A REMAINDER/REMINDER

This unusually warm weather sent me back to the garden,
literally and figuratively, where I noticed one bed that I forgot
to put to bed because I was away most of October!
I've never saved the arugula seeds before.
They are so delicate! The pod is split down the middle by
a thin veil-like membrane with tiny seeds sitting in both sides.

Fooling around with compositions in the snow

LAST LEAVES OF AUTUMN - COLORADO/NEW MEXICO

 ASPENS ON HORSEFLY MESA

ON COUNTY ROAD 5, RIDGWAY

WILLOWS ALONG THE UNCOMPAHGRE

Here are a few paintings from the week before I left for New Mexico. 

I am so fortunate to experience two autumns every year.

Below are a few paintings from the week at the Ghost Ranch!

A strikingly different landscape, one that I love for different reasons. 

VIEW OF THE PEDERNAL FROM OUR STUDIO

ALONG THE PAINTED DESERT ROAD

 Two of our favorite subjects at the Ghost Ranch are the Pedernal which is visible from about anywhere on the Ranch. Also the rock formations on the Painted Desert Road that goes out to
O'Keeffe's house. 
And one of the best things to do at the end of the day - a quick sunset painting.
Please check out a recent article about my show at the Oh-Be-Joyful Gallery at the link below!

SUNSET FROM THE DINING HALL

www.pleinaircollector.com/EXHIBITION-Meredith-Nemirov-at-Oh-Be-Joyful-Galler/20148576 

AFTER BURCHFIELD: for the Ridgway Public Library

How many times have I taken out this book from the Harold Rosenberg Collection!

I have long admired the watercolor paintings of this artist, whose work is so inspired by nature, weather and the changing of the seasons and was so pleased to find a book his drawings!

The transition from summer to fall makes me think of his work even more. 

The opportunity to make a painting for the Ridgway Public Library Fundraiser

took me to my favorite spot for painting aspens on Miller Mesa. I wanted to capture

something of the trees with Burchfield's work in mind.

This is the painting I donated. Below is the black and white watercolor I did first.

And here is a large on-site painting I returned to a couple of weeks later. Still summer!

 

 

"One of the greatest joys of an artist's working life is producing drawings, probably because he enjoys greater freedom in drawing than he does in what he considers his major work"

Charles Burchfield

Aspens And Their Environs

 

ASPEN ONE AND TWO

Watercolor, pigment marker on Rives BFK

22" x 30"

I titled this post Aspens And Their Environs because these two recent works represent

the tree and, also, everything that is going on around it. When I am drawing in the forest the 

activity surrounding the tree itself captures my attention and is as important to me as 

the apparent subject. On site paintings would include all that my eye sees, but in the studio 

 things like wind moving branches in the distance and fallen limbs leaning into neighboring

trees are represented by the energetic drawing of concentric lines and the shapes that are

randomly created by them.

DETAILS - ASPEN ONE AND TWO 

Nature and Abstraction

Micro and Macro

Walking around looking at nature in the Rocky Mountains gives me much visual information to consider using in my paintings. In the works in my previous post you can see patterns that come directly from natural objects like dried seed pods. The movement of branches in the woods really makes me want to draw those lines and how they interact and intersect in space.
Nature is predictable in the sense that season follows season, plants bloom at certain times.
It's our interaction with nature that brings surprising and unexpected pleasure.

The character Frenhofer in Balzac's said "Nature provides a succession of rounded outlines that run into one another"
I certainly see that every day everywhere I look.
and
 "It is not the language of painters but the language of nature, which we should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves; for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures"

I mostly agree with this quote of Vincent Van Gogh
but I think a lot of the language of painters too.

Subterranean

Subterranean One, Oil on wood, 10" x 10" x 2"

Subterranean Two, Oil on wood, 10" x 10" x 2"

These two paintings are based on a series I did at The Vermont Studio Center in  2010.
(see four images below)

I was trying to interpret in oil paint on wood what I did with watercolor, gouache and ink on paper. 
The original four pieces were done from drawings of aspen tree trunks.
When I turned the paper 90 degrees to the left and all of a sudden the drawings lost their tree-ness.
The edge of the trunk became a horizon line and the shapes and forms were underneath the earth!
I imagine these as things growing underground, thus the name Subterranean for the series.
I recently read an article about the abstract painter Mark Grotjahn, whose wonderful Butterfly paintings I saw at the new Blum and Poe Gallery in NYC.  About those paintings, he said "I found that rotating it (the canvas 90 degrees) took all the landscape out, so it became a non-objective painting.

From Real to Abstract

Is there a relationship between these two paintings?

An on-site watercolor and a studio work on paper?

When I work back and forth between "reality" and abstraction I like to think

that the shapes and abstract linear elements come directly from my observation of nature

during the act of seeing and painting what I see.  They also come from everyday

visual phenomenon such as when certain light conditions force shapes to pop in and outof

 the landscape in a totally unrealistic way, but that makes the scene more surprising and dynamic.

Here is a paragraph from an article by the painter Carroll Dunham in Artforum magazine on the 

occasion of the Alexander Calder exhibition a the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2009.

"There can seem to be a generic modernity to Calder's work, almost a New Yorker cartoon

version of biomorphic abstract art (a quality Jean Arp certainly shares), but this is the flip

side of something cloaked deeply essential in modernism: the somewhat cloaked use of nature as a conceptual and philosophical platform. The organically inspired forms that become increasingly central to Calder's work place him in a stream that runs through modernist thought, past worldwide war and the dawn of the atomic age on it's way to more recent (or less obviously cataclysmic) times, when it may appear to have run dry. But it stems from an archaic impulse, and it will be interesting to see if events in the world soon outpace our abiltiy  or need) to effect its denial."

Ciprés

 

Ciprés 

watercolor, gouache on 300# Arches, 20" x 50"

  Ciprés y Nubes

Ciprés y Tristeza

The cypress tree, in classical times, symbolized mourning. It was associated with death and the underworld because it failed to regenerate when cut back too severely. Today it remains the principal tree in cemeteries in both the Muslim world and Europe.

Ovid recorded the myth of Cyparissus. In the story he kills his beloved stag. His grief and remorse were so inconsolable that he asked to weep forever. He was transformed into "cipressus sempervirens", the Meditteranean cypress tree. The tree's sap represents his tears.

The winter of 2013/2014 in Northern Spain was where I painted the small on-site paintings

of cypresses, in the Parque del Ebro and also in the cemetery in Logroño.

These larger works were just completed in my studio in Ridgway.