Downtown Medford, Oregon

Well I have been very busy painting and working, I’m still finishing up the Smithfields series, I promise there will be some sort of splash involved.  I will invite you all to the opening, and then once the pieces are “unveiled” I will show them here.  In the mean time, I’ve just scanned some images of pieces I painted last summer.   As you know, lately I prefer to paint depressing semi-urban scenes, and because the traffic and pedestrians move too quickly, they can’t be included, so the pieces have this nice isolation with all the buildings and the sun, making it look like suddenly there are no people in the world.

Downtown Medford, Oregon

This painting available is for sale here.

The weather is now nice enough to head out doors, I’m looking forward to traveling to Klamath Falls, Oregon, a town a couple of hours drive over the mountains.  It’s high desert, lots of distance between trees, which I think makes for better paintings.  I just have to plan it.

I’ve been taking photography classes from Ezra Marcos as well.  I’m not trying to become a photographer, but I would like to have better photos for my Etsy shop and this blog.  Check out Ezra’s work, it’s fantastic, very fun.

Bear Skeleton

I’m entering pretty gory territory here.  Sorry if you’re squeamish or hate hunting or meat eating or anything like that.  My friend Gilbert is a hunter and recently killed a bear, which he removed the meat from and gave me the fresh skeleton, (minus the skull which he has buried in his backyard so that bugs will clean all the nooks and crannies of, so he can dig it up later and have a nice clean creepy and interesting object).  Anyway, Smithfields wants intensity and I think this will deliver – no?  The back ground elements will all be painted in grisaille, heightening the red and gold of the meat.  I have finished the previous painting for Smithfields, although I’m not showing them publicly until they’re all assembled in the restaurant and we can have a smashing unveiling.  : )  So, enjoy.

Bear Skeleton in Progress - By Sarah F Burns

Bear Skeleton Painting in Progress with the Actual Bear Skeleton

Day 4

Day 3

I’m still feeling out the composition – it’s tricky because the main focus – the raw meat – will actually come later – I”m leaving space for the hunks of meat to be displayed because I can’t really put them in until I’m ready to spend a good amount of time with them since they are so perishable.  So I’m forced to just hold them in my mind and paint in the back ground.

I haven’t established the whole value story of the back ground either yet.  It’s still in a drawing stage now.  I need to get a more complete value picture before committing to the composition.  I plan to use very, very minimal amounts of color in the back ground – like almost gray scale, but with a tiny bit of hue included – and this sounds fun -  so I allowed my self to jump into that stage a little bit today.  I did go into the fuller value story as well, but ran out of time.

The days are so stinking short right now that I feel like I just barely get started and then my light is gone.  Grr.  So much work to do and I’m so eager to do it, I had hoped to get like four of these done by February, but I can tell right now that idea was beyond delusional.  For one thing thing, there isn’t that much day light between now and then – even if  I were able to use every minute of it.

End of day 2