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The Contraption at Number Two (12 x 19" watercolor) $400
Walking around The Jordan neighborhood in Amsterdam, we collected interesting variations on the bicycle. The bicycle-wheelbarrow combination was common. We saw it used to transport children, tools, and goods.
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Haarlem Kirk (16 x 23 watercolor) $700
We spent our last day in the Neatherlands in Haarlem. Haarlem is just just under a half hour by train from Amsterdam, but feels like it’s miles away because where Amsterdam is large and lively, Haarlem is small and quiet.
The young women in the foreground were adding more chalk to a square already covered in graffiti. None of it was pictorial and all of it obviously washes off with each night’s rain.
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Fog Over Croisan Valley (17 x 23 watercolor) $600
This painting is a little closer to home than most of my recent work. I see this view every morning on the way home from my walk down Croisan Scenic Trail. The trial occupies a long thin, Salem park with our neighborhood a hundred feet above it and Croisan Creek a few hundred feet below it. The path is beautiful in all seasons and rarely feels nearly as close to town as it is. It’s particularly evocative in the fog.
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Morning on the Saint Charles Bridge (17 x 23 watercolor) $700
Prague’s most famous landmark, the evocative Saint Charles Bridge hums with tourists in the afternoon. In the morning it is quietly beautiful.
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After Midnight (17 x 23 watercolor) $700
After Midnight began with a lecture and demonstration I did for the The Watercolor Society of Oregon’s Fall 2016 Convention. For the demo, I painted the Munich Rathaus Tower six time in various stages of completeness. Below is the one painting of the six I completed:
Munich Rathaus (8 x 13 watercolor) $200
I liked the this little painting so much, I felt compelled to do it again in a larger format. But I didn’t want to just repeat the painting on a larger scale. The tower, like many in Germany, reminds me of fairy tale illustrations. So I ran with that notion tweaking the scene just a little to add a rather unreal illustrative moon and an impossible sky.
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Stairs to Cesky Krumlov (12 x 22 watercolor) $600
Cesky Krumlov is a magical town of twisting streets, nestled in a river bend. The castle, churches, and residential neighborhoods occupy the hill about town. This is the view is the from the residential neighborhood above the river. The “street” down into town is actually a stairway.
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Bridge to Cesky Krumlov (13 x 17 watercolor) $350
Cesky Krumlov sits in a bend of Vltava River in the Czech Republic. It is a walkers town. And if you walk, you eventually cross the Vltava. All the bridges are charming and walkable.
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View From The Cloister (watercolor 15 x 23) $600
This is Westminster Abbey as seen through the wrought iron work of the cloister. It is the view visitors now see just before they exit the abbey complex. But for hundreds of years it was the view seen by the monks on their way to services.
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Snapshot Cafe (watercolor 14 x 23) $600
Despite the lack of canals and only a single bicycle, this is Amsterdam on a summer evening. But it could be anyone of a number of European street scenes.
The title is a bit of a pun. I painted the picture from a series of snapshots, and girls in the foreground are sharing a snapshot. I hope the atmospheric nature of the painting has little to do with snapshots.
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Dreaming of Prague (watercolor 16 x 21) $600
Impressionists view of the Saint Charles Bridge at night.
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Pillars of the Humanities (watercolor 17 x 21) $600
This is my first painting since returning from our month long odyssey to Europe. I began with the Pantheon in Paris. I made the cream colored columns vibrant to match the intellectual vibrancy of the persons buried in the crypt: Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Louis Braille, Pierre Curie, Marie Curie, Alexandre Dumas.
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Cowboy in Chinatown (watercolor and gouache 16 x 22) $600
There is still a Chinatown in Victoria, B.C., but it’s only a few blocks long now. The Fantan Cafe dominates the street. It’s still a fun and colorful place to visit. The entrance arch remains, and they still hang Chinese lanterns.
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Diocletian Courtyard (watercolor 13 x 18) $500
This is an upward view of the courtyard behind the Diocletian Baths currently the Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, in Rome.
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Rafael's Pillar (watercolor 13 x 13) $300
A stylized repainting of a detail from one of Rafael’s frescoes at the Vatican. It was fun to re-imagine, but hardly an improvement on the original.
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"Three Luccan Towers" (17 x 19 watercolor) $500
Another Italian painting, this time of Lucca. The view is from a window in yet a fourth tower. I will have to paint the tower we climbed. The oak trees growing from it’s roof give it a surreal feel.
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Evening at the Louvre (watercolor 14 x 22) $500
The glass pyramid as seen through one of the Louvre’s arches.
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City Portal (12 x 22 watercolor) $500
The Art Institute of Chicago again, this time from the inside. While my daughter gift shopped, I took a whole series of photographs of the two doors to Michigan Ave. The great doors with their iconic lamps and the people silhouetted in front fascinated me.
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Just Before the Museum Opens (watercolor 17 x 22) $600
I love city light. The shafts of light created by openings in the tall buildings, the reflectivity of building and pavement, and the flat surfaces for shadows all lead to one thing—drama.
This particular drama is the long shadows and the warm glow of a Chicago winter morning. The crowd is up early and waiting for The Art Institute of Chicago to open up. The crowd and bus hide one lion, but the other can be seen peeking out from behind the traffic light.
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Downtown Spring Outing (watercolor 15 x 23) $500
I took my daughter college looking this Spring. As part of that trip we got to stay a couple nights in downtown Chicago. This is Wabash Avenue just North of Adams and about a block from The Art Institute of Chicago. The mother and child are just passing Palmer House Hotel. A light snow had just melted and by our Oregon standards it was nippy.
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Village Stairs (19 x 12 watercolor) $500
This is a back “street” in Riomaggiore where the streets are not only likely to be too small for cars, but may include staircases. I loved the light at the end of the tunnel effect and the contract between the brightly painted wall and the natural stone stairs. The woman was both beautiful and big.
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Lucca Cafe, (watercolor 13 x 17) $400
Cafe in Lucca, Italy, just before lunch.
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Italian Heat is not my first attempt at that painting. It is the second. I made several mistakes with the first painting, most of them having to to with composition. I left too many people from my reference photos in the image, and that took away from the real subject, the biking couple at the end of the street. Having reached the conclusion that the painting was a failure, I played around with photos the spoiled painting before sketching out the second version which ended up in the blog entry below.
That left me with a poor complicated painting with great color but no real focus. So I set the failed painting aside for a while. Then a few weeks later, I got out the mat corners (“L” shaped pieces of mat board used for visual cropping) and singled out the two bicyclists. The result is Florence Bikers.
Florence Bikers (9 x 16 watercolor) SOLD
Having rescued one painting I looked at the remainder and found Three Italians.
Three Italians, (9 x 21 watercolor) $125
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Italian Heat (watercolor 15 x 22) Reserved for Western Federation of Watercolor Societies 2015 Annual Show
We visited Florence in the heat of summer. The shady narrow streets opening up into white hot plazas continues to fascinate me. Couples biking over the rough stone streets had their own heat.
This painting may be purchased through the 2015 Western Federation of Watercolor Societies Annual Show. Or purchase a fine art print.
Pure Nostalgia (watercolor 15 x 27) $550
I’ve been busy putting together paintings for my Art in the Valley show, Bicycles. I had been eying the bikes in front of South Salem Cycleworks for some time. The show just gave me an excuse to stop and photograph them in the early morning sun. I arrived early as they were just putting the bikes outside. The young man setting up the bikes couldn’t have been more helpful, setting out out this bike just so I could photograph it.
With it’s lovely curves and built in light, this bike really is pure nostalgia. I wanted the painting to have the same 1950s vintage feel as the bicycle.
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Bike Tour (watercolor 18 x 12) $200
Rather more abstract than I usually go, but I like it. This is a Florence bicycle tour group as seen from the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy.
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Rear Derailleur (watercolor 11 x 15) $250
Painted at the Oregon State Fair.
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Chinese Dragon (polymer clay) $300
I’ll be at the Oregon State Fair in the Artisan Village (located by C Gate at the bottom of the chair lift) demonstrating polymer clay and watercolors from 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. from now through Labor Day. I have polymer clay animals, kaleidoscopes, barrettes, pillboxes, bookmarks etc. for sale as well as original watercolors and watercolor prints. Come see my latest paintings and meet my dragons.
Hunchbacked Gargoyle (16 x 18 watercolor) $400
The view from atop Notre Dame, Paris.
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Top of Milan (watercolor 14 x 22) Reserved for Spring Watercolor Society of Oregon Show
When we Armitages travel, we climb things–towers, monuments, mountains, cathedrals, arches– we generally go up for the purpose of looking down. We are never disappointed. We weren’t disappointed in Milan. But the Milan Cathedral rooftop is different. The rooftop itself is an amazing place to be. It would be an amazing place were it on the ground floor. Here is my first painting of the marble forest that lives atop the Milan Duomo.
This painting may be purchased through the Watercolor Society of Oregon Spring 2015 show. Or purchase a fine art print.
Between Amusements (17 x 21 watercolor) $700
For the last four years I’ve been taking pictures of the Oregon State Fair confident that with all those people and colors there must be a good painting in there somewhere. Four years of pictures with images taken from four different photos and I finally have one.
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Heart of the Bike (10.5 x 14 watercolor) $400
This is a hot summer painting for a cold winter day here in Oregon. It’s been snowing steadily for the last 40 hours or so. Everything is white and cold. But this painting warms me right up.
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Sun Drenched Parosals (watercolor 12 x 18) $400
There’s a reason why artists like to paint umbrellas. They are shapely and brightly colored. They add grace to the human form. We associate them with romance and romantic cities. And here I live in the Willamette Valley were it rains all winter, and yet I’ve never really painted umbrellas and now when I do it’s umbrellas used for shade.
Why? Because Oregonians hardly ever use umbrellas. We either ignore the rain with a macho sort of only wimps think this is rain air, or we wear sports gear with hoods. On the coast we have some excuse as the rain there so often comes with enough wind to invert any umbrella, but here in the Valley we hardly ever have real wind yet we don’t use umbrellas. Our family does keep a couple collapsibles in the car, but we tend to forget we have them.
These are Oregon umbrellas lent by the exhibit sponsor to the line of people waiting in the sun to see the Titanic exhibit some years ago. I embarrassed my young daughters by taking pictures of the line of people with all those beautiful umbrellas. One of my girls looked at the painting and said instantly that was when we saw the Titanic. She doesn’t remember being embarrassed, just the pretty umbrellas. My other girl is younger. She does not remember at all. Neither girl remembers many Oregon umbrellas. They associate umbrellas with London.
A couple days ago, I saw a friend’s painting umbrellas in Rome, and thought to myself, I wish I had some umbrellas to paint. And then I remembered how I had embarrassed my children by taking photos of people standing in line because the umbrellas were so pretty.
My painting doesn’t have the lovely rainy reflections Marsha’s does, but I do have shadows.
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Bike Lucca (watercolor 16 x 21) $700
This is Lucca. It could be just about any narrow lane in the old part of a Tuscan city, but this particular lane is in Lucca. The bicyclist is appropriate, because Lucca is a bicyclist’s city. The old city wall around town has been paved as a broad street for pedestrians and cyclists, and everyone, natives and tourists alike seem to spend much of their time biking the wall. Down in the city, bikes are as common as at Oxford.
Fine art prints can be purchased here.
Here is a view of Lucca from the city wall:
Two Towers (Digitally Altered Photo)
Prints of Two Towers can be purchased here.
