18″ x 24″ Acrylic on Canvas
Location: Castle Howard in England
Copyright Sandra ColleRain
The reflections in the lake were what caught my attention as I stood on a hill across from Castle Howard. Lakes do not have the geometry which I painted, colors on water just slide into each other in a continuous gradient as if they are all interconnected riding on top of the water. One color just seems to slip into another, so silently.
But I am a hard-edge painter, I avoid blending one area into another, instead I look for shapes. From a huge amount of merging color, I pulled the shapes I wanted and then made up my own color scheme to express the feeling of the lake. In reality there was only solid green interwoven with a dark grayish black. I wanted color variations and needed light colors to express the mood I felt from the scene.
The vegetation in the foreground was only a blur from my viewpoint so I was forced to just draw an abstraction of what was really there. All artists must by nature of painting use abstraction to a certain extent. You can never match reality exactly. The artist makes a choice how close he wants to come to reality. I like to wander around somewhere in the middle, not realism and not abstraction. Perhaps some of each. I like walking the boundary of what is real and what isn’t.
I painted in my sketch of the foreground plants. Sometimes I painted a reversal of what was there, objects became background and background became objects, like a photographic negative, dark became light and light became dark….spontaneously following the shapes and hoping I didn’t paint myself into an impossible corner.
I backed up across the room for an overview and in the right corner was “one of them.” A visitor to my painting….uninvited. There seemed to be a character or two, a fairy doing a dance….ON MY CANVAS….spontaneous…..appearing from nowhere, but welcome, nonetheless. Like the fairy in the plants, I wanted to dance in exuberance of the scene before me.
Written by Sandra ColleRain Copyright ©2010
www.47Solutions.com
Excitedly I propped the magazine under my arm and went in search of my husband. “Bill,” I said. “Is the Smithsonian in Washington, D. C., too terribly far from here?”
“Only about 1500 miles from Houston to Washington, D.C.,” he cheerfully smiled not yet comprehending the massive cross country adventure I was about to spring on him.
“Good,” I replied, “I thought it was further.”
“However,” he interjected, “if we are going as far as D.C., perhaps we could drive slightly further. I would like to see the coast of Maine again… AND Canada seems rather nice. We have never been to Canada where each day 100 billion tons of seawater flow in and out of the Bay of Fundy. And then there is Campabella where Franklin Roosevelt had a home,” excitement glittered in Bill’s eyes.
I could tell that he was getting excited about taking the trip. Me, I was worried whether I could swim good enough to tred water in 100 billion tons of seawater.
“Excellent,” I replied. My lawnchair remained abandoned, my ice cubes melting in the air deluting what was left of my afternoon tea break. Suddenly I was oblivious to the external events unfolding outdoors, I was too busy indoors preparing for our slight jaunt into the countryside.
Two months later with blisters on my fingertips from scrubbing, painting and wallpapering our camper, we were at last ready to go museum hopping. The butane tank glowed a perfect white, the trailer was respelendent in it’s black coat of Rustoleum paint. It is best not to mention at this point what the undulating roads of New York did to that pristine camper. Some things are better left unsaid. I will only say that I still have the parts that fell off the camper hidden in some dark forboding corner of my garage.
I might mention that Bill likes to start off every trip we take with some kind of crises. He always finds something wrong with the car before we even get out of the driveway. So there we were speeding down the Houston freeway with the trailer swaying happily behind us, when Bill got this look on his face.
“What’s the matter?” I frowned.
He stared at the car gage. ”Well,” said Bill, “if the oil indicator says zero and the engine has not blown up, then perhaps there is oil.”
“Yes, I would think so,” I replied. Deductive logic makes life so much easier. But as we drove, I kept thinking, “Blow up! The car might blow up at any moment?”
At this time I did not know that I would almost drown in the rain that poured down on the national mall and catch pneumonia waiting for my ride two hours later in the freezing National Gallery of Art. I would get lost at the Boston Museum, be surrounded by women dressed in their finest while I stood amongst them in my shorts and mud-covered tennis shoes in the National Museum of Women, visit the Cone exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington as well as the Hirshhorn Museum. With serendipidity guiding me I would chase the art of Andrew Wyeth through Maine to the Farnsworth Museum, to the Pennsylvania Brandywine River Museum to Wyeth’s home in Chadds Ford. Go up in the aviary with the sculpture of David Smith. Find a Cezanne in the attic, discover the roots for the art style of Louise Nevelson, learn how the Winslow Homer watercolors had their own little beds in Portland and be amazed by the way Andrew Wyeth painted every little fiber in the sweater of his model, Helga, and how I asked the scandulous question of the two women working at the desk of the home where Wyeth had painted Christina’s World.
Next stop on my museum trip will be Washington, D.C. and all the museums along the National Mall. Be sure to come back, you don’t want to miss how I got my camera grabbed by an irate guard at the National Gallery of Art, met the woman with mink eyelashes and witnessed the sex change of Joan Miro while waiting in line for my ticket.
Written by Sandra ColleRain Copyright © 2009
]]>You could probably figure out what this etching is meant to say. Klee was very good at showing what people meant to do by making caricatures.
If you didn’t already figure it out, these two men each think that the other has higher rank, so they are both trying to bow lower than the other.
Two Men Meet: Each Supposing The Other To Be of Higher Rank
- There are 100’s of articles that I am trying to transfer to the site.
- I am planning to let you take a peek into my classroom as I studied art for 4 years at two different universities that were totally opposite in views about art.
- There are serveral art courses you can learn from.
- AND I am going to delve into the lives of artists and find some facts that you have never heard about.
Future articles:
- Did the word “No” kill Van Gogh?
- Who was the artist with raw egg in his hair? Why?
- When they were grown men, were Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, and Edouard Manet afraid of their fathers? Why?
- What shocking thing did Monet do as his wife lay dying?
- What was it really like being an artist in Paris in the 1870-1880s?
Ya’ll come back. You are sure to have a good time picking through the past.
]]>If that is what they all thought, then the joke was on them. The collection of the Cone sisters became the backbone of the Baltimore Museum of Art. And the Cone sisters themselves? …those gullible Americans… well… they became famous as their collection toured the world.
The big letters that were draped across museum after museum, all across the country and parts of the world, did not say, “”The Stein Collection”, or “The Picasso Collection”. Those words said, “The Cone Collection“. Picasso would have grumbled, “Oh, what advantage they took of me,” the same words he used to describe Gertrude Stein herself after she supported him all those years.
The Cone Sisters, as collectors, became famous through the art they collected.
For the artist, the collector is his/her supporter. But what about the collector? The collector gets to live vicariousy through the fame of the artist. The collector can become as famous as the artist. Art history books are filled with names of famous collectors.
Do you want to live vicariously? Are you chasing fame and fortune? Do you want to be in history books? Collect art!
I got to view the collection myself in Washington, DC, and also in the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
Go over to the Baltimore Museum of Art and see Gertrude Stein herself with Claribel and Etta Cone around 1903 and view a flash video of the sisters.
The Baltimore Museum of Art-Gertrude Stein with the Cone sisters
Pictures of Gertrude Stein including the painting by Picasso
Written by Sandra Collerain Copyright 2009
www.47Solutions.com