Regina Calton Burchett – Drawings & Pastels

I have a neighbor and lovely friend who started painting again after many years of being busy with other facets of life, and every once in a while we are able to get together and work on our pastel paintings.   She paints portraits, landscapes, still-lifes and even cars, which I avoid at all costs!  Very talented and wide-ranging in her subjects – view her website here: pat-neely.artistwebsites.com

You love the image in your mind before you start.

Throughout the relationship, the creation of your painting, there are moments where you have bursts of passion,

followed by struggles and difficulties, with a grasping for inspiration,

calm times of craft and appreciation,

arguments with the surface and the medium,

and at the end, if you’re very lucky and you’ve been given a small allotment of Grace,

you’ve fallen in love again.

Ahhh.

I finally finished this piece today, bringing each area forward a little at a time. I try to remember to step back every fifteen minutes or so, and focus on the whole to make sure it is heading where I want it to. I’m not quite happy with the final photo but I like the actual piece.
The final name is Rubicon Fields, because since I moved to this part of Austin six years ago, the fields that surrounded this area in every direction are almost completely gone. In just six years. I’m sad that Austin continues to grow and grow, as if we had no other option. One that seems to never be considered is that the quality and quirkiness that has been Austin for many decades could have been preserved without the uncontrolled growth the leaders have allowed to happen.

I was able to work on this for a few hours tonight. I still have a ways to go on it, but the basics are all there. It’s good to get it to this point and let it “simmer” for a while, so you can see all of the changes that need to be made. I may not have time for that on this one, as I have a deadline two days off.
At this point, you’ve looked at your painting for many days generally, and can’t really see it objectively. One good thing to do is either look at the painting in a mirror, or take a photo and mirror the image. That makes it much easier to see corrections that need to be made that weren’t so obvious before.

The first image shows my reference photo which I took a couple of years ago, at the edge of another new shopping center in South Austin.

Second photo: I use charcoal (and sometimes pastel pencils) to lay out the basic drawing and put in some of the darker shapes

Third photo: Generally, I begin with hard pastels, filling in the basic shapes with the direct color or a complementary color, and then I blend lightly with cellophane.  On this painting, I decided to use a watercolor underpainting, filling in the general shapes.

Fourth photo: After waiting about 30 minutes for the watercolor to dry, I begin laying in the sky.  I start with my harder pastels, and use a dark teal at the top, bringing in progressively lighter colors using a diagonal stroke. The line of clouds about halfway down make the transition easier for this painting. Starting back at the top I cross-hatch and begin to lightly blend the strokes into each other.  I like the background to be a smooth transition of color and then lay in to clouds on top later.

Fifth photo: After I have the basic sky close to the colors I want, I start to put in the clouds, using a medium tone to which I will add darker and lighter tones. This is where I stopped a few days ago, and I’ll add more photos as I work on this piece.  11×18″, Soft pastel

Two versions painted from a beautiful sunset photo sent to me by my Uncle Bob from Appleton, Minnesota. One showing buildings in the historic part of town and one focusing on the sunset. I took out the snow, researched more photos on the internet, added in more of the buildings… but the main problem I had was that I paint from my laptop. And that amazing sunset in the photo could be dark and vibrant with black buildings, or more subdued with building detail more visible. All depending on how I tilted the screen! If I’m able to get a nice big monitor sometime in the future, hopefully that will cure this problem I didn’t realize I had before.

Growing older seems to bring along with it many more hit-you-in-the-face life lessons than most other age brackets.  Yes, it is much more difficult to get up off the floor after you toppled over trying to pick up a piece of paper.  No, you can’t lose weight as easily as you did when you were in your thirties.  And all of the aches and pains you have acquired become part of daily living, something you can even ignore at times. And as a woman, one of the lessons I started learning in my late 40’s, is that you start to disappear.

Entire groups of people – often those from teenagers to mid-thirties – no longer see you. You’ve simply ceased to exist in their eyes.  As you stand in a room, their eyes scan from left to right, never lighting on you because you have become a non-entity.

So while this has the capability of making you feel less important in the grand scheme of things, it also allows you to slip in and out of conversations and situations like a ghost, before you actually become one.  It is the ultimate exercise in being objective.

With the right outlook, you can learn to use this to your advantage at times, and even find humor in the experience.  There are a lot of lessons yet to be learned.  And no one said it would be easy.

eBay Listing for Egret at Lake Bastrop

Ending my year by trying something new – selling an original pastel painting on eBay!

Winter Cardinal

Pastel, 11×14
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

I’ve had this 90% done for a long time, and a suggestion from my friend Ruth Meaders helped me finish it.