Getting Back On The Horse or Facing Easel Anxiety

"Tribute To Glory", 12x12 inch oil on canvas

Do you know that old saying about how you need to climb right back on the horse after falling off? Well, the same is true for artists after an extended period of not creating. 

The truth is that I haven’t done much artwork over the past ten years or so for various reasons, and that has taken a toll on my self confidence and creative abilities. Fear of failure blocks me so often when I even THINK about going in the studio to work on a painting that too often I turn around and leave or find something “urgent” to do instead. There are currently six unfinished paintings on the studio wall that have all been there for a year or more. Most of them I haven’t touched in over a year. 

Well, I finally had to face the truth that the only way to polish up my rusty skills and improve my art was to actually DO it, no matter the outcome. Reading all sorts of articles, going to workshops and listening to podcasts just isn’t going to get me anywhere but more discouraged and bogged down. 

So, I’m committing to putting artwork at the top of my priority list, right after healthy activities and riding. The housework will just have to suffer a little while longer. It’s never been at the top of my list anyway.

To start with, I've committed myself to finishing a couple of paintings before starting anything new although my brain is overflowing with painting ideas that are calling out. First up on the easel is “Tribute To Glory” because it is the closest painting to being done. 

One of the down aspects of not working on a painting for months at a time is that you lose momentum with it and you forget how you were going about it. Even though I’d written notes on what colors I used to mix the horse color and the background color, I still had to mix a lot of paint before I found the mixes that matched well enough with what was already on the canvas. 

The other issue that’s come up for me is wanting to work in another style but being unable to switch horses in midstream, so to speak, on one painting. That will never do, unless I want to start all over again. Nope! 

So here is the latest progress on “Glory”. I’m working in thin layers of paint on a stretched canvas in oils. You can see where I left off just under the jawbone on the neck. Naturally, the next session will involve some tweaking before continuing down the neck. 

That in itself gets to be discouraging. It seems as if I paint paint paint then correct correct correct, then paint some more and correct some more. I suppose that’s true for a lot of artists, but I do wish that I could get it right the first time most of the time, anyway. 

This image is a bit contrasty and the color is a bit off, but maybe next time the sun will be out and I’ll have a better version for you to see. 

That’s all for today. Thank you for taking the time to visit and read and look. I hope you enjoy. 

Day Two; Ancient Egyptian Chariot Horse Sketch

Just a short post today to give proof that I actually did a little art yesterday.

Having wasted most of the day on Facebook, I didn’t get to any art until evening. I wanted to sketch an Egyptian chariot horse since I’ve long been fascinated by that ancient culture. I spent about half an hour looking through a thick book on ancient Egypt that I picked up from the bargain table at Borders, but only found one picture of chariot horses, and it was too small to see many details. So, I just went with memory of other pictures I’ve seen.

The sketch took another half hour or more with lots of erasing to get proportions right. I didn’t worry about being accurate with tack and just enjoyed the process of sketching like I used to do as a kid. Obviously, I’m a little rusty so a lot more sketching is in order. But, it was fun, and that’s the important thing; learning to just enjoy the process again instead of enduring the drudgery of getting the image “just so”.

For now that’s enough.

Finished Belgian Oil Painting

detail "Meet The Green Team" oil on canvas

 To celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, I finished an oil painting today with the working title, “Meet The Green Team”. You may remember this painting from previous blog posts. It’s been around so long that it’s almost an oldey moldey.

I’m totally elated to finish this painting for several reasons. It’s been “under construction” for almost seven years! I needed to finish it to send to a show next month. And, someone is interested in buying it! She lives in the same state where the painting will be going to the show which should allow her to buy it at the show if she can make it there.

This painting also represents a milestone of sorts for me besides being the first major work of art that I’ve completed in several years. I really challenged myself with this painting by making some significant changes from the reference photograph. As you can see in the reference below, one of the horses is a bay and both horses are sweaty  having just finished participating in a horse pull. I wanted to paint a team of Belgians so decided to change the bay to a sorrel and elminate the sweat from the horses. I didn’t care for the rusty trailer so decided to change that, too. One of the reasons it took so long to finish this one is that I ran into problems because I didn’t have good references for what I wanted the horses and trailer to look like. It took a lot of revising to get it to its finished state.

reference for painting

Finished painting, 12x16 oil on canvas

Next on the schedule will be finishing the taxes so they can go to the accountant, and then it is back to painting again. “The girls” are waiting to be finished: “Glory” and “Girls Play”.

Starting Over - Polo Painting

"Girls Play Too" Polo painting on Belgian Linen

 It never pays to be in too much of a hurry.

Here is my second painting that I hope to have done in time for the invitational show. I had to start it over because the first time I didn’t give enough attention to placement of the horse and rider on the canvas, and they ended up too high.  I was able to scrub off the line drawing with Gamsol and salvage the canvas which is a good thing because it’s Belgian linen.

The second time around, I took more time moving the drawing around on the canvas and even using matboard corners to check how the painting will look when it’s framed with the rabbet overlap hiding the edges of the canvas. I’m much happier with it now and think I got the placement just right. 

It never pays to be in too much of a hurry.

I used the same underpainting mixture on this painting as I did for the Glory painting  but applied the paint much more thinly which is more my usual method. The underpainting will now dry for a few days before I begin the color layer.

I’m using a photograph I tood two years ago at the Horse Shows By The Bay demonstration polo match. Most of  the players were Michigan State University students using a borrowed string of polo ponies. I’ve loved polo ever since my parents took me to a match the summer we lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin when I was about eleven. This was only the second match I’ve seen and I thoroughly enjoyed it and took a ton of photos. More paintings will come from them.

Since I really don’t know that much about polo, I went online and looked it up to check that the details would be accurate for tack, the field and the rider’s dress. All of the players had some kind of face guard on their helmets at the match I went to which obscures this rider’s face. I found online that not all polo players use them, so it was eliminated from the painting. I also took some artistic license with other elements of the photo. What you see is kind of rough, but rest assured the final painting will be polished and colorful.

I’m really excited about this new painting and can’t wait to get back to it. Meanwhile, I’ll put some color on the Glory painting which will really bring it more to life. Time is short, and I must hurry along. But, not too fast. I can’t afford any more mistakes that delay progress.

And so it’s back to the studio for me!

A New Painting and Barn Fairies

I started a brand new painting yesterday. It’s my first since last winter, and I’m quite excited about it. In keeping with my resolve to paint only images which excite me and aren’t too challenging for the time being, I chose to do a little painting of one of our cats when she was a kitten. She was four months old when we rescued her from going to animal control where her chances of being adopted were not good. So, she was pretty much out of the really cute kitten stage but grown up enough to tell that she was going to be a beautiful cat.

Annie came to us round about from a neglectful home. In a word when we got her, she stunk! She had feces caked to her behind and other parts, so as soon as I got her home from the initial vet check the next day, she got a bath. As with so many things, she took this scary adventure in stride and bounced back with kitten-like vigor.

Annie was loaded with personality and energy and curious about everything. She was often naughty but so full of personality that she wiggled her way into our hearts. She grew into a beautiful, long haired cat but suffered from some sort of intestinal malfunction for most of her life. Just before Christmas two years ago, we had her put to sleep because she had declined so much.

I still miss her terribly.

At any rate, this little painting is an oil on 6x6 inch gallery wrapped canvas. I started by toning the canvas with a mixture of yellow ochre and naples yellow and then drew the main features directly on the canvas with burnt umber. That’s the first stage you see here. The main thing was to get everything in proper proportion.

I continued by laying on the first few layers of paint, starting with her eyes and making adjustments as I went. The yellow ochre/naples yellow mixture was painted in as the base for her coat. The darker areas are a mixture of ultramarine blue and burnt umber. When I had the main features fleshed (or furred) out, I quit for the day to let the painting dry before continuing.

What has me particularly enthused about THIS painting is figuring out that I can draw directly on the canvas without a preliminary drawing on paper and have it come out well. I’ve only done one other cat painting in my life, and that was a commission years ago in pastel. This painting has really boosted my confidence, and I should have no problem finishing it in record time.

Last night, I had a really good ride on The Great Pumpkin as Scottie is known in the fall. He was moving out better and managed ground poles with no problem. Since Ann and I were the only ones to ride, we played barn fairies afterward while the horses dried off. She swept the barn aisle while I mucked out Elle’s stall. Or, should I say Miss Piggy’s stall?

This morning I got a call from the vet letting me know that Scottie’s selenium level is very low; just as I suspected. If we up his supplement a little, maybe he won’t be so stiff and muscle sore as he has been for so long.

I’m crossing my fingers!

Art and Animal Communication

Oh, my goodness! It’s been such a long time since I last posted that I decided to share with you what I’ve been up to even though I haven’t done much in the way of art.

It is color season now here in northwest lower Michigan, and I did begin a plein air painting of the lake out on the deck last week but didn’t get very far. It had been so long since I set up the french easel that I forgot how it worked and had to fool around with it for a while to get the legs extended and set up. Then I moved the easel about ten times before I found a good spot from which to paint. Next I had to set up all the other paraphernalia like the palette and paints and jar of medium, and by that time it was getting too late in the day and time to fix dinner. So, I packed it all up and brought it inside. I did, however, get one layer of paint on the board.

Since then it’s been one thing after another and I’ll probably have to finish the painting from photographs I’ve taken over the past few days when the conditions and the light were right. If I can get to it quick enough, I’ll have the benefit of being able to observe the colors and so forth from the studio window as I work.

Since my last post, I also met with my local mentor again, and he gave me some very good advice about how to handle this blocked state I seem to be in and gave me a different assignment. He suggested that I put horses aside for the time being and do some plein air painting. However, I found that going outside my comfort zone was not going to work to get me started again. So, I’ll stick with horses and just do whatever strikes my fancy.

Since my other (horse art) mentor seems to have gone MIA and is no longer responding to my emails, I’ll be on my own for now. My hope is that once I’m painting regularly again, I can get back to working with the mentors - or mentor  - again.

Another project that I undertook was doing some much needed reorganizing in the studio precipitated by buying a bunch of cheap canvas boards and then needing a place to store them. The oil and acrylic painting supplies are now moved and consolidated together as are the pastel supplies. The cameras and their accessories are also now consolidated, and I managed to make room for them to be stored together in one place. I went through all the drawers of my big desk, got rid of some things and moved others around so that everything is in better order and more convenient.

Meanwhile, back at the barn as they say, there have been complications and continued issues with Scottie's soundness. To make a long story short, I am now saddle shopping again (Oh Joy!) but may have found one that fits Scottie and that is comfortable for me. The vet has been out a couple of times, and Scottie had an acupuncture treatment the last time. It really seems to have relieved his sore back which is reason for great celebration by both of us.

I’ve been so concerned about him and his depressed attitude that I also consulted with an animal communicator who was able to reach Scottie and ask him my long list of questions. It was very enlightening, and he told us that he’s having problems in his hock or stifle, so the vet is coming out again to explore that possible source of his continued lameness problems.

I’m really fascinated by this animal communication thing and would love to learn to communicate on my own.
 Apparently, it’s now widely accepted, and my own experience with it has made me into a believer.

Last weekend my husband John and I went for a drive and stopped at this longhorn cattle farm where some cows were eating breakfast right up by the fence. I’m sharing a couple of them with you here. I’m amazed by the varieties of colors and coat patterns on these longhorns and how they skillfully maneuver their horns so that they don’t poke each other.

The rest are photos of the view from our deck taken just this morning. The leaves are falling fast now, and it won’t be long before the trees are bare and snow is in the air.

Oh, dear! Did I just say that four letter word beginning with “S”?

Alpha Mare Gets a Makeover

Whew!! That’s one more big job accomplished! Or, as my grandmother used to say, “I’m glad that elephant is behind me!”.

I’ve spent the better part of the last two weeks revising my website which had, frankly, become a bit of a shambles. I had started to revise it a couple of times but never completed the job, so there were pages with three different designs, and the site had lost its uniform look. More importantly, I had rearranged some galleries but neglected to change old links and the result was duplicate content. Google doesn’t like duplicate content.

My visitor numbers have dropped dramatically over the past two years to a point where they are now less than half of what they once were. Knowing that there had to be a reason for this, I did some exploring, both on the website pages and in my stats and came up with some answers. I hope. I found a lot of broken links, among other things. Google doesn’t like broken links.

One of the things I did was to go through my Sitemeter visitor logs and write down every single page that visitors visited during a 10 day period, excluding those who only visited one or two pages. I wanted to see which are the more popular pages and how visitors were navigating around the site. Then I compiled the figures into a spreadsheet and sorted them by number of visits. This was invaluable information as I decided which images to keep and which to leave on the site; which galleries to keep and which to combine with others.

My mantra with this revision was to simplify the whole site, so the first thing I did was to decrease the number of different galleries by combining some together. For instance, the old jumping and dressage galleries were combined into an all english riding gallery. From there I proceeded to make a list of paintings and drawings I wanted to take off the site. Mostly these were paintings which were either old portraits or just not up to current standards. Some had been sold and didn’t really fit in anywhere or serve any purpose. I figured there was no point in showcasing a bunch of old portraits if I’m not accepting commissions any longer.

I made a bunch of other changes that I won’t bore you with and have ended up with a “new” website which I think is both warmer and softer in feel and cleaner in look with the artwork better arranged for greater impact. I’m hoping that the Google gods will now smile on my website again, raise its ranking in the searches and once again bring the hoards to my doorstep, metaphorically speaking.

Perhaps you could help the cause by visiting my new website and letting me know what you think. You can visit Alpha Mare Equine Art by clicking on the link.

Meanwhile, back in the studio, I’ve decided to resurrect the pony drawing at the top and work on it again. It’s the preliminary drawing for a painting, but I got stuck with what to do about a background. I’m thinking now of going simple with mainly a toned canvas. The title is The Little Inspector, and I’ll get to work on it very soon.

But first the house needs cleaning.

Thanks for visiting, and please come again.