Welcome to Margie Guyot's updated blogsite! I do plein air landscapes plus studio paintings of still lifes in oil. You may still visit my older blog (greatlittleoilpaintings.blogspot.com) to see everything painted prior to 2010.
This was the second in the cupcake painting series. Cupcakes were from SimplyCupcakes in Traverse City. Delicious! I had to spend 30 minutes - twice! - on the treadmill yesterday to try to make up for it.
Stay tuned for more cupcake paintings. The next time I go to Traverse City I'll get more.
There's a new bakery in Traverse City called SimplyCupcakes. My friend Pete took me over there a few days ago. I bought three, with the idea of doing a grouping of cupcake paintings. The coconut one got eaten before I could paint it!
This one had a lime creme filling inside, topped with lime curd, frosting and grated lime peel and bits of graham cracker crumbs. Horribly delicious!
The most challenging thing was figuring out how to paint the paper liner.
I had a cup of hot tea with lemon and ate this afterward. YUM!
This blue glass bowl absolutely fascinates me with the shadows it casts! Of course it's just a booger to try to draw in! But I had the urge to paint a blue still life. My recent paintings had all been so "warm", with loads of red, I wanted to cool off a little. The fabric -- I don't know what to call it -- it's very shiny stuff. Like something maybe Liberace might have chosen for a suit.
Ultramarine blue was the mainstay here, but I also had to dig around way back in the far reaches of my paint drawers to come up with some other shades of blue. Some colors cannot be mixed! I found "turquoise" and manganese blue, which helped save the day.
"Dem Golden Slippers" -- oil on canvas -- 40x50" -- Margie Guyot
I wanted to do a gold and red painting and the red gills of the fish amazed me! A friend had given me this stringer of taxidermy-d perch. He'd caught them a few years ago and had them mounted. They're huge. And they're also a tattered mess -- his dogs had ripped the bejesus out of them. So it was a puzzle, figuring out how the fins were supposed to go.
The golden slippers came from a thrift shop up north of Petoskey. And they FIT me, by golly! I thought they were a hoot to paint.
And I just HAD to use the pumpkin! Isn't it great? I bought it from 2 young boys in Elk Rapids last October. They grew specialty pumpkins and this one is gigantic. It must weigh over 20 pounds. But alas -- it's starting to rot a little. Glad I could paint it. I believe it's really a squash. So tomorrow I will cut it up and bake it. Good golly -- it looks like a year's supply of squash, there's so much of it!
Some things are so challenging, I love to try painting them over & over in many paintings. If you've seen my other paintings, you probably would recognize the red striped glass pitcher. And the tapestry. Oh, and of course the turkey feathers! Wild turkeys are all over up here and I love their feathers!
I love Goodwill. They have some of the coolest stuff. I got the pink Depression glass plates and cups up there a week or so ago. It was rather complicated to try to paint that stack!
And I love painting the red Carnival glass heart dish! It has some of the wildest color reflections. This is one of those paintings that I could probably spend weeks on, putzing. But hey -- sometimes you ruin things that way. On to the next one.....!
I love gnomes! But only really cool gnomes. Not stupid gnomes! This one was found in Meijer's a couple years ago. The red poinsettia doily was a resale shop find.
Those glass ornaments have been in my family for many years. In reality, I was holding the bulbs in my fingers when painting them. One slipped out and shattered in a million pieces the floor. I went out into the woods and clipped off a small branch and added that later.
"White Poinsettias" -- oil on canvas 36x36" -- Margie Guyot
I'm a notorious poinsettia-killer. I don't know why they die so quickly for me. So I had to move FAST and paint these in a hurry! This is another type of painting where it's important to control one's panic. So many leaves! So easy to get lost and quit in frustration. It must be all the years on the assembly line at Ford that has taught me to be patient and to "keep on going".
I love a good, mussed-up tablecloth! I used to avoid folds and wrinkles in fabric; now I find them addictive. Hey -- up north, here in the "hinterlands" -- what else is there to do? Housework? Ach. Better to paint.
At the end of each painting session I had to remove the poinsettias. There are 2 young cats in my studio that love to rip apart anything "dangly". And it goes without saying that each night the kitties took great pains to totally rearrange the fabric. Oh well -- they're adorable. I have to forgive them.
Those glass ornaments are old as God. They were old when I was a kid, back in Iowa. The strand of colored lights was added at the end. I'm still not entirely sure this painting is finished. Calling it done for now.
"Butterflies" -- oil on canvas -- 30x40" -- Margie Guyot
Some years ago while walking through a gallery out in Montana, I realized that the paintings that "grabbed" me were ones done in predominantly complementary colors. My last post was of a painting I'd done in mostly reds and greens. Both these paintings began as a decision about color.
In reality, both pieces of fabric were shades of red. I used artistic license to change them to orange. The poinsettia was really pink. I love poinsettias by the way and always manage to kill them within a couple weeks. I just don't have the touch for them. One of my friends has plants she's had for years. Go figure.
The blue butterfly glasses are of 60's vintage. I found them in an antique store up north. Love the blue shadows they cast! The Lucite box with butterflies is also from a resale shop. To get the blue to "glow", I first painted it white. After it dried, I gave it coats of ultramarine blue mixed with Liquin.
One artist I was taking a workshop from said (rather snottily), "Obviously this comes easy to you!" We'd been painting landscapes at the time. I said no -- it's really tough, but I try to control my panic(!) and figure it out, bit by bit. I'm far too impatient to take a slide and project and trace onto the canvas. I always paint directly from life and wipe-outs are a part of it.
The first painting class I had was out at Scottsdale Artists School. The teacher was Clyde Aspevig. He gave each of us a simple, cardboard cutout viewfinder. I don't know how many people continued using theirs after the class, but I wore mine out. Using a viewfinder really helps find the composition. Now I use an adjustable viewfinder. When I start a painting, I first use a yardstick to lightly draw in the "crosshairs" on the canvas. Then I look through the viewfinder and determine what sits on the crosshairs. I relate everything to that. Without a viewfinder, my composition would end up running off the canvas!
Another essential thing is the principles I learned in Betty Edwards' classic, "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". During a big layoff from my job at Ford (1980), somebody loaned me a copy. I saw how the high school students made such dramatic improvements after 3 months of her instruction. That was enough to make me do every exercise in the book. I hadn't drawn or painted in over 15 years. By the time I finished the book, voila! I could draw!
People say they just want to paint. They say they don't care about drawing. Well, the skills you learn in Betty's book are applicable to painting as well. Everything boils down to measurements and comparisons. You learn to look at something and ask: is it bigger? is it smaller? is it at an angle? is it warmer or cooler? lighter or darker? The exercises teach you to ignore that inner voice that wants to scream it looks horrible!
Patience, patience! It's all just measurements and comparing.
PS -- the ice cubes! I added those at the end, on a whim. They were so fun! Will have to do more with those....
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