Cool Kīlauea morning

oil on canvas, 8"x10" (SOLD)

This one is hot of the easel! It's still drying and I hope to have it available at this weekend's Volcano Village Artist Hui Studio Tour and Art Sale, starting Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, from 10 am - 4 pm and running until Sunday. Stop by Emily Herb's studio on Kenoelehua and visit with Emily, Charlotte Forbes Perry, and me! Emily will have her beautiful native plant and animal-inspired ceramics and guest artist Charlotte will have her ceramic native species trivets, ceramic ornaments, stained glass, and surprise ceramic pieces. I'll have original artwork (as seen on this blog), giclee prints, and notecards! We are all inspired by the plants and animals that surround us in the Village and hope to share with you our love of them through our artwork. 

This is one of my favorite views of the Thurston Lava Tube area, where one can look down into a caved in portion of a lava tube, now filled with myriad native trees and ferns and noisy with the calls of native birds flying about. 

Please excuse the glare ... the paint is still drying on this one!

`A`ali`i (Dodonaea viscosa)

`A`ali`i, oil on canvas, 7"x5" (SOLD)

"Daud-vis" ... or Dodvis, is the field code for Dodonaea viscosa (`a`ali`i), the first three letters of the genus and first three letters for the species. Botanists tend to speak in code because who has time to pronounce each syllable of a scientific name anyway?! For example, "Met-paul" for Metpol or Metrosideros polymorpha (`ōhi`a) ... "Sib-glah" for Cibgla or Cibotium glaucum (hapu`u), etc. So, if we ever meet and I happen to speak plant gibberish to you, remind yourself that you're talking to a botanist who spends too much time with plants. :)

This `a`ali`i is a small shrub that grows in the area I live. The fruit, painted here, are winged papery fruit with tiny black seeds inside.  They are pretty iconic and you can see them readily when you visit Hawai`i Volcanoes National Park.

This closeup of a branch was fun to paint because sunlight could be seen back-lighting the fruit so I was able to use a variety of saturated colors .... alizarin red, cadmium red deep, cadmium orange, cadmium yellow pale to capture the light. The shadows was achieved mixing the colors with its complement, for example, I mixed the reds with sap green or ultramarine blue to achieve a more rich shadow. The highlights were achieved using titanium white with a variety colors. While it looks like I might have used pure white, it was never the case in this painting.

`Apapane is home.

oil on canvas, 12"x6" (SOLD)

I had been walking through the kipuka along the east-facing slopes of Mauna Loa a couple weeks ago and was struck by the lushness of the flora. We were literally enveloped by hāpu`u (tree ferns, Cibotium glaucum) and other endemic ferns. `Apapane, `i`iwi, `amakihi, and `oma`o were calling all around us. I needed that time to be immersed in nature and I couldn't help but grin from ear to ear because it is exactly where I needed to be. It is where my heart will always be and I feel the most at home in it. It was hard to leave that day but I wanted to paint something to remind me of that very special place.

The challenge in painting this scene was deciding where the focal point would be and by using hue, value, chroma, and sharpness, the journey your eyes would take through the painting. I don't know if I'm very successful in this painting but I did try. If you squint, you can see what I mean. It's hard not to notice the `apapane, which has the highest chroma (saturation) and then the highlights on the fern fronds are meant to draw you from the left to the right of the painting, down to the bottom right, where you end in a deep shadow, where it's a bit suspenseful because there's only a hint of what's under those fronds. Or maybe it doesn't matter. I hope you enjoy it anyway!

Wake uuuuup!

Rooster, oil on canvas, 12"x12" (SOLD)

This is an ode to the roosters that have moved in down the street. I don't mind their crowing so much but it's probably because they aren't next door. Huge wattles, yes? And that comb sits on his head like a crown! This is the kind of rooster that is the king of his neighborhood!

I chose complementary colors for this one. It's a fairly large painting (the largest size that I've done so far) but I was able to do most of it in one sitting. Most people may not notice that I tend to use the alla prima or wet-on-wet method, which presents challenges when I pile the paint on. If I fuss with it too much, the colors get muddied and I just create a puddled mess. In this case, I embraced it and used bold strokes and laid down the colors fairly quickly, then finished it with details by pushing the paint about. I've noticed that most people that use the alla prima method paint fairly painterly. In my case, I try to infuse as much detail by moving the paint about with my brush, leaving the brightest highlights for last in which I place on top of the wet paint with a very small "0" brush. Most of my small paintings take between 4 and 8 hours. I came back to it a couple days later to lighten up the feathers of the rooster and decided to leave the black feathers unsaturated (i.e. grayish), which I think gives is a more realistic look, as if they were "feathered in" with the white ones.

`Ōhelo in the rain

`Ōhelo, oil on canvas, 10"x8" (SOLD)

`Ōhelo or Vaccinium reticulatum is probably my favorite Hawaiian plant. The fruit are usually tart, sometimes sweet and comes in a variety of colors from yellow, orange, red, to purple. This species is a cousin of blueberries and like blueberries are collected for pies and jam. But, in Hawai`i, we first ask for permission to pick and in reverence, offer the fruit to Pele, the Goddess of Fire, before picking some for ourselves. And, we always leave lots of fruit on the bushes for nene (Hawaiian geese) and other native birds.

I've been choosing to paint on larger canvases and this one is 10"x8", which means changing my painting style to larger brushes, larger brushstrokes, and getting used to a larger drying time. It has also meant making more conscious decisions on areas to keep sharp and distinct and areas to push back into the distance. It is easier to fudge that with smaller pieces. Painting larger also has meant needing to step back from the painting from time to time to to take in the whole painting where I just held it at arm's length when painting much smaller pieces. It's a learning process, isn't it? Maybe my next step will be to purchase an easel so I can paint even larger!

My favorite part of this piece, besides painting the luscious fruit, was adding the red and green leaves. I used a myriad of colors for this piece, sometimes leaning toward the cool cerulean blue and sometimes toward the warmer cadmium red. I love painting with complementary colors!

Kilauea Iki

Kilauea Iki, oil on canvas, 8"X6"