Straddle the Turtle

A Colorful Tree & my Fall Newsletter (all in one :)

10.04.2023 by Barbara Grant //

Before leaving summer behind there’s something that I want to share.

I recently finished this painting titled Colorful Tree. The art lover who requested I create it got the idea when she saw my painting of kids in a tree that I had posted on my blog years ago.* She had an empty wall just waiting for something like this, had no particulars about what medium I chose, and was in no hurry. No pressure! Fun project! I’m grateful for her patience, because I was interrupted multiple times with other projects with deadlines.

Following are excerpts from our email exchange that reveal some of the magic of this venture:

Me — This painting has been a joy to work on – more play than work. I loved creating a comfortable, climbable tree; I loved pretending I was each one of those kids; I loved dressing each child and imagining their personalities. Every time I thought it was finished, I photographed it for your approval and noticed something else to fix. But I better stop now before I go too far and wreck something! If there’s something I can alter to make it more to your liking, I will do my best. It’s been so fun!

Client — Barb, I just LOVE this!!! It is gorgeous. Just what I was hoping for! I was mulling over one change. Would you be willing to change the skin tone of one the kids? I don’t care at all which one and while all of my grandkids will most likely be white, I kind of like the idea of some variety. I know that I never mentioned this so I apologize for this inconvenience. It never occurred to me. Let me know your thoughts … Thank you, Barb, I really do love it!

Me — I’m so glad you’re pleased. I have to reveal something pretty funny. As I worked on this I had an Irish redhead on the swing, Hispanic boy up on the limb, lovely Asian girl in the crook of the tree, little blondie tackling the kite and a brown skinned beauty kicking off her sandals. But in final stages I allowed them to morph into a generic crew, because I felt I was being presumptuous. I went back & forth thinking, well…they could be at a city park?! Anyway, pretty funny huh? I’ll make changes & send photos for your approval.

Client — Oh your original plan was perfect. Go for it!!!

ME — I’ll do my best 🤓

Client — I’m sure it will be fabulous 🥰

She didn’t want to risk damage or loss via shipping and offered to drive from Illinois to my studio in Wisconsin. I suggested we meet halfway, and so we were able to enjoy a nice lunch. She was interested in how I created the painting and asked questions about the process. One of the things I told her was about a song I learned as a child in Sunday School:

🎼 Jesus loves the little children; all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white; they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world 🎶

This song ran through my mind as I composed the drawing, chose colors, mixed and applied the paint. I’m fortunate to be friends with two artists who are experts in mixing skin tones; they educated me in using undertones of red or blue depending on ethnicity. It’s tricky.

* The earlier painting of “kids in a tree” that my client recalled can be found on my blog. The title of this post is Poetry + Soccer = America Scores. You can easily go to it by clicking here. This is the artwork:

My last newsletter was posted December of last year, so I have a few other project updates I’d like to share

photos of the creative process to completion

I created another book cover that turned out to be helpful in my quest to learn more about painting digitally. This came about as I was grappling with the composition for the commissioned design. I uploaded my drawings to the Procreate app on my iPad, then using the incredibly magic Apple Pencil started experimenting… So fun! I moved back & forth working on canvas, paper and the digital app and sending images of my progress to Mr. Turelli for his feedback and guidance. Quite the learning process for me! The author’s website is: PaulTurelli.com

My Catch of the Day painting was included in an exhibit this last June with my friends at Oddball Art Labs. As a teenager I heard rumors about Big Foot who roamed around the countryside near Big Hollow Road in Peoria, Illinois. I returned to scout out the area earlier this year. At dusk it was still spooky for me to visit alone. A narrow train bridge came into view as I drove around a curve on the isolated, tree-lined country road, the sides of its inner walls covered with graffiti. It took me back to my high school days and inspired my entry for this artwork.

(Happy Halloween!)

Also I created a logo for Precious Tots Preschool where my daughter Tobi teaches. The design needed to include what the director of her school desired for their new T-shirt fundraiser. I putzed around long enough with various designs and kept throwing in new ideas for approval – back & forth – I could have gone on forever I was having so much fun… But Tobi finally had to say, “Mom, stop! Quit changing things! It’s fine the way it is!!!” So with the help of Dori, my younger daughter who was finalizing the project for print on fabric, I was able to slip in one more itty bitty improvement to balance the composition – a little tuffet of grass in the bottom left corner. Tobi will never know unless she reads this far into my newsletter, which I admit is rather lengthy.😬

It was a fun summer. We made it to Milwaukee’s Summerfest to see the James Taylor/Cheryl Crow concert, Bob cleaned out the garden shed, designed and had a bar built for our deck, met some cute cows out in the countryside during one of his photography assignments, and we celebrated the 4th of July with Roxy & Ringo:

🙏 Thanks for reading and looking… 👀

bottom banner with Roxy & ringo photo signing off with love

p.s. My friend who knows a lot about watercolor told me that yellow “pushes” other colors. I did this experiment to watch it happen. I’m aware that it’s a visually powerful color but just look how it punched into this red! I used this for the background of the banners in this newsletter. I painted it on postcard paper, scanned the image and uploaded it to the Canva app to make my designs. I also sent the postcard via the U.S. post service to my friend way out near Seattle 🙂

A Sweeping Tale

07.08.2023 by Barbara Grant //

When I was a girl I was expected to help my mom with chores around our home. Not just to be helpful (though God knows she needed it with our family of eight), but also in order to learn how to care for my own future household. Early on, she taught us the proper way to set the dinner table and how to:

wash dishes & clean up the kitchen
use the vacuum & dust the furniture
fold “hospital corners” when making beds
iron shirts – at least 5 steps in a particular order
sew on a button.

Useful skills. Skills she needed a hand with I’m guessing. But she wasn’t a clean-freak; I still love her “clean to the eye” motto, which meant pick up the newspapers and toys so, if company happened to drop by, the house would look neat. She was a practical woman, and I’m thankful for the means I acquired under her casual tutelage.

I have mixed emotions, however, about a story she told me when I was sweeping the kitchen for her one afternoon – a tale my grandmother conveyed to her when she was a girl. It’s about a man who visits a household to observe two girls clean up the floors of the home. The first one sweeps the broom around the room in a flurry finishing in record time! The second uses small brush strokes, slowly and methodically gathering the dirt particles so as not to scatter it or drum up dust in the air. The man selects as the winner the more conscientious of the two – the young woman who took her time and did a thorough job. Yay! What was her prize? She got to be his WIFE! (It is a primeval story, of course.)

This morning I felt crunchy crumbs under my toes as I stepped toward the coffeemaker. Too early for the noisy vacuum, I went for the broom to quietly gather the particles. This story about a man choosing his bride based on what is revealed in her approach to sweeping dirt still comes to mind every time I grab a broom. In our garage my husband displays one that has seen it’s better days next to a framed poster of Jasper Johns’ painting entitled Fool’s House. Bob insists on hanging them together prominently – he LOVES this diptych he created. It’s been moving around with us for more than three decades.

broom hanging next to poster of Jasper Johns painting "Fool's House"

Johns’ broom series is engaging because he took an actual broom from his studio, screwed it to a stretched canvas and let it “sweep” an arc of oil paint across the surface. His creative process of using commonplace objects, along with his paint marks and scribbled labels caused a pictorial tension that was new to viewers back in the 60s. His Flag paintings caused more of a sensation and made him famous, but I lived with the broom for so long I believe it influenced me as much as my mother. I collect objects to incorporate into my own paintings. I am known for this among family and friends.

In fact, they add to my stash – save stuff in plastic bags and say, “Here, thought you could use this…” Back when I had a studio in downtown Rockford a fellow artist called to report she’d just driven passed a smashed bucket laying on the corner of Madison & Market that looked like something I could use. It became the background of the lion’s face of St. Mark for my Bible Story series.

image of smashed bucket on canvas for St. Mark (the lion)

Progression of images to create St. Mark (the lion)

Every walk with Roxy & Ringo is an opportunity to find shapes on the ground to put in paintings. These found objects are organized in shoeboxes and crates stashed under tables and on shelves around my studio. I believe for most artists the creative process involves the use of basic elements of design and lots of practice with their medium. This is true for me as well, but my approach tends to get messy and troublesome before I’m able to organize the best presentation. Especially if I want to include one of my precious found objects. But with care and focus it can become a meditation of making harmony from chaos, and it suits me.

Out of curiosity, I searched my Etsy shop to find that 34% of my items presently shown include imbedded found objects. Here is one of my favorites entitled Grace Note. Grace note defined:

a musical note added as an ornament
a small addition or embellishment

painting called "Grace Note" with found objects in it

References:

Jasper Johns, Fool’s House, 1962. Oil on canvas with broom, sculptural towel, stretcher and cup. 182.9 x 11.4 cm. Private collection, on loan to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis © Jasper Johns / VAGA, New York / DACS, London 2017.
Flag https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78805
https://www.everypainterpaintshimself.com/article/jasper_johns_fools_house_1964
Jasper Johns painting series of brooms: https://artillerymag.com/outside-la-jasper-johns/
A “found objects” search of my Etsy.com/shop/GrantviewStudio

Newsletter: If Winter comes…

12.19.2022 by Barbara Grant //

Season’s Greetings from Grantview Studio!

Last week we experienced the first blanket of snow in our neighborhood. The first is always enchanting as we look out the windows from our cozy home. But soon the novelty wears thin as driveways need to be plowed, walkways shoveled, and slick pavement can be treacherous!

I don’t mind the winter months. They allow me to hunker down and get more work accomplished in my studio. My husband is the opposite; Bob can’t wait for Winter Solstice to arrive, as the waning of daylight hours ends and days begin to grow longer again. He thrives on the warmth of sunlight.

In other writings I have mentioned that my mother suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). I remember visiting her one winter when she was quite gloomy. It was Bob who lifted her spirits by showing her the calendar. It was just a few days before December 21st. He reminded her that as soon as we pass that marker, there would be more light each day until Spring arrives. It was with this precious memory in mind that I created our Holiday Greeting card this year.

The phrase “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” had been running through my mind lately. I couldn’t remember where I’d read it, so I researched and found that it is the final line of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”. I use symbolism in my artwork, so I began to imagine a way to convey the hope and optimism of his poem.

After the leaves fall, berries remain to nourish the animals and birds who stay through the winter. There are lots of winter scenes depicting birds perched on snow-laced branches with berries, and I wanted to do my version of this.

Towards the end of a long winter, when I spot a robin, I sense the coming of Spring. In my research I was amused to read that robins can get tipsy on berries and crabapples that have fermented after a frost.

painting of robin on a branch with berries, blue sky and Chinese Lantern plants in the snow below

Also, Chinese Lanterns are an unusual addition for a winter holiday scene, but when I was walking Roxy & Ringo one day I admired these bright orange, bell-shaped husks growing near the edge of someone’s property. In fact, that lovely neighbor insisted I take some home to plant the seeds. I incorporated these decorative plants into the painting because the color of the robin’s breast combines the red berries and orange Lanterns. And the Lanterns represent a way to shine light.

The work on this holiday card began as a watercolor, but as I tried to make the robin’s breast just the right color of red/orange, I overworked the layers of paint. Watercolor is a tricky medium. And then there was the problem of adding white for snow – a BIG “no-no” in the world of purists. I am not a watercolor purist, but I have friends who are; they tell me white areas for them can only be the color of the paper. This means you really need to plan ahead, which I did not in this case.

To solve these problems I gathered my tubes of gauche “design colors”. What began as a delicate transparent rendering, became a formation of opaque layers. But I enjoyed this process so much that I’ve decided to try it on a study for “Children Climbing a Tree” – a painting still in the planning stages. Thankfully the patron who commissioned this piece is not in a rush and has left me free to decide on any medium I want. I’m excited to try this!

The novel Testimony by Paul Turelli has been recently published. I created the cover with the author’s guidance earlier this year. He had a specific look in mind for this book – super fun to do!

Paul has commissioned me for the cover of his next novel, The Magdalene House. I’ve begun reading the manuscript and am really looking forward to this project!

The Story of Straddle the Turtle by Barbara Grant as a zine

I did a little self-publishing of my own by illustrating and setting my “Straddle the Turtle” story in zine form, which is available on my shop site. I love making zines! The text and drawings are in the works for my next one entitled Deep Down in my soul #3: I Desire a Simple Life.

I also love making bookmarks. It’s a great way to use up scraps of expensive watercolor paper. Like my notecards, they are helpful as “warm-up exercises” to test color combinations, brush techniques and unique designs. I’m planning to add a variety of them to my shop soon.

hand-painted bookmarks with tied ribbons

One final story from me: I have a friend living near Seattle who I’ve known since we were teenagers. I can count on one hand how many times we’ve seen each other in person since she moved to Washington, but we stay connected via phone, text, birthday cards, etc. The first time I received a hand-painted postcard from her, I laughed with delight! Sent without the protection of an envelope, her charming watercolor was exposed to the possibility of being sullied by transport through snail mail all the way to Wisconsin.

original watercolor postcards, front & back

I loved the fact that her artistic expression was sent with such abandon, not deeming her artwork so precious that its loss or ruin would be the end of the world! I learned from this unassuming action of hers. It’s a lesson in being less anxious and more playful. I’ve been sending them to her now, too.

It’s kind of thrilling to wonder if it will make it or not…

News & photos from Bob:

My sailing on Lake Michigan ended mid-October but boating continued on a late-October visit to my son Bob’s new lake home on Lake Norman, North Carolina.

I’m hoping to get back to golfing again after successful hand surgery. First attempts began in November where my son, Scott, installed a big screen golf simulator system in his garage on Whitewater Lake, Wisconsin. Winter golfing in Wisconsin!

I still enjoy my contract photography work for a Regional Insurance Company. Included here are some early winter scenes that grabbed my attention during a work day.

cow laying in snow looking at camera man — You lookin’ at me?

photo of sheep huddled together near a fence — You lookin’ at me?

Let’s get past Winter Solstice and start the countdown to Summer Solstice!

A day in the lives of Roxy & Ringo

Roxy and Ringo love their groomer, Amy. She gives them lots of tasty treats so they will cooperate as she shampoos, shaves, clips, and otherwise makes them feel soft and fluffy again. But they’d really rather not “go there”. How they know when I am about to take them, I’m not sure. But they won’t budge no matter how cheerful I make this outing sound. However…