Cranberry Worker

 I have been working on a series of cranberry bog paintings.  Cranberries are native to our Southeastern Massachusetts area and the bogs are one of North America's most distinctive types of wetlands.  Bogs are strange ecosystems characterized by thick sphagnum moss, acidic waters, peat deposits and a spongy, mat-like substance on the water's surface. Cranberries thrive best in beds within the bog, which consist of alternating layers of sand, peat, gravel and clay.  

Few nature lovers with a camera can resist pulling over to take pictures of the brilliant magenta of a flooded bog in the Fall.  Likewise, I can't resist painting them.  For those who aren't familiar with the cranberry harvest, here is a summary.  Each cranberry has a pocket of air inside of it, and back in the 1960's someone came up with the idea to flood the bogs with water to float the berries to the surface. The wet harvest has become the predominant method of cranberry harvesting used today.  The dry bogs are flooded with up to 18 inches (45.7 centimeters) of water the night before the harvest. The following day, the farmers use water reels nicknamed egg beaters to dislodge the berries from the vines so they'll float to the water's surface. The farmers then wade through the bog and round up the fruit with large wooden or plastic brooms. This process is called corralling. Once the bobbing berries are gathered together, they're transferred to a loading area where they're lifted by conveyor belts. (Sometimes, a pump truck will suck the berries right off the bog.) The berries are then cleaned before processing. More than 85 percent of the crop is harvested in this manner; however, the use of the water reel to beat the berries off the vines is relatively harsh on the delicate fruit. Therefore, wet harvested cranberries are used mostly for juice drinks, sauces, or as ingredients in other products.  

 

Although I have worked on several cranberry landscape paintings recently, I have been wanting to work on some that include the cranberry farmers at work.   I selected a photo that I took in Wareham a few weeks ago of a cranberry farmer waist deep in amid a bright pink flood of cranberries.   I placed my small plein air cranberry landscapes in view around this canvas so that I could accurately match the cranberry flood colors to my reference paintings rather than the photo.  I know my photo is more washed out than the cranberries are in person.

I have been "preparing" this canvas for a few weeks now.  I think that this underpainting will provide an interesting ghost because of the texture of the cranberries and the variation of the streaks of white, pink, red, and crimson berries.   

I drew my grid of thirds and sketched in the farmer so that his face was at the northeast sweetspot and his brightly lit hand was on the southeast sweet spot.   The worker is corralling the cranberries by pulling the rope with his right hand while detangling weeds with his left.  Next I fill in his overalls and made drawing corrections.  

I usually use a wildly colorful canvas like this and when I get to this point, I often look at the painting and think that I like it just like it is and that I ought to stop.  I like the darkest dark silhouetted against the colorful ground.   Of course if I was radical enough to do it, I would get rid of the grid lines, then call it done!

I press ahead by grabbing a big brush and filling in the background, letting some of the undercolor show through.   I started at the top using a mixture of permanent rose and naples yellow, gradually converting the pink to cad red and the naples yellow to cad yellow for the foreground.  I mixed flesh tones for his face, arms and hands.

I returned to the background because I wanted to make sure that the distant cranberries were receding.   I think it looks too whitish, so I'll come back to it another day - after Thanksgiving.   I'll be serving up cranberry sauce and a story about the cranberry wet harvest for my guests.

Reflections to the Nth

In a recent painting class, Jody Regan challenged us to explore reflections.   What happens to lines, colors and light when reflected by a mirror, water or some other surface with glass type properties.   I just happen to be working on several cranberry bog paintings, all of which contain water of some sort.    What I learned from the class exercise is that water reflections are a bit more forgiving than a mirror and shiny object.  

I selected a silver creamer and a flashy striped fabric.   As if the reflections on the creamer weren't challenging enough, I hiked up the difficulty by setting the creamer on a square mirror.    So now, the creamer reflected the stripes, and the mirror reflected the creamer with the reflected stripes. Picture it? 

One other challenge was that this fabric had a myriad of multicolored stripes.  I didn't want to paint every stripe for sure.  I designed a new fabric in the painting - which then had to be reflected correctly in the silver.

Remember yesterday's hommage to subtlety?  Subtle this is not.  It's fun to blast out straight tube color once in a while, especially after the grey painting day yesterday.

I have a new technique for optical blending.   I think I invented it, but it's probably been around for centuries.  Instead of placing colors next to each other with a brush (that the viewer's eye will mix), I put narrow skim-coat stripes of the blending colors on my palette, then scrape up perpendicularly with a palette knife, then draw the strips of color out with one slow and steady stroke.  That's how I did my red-yellow-red stripes (after having done it the hard way first).   It does skip in places, but I like the painterly effect that has.   I think the fact that the creamer is not so painterly, but more realistic is a style I like.         I learned quite a bit about reflections in the last couple of weeks.  I  learned that a silver creamer is not silver.  It's a muted version of every color around it with a touch of white at the end for the illusion of shine.                                                                           

Noone is going to want to hang this in their house being as garish as it is.   That's okay.  I really like it for what it is. 

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Thank you to my teacher, Jody Regan for sending me this picture. She took it at the beginning of class.  It is my brush drawing of this painting.  I was recycling an old canvas that had been a color exercise.