"Molly" A Dog Portrait

 

"Molly" pastel dog portrait

Looking through a pile of old portraits, I came across this one of Molly the Bichon Frise.

She was a charming little dog who loved her tennis ball, so of course it had to be included in the portrait. She lived in a house with green shag carpet, a perfect backdrop for her snowy white coat. 

When I delivered the portrait, her owner seemed a bit underwhelmed (never a good sign) and sure enough, a day or two later she called to say that the portrait was not quite right; it just didn't look like Molly. I dutifully retrieved the portrait and examined the reference photo closely, and to my embarrassment realized that I had gotten Molly's head too narrow and the ears not right. 

Making corrections on a pastel portrait is fairly easy, and in no time "Molly" was looking like her real self. This time the client's enthusiasm was more genuine when I delivered the corrected portrait, and she has since told me how much she loves it. 

Sometimes one can get too close to a work of art and fail to see the flaws. I have learned to avoid this by standing back often from the easel, checking it frequently against the reference photo and looking at the work in a mirror where mistakes are more obvious. No artist, however accomplished, is immune from this myopia, so I've learned to be aware and to not flog myself when it happens. 

Thank you for stopping by. 

Reiners By The Bay

I have to admit that I’ve always been an english rider at heart, ever since starting riding lessons at age ten. Back then it was huntseat, but in more recent years I took up dressage. 

I have, however, always loved the Quarter Horse breed. In fact, my own horse is a very atypical Quarter Horse much better suited to the english riding disciplines than to the life of a cowpony, but he has that wonderful QH gentile, laid back personality. I’ve never had lessons in riding western although I do know the difference between direct reining and neck reining and that western riders ride with only one hand on the reins. And, I know all the parts of western saddles and other tack. I watched a lot of westerns when I was a kid in the 50’s after all. 

That’s about the extent of my western riding knowledge so when I went to the Reiners By The Bay show two weekends ago at Flintfields Horse Park, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect or when the best time to go was. A check of the website revealed only a list of classes with unfamiliar designations and no explanation as to what those designations meant. 

Unfortunately, I chose to go on Sunday rather than Saturday because of the predicted high heat, and that turned out to be a mistake. All the good (upper level) classes were on Saturday. The Sunday schedule had promised a full list of classes, but when I got there in late morning, only two classes remained; both for green horses and riders. 

Ah well. It was a learning experience if nothing more, and after checking out the light direction and accessibility to the ring, I lucked out by standing next to a woman who was there with reiner friends and was friendly enough to  clue me in to a few things. 

Maybe it was the fact that these were green horses doing the required movements awkwardly and slowly, but I suddenly understood the opinions of non dressage enthusiasts about watching dressage. Once you’ve seen one or two horses go, you’ve seen it all and the rest is pretty boring. 

My railside shooting companion did tell me that this show was a nationally sanctioned event and that they hoped to make it an annual show. I do, too, because I’d love to watch the upper level horses perform their spins and sliding stops in more dramatic fashion. 

I was informed that reiners are both very friendly, supportive of one another and noisy in voicing that support during rides. 

Dogs go to reining events, too. This is an interesting looking canine, don't you think? 

Some of the entrants were all dolled up in fancy clothes like you see in western pleasure classes with matching saddle pads. 

One of the required movements consists of going fast around in a circle three times in each direction. 

But the really exciting movements in reining are the spin, here executed in slow motion 

and the sliding stop. I have been told that the rider must not haul on the horse's mouth to get the desired fast sliding stop, haunches down and front feet walking to a stop. 

I'm pretty sure this is frowned upon, but after all this is a green reining horse. 

All in all, the camera performed perfectly, I learned a lot and am already looking forward to next year's show. Plus, I did get some great shots to use for paintings and saw some handsome cowboys, cute girls and pretty horses. 

That made the day very worthwhile. 

"Man On A Mission"

“Man On A Mission” 8x10 oil painting on canvas board

I had an email from my mentor recently. “You need to do some one hour paintings! Use big brushes and heavy paint”.

I must admit that this assignment was thoroughly intimidating because I’m a very slow, careful painter, but I knew it would be an excellent exercise to “loosen me up”. For my first attempt, I chose a foal photo, but decided that it was too complex an image for my first one hour painting. So, I found this simple photo of Spinner, a Jack Russell Terrier who belongs to a friend and sometimes riding instructor.

Yesterday I forced myself into the studio, and this was the result. I used a #12 bristle flat to apply a tone to the canvas and then used #8 synthetic flats to draw and paint the dog and the background. I cheated a little by using a round bristle for some of the small details, but that was it. I managed to do the dog in one hour but then spent another hour applying the background and fussing over the dog. I probably could easily have stretched the time into another 2-3 hours to refine everything but resisted the urge and put down the brushes.

I’m supposed to do a couple of these per week and already have a German Shepherd picked out to do next. It’s quite a departure from my usual cautious and detailed style and requires real discipline to resist the urge to pick, pick, pick at the painting. Now I’m looking forward to doing the next one.

I don’t think I’m in any danger of becoming a “loose woman”, but you never know.

I Just LOVE This Show!

The highlight of my summers has become visiting Horse Shows By The Bay near Traverse City, Michigan every July and August. This year the show has expanded to four weeks of hunters, jumpers, ponies, dressage and a polo match on the final weekend. Top riders from around the country now come here to compete including Peter Pletcher, Tammy Provost, Patricia Griffith and Scott Lenkart, along with junior riders Caitlin Ziegler and Victoria Birdsall. HSBB is now considered one of the best shows in the midwest under the exceptional management of Dean and Alexandra Rheinheimer.

Last weekend I spent the afternoon at the show and enjoyed every minute of it! Every year more improvements are made to the grounds, and this year was no exception. A new pathway for visitors from the parking lot all the way to the Grand Prix ring at the far end has shortened walks and given better access to all four of the rings for those of us who like to wander around and catch whatever action is going on in the various rings.

For a change, I was not disappointed in my photos. I don’t know if my expectations have been lowered or if I’m shooting better; whichever it is, I see many good paintings amongst them.

This year I remembered to put the long lens on the camera which greatly increased my chances of getting good jump shots. That was a good thing when I got to the Grand Prix ring which is the largest of all and has limited access for spectators.

Last year I posted the photos on my website, but I found that very few people bothered to follow the link to them, so this year I’m posting them right in the blog. Here are just a few of the photos for your enjoyment.

The first photo shows a lovely iron gray hunter horse in a warmup ring. I couldn’t resist him.



This photo shows a groom holding a pony and is very typical of this level of showing. Unlike most of us who do our own grooming, saddling, bathing, etc., the show barns have grooms to do this work. When the horse is ready, the rider hops on and is off to the rings. When the class is done, the rider hops off and hands the reins to the groom. I even saw one groom picking out the feet of a hunter while the mounted rider was waiting for her class! These unsung heroes of the horse show circuit make it possible for riders to compete in several classes in a day without wearing themselves out caring for their horses. Some riders ride more than one horse which makes the grooms doubly indispensible.



I took this shot while the show photographer was shooting this winner and his rider. The proud mom and groom are standing by, but no amount of coaxing could get this pony to look at the camera and perk his ears. He was totally bored by the whole thing.



This next shot I caught in a warmup ring. The two older riders seemed to be mentoring this little girl on her cute white pony, and giving her encouragement. It’s a great idea for a painting and just goes to show that the best action is not always in the rings during a class. You can catch many good candid photos in the warmup rings if you’re alert for them.



Since not much was going on in the pony ring, I wandered off from there to the Grand Prix ring. More in the next post.

Remembering Bo

We are having absolutely spectacular fall weather here in northwest lower Michigan; warm, sunny days and cool nights which have brought out equally spectacular fall colors. We are nowhere near peak color yet, but it's a good color year with the brilliant oranges and reds of the maples contrasted against the dark evergreens and golden yellows of our beech trees and poplars. It's been a bumper year for beechnuts, so the squirrels are again busy bounding about in our yard gathering their harvest for the winter.

Thankfully, we have no apples, so that means no deer to browse on my perennials and shrubs. On the other hand, that also means no apples for us, which means I had to buy some for the first time in three years!

Unfortunately, I'm stuck in the house looking out while continuing to work on gathering financial information for our advisor guy; made all the more urgent by the financial crisis in our world. Ugh! I've been adding up our monthly expenses and wondering how everything got so much more expensive so quickly.

In spite of also nursing a sore throat and headache, I did manage to get outside yesterday to give my car a very overdue interior cleaning. I felt a little sad while doing it because I was washing the last of Bo's muddy paw prints off the back seat and vacuuming up his hairs from the cargo area. We lost him two years ago this month, and yes, it's been that long since the car had a good cleaning!


I still miss Bo. I remember the joy this small Lab mix pooch brought to the family for nearly 16 years after we rescued him on a freezing December night from a household that had banished him to the yard with no shelter from the cold and wind and very little human contact. We were just going to take a look at him that night in response to the ad in the paper, but when my husband saw the conditions he was living in; tied to a tree and shivering; there was no way he was going to let that dog spend another cold and miserable night in that place. Bo eagerly hopped in our car with not even a look back as our kids showered him with attention.

In the first 24 hours we had him, he had to be shoved out the door to go potty because he was so afraid that he couldn't come back in. We got him as a companion for our German Shepherd, and they bonded immediately. Bo thought he was in Heaven and showed us every day how grateful he was. He and Daisy became best friends and spent hours playing in the big dog yard until Daisy became too old and crippled to enjoy the rough housing.

Bo had a habit of tuning you out when his attention was focused on something. If he got loose, he would take off on a dead run out the gate and into the road. Most likely it was this propensity that caused him to end up a stray on the doorstep of the family that took him in, so one of his nicknames became Hobo Joe. More often we called him Bobo. We could never trust him to be on the loose, but around the house he wanted nothing more than to be at your side - or Daisy's.

Bo never did get over his dislike of the cold or isolation, and after Daisy died he became strictly an inside dog.

Well, now I've digressed. The two photos at the top are views from my studio. Our lake is quite narrow and long, and on a still morning like this one, the fall colors are reflected in the water, adding to the brilliance of the scene. I love the view from my studio window, and one of these days I'm going to paint it.

Speaking of the studio, poor Bard is languishing on the easel as I work on these financial figures. It will take two or three days in a row that I can dedicate to painting in order to finish him up, and so far I haven't been able to put them together. I'm determined to finish him by month's end, however.

"Piling On" on the Field of Art

To tell you the truth, 2007 was a difficult year. Nothing really tragic happened, but somehow I struggled through the whole year never quite understanding why until I did my annual year end assessment in January. That’s when I realized that one by one the setbacks and disappointments had piled on one another, never giving me a chance to recover in between.

2006 had been a difficult year, too. My 92 year old mother declined rapidly and had to be put in a nursing home. We three sisters had to clean out her apartment and dispose of her worldly possessions which felt like we were erasing what was left of our parents’ lives. My computer hard drive died and I was forced to upgrade the operating system on the new drive and upgrade all my software. I haven’t yet had the time to learn it all again and can’t yet properly print my reproductions and business cards.

Wisely, I made the decision in early 2007 to cut back on marketing and showing in order to build up new inventory of artwork, but that never happened. Starting in January the piling on began. I learned about a local equine art show that I wasn’t invited to enter. It seems there were politics involved, and the curator only invited her “friends”. Next, I lost my only gallery because I hadn’t provided him with anything new for quite a while. But the biggest blow to my ego and self esteem happened a few months later when I lost a portrait commission because I’d taken so long to get to it. It was mortifying; something that had never happened before.

The final piling on was like a three hundred pound linebacker landing on top of the heap. In fact, I wrote about it back in January, but it is still a sore issue. In July I was contacted by a licensing agent who was wildly enthusiastic about my art and made big promises about making me into the next Chris Cummings of the licensing world. It seems she knew far less about equine art licensing than she let on, and I was never able to pin her down as to which of my images I should send her for the big branding promotion she promised. I finally sent her some images and waited and waited. Finally she informed me that the images weren’t suitable and that I hadn’t sent enough to launch a branding campaign. A short time later she rudely cancelled the contract, by email no less, blaming me for her failures. After all the time I’d spent doing research on licensed horse images and my own sales records and planning out paintings for licensing, I was both humiliated and furious. Now I’m glad to be rid of her; a person I wouldn’t want to do business with anyway.

There were a number of other setbacks over the year but these are the major ones, all art related. Confidence in the quality of my art and in my ability to succeed as an artist was shaken at the beginning of the year and never had a chance to recover. Is it any wonder that I found it so difficult to paint in 2007? We artists are such sensitive souls that it doesn’t take much to throw us off track and shake our confidence.

So far the good news is that 2008 is perking along much better. The tax materials are now at the accountant’s and off my long To Do list. I ordered some new art supplies and new canvases and am really liking the looks of the Masterpiece Belgian linens. A new canvas is waiting for the Bard portrait, and by tomorrow my mother’s taxes should be done, and I will at long last be free to paint again. I can’t wait!!

The painting above is an old pastel dog portrait which has always been one of my favorites. I’d like to add some dog paintings to my portfolio again, and “Casey” is a reminder of that.