Dept Natural Resources

Oh, man, I was looking for a painting reference picture and I found a series of progress pix I had forgotten all about.

It's a pretty big panel, 18x24 inches (45x60 cm?)

I had so much fun planning out the images!

It hung in one of the local DNR offices for years, but my husband brought it home when he retired.

   Reposting so I can put appropriate art tags on. The edges are a little imperfect, but someone sent me a note about a better masking tape for delicate paper; I’ll try that next time. The bay behind Ocean City is lovely at sunset.

the Bay and the Sea

Assawoman Bay, Chesapeake Bay at Calvert Cliffs, and the Atlantic Ocean at Fenwick, Delware and Ocean City, Maryland.

   It took me forever to figure out how to paint water, but once I got the hang of it (brown - so much more brown than you’d think) it was fun. Calvert Cliffs erode constantly, and the area around them is very silty and full of fossils.

   Yesterday afternoon I delivered this small painting to the teacher who chaperoned the trip to Iceland my daughter took in June. It was a surprise gift (and also a bit of self-promotion), and she was happy to get it. She told me a bit about her experience of the trip. I was glad to send the painting off to its new home.

   Now I just need to spend a last little bit of time on this trio of Assawoman Bay.

   I even have a ‘helper’, in case a sedentary pile of striped fluff ever assisted in the artistic process. My masking tape, gentle as it is, was not quite gentle enough for this paper, so I made do with sticky notes for the last section. Sheesh. The oil pastels have been fun to play with, but confirmed to me that I really, really prefer oil paints to any other medium.

Oil Pastels

  I haven’t played around with oil pastels for a long, long time. I recognize how easy it is to try new stuff artistically all the time, and not really buckle down and work hard at one technique (oils, in my case). Right now though, I wanted something with a little less cleanup time than oil paints and a little quicker than ink/colored pencil drawing - so I bought myself a nice 24-color set from Blick. Van Gogh brand.

   Other than the fact that I need to use the smoother side of the paper (this pad has one smooth side and one textured side), it’s been fun. They look better when you stand back a bit. I may gently brush a little oil over the rougher spots to smooth them. All-in-all, thumbs up, and I need some smallish projects I can shoehorn in around my other work. The only quibble I have with the set is that there’s no gray, but I had a gray pastel around from a student set my kids got, so I used that.

[ID: two small oil pastel works of a bay and marsh grasses, one with a sunset and the other with a cloudy sky.]

   There are many benefits, etc. While Ocean City, Maryland is undisputedly overdeveloped, there are wetland areas left on the bay side that are lovely to wander around in. The tide here only seemed to fluctuate a few inches, but it’s hard to be certain. There are so many birds hanging out in this area, including some lovely egrets.

  I painted the piece above as one panel in a larger painting of Maryland-Tree-Farm-related stuff. For some reason, in the context of the larger painting, people don’t seem to notice that it has four seasons. A couple of people asked me about it: “Why is there snow?” and when I pointed out the seasonal progression they were surprised. It’s interesting what makes a painting concept fail - or succeed - and sometimes you just don’t know what people will see when you plan your painting. Anyway. That’s what my far pasture looks like throughout the year.

Plein air donation

   Early in the summer I had a couple days to paint plein air in Annapolis. Technically, it is a ‘small city’ but to me any city is a big city, and I needed some help from my aunt getting around and generally staying safe. For my first painting I chose a restored drainage area owned by a church, because they had planted a ton of new shrubs and trees and spent untold money making the storm drainage back into a ‘natural’, healthy area. It was a fun painting and I didn’t get attacked by geese while doing it, which I was keeping a sharp eye out for because they’re aggressive bastards. When I was done, though, and the euphoria faded, I realized I had painted an almost unsellable painting. It was nice and all, but the only people interested in that area would be the folks at St. Luke’s church. 

   I enlisted the aid of my aunt and sent the painting back to Annapolis with a request that she attempt to donate it to the church. This would at least get my name out there as a landscape artist and general nice person. It took a few tries on her part to get that to happen (You want to donate what, now? Why? What are we going to do with it? Hmmmm, we need approval for that.)

   Few people say ‘no’ to Aunt L., however, and when she prevailed upon them to take it they were actually very happy. I got a great note from a person there who told me about the history of the church and the surrounding area, including that the exact spot I painted had once been (probably) an area for Chesapeake Bay watermen to sail in and unload their catch.

   So, all happy. I got to unload the painting in a productive way and put some positive energy out there. The church can hang the painting or raffle it off. People will hear my name. And Aunt L got an invitation to the Wednesday morning sing-along.

   We found a spot in the bay where you could walk right out into the shallows. There were several clams out there, engaged in clam business. K captured them. Clamming is possibly the easiest form of acquiring protein in the entire world. Standing in murky, knee-deep water, clutching 4 large, living clams, she engaged in what I will charitably call a ‘spirited debate’ with us about whether or not she could keep them. No! But! No! But!    I’ve never argued with a young woman clutching an armful of live clams before, and I’d be just as happy never to do it again. If it hadn’t been the last evening of our stay, and nearly 8:00 at that, we would have steamed the blasted clams, but we made her return them to their habitat.