NOT AN ASPEN, a cactus for Christmas and a New Year's Juniper

 All species of cactus originated in The Americas.

Here's a saguaro in Tucson, AZ.
It would become my next figure in the landscape if I moved from mountains to desert.

This one must be hundreds of years old.

 Back in Colorado on New Year's Day with an old Juniper.
Figure and Tree in the Landscape. 

Snowy pine in my backyard,

and a snow drawing.

 

WINTER IMAGES, 2014/1015

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.