This carved and painted piece - "Dancing Cow and Frolicking Farmer" - sold last weekend. A thank you to David and Denise in Allentown, Pa! I know not everyone can buy, but a purchase is the ultimate in applause for an artist. On a purely practical level, it pays the bills and buys me more time in my studio.
Detail shots below:
After showing the nitty-gritty details of what went into the making of Amish Farmer Harnessing Horses, here it is complete.
This is a sweet portrait of friendship between farmer and cow.
Below, the piece unpainted...
Before the base was screwed on...
Painted...
Detail...
A new farm picture can start with the inspiration of a lovely barn, this one located in the Catskills region of New York.
This photo led to a carving livened up complete with cows, farmer, a tractor and my usual clouds:
Close up of the cows:
The most recent painted woodcarving in my sheep series is Shepherd with Five Sheep #22. Although there are 22 pieces in this series (the first 21 have all been sold), each one is individual and unique. Shepherd with Five Sheep #22 either hangs on the wall or sits on a surface.
December 6-7, 2014 I will be at the 44th Annual Syracuse Plowshares Craftsfair at Nottingham High School, Syracuse NY.
Below, I added a red color to the frame, and shaded in order to bring out the shapes.
More work done on the shading and coloring, here I've lightened it back up.
The finished piece!
In my last posting, I showed a quick run through of the making of Catskills Barn, East of Oneonta, Route 23 - from photos, to sketch, to finished work.
Way back in July of this year, I posted on carving the piece at the Ithaca Farmers' Market, so I must have started to paint it around mid August of this year.
Below I will the discuss the painting of the piece, with the caption describing each image being written in the space above it.
After the picture was entirely carved, I began to paint it a kind of warm coral base coat color (see center of the piece). I quickly remembered that I had forgotten to take a photo, so I stopped myself to take a picture of the piece while it was still mostly unpainted.
Now the entire carved area is painted and sealed with this warm coral undercoat. It takes time to seal all the edges and work the paint into all cavities...
I work out the major shapes by putting whites on top of the coral background and putting some shading into the places I want to receed.
Since the colors I used to do the darker shading are ones that I do not usually use, especially Manganes Blue Hue, I documented them for myself with a photo (something new for me). The colors were vastly diluted and put on as a thin glaze.
Below the piece with still more layers of darker glaze that makes the whites pop out. I have added yellow ochre in the inner frame area.
To be continued...
I intend to be at the market this Saturday, but I am coming near the end of my 2014 season. The temperatures steadily continue to drop.
Recently I've been traveling back and forth between Ithaca and Hudson NY. As I pass barns that catch my eye, I stop and take a photo. This barn is on Route 23, east of Oneonta, NY. It has nice solid lines and its state of disintegrating repair speaks of younger days when New York State farms were more vital. The picture was taken last winter, that is snow and ice in the foreground.
Below is a picture of the same barn, taken a little bit further back and a from slightly different angle.
The sketch features the cows, farmer and tractor who once might have made this barn lively.
Lastly, below is the finished carving. I wanted you to see a really quick run through of the inspiration for this carved and painted picture, from photo and sketch to finished painted piece. My next blog postings will go into how I got from early to later and later painted stages of this work. Stay tuned for next week's posting.
I will not be at the Ithaca Farmers' market this weekend. My hands don't like to carve when the temperature is below 50 degrees. Soon, the best way to reach me will be via the internet or by making an appointment to visit my studeo.
Here's a sweet cow piece I finished several months ago, below with its first coat of paint...
and finished....
My market season is winding to a close. I go until it gets too cold for my hands. Come visit me at booth #3 at the Ithaca Farmers' Market tomorrow March 18.
Cows and Barn, Top of the lake is DONE! I wanted a feeling of wind/winter, with cozy barn surrounded by wild and windy outdoors. I think I accomplished it.
It's that idea again that I'm interested in, of us being so small with the forces of nature being so powerful. Midway down the picture, on the left the cows and on the right the treeline, these details anchor the picture in place. But there's no disregarding the wind that sweeps behind the barn and which for now is prettily domesticated.
Each one of my carved and painted pictures involves many layers of paint. Sometimes it can take longer to paint a piece than it takes to carve. I wanted to show you a "before" and "after" of the cows in the lower left corner of Cows and Barn, Top of the Lake.
Before. Below you can see the cows much as they were in the previous posting of this blog. Although much painting has been done, details are still rather blurry. Note that I decided to move the snow drifts into the outer frame of the piece, thus necessitating me carving down into that area (see the raw wood?, and the few little pieces of woodchips?).
After. After a lot more painting of lights and darks, gold leafing the inner frame, plus adding eyes to the cows, I'd call this lower left section complete.
Cows and Barn, Top of the Lake is moving along. Although other details have been fleshed out, what stands out for me as I look at this photo is the wind swirls, I've begun my quest to try to catch a feeling of the wind.
Now we're moving into a new phase in the life of Cows and Barn, Top of the Lake. Here I'm starting to try out different colors, the reds of the barn, the white of the clouds. After I painted the barn I had some extra red paint left on my palette, so I used it up by painting the reds in the person and in the noses/ears of some of the cows. I hate to throw away paint by letting it dry on the palette!
Cows and Barn, Top of the Lake is all carved, I still have to fasten the top and bottom boards that complete the frame. The top and bottom frame pieces will extend beyond the carved detail and protect the carving in case it takes a fall onto its face.
Below you can see the artwork in the early stages of painting, and now it has the top and bottom frames in place!
Every one of my painted woodcarvings starts with a sketch, which I try to save so I can laminate it and staple it to the back of the finished piece (along with my business card). Below is the sketch I made for Cows and Barn, Top of the Lake.
Winter is often when I have time to drive around the countryside looking for and photographing barns. Several years ago, coming back from the opening of the show I had at the Cayuga Museum, I found this lovely set of three barns located immediately off the road somewhere (I hate to say I can't remember exactly where) at the top of Cayuga Lake. If anyone recognizes them, please let me know where they are.
I couldn't fit the barns all in one photo, so you'll have to imagine a composite of these two photos.
Cow and Milk Icon Number 5 is DONE! I like that one big happy awake cow in the middle, with the two cows in the back sleeping. The barn is tucked in between the cows just as the big cow in the front is tucked in between the milk bottles. It's a cozy, happy, complete scene - a world unto itself. It works, it's done.
Cow and Milk Icon #5 gets its first milky layer of paint...
Starts to develop some three-D space and color...
We're getting close to done, two sleepy dreamy cows and one wide awake one...
If my dog pieces bring to mind protection, and a fierceness that I might sometimes want to incorporate into my own being, my cow art reminds me of gentleness, giving - qualities that I also want to absorb.
For a cow, what could be more loving than the giving up of a product made of one's own body - milk. Current farming practices involve controlling cows' milk production by feeding cows hormones (to enhance their milk production) and keeping them in the barn so that they can be milked as often as possible to produce more milk. We need to treat our cows better, let them out of the barn to frolic in the fields. I used to travel around upstate NY and see cows everywhere, but now it is more of a rarity to find cows in the fields. I like to keep drawing my cows out in the fields, outside of that barn- in hopes that someday they will be out there (in the fields) again.
Below, the sketch, drawn on a piece of lined paper...
The Cow and Farmer Friend picture is DONE! I cleaned up the whites, added the farmer's eyes and face, made the greens a bit wilder, changed the frame color, added the gold leaf. I'm happy with it. What do folks out there think of this one?
A little further along in the painting, close to done, I have to add the outlines. It just doensn't look right to me until I have the outlines.
These two (the farmer and the cow) are friends. The cow is kind of little, or else the farmer is kind of big. I guess it doesn't really matter in the end. What's important is how they get along.
When I showed Kiki (Vicious Cow Art) as a guest artist, she didn't know I did cow pictures. Pictured is my most recent, Cow and Farmer Friend - unpainted.
Years ago I did TONS of pictures of cows, and farmers and farms. I grew up on a farm in Bucks County, Pa., located in Bedminster Township. My mother went to Cornell in Animal Husbandry in the 1940s. Her parents (my grandparents) had a large farm/dairy with milk delivery service in the 1930s. That farm is all demolished now, replaced with suburban houses. Below is all that's left of that farm, a grainy aerial picture of my grandparents' farm.
A picture is worth a thousand words. These cows are trying to be patient, in fact some of them have even gone to sleep, but they're still waiting. What sort of emotion does this picture bring up for you?
I"ve added whites and tans to the small Cow Icon #4 piece. The base is still unpainted.
After taking a break from carving and painting cows for a few years, I've gotten back to them. My cows are always waiting, so that's why I've added "Still Waiting" to the title. The picture below shows the carving with its first coat of paint. This is a small icon piece, 7.75" tall by 11.5 wide.
In the version below I've deepened the colors of the circles and added color to the frame. These colors are still not working. They take up a lot of space in the picture so I've got to figure this out... The crows are better, I added some lighter colors to them so their wings and other shapes stand out.
Keeping going with the experimentation before I get discouraged, I added some greens to the frame, removed the blue in the four corners and put in the white of the crow eyes. This version is better.
Here's a picture of the Cow on a Shelf piece from the side. Last night I put it in the farms portfolio at my website. What's this with cows you might ask? I used to do a lot of pictures of cows and milk bottles. I grew up on a farm and my grandparents had a dairy/milk delivery business. My mother went to college with a major in animal husbandry. Cows and milk are in my blood. Haven't done so many cows and milk bottles in the past years, with the exception of a small cow, milk and barn icon piece last summer. Why? Maybe because I stopped drinking milk (allergies). Maybe I just have to take a break until the inspiration becomes "fresh" again. Maybe because when my kids were little, milk was a symbol for nurturance and mothering. Now that my children are big and out of my house, they're more in need of me sending them guard dog energy. Cows are gentle and soft, ultimately giving. Dogs can be fierce, stand their ground when they need to be tough. When I carve a cow or a dog piece it's like doing a meditation on two opposite kinds of energy I need in my life. Does this make sense to any one out there in cyberspace?
Here's a fast forward to the Cow Farm Icon painted. I like how simple and symmetrical it is. I like how the barn is sandwiched between the cow and the milk bottles. This one sold last August from my booth at the Ithaca Farmers' Market. The person who bought it had wanted to get a piece of my work for a long time. They were retiring, had just sold their house and were leaving Ithaca to return to the part of the country where they'd grown up. This was their gift to themselves.
My cows are always hungry, waiting to be milked, waiting to be let into the barn. They're metaphors for patience. They're nurturing figures who are also in need of being nurtured. I identify with my cows - as a woman, a mother, and an artist. Over the years I may have made several hundred carvings that feature cows. I've taken a little break for a while. It's just that the juice ran out of the metaphor for me. Perhaps because my children had grown up and left home - and I was no longer nurturing them so much.
I see few cows in the fields these days. Poor babies, now they're locked up in the barns like living milk machines - given hormones, milked three times a day, never get out into the fields to graze in the grass. Now the cows don't beg to get into the barn, perhaps instead they're inside begging to get out into the fields.
Here's the Cow Farm Icon completely carved. I carve these small irregularly shaped pieces (this one is nine inches tall by 10 inches wide) by screwing a square board onto the back. This way the work can be more easily held in my bench vise.
Holding the wood steady in a vise is important. By freeing up my hands from the task of holding, I can instead put my full concentration on carving. By using a vise and not my hands to hold the work, then I'm less likely to cut myself.
The two penciled circles with an "x" indicate where the screws once were - this reminded me when carving to not work too deeply in these areas. I wouldn't want to hit a screw with my chisel, creating unnecessary hours of sharpening work to correct the mistake.
Here's a piece I call Cow Farm Icon. I carved and painted and sold it last summer. I used to do lots of cow pieces, with the cows large and central, but I haven't done as many in recent years. It's likely that when I do cows now, they're less central andmore to the side, as they are in the carved and painted farm folk art of the previous blog.
Here's a picture of the piece half way carved. It's sitting flat on the carvers bench in my studio. In the background you can see the woodchips that end up being everywhere in that busy little studio of mine. The picture was taken by standing on a ladder and pointing directly down at the piece! I've got the large shapes carved except for the cow's head and the rightmost milk bottle. I still have to carve the details. You can see from the pencil lines on the piece some of what is still left to carve - the windows on the barn, the circular opening at the top of the milk bottle on the left. Being that this is one of my "icon" pieces, it will eventually have a base that will allow it to stand upright on a surface.
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