A little bit bigger piece this time

Red Poppy 2, ©Jill Rosoff 2010, 11 3/4″ x 6″, $245.00

I’ve missed blogging for awhile, I’ve been preparing entries for two juried shows.  So I thought this time I’d post one of the pieces I just completed for these entries.  This piece is a little larger than I typically post here, but what the heck, it’s been awhile.  Click on the image to see it larger, the details in this piece will show better.

I’m doing more and more of these patterned pieces lately.  They take a little more time to complete, what with all the textures and layers of color. I started doing these pieces with the very busy texture work in the early 90’s, they came about as I studied iceland poppy beds and noticed all of the textures, in the grain of the soil, in the clumps of leaves of each little plant, and what they look like compared to each other.

Blue Moon

Plate design, Texas Bluebonnets, ©Jill Rosoff 2009

Its the last day of 2009 today.  Its been a long, curious, elating and sometimes frustrating year.  Welcome 2010, it’ll be nice to move forward.

It’s also a full moon tonight, and a blue moon to boot.  And as I think has become clear, blue is one of my favorite colors, especially for flowers.  So I thought this design for a plate featuring Texas Bluebonnets would be apropos for this last entry of the year.

Wishing everyone love, luck and prosperity in the New Year!  And thank you to all who visit here.

Sweets!

“Sweets”

Wishing everyone a Sweet Holiday Season and a Merry New Year!

In process

“Hydrangea”, painting in process, ©Jill Rosoff 2009

Its a good news/bad news week for a new piece for this blog: with a couple of projects that came due this week there was little time to work on my small paintings.   So for this week’s entry here is a photo of a new, larger piece I have going of a blue hydrangea.

What’s fun with these is that each big bloom is a globe of small four-petalled blossoms.  And each one is in a different stage of its bloom, which means there’s a variety of colors going on.  The younger blossom pops open from its bud, and is paler and greener.  As it matures it gains more and more of its color.  So I work with each petal on each blossom, infusing it with its own color as it blooms.  Then when you step back and look at the flower from a longer view the mature blossom is blue, or lavender or pink.  When you keep an eye on it over the course of a few days you get to watch the young blossom grow and  become bluer and bluer, or pinker and pinker.

Another Little Bit of Paradise

“Plantation Cottage” ©Jill Rosoff 2007, 5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″, $55.00

While I was in Hawaii last month with friends we went to visit friends of theirs on the windward side of Oahu near Kailua.  We drove over the old Pali Highway, stopping briefly at the Pali lookout to look at the Pali’s steep cliffs and see how lush green the rainy side of the island is, so remarkably different from the dry side and in such close proximity.

After meeting for lunch at Buzz’s Steakhouse, we all went back to their lovely little bungalow, a sweet illustration of local island Plantation architecture, simple and straight-forward in the Hawaiian/Victorian way.  The interior  had lauhala matts on the vertical grain fir floors, and the windows and doors are screened so the trades breeze through keeping the interior tropically cool.  She was born and raised in Hawaii so knows the old Hawaiian ways, the ones my mother taught me and my sibs when we were growing up, and which are still a part of the way I experience Hawaii when I’m there.  So it was nice to see this traditional home, and to learn that this cottage has been in their family for generations.there’s a kind of permanence out there.

Standing in the front yard with the southern side of the Pali mountains in the background, it was too good a sight to pass up.  And even though I’d gone without my camera or drawing pad (egad!) I took some shots with my cell phone’s camera, which were the source photos for this piece.

Paperwhites

“Narcissus, single stem”, ©Jill Rosoff 2007, 12″ x 4″ $125.00

I love it when bulb season starts.  I bought my first pot of paperwhite narcissus (of many, knowing me) at Trader Joe’s the day before yesterday.  Since I first grew tulips from bulbs I’ve loved bulb flowers–narcissus, daffodils and tulips mostly.  And they don’t grow easily in Southern California, they need cold weather, so I have abandoned trying to grow them here, I just buy them.  When I lived in the house with a garden in Berkeley I grew tulips for a couple of years (see my August 15, 2008 entry).  I did a lot of my early watercolor explorations from that garden.

The paperwhites are particularly interesting to paint, because its a white blossom. In watercolor, the white area is left alone, there’s no color on it, its just the white paper.  Its an exercise of negative space.  I want to articulate the delicate and sensuous shapes and curves of each petal and flower, while maintaining its white-ness.  So its an exercise, of which color to use for rendering those lovely shapes, and how delicately I can apply it.

This piece is a little larger than my small works, but I decided to add it to the blog today to celebrate that the holiday season is starting.  And that there are new ‘models’ available again!

Workshop series starting up in January

I’m very happy to announce that I’ll be giving watercolor workshops in Costa Mesa next year.  The sessions will be held on alternate Saturdays starting January 9th, from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm. These will be informal workshops aimed at helping those who come with their watercolors and their techniques.   Attendees are welcome to bring any paintings they are currently working on, ideas for new projects, and to those who have little or no experience, bring your desire to learn how to paint with watercolors.  I will help you along with your paintings, give demonstrations on technique as the situations arise, and I’ll work with each painter to help them achieve the painting they they want.

Please contact Karen at Karen’s Custom Framing, where the classes will be held, to sign up.  The room holds 8, and 3 people are already signed up!  The cost is $25 per person per session.

Tell your friends!

KAREN’S DETAIL CUSTOM FRAMES

3625 West MacArthur Blvd., Suite 303

Santa Ana,CA 92704

714-966-9138

karen@karenscustomframes.com

http://www.karenscustomframes.com

Drank the whole thing

“Finished with My Coffee”, © Jill Rosoff 2009, 5 1/5″ x 8 1/2″, $75.00

The empty cup stares back at me after I finish my morning coffee.  >sigh!<

With this painting I had to decide whether to paint it with coffee in the cup.  Up until this piece I had yet to do one of an empty cup, and I’d just finished my morning cup o’ joe, so I went with that moment, you know, when you long for just one more sip.  Thinking about it I found that I was looking at the shadows falling in the empty bowl of the cup, especially as they added an unexpected swirl in the composition, a happy happenstance.  The pastel colors of the coffee cup popped when I contrasted them with the yellow with red striping of the table cloth.

A Pretty Great View

“A Pretty Great View”  ©Jill Rosoff 2009, 5″ x 8″, $65.00

I just went on my first away-from-it-all vacation in 5 years, back to Hawaii, an old favorite.  For me, Waikiki is one of my favorite beaches, you can sit and do nothing and still be completely entertained.  The view is spectacular, and even though civilization continues creeping in an taking over, there are still some things that will always be special.  And even though I managed not to pack my camera (egad!), between some sketches, my cell phone’s camera (!) and my deep memory, I’ve done some watercolor sketches.  Here’s the first one of the land of aloha.

Cup and spoon

“Blue Cup on Yellow Table” ©Jill Rosoff 2009, 5″ x 8 1/2″, $75.00

I’ve been away on vacation, my first real one in a long time, so please forgive my long absence from this blog!  It was really good to get away, leave all cares behind.  And Hawaii called, it really did.

This piece is an iteration of “In Blue and Yellow” that I posted on August 26th this year, revisiting the colors and the arrangements of the elements.  I rarely revisit a composition so specifically, but this one just pings with me.  It ended up dealing mostly with primary colors, with secondary and tertiary colors showing up pretty much just when their layers met one another, except for a little magenta I couldn’t resist using.