Martha Kelly Art

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.

​I’ve been working away on my water series of oil paintings since I got home, in between a couple of work trips and some other obligations. I’m still feeling incredibly excited about this series as a whole, and it’s been such fun to just play in swirly paint. If I mess up a bit, I can go back in and fix it, unlike either watercolor or carving. There’s a freedom and also a sense of immersion in diving into a big canvas covered with wet paint. I love the days where I can spend one whole day laying out and diving into a canvas. I save fixing the smaller bits for days when my time is more broken up, but my favoarite are one long day for one big painting, where I get it mostly covered.

That said, this one took longer than most. I got all the stones in and then let it dry overnight before coming back to do the water patterns on top. It’s taken several long days, but I think it’s just about done. You can see the incremental progress below.