I thought I’d get a two-fer this week and combine my eBay listing with Mongolia Monday since the painting up for auction is a 8×6″ oil of a takhi (Przewalski’s horse). It’s from a photo that I took at Khomiin Tal, the westernmost of the three takhi reintroduction sites in Mongolia. I visited there in September of 2006. What an adventure that was for me! I flew out to Hovd, met my guide and then went by Russian Fergon van (those of you who have been to Mongolia know what that means…) east over 100 miles on what the Mongols call “earth roads” to the river valley where the horses were. I got to see them in late afternoon and morning light and got a lot of good reference. Here’s a photo of some of the horses grazing-

Takhi grazing at Khomiin Tal, western Mongolia

And here the painting that is currently available at auction here

Takhi 8x6" oil on canvasboard

Niki and me, Redwood Creek, Dec. 19

Lots coming up in 2010…but first I’m doing some necessary career “housekeeping” like updating my marketing plan, setting up a budget spreadsheet, continuing to add info. to my Flick! painting records, planning a couple of gallery submissions and starting to think about what paintings I want to do for the jured shows I plan to enter. I even got in some drawing time earlier in the week between doing…..absolutely nothing useful.

At Trinidad State Beach, Dec. 25; photos by my husband, David

How about you other artists? What are you doing to get ready for what we all hope is a happy and (more) prosperous new year? If you feel like you need to take the next step to get your career moving, I highly recommend “I’d Rather Be In The Studio” by Alison Stanfield. She also has a great blog that you can subscribe to. Good, solid stuff every week.

That’s the business side. What are you going to do to nurture your art? Try a new media? Take a workshop? Concentrate on a particular subject? Travel to an inspiring place? Or……

(Photos taken within a half hour of our home. Yes, we are really lucky to live in northern California!)

Mongol Horse #3- Young Stallion 16x20 oil on canvasboard

“Mongol Horse #3- Young Stallion” has been juried into Art Horse Magazine’s “EX ARTE EQUINUS III!

You can see it here There will not be a physical show. Images of the art, in a variety of media, will be published in the summer issue of the magazine and a selection will included in a limited edition book, both due in March. I’ve made it into the book and greatly look forward to getting a copy.

Lesley Humphrey, who placed first in painting in Ex Arte Equinus II, was the painting juror for this year. Her juror’s statement is here and is very well-written.

And if this image looks familiar, yes, this painting was juried into an American Academy of Equine Art show earlier this year.

Sort of an odds and ends Friday as the year winds down. The deep freeze is over here in coastal Humboldt County and it’s back to nice normal rainy weather with nighttime lows in the 40s. I’ve been getting in some good easel time of the past few weeks. Here’s a new argali painting from reference that I shot in July at Gun-Galuut Nature Reserve. I watched this group of rams work their way across the rocky slope for almost an hour. “Uul” is Mongolian for “mountain”.

On The Slopes of Baits Uul, Gun-Galuut 18x24" oil on canvasboard (price on request)

I’ve also decided that I want to paint not just the domestic Mongol horses, but the people who ride them. Which brings me back to wrestling with human figures, as described in an earlier post. I get a better result if I can scan the drawings rather than photograph them and also wanted to really hone in on accuracy, so these are smaller and done with a Sanford Draughting pencil, but on the same vellum bristol (which erases very nicely). The heads ended up being only 3/4″ high, which is pretty small, but it reminded me of a story from art school that I thought I might pass along.

One of my teachers was Randy Berrett, a very good illustrator who chose to work in oils. This was kind of masochistic, in a way, because it added a layer of complexity when he had to ship out a wet painting to meet a deadline. In any case, he was showing some examples of his work in class and one was a really large painting of the signers of the either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, I can’t remember which. Someone asked why he painted it so large. Randy’s answer really struck me at the time and has stayed with me. It’s something worth remembering when planning a painting. He said that he wanted the heads to be at least an inch high and that requirement controlled the final size of the painting. I’ve sized more than one painting on the basis of that criteria since then.

The first drawing combined two pieces of reference. One of the horse and one of the man. In the latter, he was in front of the horse’s head. In the former, I didn’t like the pose of the horse. Moving the man back works much better. The sweat from a winning horse is considered to be good luck. There are special scrapers made to remove it.

Scraping the sweat after the race, Baga Gazriin Chuluu

Local herder, Erdene Naadam

Boy on horse, Erdene Naadam

Part of the reason I did the previous two was to see if the images “drew well” and to work on horses coming forward at a 3/4 angle. The final two are head studies, in which the heads are 1 1/2″ from forehead to chin.

Local herder, Erdene Naadam

Finally, the folks at Eureka Books in Old Town, Eureka have decided to hold a special art show. Here’s the Call for Entries.

Lost Coast Daily Painters in having a big, Big, BIG holiday sale this Saturday night during Arts Alive in Old Town, Eureka, California. This may be your last chance to get one of our paintings listed in the Buy It Now section of the blog. I’ll be there with the other artists at Kathy O’Leary’s studio upstairs at 208 C St. from 5-9pm. We’re even offering free gift wrapping and can handle shipping if you find that special gift of art for someone who lives out of the area.

Here’s a selection of what I’ll have available. Almost everything will be $50-$95. They are all original oil paintings.

I received a delightful surprise in the mail a few days ago. My friend and colleague Shawn Gould sent me a sweet little self-published book of some of his recent paintings. I’m writing about this for two reasons. One, because I thought that you would enjoy seeing his work, which is quite different than mine, and two, to look at what he has done from a marketing standpoint.

Sparrow Song 12x16 acrylic on masonite

Shawn grew up in Iowa, but now lives about twenty minutes from me in Eureka, California. He started out as an illustrator, creating award-winning work for clients like National Geographic, the Smithsonian and the Audubon Society. For the last ten years, however, he has been creating beautiful paintings like the ones you see here. He’s a Signature Member of the Society of Animal Artists and his work has been accepted into a variety of national juried shows like Birds in Art, Art and the Animal Kingdom and Arts for the Parks.

Good Dog 18x15" acylic on masonite

Now, for the book, “Wild Sanctuaries”. I asked Shawn via email to tell me more about it. He said that “I have a lot of new work that hasn’t been seen by very many people, and the book seemed like a nice format to get it out to a targeted audience for a reasonable price. We sent out 100 books for less than the price of a one page magazine ad.”

The publisher is a company called Blurb.com, who I had never heard of. I wondered what they were like to work with. “Blurb was great. Kristen (Shawn’s wife) did the layout of the book, and deserves all the credit for how it looks. If like me, you don’t know InDesign very well, blurb does offer software you can download from their site. I don’t think you have as much freedom with the layout, but it’s easier to use and does still look good.

Gambel's Quail 12x18" acrylic on masonite

“Wild Sanctuaries” is available through Blurb on a print-on-demand basis, so Shawn hasn’t had to tie up any money in inventory. If you would like your own copy, for yourself or for a gift, it’s $30 plus shipping and handling and can be ordered here

Challenger's Bugle 26x38" acrylic on masonite

Given the down (down, down) economy, creating and producing “Wild Sanctuaries” took some courage and a leap of faith. But Shawn now has a powerful marketing tool that should prove increasingly valuable as conditions improve. Food for thought.

You can see more of Shawn’s work at www.shawngould.com

SHOW NEWS!

I recently received one of two Janie Walsh Memorial Awards from the Redwood Association for a painting that was in their 51st Annual Fall show. It even included $100 check! Here’s an image from the show. The painting of bighorn sheep, “Heavy Lies the Head” is mine. The show ended yesterday afternoon.

Drawing and painting animals has always come more easily to me than humans. No idea why, that’s just been how it is. But now, I’ve gotten really interested in the Mongol horses and the lives of the herders who breed, train, ride and race them. And I want to paint all of that, so now I really do have to get up to speed with people. These drawings are part of that process. They each took a few hours and I enjoyed doing them a lot.

Horse and Rider at Erdene Naadam, 2009; compressed charcoal on vellum bristol

Horse and jockey, mountain blessing day horse race at Baga Gazriin Chuluu, 2009; charcoal pencil on vellum bristol

Herder and horse, Ikh Nartiin Chuluu, 2005; charcoal pencil on vellum bristol

A few people are posting on Facebook about the fall of the Berlin Wall, which happened twenty years ago, so I wrote the following at a Note to post there, but also thought I’d share my memories here of that amazing point in history and our trip to Germany the following year.
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I and my husband, who arrived in Berlin (courtesy of the Air Force) six months after The Wall went up, watched it come down on TV 20 years ago. It was something we never thought we’d see in our lifetime. I’ll always regret that I didn’t hop on a plane and get over there to join the party.

We did visit Germany in December of 2000, three months after unification. We flew into Frankfurt, picked up a rental car and headed towards Berlin. I remember crossing the old border between West and East on a country road and coming to an autobahn Kreutz (intersection “cross”) with abandoned guard towers looming over the road in the half-light of a late winter afternoon. It was snowing and very quiet. We took an exit, drove into a village as night was coming on and suddenly found ourselves in the 17th century. Old, old houses and muddy dirt roads. I half-expected to see a horse-drawn cart amble by. The only gasthouse was closed and had obviously been so for many, many years. So we had to scoot back across “the border” to a “west” German town to find a place to stay.

The next morning we crossed the old border again. There were fence posts, but the wire was gone. Tacked to one of the posts was a campaign poster for Helmut Kohl, who had rammed through reunification, knowing it was the right thing to do. I thought the symbolism was very powerful and neatly summed up the dramatic change which had happened the previous year.

We drove on to Berlin through Erfurt. I have ancestors who came from around there and I wanted to see the medieval Cathedral, which has some statues (of Count Erhard and Countess Uta) that I had been struck by when I had seen them in a costume book. As we walked around the city, we drew some stony-faced looks, especially when people saw my camera. We were probably the first western “tourists” they had seen in a long time, if ever. I remember walking past a building that was completely collapsed on the inside and realized that it had probably been bombed during WWII and had never been repaired or replaced.

We found the Kristkindlemarkt in the main square and bought Nuremburger bratwurst and glugwein for lunch. Someone was doing a brisk business selling small, unassuming Christmas trees. There were no merchant booths like we saw in the west German cities. People seemed cautiously happy.

When we got to Berlin, we went down to the Brandenburger Tor or Brandenburg Gate. It was blocked off, but on either side were rows of tables and blankets laid on the ground. Covering both was the flotsam of the end of a country. For sale were East German military coats and hats, ID books, medals, various other documents, East German currency and pieces of the Wall. We bought one big chunk for ourselves and some smaller ones for gifts. I remember that the sellers weren’t speaking German, but a variety of other Eastern European languages.

We then walked all the way around the nearby Reichstag. The walls on all sides had obviously patched bullet holes from the final battle for Berlin.

It’s no longer there, but we also visited the Checkpoint Charlie Museum and saw all the desperately creative ways that people used to try to get from the East to the West, including a small convertible car whose doors had been filled with concrete to stop bullets. It was a convertible because the plan (which worked) was to duck down with the doors for cover and drive right past the guards and under the horizontal gate bars at the border.

Outside we found that Checkpoint Charlie itself, the gates and guard booths, were already gone. As we drove past where it had been, there, on the right hand corner of the first block, was a United Colors of Benneton store. I’ve always wondered how in the world they were able to negotiate a lease and get a store up and running in three months. It was the only western store we saw on that side. I’ve joked over the years that, yes, we got to the old East Germany ahead of McDonald’s. But not Benneton.

We drove around for awhile and then back to the west side of the city past enormous apartment buildings that were the personification of East “bloc” housing.

We went to Templehof airfield (where my husband worked for part of his tour), the sole remaining example of Nazi meglomaniacal architecture, courtesy Albert Speer. The scale of it, even though it was never finished, is almost obscene. But outside is the Berlin Airlift Memorial, which commemorates one of our country’s finest hours and that of the Allies who also participated.

My husband also did part of his tour at a location south of the city. We drove out that way one afternoon and he saw the Berlin skyline from the south for the first time, looking back across what had been no-man’s-land. The farmer’s fields were covered with sparkling frost and a few burned out lime-green Trabant cars lined the road. These quintessential communist-era cars were the subject of many jokes back then, such as “How do you double the value of a Trabant? Fill it with gas.”

Our stay in Berlin at an end, we drove back to Frankfurt via the east-west autobahn that was one of the only ways in and out of Berlin during the Cold War. The East Germans timed travelers. They knew how long it took to get to Berlin and you were asking for serious trouble if you stopped along the way. For us, it was a beautiful drive through the green forests of a Germany that was whole again.

I just got back last night from a two-day trip to New York. One day was taken up with the Society of Animal Artists board meeting (of which, more later) and the second day with wandering around Greenwich Village sketching and then hitting some jazz clubs in the evening with fellow artist Guy Combes, who lives across the river in New Jersey as the artist-in-residence at the Hiram Blauvelt Museum of Art.

I hadn’t done any “urban” sketching for quite a long time, but the area of New York that I was in could keep an artist busy for a lifetime. As it was I did the four following sketches in a  5.5×8.5″ Strathmore Series 400 recycled paper sketchbook with a Pentel “Energel” .5 pen.

Nothing fancy here. These are about the process and just having fun.

Notice that I didn’t get into rendering a bunch of leaves on the big shrub. It’s just a shape.

All the little dark marks are what is left of old pier pilings.

I stood on the opposite corner to draw this festive restaurant exterior with the piggy sign.

None of these took more than about twenty minutes.

Writers of fiction say that they will have a story all plotted out, but sometimes the characters take control and things go off in unexpected directions. That’s more or less what I feel happened with the painting below. I wanted to do a big argali, because, well, I just needed to do it. About halfway through, though, I could see it starting to diverge from where I thought it was going. By the time I had the background mostly done and had started on the rocks and ground, it had become clear that the painting was going to be what it wanted to be and I was along for the ride. Interesting sensation. Without further ado, “Gun-Galuut Argali”:

Gun-Galuut Argali 36x24" oil on canvasboard (price on request)

I’ve gotten in a couple more good sessions on the big argali painting.  The right side background still needed something, so I went back to my reference and found some rocky slope images that I liked. So far this one is behaving itself, but you never know.

This one shows how I start to block in the light side and some of the dark areas. The drawing is still kind of lost, but I’m not worried about that at the moment. I’m working on shapes and value/temperature relationships.

head detail

Here’s the studio set-up with my iMac on the left. And, yes, I love my Hughes easel, especially when I’m working on a larger painting since I work my way over most of it during a session.