Painting Radishes 1

Small Square Radishes, oil on canvas, © 2011 Sukie Curtis

I paint radishes more than I eat them. That's just the way it is! 

I can hardly resist buying new bunches of them at the farmers market, even when I have an older bunch at home. But I've learned that they keep an impressively long time in a plastic bag in the refrigerator, and can be my painting models and muses many times over, though their greens go limp and eventually rot. 

Even then, the life force and the "urge" to live and create new life is so strong in them that in the dark and cold of the refrigerator drawer, old radishes will sprout vigorous new root hairs and even pale, spindly greens. They are built to live and flourish.

And to ravish the eyes: such lovely round, though not perfectly round, shapes! such whimsical, quirky tails! and such colors! 

These days radishes come in more than just shades of red, crimson, and pink; there's deep blue-violet, wild magenta, pale pink, and a blush creamy white. And if that's not enough, you can always make up other colors as you paint them! Why not?

Which reminds me: the collage artist and children's book author and illustrator Eric Carle has a new book out, The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse. Carle calls it "an homage to the Expressionist painter Franz Marc." Carle was inspired at a young age by Marc's work when a teacher showed him his painting of a blue horse. 

Delight at Kidney Pond

What can I say? During our recent three day stay at Kidney Pond in Baxter State Park, I really got into clouds in a big way. Which was a good thing, since there were a lot of clouds around, and when they mingled with sunlight it was especially easy to enjoy their shapes, colors, and movements.

And as you can see from the photos above, I really got excited by what the pond (lake, really) waters did with the colors of the sky, the various shades of cloud color, its own transparency to the pebbly bottom, and the nearly constant motion of small waves toward the shore at my feet.

So I took several photos. Well, more than several. I even took my first ever videos using Anna's basic point and shoot digital camera. (If I've ever used a video camera before, I'm forgetting. We've never owned one, I know that much.) They may not be prizewinners, but I had a huge amount of fun taking them and just basically dancing with delight noticing the patterns!

Here are just a couple of my color-patterns-on-the-water photos. Just to get me back into the bloggerhood.

A bit of midwinter color

Wow. I've just noticed something. I started this blog thinking I'd be using a lot of images rather than words, and I was under the impression that I had put a lot of images in it since starting out in September, but I've just looked back and counted a grand total of eight images of paintings or drawings. Nowhere near as many as I thought. 

So, before we all (or especially I) get buried under too many words--and there are plenty more of those!--how about another image or two. I don't even know when I drew these dahlias, actually...they're not dahlias, they are gerbera daisies that I bought back in the fall (October? November?) to brighten up our dining room table. (Well, really, I bought the gerbera daisies because I felt like buying some gerbera daisies for myself, but at least I decided to share them.) And I did this drawing when I wanted to play with color and not get tied up in knots about painting styles and composition and all those things that being in a painting class causes me to fuss about. Really I just wanted to have some fun. Fun with a pen and some watercolor crayons, and of course a brush and some water. And some gerbera daisies.