Birding with oils

My backyard studio

Scarlet blooms of crocosmia brighten an otherwise emerald wall of grape- vines cascading down one side of my stuccoed garage.  They've been blossoming all summer.  But now they seem to sense that I'm trying to paint them, and they're tiptoeing away.

This summer, I'm determined to once and for all face the challenge of oil paints bequeathed to me by the late Charles Foster, New Orleans portraitist and composer who settled in Tacoma following the loss of his studio to Hurricane Katrina.

For the past year or so, I've collected How-To books on the subject.  I talk with painters.  I inventoried the thumb-stained tubes and worn brushes Charlie left me. I've uncapped the jug of turpentine and sniffed the jar of linseed oil, all but gagging at the overpowering stench.  If this is the price of printing "oil on canvas" in my catalogs, I think, forget it!  I won't have the smell in the house.

But sailing in on this summer's high-pressure atmospheric jet stream is my opportunity, I realized.  With little likelihood of rain, I set up a 10-foot pop-up canopy in my  back yard.  Paint cans filled with concrete provided anchors.  I hauled a studio easel downstairs.  I set it up near the crocosmia.  A portable vinyl table and a lawn chair completed the studio furniture.

A recycled pastries tray from Costco is my palette.  I spread out a half-dozen tubes of Charlie's paints.  I circled the tray with my basic colors.  I diluted a  green oil with turpentine and lay what I'd thought was a thin ground on a stretched canvas.  Apparently it was not thin enough.  Three days later it was still damp.  And it still stunk.

When I paint plein air with my acrylics or oil pastels, I seldom sit long at a canvas.  For better or for worse, i lay the pigments down with almost rhythmic deliberation, often bypassing the palette to blend paint right on the canvas.  I work from horizon to foreground.  That's the beauty of acrylic--paint dries to the touch within minutes, especially in this warm summer weather.  I need not imagine my "whites" in advance.  I can change composition as I go.  Or paint out problem areas and start over.  In any case, in two hours I pack up my kit and I'm gone!

But I've been 10 days into this one painting.  I began with a white ground and thinned the oils with an odorless mineral spirit.  I work as far as I can over dry areas and then walk away, usually until the next day.  A few times I paint both morning and evening.  For all the attention I'm able to pay to the different lights, I may as well be working from photos.  But I'm slowly filling the canvas.  And if I didn't believe I will have something worth hanging at the end of this summerlong journey, I wouldn't continue.

Yesterday morning, I was outside about 10.  The sun wasn't high enough to light up the scarlet blossoms, but I had plenty of background to lay in.  Across the street, a neighbor practiced her scales on an alto recorder.  jFrom two blocks further, I could hear the young voices of a cheerleader camp, under weigh at the university.  And suddenly, these sounds were drowned by the whirrrrr-whirrrrr-whirrrr of a hummingbird's wings as it fed from the crocosmia. 

The bird hovered, darted, backed away, dived in again.  And then it spotted my reddish-colored shirt.  It came within a foot of my shoulder, slid sideways a few inches, then back, eyeing me all the while.  Deciding I was not a flower, it buzzed away in a grand loop, out through the arched sidewalk gate and to the red feeder outside the kitchen window.

Each day I return to my palette, there seem to be fewer crocosmia.  It must be near the end of their season.  But even if they're not around to let me finish my painting,
I'll have that hummingbird's visit to remember.