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Fine art painting has been what I have been concentrating on for the past few weeks. Illustrating my children’s books has consumed my time for several months, so I am taking a break from them and I am working on my fine art.

Trompe l’oeil is a type of art that I especially enjoy. Design is my passion: drawing up plans for remodeling projects, creating and then plating gourmet cuisine, room decorating, the gardens around our home, but most of all, constructing trompe l’oeil artwork. All of my art requires design, of course, but for me there is something different with trompe l’oeil. Maybe it’s because I enjoy the deceptions that I create, as well. Watching the realization dawn on people’s faces when they realize that I have created a painting not a collage is fun to see. This trompe l’oeil painting is constructed very simply compared to a lot of my other pieces in this style. A much more involved piece will be on easel in the near future. Remodeling a piece that was only partway finished will be a project for me in the New Year. Feeling like the unfinished piece was heading towards failure a couple of years ago, I wisely put it aside until I could figure out what it was trying to say to me.

Often times, if a painting is not working, it is because I am not listening to what is being said by the piece. The hard reality is that I, alone, am accountable for the success or failure of my paintings so I must listen. Accountability is a big thing with me, for there cannot be growth without it. Accountability was something that I tried to teach my children and then my students. There cannot be growth without accountability, for how can you change directions if you don’t think that you are the one that is responsible? Nobody can know everything, so thinking that you do can just lead to disaster. When a piece of artwork wasn’t working for me years ago, I did battle with it for days or months before I finally listen to the piece. Now, when I am struggling with the vision I have for a painting, I take a break and then practice patience until I can figure out the resolution. After all, past failures build the foundation for future success.

Currently, I have two trompe l’oeil pieces in an art show. Paintings of this genre are not common in painting exhibitions. After all of these years of painting, however, I am painting what inspires and intrigues me and not what I think might sell.

Back to the demonstration workshop that I attended a couple of weekends ago….. I want to talk about glazing. The glazing technique seems like such an obvious thing, but at that workshop, when the instructor asked for topics for future workshops, many of the artists wanted instruction on glazing. “How do you do it?” was asked by many of the artists present. He stated that correcting color that he hadn’t quite gotten right the first time was a common way that he uses the glazing techique in his paintings.

I worked for many years glazing with watercolors and then acrylics, painting layer upon layer of glazes on the paintings that I created. I loved how the various hues would come through the coatings of colors that I used. Instead of blending to get the colors that I wanted, I would put very thin layers on the canvas and build up to what I wanted. Why hadn’t I ever thought to do that with oils?

When the instructor said that the previous oil layers needed to be dry before glazing could occur, I realized why I had never thought to glaze my oil paintings. Drying an acrylic painting with a hair dryer, I could layer many acrylic colors in a fairly short time. To wait for an oil painting to dry so that I could put on a glaze never occurred to me, for I tend to paint oil paintings alla prima. Finishing an oil painting before the paint is dry is quite common for me. I’m not sure if it is lack of patience on my part to wait for the long time that it takes for oil paintings to dry or if it’s just that I have a different technique in my mind for oil painting compared to acrylic painting, that I didn’t think of glazing earlier. Having painted for so many years with a glazing technique in other mediums, how could it not be apparent to me that I should try it with oil paints? I felt foolish that I hadn’t seen the obvious.

This little painting, Sunlit tree in the Grand Tetons, is an example of my glazing with oil paints. When I came home from the workshop, I saw this little painting and I knew what needed to be done. I had tried to get the color that I wanted by mixing the paints on the palette several months earlier, but it just didn’t turn out like the image in my mind. To try the glazing technique, I applied a medium to the painting, and then added a glaze. YES! That was the look that I had envisioned, but didn’t quite get when I had thought that I had previously finished the painting. Now it matched the vision in my head of the sun striking the yellow leafed tree that was all alone and surrounded by the shadows of the Grand Tetons.

Almost 30 years of painting, and this old dog is still learning new tricks. And speaking of old dogs, it is my birthday today, October 16th. I want to thank all of you for checking out my FASO website and blogs. Today was my record for visitors and pages viewed in the little over a month that I have had it…. Thank you, so much! Your support is a great birthday present!