Art Blog - Caroline Henry

A collection of wedding scenes are painted in watercolor, a background of pink ribbon and scattered leaves on a purple background unites the moments. The largest vignette a traditional bride and groom pose; others include a view of the entire wedding party, cutting the cake, a detail of the back of the brides necklace, and the band. Others portray details of the setting. This painting is not for sale, but I am available for commissions. This was a complex work. Any part of it could have been a painting in itself. The first dance at the reception also makes a lovely painting. A couple might cherish a painting of the church in which they were married, especially if it was the home church of both… Continue reading… 0 comments

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

I made this sketch on a recent trip to Felton, California, a small town among the redwood forests in the coastal mountains south of San Francisco. The bridge is reputed to the the tallest covered wooden bridge in the world, and I drew it straight on to emphasize the height. It was a brisk fall morning, with a wind sufficient to damage and shut down San Francisco's Bay Bridge, some miles to the north, but simply chilly in Felton. I worked fairly quickly because I did not want to be out in that location too long. Under pleasanter weather conditions, I painted a plien air acrylic version of the bridge in two morning sessions last year. That is listed on my Etsy site http://www.etsy.com/view_listing… 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

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

A yellow iris glows with color in a garden setting. The surrounding lush foliage is suggested by the cool greens and touches of orange in the background. Every spring my eyes and heart are captured by the irises growing in the backyard. They are all the more beautiful in that the back of the lot may still have a raggedy look from our winters that spout forth a growth of weeds while remaining cold enough to discourage long spells of clean up work. While I love the brightness and the crinkly folds in the edges of this flower, I find the background especially intriguing both to paint and to see as a compliment to the flower. One of my friends refers to paintings such as this as portraits of flowers because they focus in on a single flower as a portrait artist will upon a face… 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

"Heavenly Path" took a long time to paint. It started as spill of dark blue paint with bits of watery reds and yellows dropped in on watercolor paper. After a great deal of thought, it seemed to me that the central area should be a window into another world, a glimpse though to an enchanted place. At this point the pines came into being, the pinks and yellow were given more definite shapes as blossoming shru. I also Intensified the red in the deep blue at the top, and let the geeen emerge above. scatterings of blue long the bottom were stretched to form a path, still in a blue gray. i lifted some blue in various parts of the painting to give greater light to the world. Still it wasn't finished. It waited… Continue reading… 0 comments

Watercolor painting of a city scene has an old town feel to it. Patrons of a sidewalk cafe add extra interest. The image is 7" by 10" and is presented in a white mat measuring 11" by 14" Usually I paint plein air, from photographs, or from a still life set-up. This painting is just from a general memory of street scenes in any number of old town sections of various communities. I painted it during the time of was staying with my mom while my step-dad was in an out of town hospital for a difficult surgery (he's fine now). I was fooling around with different composition types, and painted a blue cross on an empty sheet of paper, and then thought about what to do with the cruciform composition… Continue reading… 0 comments

I wish I had taken a before photo of this still life. I painted with a group last Tuesday. We were working from a still life set up which included a lemon, a rose, and a cluster of rose leaves against black velvet and white linen. Most of them worked on a vertical plane, but I decided to do a horizontal composition. I did not want to center the two major items in the still life, but in my effort to get them off-center, I wound up with the center of my white rose creating a bull's eye effect at the middle of the painting. The area to the right of it was only draperies. I liked the form of the rose, and I liked the lemon with its rich yellows, its greenish low-lights and the bright white highlight… Continue reading… 2 comments