Backyard Visitors: Springville Art Museum 101st Annual Show

This year has been a good gallery showing year for me. I have been in three different shows, but one of those shows was my elusive golden egg. The Springville! Today I wanted to share with you a little bit about why the Springville Museum show is so important to me, a little bit about the painting I entered, a video of how I painted my Backyard Visitors: Lesser Goldfinch, and finally a step by step description of paints used and when.

Springville Museum 101st Annual Show

I have heard/read so many stories about Utah artists saying that they were ready to give up on their art if they didn't finally get into the (insert year) Springville show. This show's opinion of you as an artist is taken more seriously than God's.

Backyard Visitors: Lesser Goldfinch, 8 x 12

I was not quiet ready to give up on my art, yet, but I did tell my husband that if I didn't get into the show this year that I would take it as a sign that I am just not the type of artist that they are looking for. More as some kind of attempt at self acceptance than anything else, all the while thinking to myself, "Please please please please please please love me."

AND THEY DID!

Turns out the museum knows when you are at your lowest and only then will it accept you. Ha!

988 pieces were entered into this year's show, along with additional artist who were invited to participate. Only 240 of those entered/invited were accepted. They really packed them in and the works were all so lovely. To say I was excited to see my name on the acceptance list would be an understatement.

They created a wall of birds, which was really great, but my painting was in a slightly awkward place:

Can you find it? Super high up and so small, the painting only measures 8 x 12, it gets a little lost.

I think the person who purchased it must be seven feet tall. It had the worst glare on it and was almost impossible to really see. I had strangely mixed feelings when I found out it had sold. One, I was so excited, but two, also bummed. I really loved the painting, and I didn't have a chance to get it to my printer to be scanned. In typical Katherine fashion, I finished right up to the deadline, even the photos I have of it were rushed and taken minutes before I whisked it off to the museum.

I am considering repainting a new version of it.

Backyard Visitors: Lesser Goldfinch

BackYard Visitors: Lesser Goldfinch is the first in a series of sculpted heads paired with different birds that frequent my yard. I have combined both as a comment on our collective art historical past as well as our current environmental legacy. We honor our past by protecting some our greatest artistic achievements in stately edifices of grandeur, should we not also protect our wild spaces and animals with the same amount of fervor? Are they both not equally valuable and necessary to our future?

In Backyard Visitors: Lesser Goldfinch, the head is of St Joseph made of limestone and was originally part of a stone choir screen from the cathedral of Chartes. Carved in 1230, the head belonged to a figure of Joseph, which would have originally been apart of a Nativity relief. It is now located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's medieval gallery 304.

Around Joseph are five, two female and three male, lesser goldfinches. These adorable, bright yellow babies frequent my backyard during the winter. I love them the most. Around Joseph are ivy and cedar leaves with accents of bright blue cedar pods, also from my yard.

A couple of years ago I was in New York City and took a picture of the head. You can actually access the head, as well as the Met's entire open access archive here. It is one of the many places you can get open access images from museums, here a more extensive list.

For the birds, some of the images I took myself, others I got off of pixabay. Pixabay is a database of royalty free images. I love it and use it with almost every painting. You can also make donations to the photographers, which helps me feel good about using their images.

My Painting Process, an incomplete video:

Step by Step Painting Process

I have started being very exact with my painting process. It helps me feel less overwhelmed by painting as I always know exactly what needs to happen next. This can seem a little bit less "artistic," but as any producing artist will tell you, creating a process is a life necessity.

• Step 1: Base Layer, the Underpainting

  • 

    I paint indirectly (which is a fancy way of saying I paint in layers), and in my first layer I try to create a mass tone for each object. The temperature of each color is the same and matches the temperature of the highlights of the painting. In this case all of the colors were warm.

    • Transparent Red Earth

    • Ultra Marine Blue

    • Sap Green

    • Hansa Yellow Med.

• Step 2: Establishing Deep Shadows

  

  • I then block in all of the shadows. I use the same shadow colors for all of the different elements regardless of what my reference photo is telling me. This helps create a sense of cohesion. In this case my shadows were all cool because my lights were warm.

    • Paynes Gray

    • Raw Umber

• Step 3: Establishing Midtones and Highlights

• On the face this was a mixture of:

  • Ultra Marine blue

  • Titanium White

  • Burnt Umber

• Step 4: Foliage and Birds

• Step 5: Background

• Titanium White

• Paynes Gray

In total I used only 8 colors and the painting took about 32+ hours to complete (I think, possibly more, I need to do a better good at tracking my hours).

If you have any questions for me, feel free to reach out at katherine@katherinegriffinstudio.com and/or subscribe to my newsletter, using the link below, to stay up to date on my blog posts.

Subscribe Here

Have a great day and as my grandma used to say, "Smile at the people." She also used to say, "Go suck a rock." So I guess whichever matches your mood.