"Dingle Peninsula, Ireland" (oil on linen; 12" x 12") sold

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Have you ever been to Dingle in County Kerry, Ireland?  The only town on the Dingle Peninsula, it sits on the Atlantic coast, at the westernmost point of Island and Europe.  Greens are even more vivid in this Emerald Isle after a squall.  The painting brings back the fond memories of our trip in 1996--driving on the "wrong side" of the narrow roads, frequent rain showers, rocks and ruins, green rolling landscapes, and the pub visits.

"Robin Bath" (oil on linen; 8" x 10") sold

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I was taking a walk when I saw a scruffy-looking robin at a shallow brook the day after a heavy rain.  Charming!

"Fine Creek Morning" (oil on linen; 9" x 12") sold

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On the fourth day of Gregory Packard's workshop, which was last Thursday, the sun has returned to Richmond, VA.  The workshop organizers had kindly arranged a plein-air painting opportunity for us.  Following our fearless leader, Greg, we trekked for half an hour to the Mill at Fine Creek in Powhatan, VA. Yes, there were the romantic mill ruins, which have become an outdoor dining area and wedding venue.  But the real surprise was the creek itself.  The name apparently comes from General Robert E. Lee, who said that it was a fine creek.  I have never seen anything like it in Virginia.  The entire creek bed was rocks!

The romantic mill ruins at Fine Creek

Fine Creek

Workshop participants painting away

I decided to paint a scene facing the other way.

"Fine Creek Morning" half finished 

There was no shortage of beautiful sceneries: garden flowers, quaint houses, the mill ruins, the creek, etc.  But I didn't feel motivated.  Shocking, isn't it?  Kim Stenberg, a painting addict, not motivated in such a stimulating environment?  I didn't know it at that time, but I was coming down with a bad cold.  So I took a picture of the above scene that caught my eye and seemed "easy" to paint.  Unfortunately, by the time I was finished setting up my easel (it takes at least 15 minutes to set up the outdoor oil painting gear), the sun disappeared for the rest of the morning!  It actually rained a bit. Dang.

Do you know what I, a sick puppy, did?  I painted the scene from the LCD screen of my camera and memory!  Greg wasn't terribly impressed with my efforts; I wasn't either. The biggest problem with the half-finished painting was the composition.  If you look at it carefully, it is divided into a series of rectangles.  What's up with that?

I called it quits (good for me!), had a sandwich lunch with my new friends, and successfully persuaded Greg into doing a plein-air-painting demo.  I even helped him to unload and carry his painting gear.  He said that he was rusty because he hadn't painted outside for a year.  Tough.

On Monday, I worked on "Fine Creek Morning," focusing on correcting the compositional error.  I am pleased with the final painting.  Please leave comments about what you think!

"Pink Phlox" (oil on linen; 8" x 10") sold

sold

Yesterday morning, I took a walk at the Green Spring Gardens Park in Alexandria, VA. It has been crazy busy this year, so it was my first visit to the park.  Ah, I could breathe deeply.  I wish you were there with me.  It was sunny and mild.  There were just a few people around.  We all smiled and said good morning to each other.

For someone who likes to paint flowers, spring can be exhausting.  Flowers come upon each other like torrential rain.  How do I keep up with them?  The secret to the true enjoyment of this vernal floral glory is letting go.  I can't paint them all.  Enjoy the sunshine and breeze; bring some flowers inside and put them in a pretty vase; above all, don't forget to smell their enchanting fragrance.  If I miss some, there will be always another spring.

The rock garden in full bloom; from this angle, one can see both the gazebo and Manor House.

Spring wildflowers along the Virginia native plant trail

Holmes Run runs through the park.

A fake great blue heron at the pond

"Pink Phlox" (oil on linen; 8" x 10") sold

sold

Original state, then titled "Rock Garden Phlox"

I am feeling better.  Yeah!  Yesterday I cleaned up my studio, then went through my photo stash looking for inspiring pictures for about two hours.  My stamina wasn't yet quite up to speed unfortunately, so I took a rest and decided to work on an old painting instead of starting from scratch.

"Rock Garden Phlox" is a year-old painting, which I once thought was one of the best florals I have ever done.  Well, that was then.  The tiny florets of the phlox, which I had found blooming at the rock garden at Green Spring Gardens Park in Alexandria, VA, were actually cool pink, not warm pink as in the original state.  I wanted more paint on the painting.  After all, these things are called oil paintings, not oil washes, right?  I also thought that I could strengthen the feeling of light striking a few petals and dead stems here and there.

So I got to work.  An hour and a half later, I came up with "Pink Phlox."  What do you think?

"Mountain Waterfalls" (oil on linen; 12" x 10") sold

"Mountain Waterfalls"
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"Great Falls Roaring" (oil, 14" x 11")
click here to buy

Waterfalls are magnificent to look at and difficult to paint.  I have seen quite a few waterfalls, both in this country and mine (South Korea).  The biggest was the Niagara Falls, although my favorites are those in Oregon.  I shouldn't have tried to paint them on location until I had gained more experience in oil painting.  Who knew that rocks, trees, and everything else seemingly kept moving when I first set out to paint Great Falls last summer?  The noise, heat, and crowd got to me! 

I went back and "Great Falls Roaring" was the second attempt at this popular tourist attraction, close to the nation's capital.  The painting used to be a little bigger (16 x 12"), but I decided that I didn't really need that much foreground rocks and cropped it to the current size.  It's not the best painting of Great Falls ever painted; it was, however, a great leap forward for me.  So I am keeping it in my private collection.

It appears that the hardest part of painting waterfalls is keeping the balance between the hard and soft edges for the water.  It has to have hard edges here and there to maintain form.  On the other hand, if the water is hard-edged everywhere, the waterfall looks like icicles.  Since waterfalls usually occur in a rocky environment, one also has to paint rocks convincingly as hard, three-dimensional, bulky objects.  Surprisingly, neither tasks--painting water and rocks--are easy.

Does it sound like another mini-series coming up?  Yes!  How does one learn to paint something well unless one keeps at it many times?  So I painted "Mountain Waterfalls" today.  I don't know the name of this fall in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.  But isn't it pretty?  The upper falls looks like lady fingers!  I thought that it would be a little easier to paint waterfalls from a photo.  It wasn't.  After lots of wiping out, I got this far.  What do you think of the result?

"Winter Sunset at Sea" (oil on linen; 8" x 12") sold

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Thank you for taking time to read my blog in 2011. I will be back with more (and, hopefully, better) paintings and stories next year!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

"Springtime at Central Park" (oil on linen; 9" x 12") sold

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Reference photo

I love New York, NY.  I don't want to live there, but would drop everything to visit the city anytime.  So much energy and cultural diversity!  The above picture was taken a few years ago on a family mini-vacation.  It was a mild, overcast spring day.  We had walked for I don't know how many blocks from our hotel at Times Square, stopping at many landmarks.  Our destination was the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an afternoon of Ancient Egyptian history and culture.  (I would have spent the time looking at paintings, but my daughter would have none of that and wanted to visit the world-famous Egyptian collection.  Sigh.) 

Central Park was crowded as it was a weekend day.  I don't know how New Yorkers would manage without this green haven.  Thank goodness, we had Frederick Law Olmsted, who had the vision to design this beautiful park!  Do you recognize the famous bridge, which had been featured in countless movies?

I wanted to paint the scene for a long time.  But something held me back.  Do you know that made me hesitate?  It was the tyranny of the color green.  It's green in the foreground, middle ground, and background.  I might as well pour a bucket of diluted green on the canvas and call it quits!

I thought long and hard about the problem and decided to take an artistic license.  I made the foreground greens warm (with the various mixtures of cobalt blue, cadminum yellow medium, and some reds), while keeping the middle ground greens pale and cool (with cerulean blue, cadmium yellow light, some reds, and lots of titanium white).  The background greens just above and below the bridge are muted violets.  I edited out the tiny figures to enhance the serene mood I was going after.  What do you think of the result of my efforts?

"Autumn Brook" (oil on linen; 9" x 12") sold

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Reference photo

It was a picture-perfect autumn day when several members of the Art League Plein Air Painters went to Green Spring Gardens Park in Alexandria, VA.  It had been a busy, exciting week, and I was tired.  I walked around, taking numerous pictures of last roses, trees with their fall colors, etc.  But I couldn't settle on any particular view to paint.  So I continued walking down the trail in the woods until I came across the above scene.  This was it!  Except that I had left my painting gear back on the main lawn.  The thought of having to go back to fetch the stuff, drag it down by the brook, set up the gear, and actually paint the scene tired me out even more.

Among my artist friends I am known for my workaholic (or shall I say, artaholic) habit of painting fast and furiously every day.  Not that day.  I decided to give myself a break.  Gasp!  I sat by my teacher and friend, Bobbi Pratte, and watched her paint an overgrown garden.  We kept company, got to know each other better, and had a great time.  It's sometimes good to kick back and relax.

I painted "Autumn Brook" from the photo yesterday.  The background trees with their fall colors are brilliantly backlit.  Tree shadows caress the foreground and middle ground forest floors.  And there it is--a tiny waterfall in the center of the painting.  It was a glorious day to take a walk in the woods.

"Golden Girl" (oil on canvas; 18" x 18") nfs

nfs

Some paintings I do to sell; others for entering juried shows.  And there are paintings just for myself.  "Golden Girl" belongs to the last category.  The girl who is holding something in her right hand is my daughter when she was ten.  She had just found a piece of sea glass and was showing it off.  We were at Glass Beach in northern California.  Yes, Glass Beach--I didn't make it up.  Apparently, there used to be a bottling factory nearby and lots of broken glass made into the beach, hence the name.  The time of the day was obviously the sunset.

Reference photo

I had this girl when I was almost 40.  She was my dream child come true--healthy, happy, affectionate, and bright.  She just became a teenager this summer, and well....  She has changed quite a bit since I took the picture above.  Although I wouldn't change anything about her for the world, I still miss her when she could sit on my lap, be a flower girl, and pose for the camera gladly.  I miss those days. 


So I painted "Golden Girl" to remember my daughter at the age of ten, just as I painted her when she was a preschooler.  She was about three when she posed for a photo in a rose garden in Portland, Oregon. Of all the beauties I saw that day, she was the prettiest in my eye.

"Pretty in Pink" (watercolor, 17" x 12") nfs

I will probably do more portraits of my daughter, perhaps as a young lady, definitely as a bride, and hopefully as a new mother with her baby.  I am thankful for my family and my ability to immortalize their likeness in paintings.

"Golden Light" (oil on linen; 12" x 16") sold

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Reference photo

I took the photo above three years ago at Glass Beach in northern California and have been wanting to paint from it for some time.  I liked the sunset sky and its golden colors reflected in the ocean water.  But I was put off by the dark lumps of the rocks.  That is what a camera does when it takes a brilliant backlit view.

When I showed the picture to Bobbi Pratte in her class on Monday, she advised me that I paint the water first, then add the rocks as dark shapes, and finally sculpt them with lighter colors to make them three-dimensional and rimlit.  Brilliant!  She also told me not to get fussy with the waves and ripples.  There is no way that I can copy these hundreds of ripples; just make them believable and DON'T go back after I put down brushstrokes that go in the same directions as ripples.

I did exactly as she suggested.  The painting went fast.  As it was almost done, I finished it later at night at home to take advantage of wet paints.  I simply love the golden light that seems to glow from within.  Thanks, Bobbi!

"By the Lily Pond" (oil on linen; 12" x 9") sold

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Despite the threat of a heavy thunderstorm, five die-hard plein-air painting friends including myself went out to paint the water lily pond at Green Spring Gardens Park in Alexandria, VA.  The thing is that we are not going to have a nice, balmy weather until September in the mid-Atlantic region.  We might as well brave the elements so that we can show off to our soft friends what we are made of.

Having said that, it was hot and very, very humid.  It would cloud up, making us all nervous, then the sun would return to cast gorgeous shadows on lily pads.  The fluctuating light and generally intolerable weather conditions somehow led me to paint decisively so that I could go home as quickly as possible.  If I may say so, I like "By the Lily Pond" very much.  Unfortunately, I lost the photo file, so I cannot Photoshop it to show you the true colors of the painting.

"Great Falls Roaring" (oil on linen, 14" x 11") sold

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Last week when I heard the weather forecast for the first three days of the coming week, I knew what I would be doing.  Plein air painting!  I organized a paintout at Great Falls Park in northern Virginia.  Five of us met in the late morning on Monday, congratulating each other on our good fortune of painting outside on such a glorious day, which is rare here during the summer. 

I painted Great Falls three times last summer with unsatisfactory results.  I learned that rocks could move!  Not literally, of course.  But after a couple of hours of staring the same rocks under the intense sun with hearing deafened by the roaring water, rocks did seem to move.  I ended up overpainting.  This year, I came up with a new battle plan.  I decided to cheat.  How?   By framing a good design on the LCD screen of my trusty Leica, and drawing the big, major shapes on the linen, I saved a lot of time at the outset. 

Then I painted the sky, the distant woods, the foreground rocks, and so on.  I painted in, section by section, finishing brushstrokes, meaning I didn't go back later to refine if I could help it.  For the rocks, I focused on the planes, values (lights/darks), and subtle color changes.  As you can see in the above photo, the rocks don't have a lot of detail at this point, but the major shapes, values, etc. were well established. 

The water, or rather, the pattern created by the water falls was the structure under the design, so it was important to get their shapes right.  Wow, you would not have believed how dark and blue green it was in some places.  By the time I went as far as the stage captured in the photo, I was getting tired and hungry.  The sun had moved and, despite the umbrella, the canvas and palette were in the sun, which is no, no.  I quickly finished the rocks on the left in the middle ground and called it quits.  The painting was finished at home today.

"Mount Rushmore" (oil on stretched linen, 28" x 32")

click here to buy

"Mount Rushmore" is the most ambitious and largest oil painting I have ever painted.  A celebration piece, actually, on my becoming American citizen last month.  I even learned how to stretch canvas by watching my teacher Diane Tesler, who did the actual work.  With a teacher like that, one can go far indeed.  Thank you, Diane. 

I had done a miniature painting (6 x 8") of the same subject, which simply did not do justice to the grandeur of Mount Rushmore.  The sculptor Gutzon Borglum had an awe-inspiring vision to carve the likenesses of four great presidents into the mountain itself.  I had the photo of the usual view of this American icon, but chose this view for two reasons.  From this vantage point, one can see only George Washington and Abraham Lincoln--my two heros--fully; Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt can be just glimpsed.  And I wanted to be present a different picture not too many people have seen.

I added  a lot of sky, more than a quarter of the painting, which made the huge sculptures look way up and grand.  Although it is a close-up picture, I wanted the viewer to feel the air between her and the subject.  So I kept the values of the subject light (high-keyed) and introduced the blues of the sky into the rocks.  The V-shaped chasm was painted warmer than the rest of the painting as sort of a divider between Lincoln and the other three presidents.  Originally, he looked so deathly ill that I had to give him more life, so to speak.  I am proud of my endeavors and thankful to the great presidents who created and kept together this country.

"Iwo Jima Memorial" (oil on linen, 11" x 14")

A friend of mine wanted to paint Iwo Jima Memorial.  She went there twice just to draw and several more times to paint it in the course of two weeks.  Impressive!  Tuesday last week I was supposed to meet her there, but somehow missed the exit off Arlington Boulevard and ended up in Washington, DC.  Oops.  Yesterday I followed another friend's car not to get lost again.  I don't know what the story says about me: my stubbornness or poor driving skills.

Anyhow I made it this time and was impressed by the memorial.  I have seen it many times driving by, but never actually visited it to pay my respect to the people who died during the terrible battle fought on Iwo Jima in 1945 during World War Two--20,000 Japanese and many American soldiers as well.  The weather could not have been better after the last several steamy summer days of Washington.  Four of us settled in a shade to paint the view undistrupted.

The biggest challenge of painting "Iwo Jima Memorial", of course, was drawing, since it involved the sculpture of five men.  You don't have much margin of error in drawing human anatomy.  The sculture doesn't move, but the shadows do.  When I started the drawing, the memorial was backlit; by the time I started painting it was sidelit.  This worked in my favor, but the shadow/light shapes had to be adjusted accordingly.

I used to have a tendency of getting into a slight panic mode whenever I painted outside.  The pressure of limited time, the sun's movement, clouds moving in and out, and so on made me hurry and do a sloppy drawing to get going with painting.  Now I usually sit down to paint, which is less tiring to my lower back and somehow inducive to a more calm attitude.  If I nail the drawing at the outset, the painting takes less time and becomes less belabored.  Each brushstroke is deliberate and there isn't much blending going on (or, at least, that is the goal).  Richard Schmid is my saint patron; I read his book, Alla Prima, in rapture.  These days I try to channel his spirit whenever I paint.  I cheated, however, with one thing.  The flag was painted at home from a photo.  Am I bad?

The painting was juried into The Art League show in Alexandria, VA in June, 2011.