The Last White Poppy, 9x12, ©2011 Helen Klebesadel
Welcome to day eighteen in the 33 Paintings in 33 Days Project of Alaskan artist Nikki Kinne and Wisconsin artist Helen Klebesadel.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I have preserved my spring poppies in photos that I used as a source for this painting. While I absolutely love painting directly from life, I have found that when working from life I am more detailed and interested in preserving a representational rendering. When working from a photo I tend to get a little more expressive to keep my interest engaged. In either case I usually just start painting using the watercolor to draw with rather than doing a preliminary pencil drawing. For larger more complex paintings I will do a drawing to ensure a strong composition.
Nip-N-Tuck, 5 x 7, watercolor, ©2011 Nikki Kinne
I cannot tell you how pleased I was to see this painting by Nikki of an old fishing boat called the ‘Nip-N-Tuck.’ This was the painting that wanted Nikki to paint it. She says of it “Old habits are hard to break and that I resorted to using a photo once again. Using photos isn’t bad – it is just not keeping with the project as I had defined it.”
The reason I was so pleased is that I always like it when a rule is broken in the service of creative exploration, especially when they are rules we have imposed on ourselves that limit what we can do for no particular reason. To be clear, Nikki imposed this rule on herself so she would have the opportunity to play and learn more from this project than she would have if she had allowed herself to use photos for all the paintings, and that was an excellent impulse. (As you can see she is VERY accomplished in using photos as sources for her watercolors.) However, since this painting wanted to be painted so badly on our eighteenth day of the 33 of 33 Project I am delighted she put the rule aside so we could have this wonderful painting in the world.
I am now making my daily works for this project available for sale online in my Meylah shop here: http://meylah.com/HelenKlebesadel I will post them each day after they are posted in the blog.
Thank you for joining us on our shared creative journey.
2 comments
just wanted to say how much I am enjoying following this series.
Thank you Jan. It is nice to hear from a sister TAFA member. By the way, I love your blogging about vintage fabric and the beautiful old quilts in your etsy store (http://www.etsy.com/shop/fabriquefantastique). I have a series of paintings based in traditional quilt designs so I share your passion.
For other reading this, TAFA is the Textile and Fiber Artists List (http://www.tafalist.com/) and it is filled with wonderful offerings. TAFA is in the midst of the final 5 days of a fundraiser to fund a new website. All help is appreciated. Check out their fundraiser here: http://www.indiegogo.com/Fund-a-website-for-TAFA
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