Author name: Karen Waltermire

New in my store….oil painting 11″x14″ for $300.  The title is “One Turquoise Eye.”  The person is central to the composition with one eye and a patch of turquoise where the other would be on a yellow face.  The face is bright and the color doesn’t jump out too much.  There are lines going horizontally and vertically on the canvas which support the portrait without holding her down.  Lots of

For almost one month I have been drawing every day and posting the drawing as a story to Instagram and Facebook.  The drawing above, today’s Story, is about 5.50″ x 6.0″ and didn’t take too long to do.  I have never drawn as much before and maybe because I wasn’t keeping track of when I drew – I just did it.  When I thought about creating art daily I used to worry that I would run out of ideas and get in a rut.  The exact opposite has occurred – I seem to have opened up, in my imagination, a whole new way of seeing faces that I want to draw.  I love it and look forward to drawing when I wake up.  My next goal is to paint daily after I figure out how to do that with oil paint when I only have about 30 minutes to work.  I am sure I will find a solution to that, too.

Do you draw and/or paint daily?  Have you had trouble finding inspiration?  If you haven’t tried to work every day on your art, I hope you will.  I think you will find it pleasurable and almost meditative.

Ink drawing on white paper (5.50″x6.0″).  The title is “Scanning” and it is available in my online store for $40.00.

Painting is so much more than the act of moving the brush across the canvas.  What colors do I want to use?  What is my painting going to be about?  Composition is crucial to the success of a painting because it is the foundation upon which the color sits and it is impossible to fix a bad composition with color.  Even paintings with no human or animal subjects need a good foundation to start with.  Even paintings with no drawing involved need a good foundation.

Some people prefer to draw the composition in pencil on to the canvas before painting and some draw the composition with paint and both are great ways to begin.  I draw my compositions in paint before adding color and revise as I go along while working on the painting.  For the painting above, “On A Bike”, I focused more on the bike sculpture than the figure because the bike is the foundation of the painting.  Since the painting is large (30″x40″) I needed a large focal point.  The figure is important to the painting but the emotions conveyed by her sitting on the bike are more crucial to the composition than what her face looks like.  The setting is the beach, so there is sand and sky behind her holding her in place.  There are vertical lines the same color as the sky and the horizon line is a counterbalance which gives the painting balance.  I think I used around five or so colors in this painting.

“On A Bike” is 30″x40″ oil on canvas (framed with a hook on the back) and the price is $2400.00.  Available now in my online store.

I recently began offering prints of my work through Fine Art America, a well known print on demand technology company that has been working with artists since 2006, to give my customers more size and price options for enjoying my work.  They have a stellar reputation, offer several different kinds of prints (i.e., print on canvas, print on paper, etc.) and also offer the option of having the print framed.  The smallest size print (around 5.50″x8″) is around $17.00 US and the largest size print (around 40″x60″) is around $154.00 US.

How to use prints in your home or office?  Buy a few small prints and group them together, buy prints in different sizes to make a statement on a large wall, or buy different kinds of prints (framed paper print, print on canvas, etc.) to group together.  As these examples illustrate, there is a lot you can do with prints.

Click here to see my offerings on Fine Art America.

This summer I am the featured artist in Shop Made in VA (1121 King St, Alexandria, VA) and nine of my paintings are on display.  “Lightbulb” is about getting something you really want.  Sometimes when people get what they really want – a job or promotion or achievement in an activity – their head lights up because they are so happy.  I have seen it a few times and it is heartwarming.  The blue lines from the eye to the mouth are a subtle suggestion of an actual lightbulb.  The background is a very bright orange to signal happiness.

18″x24″-oil on canvas.  $850.00  Contact me to purchase.

This summer I am the featured artist at Shop Made in VA (1121 King Street, Alexandria, VA) and nine of my paintings are on display.  This one is “Hope Over Despair”  which I painted in early 2021.  I was so affected by all that health care workers were going through during the pandemic.   They were caring for very sick patients who had a highly contagious disease with not cure or shot to lessen the severity of it.  I was struck by how impossible it must have felt to leave all the suffering they saw in the hospital when they went home to their families.

27.50×35.50 – oil on oil paper.  $1950.00

I think this is the first large (36”x36”) square painting I have ever done.  Most often I paint rectangles in the vertical position because most of my work is portraiture.  However, I bought a few large canvases for almost free that someone had painted on in acrylic so I got to work a little larger than I usually do.  I exaggerated the shapes around the head to give the illusion of a rectangular shape.  The blues in the background represent shadows around the face.  I accented the blues with naples yellow and white to create a misty feel like a surrealist painting might have.  This painting is about dreams deep in our subconscious and how we exist with them.  The price is $2600.00.  Contact me to purchase.

As a teen-ager I studied music privately and loved being in the band in high school.  I never thought of drawing until I was around 30 years old.  One night a group of us went to a club in DC and a woman was dancing to jazz music.  On each table was a soda can filled with something like rice that we could shake.  I remember thinking I could make something that would look better so I started saving soda cans and painting on them.  I didn’t know how to draw or paint so I created faces using combinations of lines and circles in multiple colors of acrylic paint.  About a year later I took my first drawing class and afterward I knew I was ready to learn to paint.  For a few years I studied painting – mostly interiors – at Washington Studio School in DC.  The painting above is one I created during my time there.  The teacher would set up a still life/interior that we would work on for a couple of weeks.  I learned about the relationship between objects in a composition, the influence that color and temperature have, and how to use oil paint.  This was a great start for my painting journey and ever since I have been working on these skills and more.

Big news!  I am the featured artist for summer 2023 at Shop Made in VA.  They selected 9 of my paintings and my work will be for sale in the store from now through the beginning of September.  Shop Made in VA carries only items and products made in Virginia.  If you can’t get to their store (1121 King Street, Alexandria, VA), you can shop online.

https://www.shopmadeinva.com/shop/original-art/38?page=1&limit=120&sort_by=category_order&sort_order=asc

5 Fast Facts: Marie Laurencin

One of my favorite painters is Marie Laurencin.  She was part of the avante garde scene in Paris in the early 20th century.  Marie Laurencin was a siginificant member of the lesbian artist community and lived her life unapologetically.  In the era of cubism, she was an impressionist painter using pastel colors instead of the strong primary colors used by most artists.  Although she was as good as the male artists of that time she never received their acclaim and her paintings are not usually in exhibitions.  There is a Marie Laurencin museum in Japan and the National Museum of Women in the Arts has some in their permanent collection.

I love how soft and delicate her work is.  The emphasis is on color rather than getting the anatomy just right.  Several years ago I spent many months studying her work and realized that the calmness of each one drew me in.  It really is difficult to create soft and feminine paintings.  I struggled at fist to emulate her style but eventually found my way and incorporated her style into my own.