Artist in Residence – Feb 15-20 recap

The VECCA Artist in Residence (AiR) was a new intiative started last fall to keep VECCA’s doors open more. Doors open more equals more foot traffic, equals more community engagement, equals more opportunities for sales. VECCA artist and board member Travis K Schuerman kicked things off by setting up an easel in the front window and just getting to work on some oil paintings. The effect of having a live person painting in the front window was pretty immediate. Folks walking by, on their way to or from morning coffee and lunch, started stopped to watch, started coming in to talk to a friendly artist for a couple minutes and taking a look at a gallery full of great local artists. You’ll usually find someone painting there weekdays from 10am – 2pm, so stop on in for a quick hello.

This week was my third tour painting in the window. I had this dam painting unfinished, that I haven’t touched since my first pass and layer of paint on it… over a year ago. Its a scene of the Burnshire Dam in Woodstock, on the way up to the tower. I had sent up a drone to get a cool video of it, so thats why its a bit different and much higher perspective than you might know just driving over the bridge next to it. More details below.

And while working on it this week, I was also joined by a couple fellow VECCA members and artists. First visitor was, the current Artist of the Month, Ann McCarty, who came in to do some small revisions on her latest piece, Winter Sunset, seen below, that she had also worked on in the front of the gallery the week prior. After she removed some rocks in the water, and adding some more of the suns warm orange glow to some rocks and reeds, the painting was added to the collection of her work already hanging on the walls.

The second artist to join was Keith Rocco. He was finishing up a plein air piece that he started in December at one of VECCA’s Plein Air Meetups that was held in Downtown Woodstock. Artists had all picked different elements of downtown and Keith had chosen to capture the courthouse and street in front of it, from inside VECCA, pictured below. He even included the vinyl lettering on the window that he was looking through, which was a nice touch.

Keith with some finishing touches

Ann McCarty had a few final touches to work on

Finished Keith plein air piece

This Week's Progress

So, after I did the original first layer and session laying this painting out, I then let it sit for over a year. I was working from a reference picture, seen below, I took from a drone over the dam. It gave me such a cool angle and morning color on the ridge. But I guess once I blocked it in I wasn’t interested in it anymore. Something about it was telling me if I finished it as is from the reference photo it wasn’t going to be that interesting, so I lost all motivation to work on it.

Fast forward to last week when I agreed to be the Artist in Residence and had to quickly think of what to work on. I had nothing, no real burning ideas. But I sure did have lots of unfinished works. And this painting, being a decently larger one than recent small landscapes, needed to be dusted off and finally attempted to finish up.

It was still boring. A cool and unique perspective for sure, but still nothing too interesting. So I brainstormed what could make it at least more interesting enough to give me enough motivation to push through. The answer ended up being adding some fisherman in a small boat, that can usually be seen in that area. And without thinking that decision all the way through, those guys gave the scene a sense of scale that was missing. That right there was a big improvement. The size of the dam, the size of the river bend, and the ridge in the background were clearer now and more interesting to look at.

Then the sky… my first reference had a perfectly clear sky, which while was a nice gradient of light to blue, but again as the lower area was getting more interesting, the sky had to have something more going on too as it was clearly unbalanced. Me and Terry frequently stop at the dam and take pictures, so we have tons of material to look through, and I did end up finding another morning scene we saw that had some nice clouds with morning sun lighting up some highlights that worked. So I used that.

I still have a ways to go. The moutain ridge needs to be softened up across the canvas, mostly on the right. The clouds have alot of softening to go to, but they are atleast close to what I’m aiming for. And the water going down the damn needs more highlights and finessing.

It will be at the gallery shortly I think. After our second snow thaw of the year.