foam pieces to board backing.

I’ve made a little video to show you how to do this and if you try it I hope you have as much fun as I am having!

In the past couple of weeks I’ve been printmaking.  I enjoy the resulting high contrast and the textures in printmaking, and I want to bring that same feel to my next painting.

I added line and colour to this print.

This is a story of how one thing leads to an unexpected other thing. The online personal symbols class led to this printmaking experiment. In a later post, I’ll show you how it has impacted my painting.

Printing and painting.