Forest Lightening, 13 x 8 1/2, watercolor, ©2011 Helen Klebesadel
Welcome to day twenty-four in the 33 Paintings in 33 Days Project of Alaskan artist Nikki Kinne and Wisconsin artist Helen Klebesadel.
My 24th painting brings back the surreal. We finally started to have rain after a long dry spell. There was pretty amazing lightening that made me want to paint it. It brought with it a refreshing downpour and an strangely green light that sparked my imagination.
Paint Out July 2006, 11 x 14, watercolor, ©2011 Nikki Kinne
Nikki’s twenty-fourth painting was another rescue. She took the beginnings of an older plein air painting that had been relegated to the ‘dead zone’ and reconsidered how to approach it. She says, ” I really, really REALLY wanted to go to photos and finish the painting.” Instead she edited it by cutting it smaller and added value and texture until true depth emerged and her memory of the beauty of the vista was finally achieved. The painting is in the ‘dead zone’ no more!
Nikki demonstrates here how important it is to put works away that are not working rather than forcing yourself to complete them. Some times you just need to put a painting away until you can see what you actually painted rather what you were trying to achieve. Once you can see the work clearly you can make decisions about how to complete it. If you are reluctant to set a work aside it is possible to better see its composition by holding it up to a mirror. The compositions should be just as strong in reverse. If it isn’t working you may be able to see why when its flipped. If that doesn’t work, put it away and go on to the next painting, pulling it out again in time for reconsideration.
Thank you for enjoying our creative journey with us.
I am now making my daily works for this project available for sale online in my Meylah shop here: http://meylah.com/HelenKlebesadel I post them each day after they are posted in the blog.
2 comments
wow i love both of them~!!!
why did you also paint the roots of trees? was it because the lightenings resemble roots ?
and that little bit of pink on the second one was sweet~~~!
Thank you Summer. I love tree roots and paint them often. I’m fascinated by the idea that the root ball on many trees extends as far under ground as the branched canopy does above. Its a nice metaphor for the sub-conscious.
Lightening is amazing too. In this case was imagining the electricity charging through the tree branches right down into the soil. I grew up rural and was taught that over a year worldwide many millions tons of nitrogen is put into the soil by lightning strikes. Nitrogen is plentiful in our atmosphere but isn’t in a usable form for plants.
The high energy of lightning causes the nitrogen to react with oxygen and form a form of nitrogen which, combines with water and seeps into the soil in a form that the plants can process. Somehow all those ideas came together in this painting.
Thank you for asking Summer. (I think that bit of pink in Nikki’s painting is sweet too.)
Your email is used for verification purposes only, it will never be shared. By submitting a comment you grant Helen R. Klebesadel a perpetual license to reproduce your words and name/web site in attribution. Inappropriate and irrelevant comments will be removed at an admin’s discretion.