Art Blog - Caroline Henry

Original pastel shows three tangerines next to a celadon vase with an abstract water lily leaf pattern in blue. A blue silk cloth lies under these objects and a peach colored wall is seen behind them. This small pastel is on 5" _ 7" Ampersand pastel board, and will be shipped in its 8" _ 10" frame. I love working with the toothy Ampersand pastel board. It hangs on to the pastels extremely well. Notice the repeated shapes and colors accompanied by eye pleasing variation. The purple shadows and the fruit break the blue into a larger and a smaller segment, and the vase breaks the larger segment for three blue shapes. The three rounds of fruit are each smaller and paler moving back on the picture plane… Continue reading… 0 comments

This is a detail of my latest addition to my ArtId gallery and most definitely and 'Artist at Play" product. I had created an ACEO by developing some odd bits of color already existing on a small sheet of paper cut from a failed painting The ACEO was in a vertical format and showed a little sheep in a shed and some foliage in the background. I liked it a lot and decided to build a larger painting from the basic set of forms and colors. However, in the larger size a horizontal composition felt right. For this larger version, I also decided on acrylics rather then the watercolor and pen & ink used for the ACEO. Original acrylic painting features a black sheep in a field of dry yellow grass… Continue reading… 0 comments

Three red ripe tomatoes sit on a green surface in front of a wall with ochre yellow and red tones. Shadows and highlights add strength to the simple and effective composition. You can almost taste the plump, garden fresh tomatoes. The red and green complements go far in building interest. Actually nature starts the tomato on the plant with that pleasing companionship of color. It seemed appropriate to carry it through to the finished painting. My life seems tomato filled of late and the abundant vines provide material for salads, snacks, vegetable medleys, dried tomatoes for future use, jars of thick puree for winter soups and sauces, the ketchup simmering on the stove at this moment--and fantastic painting models… Continue reading… 0 comments

Small acrylic painting has a snow covered hill in the foreground. In the moonlight it has tints of blue and has white highlights, beyond that is the sea painted in the cold blue of ice, the blue white moon rides in a deep blue sky. The lines a simple, the palate limited, and the composition compelling. I love detail and complexities, but sometimes simple is absolutely best. I wanted to create a painting that was restful without being static. I aimed for a crackling sense of immediacy in the cold of a clear winter night. Much is left to the viewer's imagination. The only colors I used were titanium white and ultramarine blue. Limiting the palette really forces the artist to concentrate on building value--those essential contrasts of light and dark… Continue reading… 0 comments

The Pumpkin Patch at Honey Lake was filled with bright, beautiful pumpkins casting deep shadows. I wanted to show these three pumpkins as the stars of the piece, but I also wanted to show the field in which they grew without diluting the power of the close-up pumpkins. The resulting composition was something of a tromp l'oeil piece as if the main image were on a separate sheet floated on the larger landscape. I chose sepia rather than black pens as part of a desire to make the background painting recede and move the smaller detail painting forward. Honey Lake is formed in a large shallow basin in the Eastern Sierra along the route from Reno, Nevada to Susanville, California. During mid to late summer the lake bed may be entirely dry… Continue reading… 1 comment

Fall colors in the foreground are highlighted by the contrasting purple and blue of the distant mountains including Lassen's peak. I began this as a plein air work in the light of late afternoon in the autumn with the shadows of evening starting to fall, but the fading sunlight bouncing golden off the mountain top. I exaggerated the colors somewhat to give the feeling to the time and place to the viewer. We were on the western slopes of the Sierra/Cascade region looking back at the volcanic peak of Lassen on our way home from a camping trip at Lassen National Park when we stopped to enjoy and capture this scene. I did the painting several years ago. I liked the painting, but it lived in a drawer waiting for that something to make it sparkle… Continue reading… 1 comment

Two boys play in a pool among oversized boulders at Zion National Park in Utah USA. The watercolor painting depicts both the rugged majesty of America's southwestern region and the charm of children at play anywhere. This painting started as a plein aire watercolor sketch. The original composition covered a larger area, getting into the scrub brush and canyon wall behind this scene and including a boy climbing on the large rock behind the wading, dancing boy. In the end it seemed better to focus on the more intimate scene. The story becomes one of childhood living in the joy of the moment, for the time being unimpressed by the grandeur around them and sending laughter rippling against the mighty walls of Zion… Continue reading… 0 comments

Acrylic iris is bright yellow on a blue background with spring green leave and stems suggested. It's a "goes anywhere" size of 4 inches by 6 inches. Some times it's just fun to create something small, quick, and bright. Minimal thinking and planning, maximum spontaneous creativity. If others like it great; if they don't you've had so much fun with it that that's okay, too. After patiently working my way through a couple of iris paintings and a landscape with ducks, all in watercolor with multiple glazes (which I liked doing, too) this little painting was a nice change of pace… Continue reading… 0 comments

Bright yellow mustard grows abundantly among the dormant vines of a vineyard in January. A rain puddle in the foreground is colored by the reflection of a sky where spent rain clouds drift. Bare branched trees line the far edge of the vineyard field. The painting is 10 inches by 7 inches. It is done in watercolor and sepia ink. This work is more of a painting than a drawing, but the lacework of bare branches against the sky brought the sepia colored ink to mind, and the effect proved it a good decision. The mustard, grasses, vineyard, and clouds are painted very loosely with hue and expanses of color of greater consequence than fine detail. Only the trees get this treatment, and it is more suggestion than photorealism… Continue reading… 0 comments

This pastel drawing is a still life depicting a coffee cup and fruit on a table with a shadowed wall in the background. Warm brown and gold tones predominate but are cooled by the greens in the pear and apple and the blue shadows. Image is 8" by 12" presented in and protected by a 16" by 20" mat. It is currently listed on ArtId's Ebay store. Coffee is on my mind because of Mary Lawler's recent communication urging people to get their CD's of art completed for submission to the Independent Coffeehouse Network. I don't get it that so few people have applied. It seems to me this is a great way to get promotion which feels like entertainment to the viewer and potential art buyer at no cost except what you are already paying in ArtId fees… Continue reading… 0 comments

Sunflowers, white with negative space in black ink, stand out as if lit in an inky night by a bolt of lightning. Contrast and a certain eeriness result from squiggles of red acrylic and splashes of gold. 5" by 7" image in 11" by 14" mat. I wrote about developing this piece from a misadventure in creating an archival reproduction of a conventional floral painting. I quite like the drama of the final result here… Continue reading… 0 comments

The rooftop of the lighthouse keeper's residence and the top of the lighthouse stand out in red watercolor in this graphite drawing of the old lighthouse at Point Reyes. This drawing was a long time from start to finish. A number of years ago, I lightly penciled in the lighthouse as seen from a turning in the 200 or so steps leading down to it from the cliffs above. . The lighthouse sits low, and it is a squat structure. It was actually built to send a warning signal out from below the layer of fog that so often lingers at about cliff level in the Point Reyes area, a peninsula just north of San Francisco… Continue reading… 0 comments

The image here is of a Fairy & Flowers ACEO that I put up on my Etsy site this morning www.Carolineart.etsy.com. ACEO 's, which are offer for sale, and ATC s, which are traded directly among artists, are 3.5" by 2.5" works of art--about which I had not a clue until about a year ago. This one is in watercolor and colored pencil. It began when I decided to recycle a workshop piece I had done several years ago. The workshop focus was on working with color in watercolor, and as a time saver the instructor had us work not only from her composition and reference photos, but also her drawing. I learned some things but could hardly call the finished product my own, so it had languished in the drawer of a flat file… Continue reading… 0 comments

I was challenged to do something a little more abstract than my usual when the art group I belong to made Abstraction its January show theme. We allow our members to show work outside the theme, but the themes help us stretch a little. For this painting wet the bottom two thirds of the sheet and then ran a bead of watercolor in a mix of idanthrene blue, Paynes gray, and cobalt, more concentrated toward the front as it moved to the foreground. The same combination with very little water later created my darkest darks. Hand made papers, tissue papers, and iridescent medium helped build the iceberg shapes. The Northern Lights are suggested by streaks of watercolor onto very wet paper.It suggests, rather than portrays… Continue reading… 0 comments

A basket of green Granny Smith apples, gathered to bake a pie, sits on the counter. The rich Aztec gold shade of the wall provides a good complement to the apple green. I've painted this on the wonderfully toothy pastelbord by Claybord in early Octover. This was a first attempt with this surface, and I discovered that I really love it. I bought some more next time I was in an art store. Most of the painting here was done with side strokes, using edges only for those areas where clear lines needed to be drawn, the crispest of these being the apple stems. The blue of the shadows was also used to create added interest by breaking up the bloks of color in the background surfaces. Near whites highlight the reflections on the apple surfaces… Continue reading… 0 comments

I've been off the blog for a time, and with much reduced art activities as the needs of my extended family made ofr a busy and stressful August. This little still life is one of the few things I completed. I enjoyed working in strong colors and playing with reflected light as well as deep shadow. Certain images, such as pears and calla lilies, have such simplicity and grace of form that they are always a pleasure to paint and often charm viewers. I suppose everyone has their own go-to favorites when they just need to paint something even it life and time are pressing in upon them. Pears are definitely one of mine. I may share another recent pear on a different blog entry, one with a totally different approach… Continue reading… 0 comments

My latest ArtId listing is a monochromatic painting of a river, riparian forest, and rising moon emerging from a cloud bank is all in shades of blue. I once did a river scene with a swan floating in a wide pool and distant castle turrets above dense forest growth entirely in greens. It sold at its first showing, a small works competition. These pieces are great lessons in establishing values within a painting, for that is the only tool you have to keep the forms from getting lost in one another and giving form to the objects in your painting. In watercolor the amount of water used and the number of washes are the control for the values… Continue reading… 1 comment

I was recently asked to do a show at the Lodi Wine and Visitors Center. I decided to feature floral and still life works, and I will be hanging the show later this week. As I worked to assemble an appropriate collection which would include a good number of pieces not yet shown in Lodi, I focused on a small (8" by 10") acrylic which I painted plien air in my backyard on a breezy March day. I wrote about it in my ArtId blog right after I painted it. Now that it was going to go out into the world and be seen, I decided it needed to go from the look of an acrylic sketch to a painting with some punch… Continue reading… 0 comments

Vines loaded with yellow berries climb a rock wall on a fall day. Dominate colors are pinks, yellow, and green. Shadows give the work dimension. This is the sort of delightful scene that will give one reason to pause during a walk and drink in the details of shape, texture, and color. This painting represents a detail at California's the Valley of the Moon's Jack London State Park on the former estate of the well-known author of Call of the Wild and a host of other books. I could have painted the ruins of Wolf House the dream home he started to build but never lived in. It burned, and London died at a rather young age before it was completed… Continue reading… 0 comments

Yesterday the light was good again. For the first time in almost a week I painted, working on this coastal scene which is still far from complete. Colors look right again. They did not in the dim red-gray filter of smoke. (my last blog posting dealt with the effects of the California fires). The edges of the horizon are still marked by smoke from the various fires but a delta breeze moving through the pass where rivers flow into the San Francisco Bay has pushed much of the particulate matter away from my area. while out shopping a short while ago, I looked up and the sky was a blue bowl with a bright white egret flying directly overhead. Oh, joy! With still some thousand forest fires burning, you can be sure there are many people still under a pall of smoke or at personal hazard… Continue reading… 0 comments

A sail boat at Huntington Lake rests in dock near summer's end in the High Sierra mountains of California. The lake is famous for its July sailboat regatta, but soon there will be frost on the ground in the mornings and the boats will be hauled away to dry dock or milder climates. The work was drawn in ink and the lines are an important part of the image. Watercolor brings up the brilliant blues of the craft and the water, the green of the pines and the brown deck planking. Image is 11_14 in a 16" by 20" double mat. I love to sit out and draw/paint this kind of thing, especially when wind and sun dry watercolor quickly. The evaporation time under such conditions seems to increase at elevation… Continue reading… 0 comments

This pastel has been sitting for a couple of weeks, but I am ready to get back to it. I set up the still life with the weights. Ideally I would have had a large block of time to work straight through, for I also lift those weights three or four days a week. However, it did not work out that way, and I kept having to re-set up. I left off in a combination of frustration and interest in other projects. I chose the elements of this still life as a colorful, but non-traditional, grouping of objects. The idea of keeping fit, the books behind the towel and weights, and the paint brushes which will appear in that unrefined cylinder behind the other objects are all meaningful in my life. I think I've benefited from moving away from this… Continue reading… 0 comments

Watercolor with the intense flow of poured paint creates the heart of this almost abstract landscape. I had actually mixed the blue (using indanthrene blue, ultramarine blue, and I think a little Payne's gray) some time earlier for use as a background for a sunflower painting for a class I taught. I had kept the paint in a tightly closed jar where it stayed liquid and may have thickened a little. I poured it on wet the 140 lb watercolor and let it run. I added a few other colors on the wet paper and let the whole thing dry. Only later did I decide what it would become. The scene comes from memory and imagination… Continue reading… 0 comments

When I added "Fish" to my studio, I noticed it is the first painting listed here under the "humor" category. So, first I'm wondering, are "humor" and "whimsical" categories that others would use with this painting? It is the first in a gallery I am calling "Artist at Play". This one began when I was doodling around with cat forms. I liked these three--but what were they all interested in. It had to be exciting enough to make one jump for joy and valuable enough in the cat mind for a direct stare or a sidelong pre-pouncing gave. A fish of course! I moved from ink to watercolor at that point. For my bright finish I brought out the Prismacolor markers for lasting color. I decided to use a series of repeated patterns for a unifying effect… Continue reading… 1 comment