Regina Calton Burchett – Drawings & Pastels

I had a great time at the Claudia Seymour Workshop last weekend in Georgetown at the wonderful Windberg Art Center.   She is an excellent still life artist from Connecticut and President of the Salmagundi Club (Center for American Art) in New York City.  Claudia was open to all interpretations of a still life, and even though she is an amazing realism painter, she loved the color and expressionism of other artists.  Here are pieces of the two paintings I started, and hope to finish in the near future….

Still life - copper and teal

Detail of mango still life

And btw, I still hate ellipses….  anyone have a tried and true method for drawing an ellipse???

Clouds for Deep Eddy

The Creative Arts Society has encouraged its’ members to donate a piece of art to help the Deep Eddy Mural Project.

“Art for Change” is an evening of Art, Raffle, and Libations to support the Deep Eddy public arts project. Saturday, April 17 from 6pm to 9pm.  Hosted at the East Village (1200 E 11th – 11th and Lydia, east of I-35)
Over 50 Artist have donated works that will be raffled off at the end of the Night. Appetizers & Beverages provided by Katz’s Deli (the deli that never closes),  Lone Star Beer, Tiff’s Treats, and the delicious local vodka cocktail Deep Eddy Plunge.

A $5 donation at the door is encouraged, raffle tickets will be sold for $5 each or $20 for five.   Sponsors for the show:  The Creative Arts Society, South Texas Art Therapy Association, Jerry’s Artarama, Lone Star Beer, Tiff’s Treats, Katz’s Deli, more to come!

Katherine Tyrrell of Making a Mark blog had a great post of the most wanted paintings on the web, a study done about 15 years ago. The study had different results for different countries, but apparently for the USA, if you are painting medium-large historic-appearing landscapes of wild animals near a lake, you are good to go.

If you usually painted small still-lifes, would you completely change your subject in order to make more sales or appeal to a larger audience?

I guess all artists and writers have to come to terms with that, if they want to make a living in their chosen field. Then we learn the art of compromise….

2/18 ~ It appears this topic is several places across the artistic web this week – here is another very good post by Armand Cabrera on the definition of artistic integrity.

I’m so glad to have time to paint again. I’ve wanted to do this one for a long time, from an October morning camping at Inks Lakes in central Texas.

The Austin Pastel Society monthly meeting was yesterday, and we had a member-artists Paint-Around with Johanne Morin, Debra Richardson , Mike Etie, and John Bittick and myself.  I’ve dreaded this since Rae Andrews did some cheerful arm-twisting to get us to commit.  We each started our own painting from our photo we brought with us, were allowed to paint for ten minutes, and then passed the photo and painting off to the artist to our left. Then we had ten minutes to work on the next one, until we had each had worked on all five paintings.  At the end, we had a final ten minutes to finish up our own piece.  It sounded like torture.  It wasn’t though – it was fast-paced and very fun. Thankyou to Vicki Brevell who assisted the whole process, and to Janis Langley who took photos!

Here are the final or close to final paintings:

The Austin Pastel Society yearly competition has 98 entries, and you can see them all here. There are so many good artists in this group, and these entries will be reviewed by juror Claudia Seymour. Those chosen for the show will be on exhibit from March 7 through May 2, 2010 at the Corridor of Art – 700 Lavaca, Austin, TX

These three paintings shown below are the ones I have submitted. This year, rather than painting in a last minute rush, I chose three I had done earlier in 2009, that I still liked after several months had passed.

Distant Lights

Congress Avenue in the Rain

Pathways

Many new artists have offered their wonderful pears for inclusion on the www.pearathon.com website – please check it out to see all the variety of artists dedicated to capturing the essence of pearism ~

Pearathon.com

I like working on these 5×7 landscapes, but need to improve on…  so many things.  Not over-working a piece, brush type strokes rather than drawing, maintaining my way of painting without copying the current movement toward complete minimalism, while still studying to be a better artist….  practice, practice.

LittleLandscape2     5×7    Pastel

I worked a bit more on my first little landscape, and think I like it better.  After watching just part of the DVD on composition, I should have known better than to put a row of clouds all the way across the painting, even though that was how they occurred in the sky, as it stops the viewer’s eye from traveling through the painting. Hmmm.

Now I may wait for more inspiration on the trees

I woke up at 5am, dreaming about pastels. I hadn’t been able to paint in so long (with the exception of my paintout with Jo almost two weeks ago), so went out to my studio a little before 6am and cleaned some, watched a DVD on composition for a while, went through a bunch of my sky photos to decide which one I wanted to paint. This was a fairly quick one I started – not sure if I am done yet. 5×7, pastel on sanded Art Spectrum paper

Little Landscape, 5x7, pastel