Birch Piece

I tried to take a better photo of this painting.

Here's how we did it.  Adam drilled a screw into the kitchen wall.  Based on its orientation and because the kitchen has windows facing south, this room and this wall seems to get the best natural and indirect light in the house.  You can still tell that most of the light hits the lower right corner of the painting.

Photographing artwork is a serious challenge!  It is amazing what the camera does to the color and the way it changes the light.  Or perhaps, the way it captures everything exactly, whereas the eye does some selective modifying when it looks at things.  Either way, a challenge.

Afterwards, I cropped it and adjusted the exposure using picnik.com.  It was useful since I don't have Photoshop on our new awesome computer.

More about this piece... I created a painted frame and green box based upon my drawing habits in college.  I have always had a hard time facing the blank white page.  (I recently watched this film about Georgia O'Keefe, where she said something like, "Each time we face a new canvas we are facing our whole life, from birth to present."  I wish I could get the quote right, because I like it.)  At any rate, I had a hard time deciding upon a first stroke.  So in came the box, and it freed me up.  I tried this technique with my painting.  Plus, it gave me a chance to play with creating textures with a palette knife, which is something I had wanted to try.  I also used a masking technique to create it, but this doesn't show in the finished painting.  The other thing about making the box was that I recently discovered the bar that Judith Murray uses in her beautiful paintings.  I like her bar, but I probably won't continue to paint boxes around my paintings.  When I look at this painting, I wish it was all forest and no box.  But sometimes you just have to stop and say, "enough is enough."  I'd rather have a finished painting than continue to work on this one.  So maybe it shows that I'm a beginner... but hey!  I am.