visit me at karenphippsfineart.com!

In an effort to make my "online presence" more cohesive and streamlined, I'm moving my blog over to my new (!) website at karenphippsfineart.com !

I'll continue my blogging there, with frequent updates of new work and studies...and, as always, all of your generous comments are welcome! On the new site, I'll also be updating current or upcoming exhibitions, art fairs, and workshops, as well as frequently updating the regular content of the site (the paintings). You can also join my mailing list there.

If anyone needs a fantastic web developer, don't hesitate to contact Tom Karels, at tomkarels@gmail.com. In helping me get my site up and running, he has been incredible: fast, efficient, immediately responsive to all of my questions and needs...and all of my work with him was done online, so he could work remotely with anyone! I can't recommend him enough!


And to all of my wonderful blog subscribers, I hope to have your subscriptions continue uninterrupted...but I ask for your patience in advance if there are any hiccups along the way while getting the new distribution of the blog set up.


See you all over at karenphippsfineart.com!

Brown County paintings

Towards the end of my residency at the TC Steele site, I was able to explore the surrounding areas of Brown County a little. It's a magnificent, pastoral locale full of soft, rolling hills and winding country lanes, where the atmosphere seems to create distinct bands of color through space.

A generous friend took me to some of the acreage that she owns there...miles and miles of fields and forest...
9" x 12", oil on panel


And the leaves just beginning to turn...
12" x 9", oil on panel


And there was this incredible field of flowers that I drove by each day...
9" x 12", oil on panel


I can easily see why TC Steele and his fellow artists congregated in the area. It's an immensely inspiring place to paint, but even aside from that, it's a beautiful, quaint, and quiet area to visit as well. I'm already making plans to return! Check out info. and photos of Brown County and also of the TC Steele Site.

TC Steele still life workshop

One of the best parts of my residency at the TC Steele site was the opportunity to give a two day still life workshop. I know for sure that I learned as much during the two days as the wonderful people who joined me. It was a privilege for me to have hopefully passed on even a fraction of what's been taught to me by my favorite teachers. So a much-belated Thank You! to all of the kind (and industrious!) students who attended. I hope your painting has been continuing on in full force!

Demos from the workshop:

quick study of a couple of objects with the emphasis on light and shadow, and creating the illusion of forms turning in space (8" x 10", oil):


another study with the emphasis here on composition (as well as turning forms in space, value, and color) (14" x 18", oil):

the grounds at the TC Steele State Historic Site

The grounds at the TC Steele State Historic Site were incredibly inspiring to spend time on. I was lucky to have been able to spend much of my residency there simply roaming the site and painting.

It's interesting to think that when Steele painted there, the land was wide open and he could see for miles...all the way to Bloomington where the university is, and nowadays the trees have grown up all around the area and the site feels quite intimate. I had imagined before I went that I'd be working on the type of wide open vistas that I usually paint when I travel to Northern Indiana, but because of the site's dense tree coverage, I unexpectedly found myself interested in studying the plants and trees up close.

Some views of the grounds...

Hydrangeas in the afternoon sun:



Along the entryway, lined with yucca:



The bank behind the Steele house:



And some of my plant studies...

Hydrangeas in the afternoon sun (8" x 8"):



I don't know what these amazingly pink plants were that were lying among the other flowers in the formal garden (8" x 10"):



And one of the most beautifully fluffy and back-lit plants I've ever had the delight to paint (6" x 6"):

TC Steele Artist Residency

It seems like forever since I've posted! It's been a busy month...first at the TC Steele Residency, then lots of traveling here and there...and all without a laptop or easy access to be online, which, in thinking about it, is not such a bad thing. It's good sometimes to be away from the clipped pace of online existence, but certainly strange...


Being able to participate in the Artist-in-Residency program at the TC Steele State Historic Site (in Nashville, IN) was absolutely wonderful! When I first arrived I was generously treated to a tour of Steele's house and studio, all filled with many of his paintings, and an inspiration to see. These are a couple of pictures of the grounds:

This one shows Steele's home called 'The House of the Singing Winds' (because of the sound the wind made as it came through the screened in porches), perched at the top of the hill:


And here is a picture of the cluster of buildings on the grounds...Steele's studio on the left, home in the distance, and the current office on the right. The buildings are all located together here on the property, and then there are acres and acres of woods and gardens to explore which can be reached by trails that lead off from this central area.


Here is the wonderfully rustic guest cottage where Steele's friends stayed when they visited him, and that served as my studio while I was there:


And a couple of paintings!
This one is a view of the House of the Singing Winds in the late afternoon:


And a view of the studio as seen from the pathway below it:

lake albert in afternoon, and a residency

12" x 9", oil on panel.

Back at Lake Albert for a late afternoon view where the sunlight falling across the trees struck me as wonderfully dramatic. I'm also always fascinated by these trees' 'personality'...how they form a strong stand there at the lake, and yet they each have their own little unique qualities...a certain bend away from the pack, or one reaching slightly higher than the others.

On another note, I'm heading down to Brown County, Indiana today to begin my residency at the T.C. Steele State Historic site. I'll be painting on-site there for the next couple of weeks, as well as teaching a still life workshop and giving a plein air demonstration during the Great Outdoor Art Contest. If anyone is in the area, come visit! I hope to be able to upload some pictures and post about the experience, but, as usual, my computer situation is iffy at best, so we'll see...

cobus creek

9" x 12", oil on panel.

Cobus Creek in Indiana is a close second favorite to Lake Albert when I'm in Indiana painting...it's also a place that I return to again and again and have painted through different seasons, at different times of day, and from many different views.

For this study of the field I actually managed to get out early enough to capture the long morning shadows as the summer sun came up. And considering the wonderful drama the shadows can inject into a simple scene, it's definitely worth setting the alarm a bit early!

lake albert in rain

6" x 6", oil on panel.

We all know how many times I've painted at Lake Albert in Indiana...it's just one of those places that, each time I return, there is something a little different...different flowers in bloom, different light and atmosphere, even minutely subtle shifts feel different...a different animal crosses my path while I'm working, the leaves change again.

It is quite amazing to return again and again to the same place and feel all these differences, and yet, there is also the rhythm of the place that repeats itself (seasonal and otherwise)...a foundation that carries the changes along.

And this day, for some reason, in this tiny painting, I feel like I got it...what feels like Lake Albert.

Marcia's Roses

Thank you to my in-laws Marcia and Rick for a wonderful weekend spent eating and drinking and boating and visiting, and generally just lazing around in the sun!

And, of course, a little time spent painting the beauty around the house:



8"x 6", oil on panel.


...and the view across the river in the morning:


6" x8", oil on panel.

small and square

6" x 6", oil on panel.


6" x 6", oil on panel.


I almost always work in a horizontal orientation, occasionally vertical...but almost never in the square...so why not?!

Lately I've been drawn to the square format, for a change of pace, a way to see things a bit differently, and, somehow, a way to more easily grasp the abstraction that underlies the image. Because a square doesn't have the immediate associations that a horizontal rectangle does with a landscape, for example, it seems easier for me to think about the abstraction first, and then build the representation into that. And anything that helps that....is a good thing.

tomatillos

12" x 16", oil on canvas.

For this still life, I wanted to try something a little different: to move away from my typically dark green-gray background (a.k.a. David Leffel green), and to use a background color that was lighter than some of the objects themselves, but something that still created a harmony with them. (I did, however, decide to take some liberties with that background's value; for example, where I wanted the white onion to read as very bright, I slightly darkened it behind.)

bonneyville mill

9" x 12", oil on panel.


An overcast and quiet day at an historic mill in Indiana gave me the chance to study how surprisingly rich the colors become when the light is low. It's as though the cover of clouds somehow holds in all of a color's brilliance and allows it to almost glow. And that's how I wanted this scene to feel, as though the atmosphere was enveloping this little area around the creek, creating a sort-of cocoon of quiet.

small to large: simplifying

Here is a lesson in seeing to much.
This piece was completed on location, and although our aim as plein air painters is to capture the essential mood/feel/light of the scene, we are always tempted to see more than that...to see too much. For example, here, after I'd painted in the large masses of the piece, I feel that I became distracted by, and consequently painted in, all the little grasses, clods of dirt, etc. So I felt that the piece lost some of the initial, simple, impact.

9" x 12", oil on panel.


When I went back into the studio to enlarge it, I was able to step back a bit and see that perhaps all the little blades of grass, etc. were too much visual information, so I decided to remove them, and to backtrack to the simplest masses of colors. Yes, the piece changed, and in this case, I think for the better. By simplifying, the piece came closer to the feeling of quiet, soft, morning that first drew me to paint it.

16" x 20", oil on panel.

riverside wildflowers

6 " x 8", oil on panel.

A recent painting outing with Susan yielded a couple of bright little studies, one of which is posted here. We painted that day in a wooded area which was very dark under the cover of the trees, and yet punctuated by brilliant spots of sunlight. I tried to exaggerate that effect here by keeping the darks very dark so that the light would feel very bright.

high key/bright light

8" x 6", oil on panel.

What surprised me as I painted this recently was just how high-key the whole piece had to become in order to get that feeling of really bright sunlight-- that even the shadows had to be much lighter than I had at first expected...so I painted them that way, and the piece actually gained a feeling of having a specific time of day.

plein air in Vegas!

What a fantastic contradiction! But I managed to get a few paintings done during a recent long weekend in Vegas...here looking out the hotel room window and down the Strip:

8" x 6", oil on panel.


And while sitting around the pool it was an inspiration to study some of the vividly colored palms:

6" x 8", oil on panel.


And another morning spent at the pool, where that turquoise! What an amazing color, surrounded by subtle variations of all sorts of greens:

8" x 6", oil on panel.


On another note, this week I've been busily preparing for my first outdoor art festival this weekend. If anyone is around Skokie, come see me at the Skokie Art Guild Fair, 5211 W. Oakton, 10am - 5pm! I'll report back on it next week.
Hope everyone is well.

lessons learned, cedarburg part 2

In my last post about the Cedarburg Plein air paint out, I mentioned that I thought that each painting had lessons to teach. And I found that during a concentrated period of time of painting that these lessons were fairly easy to see (perhaps more so than when surrounded by the usual day to day distractions). Times like this can be as valuable as any workshop that we take from anyone else, in fact, they're like workshops taught by ourselves.

For example, a lesson learned in this painting is to never, ever, paint anything that I'm not truly excited about. Here I think the light/dark pattern is okay, the vales and colors are okay, the drawing and edges are good enough...and I find the painting so very, very boring.

12" x 9", oil on panel.


While in this painting, I was much more excited about the subject matter (Ernie's Wine Bar, tucked away behind the railroad tracks in the bottom of a house); however, I learned (again) about composition, and how the biggest masses are the key to the whole painting. Looking at this painting now, I feel that the big masses got broken up too much, so that the 'whole' disintegrated into little discrete, compartmentalized, pieces, so, ironically, the initial impact of what I was excited about was lost.

8" x 10", oil on panel.

The biggest lessons learned are how incredibly valuable concentrated periods of study are, and how much our own work can teach us, if we only take the time to listen to it and believe that it actually has something to say.

cedarburg

Just back from the plein air paint-out in Cedarburg, WI, which is fun, and tiring...and wonderful to spend a couple of days wandering around this quiet little town.

The first painting I submitted for jurying is of a local drive-in restaurant, Wayne's. It was a challenge to paint because of its unique shape!

8" x 10", oil on panel.

The second painting I submitted is overlooking the fields of a local vegetable farm...and felt somewhat different... This one became quite abstract as I kept simplifying down. Instead of painting each leaf of lettuce, I kept thinking, What is this painting about? And I decided that it was really about the geometric patterns that vegetable groupings formed, and how they traveled up the hill.

9" x 12", oil on panel.

Doing these paint-outs with time limits is great because it's a time of really intensive painting, and each painting has major lessons to teach. It's also difficult because, of course, as soon as I turn the paintings in...I see my mistakes and what could have been improved!

clearing

6" x 8", oil on panel.

This small plein air study was inspired by a beautiful afternoon sunlight that flooded across a clearing that I found as I walked through the woods one day. Dense greens all around, and a little sea of yellow flowers for as far as I could see.

summer farm

14" x 18", oil on linen.

I've been drawn to fields, and fields with farms, more and more lately...something about their sense of distance and space, and how they create a certain serenity...how the land opens up into vastness is something that we city dwellers get a longing for (after being boxed in for too long)!
And sometimes simply making or viewing a painting can gather those same sensations, when we can't actually get to that place.