Martha Kelly Art

I’ve been out a few more times with my gouaches to do plein air landscape studies. It’s been fun because I’ve been able to go on my new bike. The first one I’ve ever had. It’s got a makeshift but perfect basket on the back that will fit my stadium seat and my daypack with the art gear in it. I’ve enjoyed riding out of town to places I can paint. Getting out of town and into the countryside is so easy here in this town of 700, so I’m taking advantage of that while I’m here. I’m still struggling to find the right brushes, but mostly I’m pleased with the painting I’m doing. I’ve also included a snapshot of me working out on the trail, so you can see the small amount of gear needed for traveling with gouache. The stadium seat is optional but comfortable.

Is there anything better to do on that holiday than go cheer your team on in person? The St. Louis Cardinals just happened to be playing an inter league series in Seattle last week, and I got to go see them in a gorgeous park on a perfect day. Such fun. I brought all my Cardinals gear out for the occasion.

I did both sketches before the game started and then really just watched the game. Especially since we were in prime foul ball territory. I was happy to see (in the second sketch) that a number of Cardinal players were across the field at the visitors’ dugout signing autographs for more than an hour. They came and went a little, but multiple players were out there for a long time. Really nice and good public relations on their part.

I’ve been working on more Gouache studies over the last week. They’re all quite small, 3x4” or so, and done on brown paper. With watercolors, I squeeze paint into palettes, wet the brush, and then just wipe it across the paint. Gouache very thin is chalky, though. It works better straight out of the tube — wet and thick. Which means I carry a zip bag of all the tubes of color with me, but it’s still considerably less to carry around than doing oils on site. I like that visually gouache has the darkness of oils, even if it doesn’t have the gloss. I think these studies will have enough depth to do oil paintings from back in the studio, though I try to always take a photo of the scene I’m painting in case I need more information. Sometimes I remember.

I feel like I’m making progress getting where I want to be, and I think this might be my project in Paris this year as well. I’ve done a lot of the watercolors I want to there, and gouache will give me a new way to see the city.

The lights are still weak in some of them. Here are two of the recent ones that have worked better. I really have to be intentional to work up to the lighter values, since I’m starting dark, which is exactly the opposite of leaving them open in watercolor. The good news is you can add them in if you forget (which I often do) to leave them from the start.

One of the things I came out west hoping to do was get more comfortable with gouache. I had started doing some forest studies in Memphis in pastel because watercolor just doesn’t have enough depth and value richness, but I wasn’t happy with the greens. Also pastels are cumbersome to carry around because I need an easel to keep the piece vertical while I work, and the pastel box itself is quite heavy.

Gouache has almost the portability of watercolor, and the same ease of cleanup. I carry full tubes of paint because I like to use it wet instead of reconstituted, but it’s still much lighter than pastels. I tried two years ago to learn to use it, and again I was dissatisfied with the artificial greens I got. This year I bought a couple more mossy, forest type greens to bring out. I was also trying to work as large as I do in watercolor, and that wasn’t going well. I notice that a lot of gouache painters I admire work quite small, so I brought a number of small bits of thick, brown paper with me (Stonehenge, my go-to printmaking brand).

This was my first effort, and I was pretty delighted. I could probably stand to have more highlights in the trunk, but the painterly-ness of it feels like oils without having to carry nearly as much stuff (and solvents) around with you.

Plus a little buddy I found on my walk the other day. I tend to go for a big double spread of watercolor, but I’m hoping to also exercise some restraint, so some smaller spreads, maybe not cover everything with paint every single time. We’ll see how that goes...