Painting Transparency

Painting transparent objects can seem like a contradiction of nature. How do you perceive something if it is clear and how do you paint it? The mental twist is that glass or plastic is never really completely clear. It will always have a bit of cool color, whether gray, blue, green, or lavender that distinguishes it from the surrounding atmosphere.

For an exercise in painting transparent objects in watercolor, I put together a collection of bottles filled with colored water. In front of the bottles I added a glass vase partially filled with clear water and an empty plastic mayonnaise jar. For the first step, I sketched the shapes of all the containers lightly in pencil. In the second step, I began to paint, blocking in all the colors generally, including the foreground and background. For the transparent objects in this exercise I used a very light gray blended from ultramarine blue and burnt umber.

I painted the objects with broken strokes, leaving the white of the paper unpainted to represent highlights. I also left white outlines unpainted around the containers to create the illusion of highlights on their outer edges. I blocked in the colors of the bottles, also leaving the highlights unpainted. Once I completely blocked in the foreground and background colors and allowed that layer to dry, I started adding some detail. Over the first paint layer, I used a fine brush and a darker gray to outline the forms of the clear vase and the jar. I used a broken outline based on observation and a dark line of varying thickness.

The edges of the water in the colored bottles called for a darker colored line, so I deepened my mixture of orange and pink with a touch of burnt sienna. I then went back into each form and carefully painted the abstract pattern of colors and shapes as I observed them. Then I painted the blue cast shadows on the foreground and some cast colored light that flowed through one of the bottles onto the foreground. I may go back and add some brighter color and sharper value contrasts, but this was a good beginning.

All content copyright 2010 by Susan Sternau

The Magical World of Peter Max

One of my earlier art memories is of riding the Number Ten bus to school on Central Park West in the late 1960s. In those days New York City buses had rows of advertising posters above the seats which always commanded my attention. One day I noticed a beautiful brightly colored poster that didn’t seem to be advertising anything. The firm black outlines enclosed flowing graded pastels in candy colors – they were irresistible.

Over the months different designs kept appearing with motifs of suns, stars, butterflies, and happy people in magical places that were a perfect synthesis of the psychedelic spirit of the times. The posters were signed by an artist named Peter Max. My classmates on the bus admired the posters too, and we all looked forward to spotting new ones. But then the posters disappeared again, all too quickly. There were rumors that people were stealing the posters – it seemed everyone wanted one. We were left with a landscape of the grimmer sorts of bus posters for hemorrhoid creams and trade schools, and the awful and memorable poster with a photo of an atomic mushroom cloud which puzzled and terrified me. What exactly was being advertised? Was it fear of our cold war enemies? I mourned the disappearance of Peter Max.

As the music and fashions of the 1960s are revived, I’ve been rediscovering the good feelings of Peter Max’s art again with one of my students. There is a combination of poster style, outlines, pastels, and creating a happy, colorful dream world that makes for appealing images. This monarch butterfly fantasy in ink and watercolor is the result of revisiting Peter Max’s world. I recommend Charles A. Riley’s book, The Art of Peter Max, as a great introduction to the artist.

The Day of the Dead and Mexican Folk Art

The Day of the Dead (Dia de Muertos) is a joyous festival – a celebration that combines the images of death with delight in life. In Oaxaca, Mexico everyone participates in creating the festival and everything is decorated. Several days before the big holiday weekend, the whole town hums with activity as people prepare and decorate.

In the town square many young people crouch together in a giant sandbox creating sand tomb sculptures of skulls, sand skeletons, bony animals, and all manner of strange folk art creatures. The sand is wetted with buckets of water then molded and sculpted by hand into mounds that quickly transform and articulate into bony shapes. The artists (and for this festival the whole community are artists) work from drawings that have been squared up so it’s easy to translate the small sketches into sand sculptures many feet long. People work peacefully together. There’s no tension or squabbling, just efficient cooperation and concentration. Once the design has been molded into 3-D sand, the artists begin to color their sculptures by sprinkling colored sand over them, white limestone dust for the bones and black charcoal powder for the shadows. All the colors are sprinkled from kitchen strainers tapped lightly with the gesture of a baker dusting powdered sugar over a cake. Blue, green, and red as well as yellow and brown are added as accents for a brilliant final product, although I actually preferred the elegant monochrome light and shadows of the brown sand before the colors were added.

The tomb sculptures take shape over several days, culminating on the festival day. The work in progress draws many curious admirers and the sculptures sit unguarded at night. Apparently no one would think to vandalize them, as they represent the collective efforts of the whole community, as do all the decorations. The sand sculptures are a recent tradition that was only introduced about a decade ago, but already they are popular all over Mexico. Day of the Dead celebration has Christian elements but the root of the celebration is millennia deep in the pre-Christian and pre-Spanish traditions of Mexico.

All over the city of Oaxaca, in hotels, restaurants, schools, homes, public buildings, and of course, cemeteries, people are making Day of the Dead altars, every one a creative masterpiece. They weave golden marigolds and fuchsia velvet flowers into arches supported by sugar cane and adorned with clusters of fruits and vegetables. The altars are piled with offerings of skulls made from sugar and chocolate, bread baked in special forms decorated with spirit faces and other goodies to please the dead including bottles of mescal liquor, Corona beer, and plates of mole, soup and other popular dishes.

I love that the whole town is unified by a creative force for this festival. Everyone becomes an artist because folk art is for everyone. The common purpose is to honor and celebrate the spirits of the departed in a joyful manner with folk art, music, dancing, feasting, drinking, and costumed parades. The Day of the Dead in Mexico is equally a celebration of life.

Monarch Butterfly Memories

Sausalito is on the monarch butterfly flyway and in the last few weeks I’ve seen a couple of monarchs every day heading through town. Their seemingly directionless fluttering is actually a mass migration following a specific route each year. The butterflies I see are headed for their over-wintering spots in forests along the California coast. I’ve seen them sheltering in the trees of Pacific Grove. They congregate high up in the Eucalyptus trees in huge hanging clusters with folded wings – while others flutter in the sunshine. It’s amazing to see a collection of so many creatures grouped together and yet be surrounded with absolute silence, except for the wind in the trees.

Monarchs have a distinctive “stained glass” wing pattern of orange with black lines bordered with black with white dots. They don’t look like any other butterfly I’ve seen. Birds, which like to snack on butterflies, know to leave them alone because their bodies are filled with toxins from the milkweed plants they love to eat.

There was lots of milkweed in Connecticut when I was growing up. Tall stems of rubbery broad leaves with pink flower clusters lined the roads and fields. If you broke a leaf or stem, sticky, milky juice leaked out – hence the name milkweed. In the late summer the plants were full of drying pods that would burst open to release clouds of dandelion-like fluff that sent seeds flying everywhere on the wind.

One summer I captured a fat caterpillar, beautifully striped in yellow, black and white. I punched air holes in the lid of a jar with a nail and added a twig, milkweed leaves, and my captive caterpillar. In a few weeks, after eating most of the milkweed, the caterpillar sealed itself inside an elegant jade-green chrysalis flecked with gold that dangled from the twig. A few weeks later the chrysalis turned transparent and I could see the monarch butterfly within. I carefully placed it in the garden and watched the butterfly break out of the chrysalis and slowly unfold itself in the sunshine, warming and dry its wings before flying off.

Monarch butterflies populations everywhere in the United States suffer from habitat loss and for a few years I didn’t see any monarchs at all in the early fall. I haven’t seen milkweed anywhere for a long time. This year, though, the monarchs are back in force and I feel hopeful that they are rebounding. Plant some milkweed if you can and help the monarchs on their way.

Stormy Weather

This time of year always gets me thinking about storms. August and September mean it's hurricane season again. Soon we will be looking at the slowly revolving, ominously expanding spirals of hurricanes clouds seen from above in satellite images. I’ve always been easily hypnotized by the violence of wind and rain. I’ll be unable to look away from tree branches moving frantically and erratically in the wind. I can’t take my eyes from water drops sluicing down window glass or rippling puddles in the road, expanding into instant lakes.

When I lived on the east coast, muggy summer weather was always punctuated by the drama of thunder storms. You could smell them coming-- there was a tinge of ozone in the air. The most amazing lightening storms I ever saw were in Texas where the big sky lit up with a bright forest of jagged strikes in pink and white.

Even ordinary landscapes take on extraordinary dimensions when in the grip of a storm. Artists have always understood the drama of storms and exploited the excitement that storms clouds and lightening strikes bring to skies to make more interesting pictures.

George Burr was a master American print maker of the 1930s. I recently did this drawing in ink and graphite after Burr’s etching “Arizona Storm.” Enormous thunderheads darken the Arizona sky. They dwarf the eroded and mysterious ruins of the desert landscape swept with fierce winds and rain.

Turner was a master of dramatic light effects. He worked his magic on waterfalls, rainbows, and the cloudbursts of light rays showering from the heavens. He also did a masterful job of painting storms at sea by exploiting the drama of roiling waves and stormy skies. I did this new drawing in white chalk on black paper after Turner’s mezzotint print of “Catania, Sicily.” You can read more about Turner’s dramatic approach to landscape in Andrew Wilton’s book, Turner and the Sublime.

A Cat to Remember

Our cat, Princess, disappeared quite suddenly at the end of July. She went out early one morning, as was her habit, but never returned. There was simply no knocking at the screen door demanding reentry for breakfast, no appearance later on my studio door mat requesting kibble, and no little creature curled under the nasturtiums in the garden. Princess simply vanished, leaving our life as suddenly as she had appeared on another July day, six year before, when I was summoned to the garden to feed her a can of tuna.

Princess was the smartest, prettiest, sweetest black cat you’d ever meet. She had both of us wrapped around her littlest claw, doing her bidding, admiring every twitch of her tail and pointy ears, her luxurious neck ruff and her fluffy plume of a tail.

She spent her days sleeping on her chair on the studio porch, checking out the activities and greeting the students. She’d entry the studio through the window and drop to the floor with a startling plunk, then glide silently across the floor to investigate the hole under the heater or the space behind the futon. Evenings she perched on the window ledge on her lavender blanket and watched the “lighted mice” (cars) with great attention, then settled for a nap on any available lap.

When Nancy came home from work, Princess presented herself for a belly rub before Nancy had even had a chance to put down her briefcase. She recognized the sound of our car, intuited the timing of the bus, and knew exactly when Nancy would be knocking.

Princess, which is short for her full title, Princess Landed Gentry of Sausalito, disappeared a few days before a full moon. She’d been unusually lively and playful in the days before. She’d recently brought home two mice for our approval, and had been worrying a garter snake half to death by the garden gate.

She’d been out late hunting, maybe prowling the storm drains, or perhaps answering the calls of her noisy “boyfriend” who was in the habit of serenading her from the driveway every night around 10 pm. She’d been in an out numerous times for several nights before she vanished keeping us somewhat sleepless in the process.

Then suddenly, there was a little tuft of hair on the rug by the window, a collection of pink toy mice, a lot of memories and a hole in my heart. I can see her in every corner, curled sweetly sleeping, or alert like a lion in her lair. She’s exploring the book case, peering up the chimney, clawing the couch, chasing a string, batting a ball, weaving between the legs of the dining table and chairs, scooping her kibble out of the dish on the mat with a distinctive plunk. She’s knocking at the screen door, scratching at the basement door, curled on her condo watching the night, walking across the quilt leaving a little foot print indentations in the fluffy down. She’s hopping up the book case to look out at the birds in the avocado tree, strolling across my desk and hopping down from the printer, lapping up the remains of the butter and cheese from a dish of pasta placed on the floor after she stares at us through dinner, or drinking juice from the tuna can, saved especially for her, but ignoring the flakes of tuna. She’s racing around the house like a circus cat when I clap, climbing the avocado tree, negotiating the studio roof and slinking through the weeds in back of the studio. She’s leading me down the stairs and across the basement with dancing steps, stopping to bat around a wood chip on the way, or to lurk in a favorite dark corner. Her green eyes shine in dark behind the boxes as she follows her secret pathway to the door, leaping over the dusty plastic bottle of emergency water as she makes her exit.

Princess is peering into my sock drawer or up into a corner of the room, as though a magic door with suddenly appear. She’s curled on top of the boxes in the basement, sulking because the good folk of Sausalito are having another noisy civic event. She’s presenting her sleek little head for scratching, her soft wet nose for petting, her belly for rubbing and brushing. She’s rubbing her face on my toes, tickling me. She’s racing around trying to avoid the vet and having her ears cleaned or starting for the door in scout mode, long and low with her tail flattened, when the UPS man knocks too loudly.

She’s angling for treats when I get up, and when I sit down, batting open the bathroom door to check on me and peaking around the corner with one eye to make sure I’m there to obey her. She’s patrolling the driveway from under her favorite bush or car, vanishing skillfully into the shadows when dogs walk by. She’s waiting on the doorstep accusingly when we return home from a night out, or lovingly emerging from inside to greet us when we return home with her happy tail held high.

She’s curled in her little green bed by the heater on cold winter mornings, or curled under the cool ferns on hot fall days. I’m toweling her off with two towels when she comes in soaked from an outing in the rain as she slinks around, ducks under the coffee table and enjoys and evades the towels simultaneously. We watch her dreaming and smile as her paws twitch and her body vibrates as she chases imaginary mice.

And then there are all the conversations she has – she imitates our speech with tones, replies, solicits comments, whirrs and chortles gently. Sharp demanding meows are when she wants to go out, and there are loud purrs at all hours of the day and night, purrs from the foot of the bed as she blocks my view of the TV, purrs from under the covers where she seeks our body heat.

Princess was my muse. I’ve drawn her and painted her countless times. She inspired my Big Pet series of paintings, and has a wide circle of admirers among our friends and family.

Princess, we’re going to miss you!

All content copyright 2009 by Susan Sternau.

Time Travel

The lure of time travel has always been one of the most appealing aspects of science fiction as well as just plain fiction. Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper plunks the characters and the reader down in Elizabethan England. Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court does just as the title describes, with hilarious results. C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series allows children to step through wardrobes and pictures into other worlds with a resulting magic.

Recently I’ve had two memorable encounters with time travel. Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking introduced me to the concept of wormholes which theoretically are a warp in space-time which might permit time travel. Hawking says it’s possible “that one could warp space-time so that there was a shortcut between A and B. As its name suggests, a wormhole is a thin tube of space-time which can connect two nearly flat regions far apart.” I also was unaware, except in the vaguest way that, to quote Hawking, “the theory of relativity says that there is no unique measure of time that all observers will agree on. Rather, each observer has his or her own measure of time.” To me, physics novice that I am, that seems to imply that time travel is indeed scientifically possible!

Of course, given the current lack of available wormholes, imagination offers the best possibility of time travel in 2009. I found this out during the improbable exercise of copying a Rembrandt etching with one of my drawing students. Rembrandt did many etching of everyday life that capture the mid-seventeenth century world of the Netherlands in remarkable detail. This group of thatch-roof cottages is but one example. The more time I spent drawing the scene, the more I could feel myself being transported back into that moment in time, seated on a stump beside the road, and gazing across at this small domestic grouping. The minute observation of detail, vivid textures, individual planks of wood and patterns of straw, cluster of people blending into the shadows, and the moist atmosphere of the place made me feel as though I was the one seated there sketching this scene, which hasn’t existed in over 250 years. How’s that for time travel?

In terms of technique, a combination of ink lines and finger-smudged graphite on Bristol board captures, if approximately, much of the inky, smoky quality and rich values of the etching. An actual etching is made by drawing with a sharp tool on a soft ground covering a copper plate. The plate is placed in an acid bath which literally etches the drawn lines into the copper. Once the protective soft ground is removed with solvent, the plate is inked, wiped off, covered with damp paper and run through a printing press. The resulting print combines the black of ink-filled etched lines with some residual ink left on flat surfaces of the plate. Thus value is created by linear means – cross hatching and closely spaced lines -- and also by areas where some ink is intentionally left on the flat surfaces of the plate to create tone.

All content copyright 2009 by Susan Sternau.