Martha Kelly Art

I’m back to market still lifes this week. It’s an pleasurable and easy way to get the paint flowing when I’m feeling stuck on another project, and I do enjoy the feeling of continuity with still life painters through the centuries. Pieter Claesz is one of my favorites, and several early women painters were flower and still life painters, Rachel Ruysch and Clara Peeters among others. It was a genre women that was “acceptable” or women to do at the time, and they did it beautifully. And made lasting names for themselves, which is amazing given the patriarchal society they were born into. I also think it’s a gift to the world to simply paint beauty occasionally and remind people of the joy in the everyday things that surround them. Still lifes often get marginalized in the same way as genre fiction, but I’ve always been drawn to them, both in viewing and execution.

This week it was sunflowers, which I discovered are harder than they look. I’d done some years ago, but in a very simplified way. I’m drawn to the size and robust presence they have. I started off a little fussy with them, but then the tomato and carrots went in largely one pass. While I painted the flowers likely ten times. So it goes.

You can see the chalk marks I use for my initial drawing in the early views. I used NuPastel either light yellow or light gray to lay the shapes down where I want them before diving in with paint. Nothing very detailed, but a road map.

The end of the first day below on the left. I was largely happy with it, though I ran out of steam before I finished the second set of hydrangeas. There had been a different flower there that I wasn’t happy with, so I did a little rearranging near the end of the day to bring another hydrangea blossom around to the visible side. The next day I finished that and also decided the sunflowers were a bit fussy, so I simplified them down a bit. I think it’s finished now. The background is pretty uniformly dark, but it’s hard to get a snapshot without glare. The dark background feels to me particularly in an almost apostolic line with the Dutch painters of the past, and it really makes the lighter objects in the foreground pop. Feeling happy with this one is making me reconsider the previous still lifes in this series. A follow up blog post will show you work I did on one of those.

I've only ever been able to go for one day, sandwiched in with other things, so that was a rare treat. All the folks who work there were warm and welcoming, and I got to have some great conversations as well as looking at art.

They also went above and beyond the day of the opening. It was a day of six hour tornado watches and a huge wave of bad weather coming across the state. It would have been supremely easy for them to simply push the opening back a day. But they knew several of us had come to town and stayed for the party, so they decided to work quite late two nights in a row and had a storm party on Thursday and the official opening on Friday, an evening later than originally planned. I was so grateful for this generosity because it was a huge marker for me to have art in what is essentially sacred art space for me. Those of us who were there got a marvelous tour of the collection with Mattie Coddling, the curator who has recently put up a comprehensive exhibit tracking the progression of Anderson's life and work (which are essentially the same thing).

The unexpected and amazing bonus was that John Anderson, one of Walter's children, generously came out on a terrible night to be present. It would have been even easier for him to simply stay home. Because of the smaller crowd, I ended up having a couple of long and delightful conversations with him. He was kind and remarkably generous with his family stories. I was halfway through his mother's memoir, Approaching the Magic Hour, which is marvelous. John talked to me about art in general, living as an artist, and how his father wanted to invite everyone into the process. It was a standout moment in my life, and I could not be more grateful to everyone involved in making it happen.

I did most of a still life today. I’ll look at it tomorrow with fresh eyes, and I’m sure there will be some adjustments, but it’s close to what I had hoped (assuming I still like the wallpaper tommorrow — that’s the big variable). It’s from a farmers market bouquet I bought on Saturday that I couldn’t stop looking at and wanting to paint. Last night, after finally finishing and submitting (to a first place, anyway) the graphic essay, I treated myself by doing a quick watercolor of the bouquet after dinner and before heading to my jam. I don’t too often splurge on buying flowers, and it’s fun to make them more immortal in my sketch journal when I do. That way I can enjoy them all over again whenever I open the book.

This sketch went well, and I was really charmed by the whole bouquet. It reminds me of the small, last still lifes Manet painted in bed as he was dying. His friends would bring him bouquets, and he would paint them lying there. That’s what I hope for myself — to make art right up till my last days. And these pieces are absolutely exquisite and have some gorgeously handled glass as well as the flowers. I’ll never have that facility, but it was fun to try my own version. After thinking about the sketch overnight, I decided to do a full on oil today.

I drew it out on the canvas just after breakfast, and then I went on my walk to be able to come back to it with fresh eyes and make any adjustments necessary before committing to paint. Then I painted straight through till after my regular dinner time. I’m exhausted, but it’s deeply good to have a whole day to dive into art and just paint until I get to the natural end.

I have loved the Walter Anderson Museum (WAMA) for years now. Anderson is one of my top art heroes, along with John Constable (for his life and work habits as well as for his gorgeous landscapes), Georgia O’Keefe (for her strong independence and her love of place as well as for her paintings), and a handful of others. Anderson, like both of those others, had a deep and strong connection to the landscape he lived in and an absolute need to share his vision of its loveliness with others through the art he relentlessly made. He is not well known outside the south, where he spent his life living in his boyhood home of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and painting the coast, wildlife, and barrier islands, but I think he’s one of the best artists America has produced, along with Sargent and O’Keefe.

WAMA is a magical place for me. They not only have a massive number of his free standing paintings, but they have his boat, his bicycle, and (most importantly) two different rooms covered in his murals. You can completely immerse yourself in color and form and pattern on all sides. The secret room he painted (solely his until his death, with no one else allowed to see it) brings me to tears every time I stand inside it. I’ve been trying to get down this spring, since it’s now been several years. I cancelled not one but two reservations due to sickness, but the universe gave me a gift this week. I had three pieces accepted into a group show at this museum that I love. The theme is water, which is perfect for me, since I’ve been doing waterscapes since last summer. Two of my oils and the above print will need delivering down next month.

I’ll get a delightful “mini-break” as the Brits say between art drop off and the opening two days later. I had originally planned use to shoot down overnight, and I’m excited to have such a marvelous reason to stay for three nights instead. I’ll immerse myself in the museum, visit Shearwater pottery (the family business Anderson grew up in, which remains in the hands of the current generation), and spend a little time at the beach. Careful readers will remember my glee a few months ago when I found a Shearwater teapot at a local antique mall. It’s gorgeous but also has several cracks. I may get myself a new one for daily use and to mark this special occasion.

The opening is April 18, 6-8pm, if anyone would like to join me for a mini break at a place that will stay with you for a long time.

This one still has some refinement to go, but I’m feeling largely good about it. It’s probably 85% done at this point. I’m having the best time with oils lately. I’m taking time off this week to demonstrate printmaking the the Pink Palace Crafts Fair, Memphis’s oldest and marvelous outdoor fair. I loved it as a kid, and now I get to be a part of it. Come see me in the demonstration area Friday, Saturday, or Sunday if you’re in Memphis. I’ll be back to painting (and working on a children’s book) again next week.

I’m back home and getting into the swing of painting again. I’ve given myself time to just dive in and start working, so at some point I’ll scan in the late sketches from my trip and post them here, but in the meantime, here’s the first oil I’ve been working on since I got home.

I’d had a great flow going on large paintings of water before I left, and I was worried about losing my momentum in five weeks away. Paris is always a restorative time for me, where I experiment with new things, walk and think, and look at lots of amazing art that inspires me for the year to come. This year, though, I was buried so deeply in this series that I was reluctant to leave. I did several things to try to keep the flow going while I was gone. I worked larger in watercolors, which I had wanted to learn for illustration purposes anyway, and it also helped me to stay slightly more in the scale of the work I wanted to come home ready to do. This series includes figures in a number of the paintings, which is still pretty new for me, so I did a ton of larger self portraits (9x12” instead of my usual 5” or 6x8” watercolors) and also sketched a lot of people out in public to keep improving on my figure skills.

Most importantly, I intentionally cast my mind back to the larger paintings and visualized the couple of next ones I wanted to start. I did this especially the last week, while I was walking or right on that edge of sleep, which is a very creative time for me. I was hoping to keep the ideas fresh and get myself back in that mindset for when I got home, and it worked beautifully. I had one day of unpacking and serious jet lag, and the next day (still a bit jet lagged), I was up early and drew off three new paintings before it was light enough to walk Mr. Darcy. This is the first of five paintings I’ve started in the last week and a half. I think this one is finished, though I may tweak it a bit more. Others need various levels of help still, but they’re coming along nicely. It feels good to be back with big canvases and flowing paint again.

The latest oil painting I've been working on is from a photo I took on a rainy evening dog walk last year. I've kept thinking about it, and now that I'm working with water images, I went back to find it. Below are a couple of photos from along the way. I'll work on this a bit more, but I wanted to let it sit and think about it some before going any further.

Here’s another behind the scenes peek at one of the water themed oils in progress. I took a series of photos downtown at the Greenbelt park back in the spring, and they’ve been continuing to call to me. I was happy to get going on this. I shared some later on photos of this recently, but sometimes it’s fun to see the start.