Marilynn Brandenburger

Cross Country by Train

marilynn — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:28:23 +0000

A few weeks ago my husband and I rode the California Zephyr, one of Amtrak’s cross-country passenger trains, to San Francisco to celebrate our birthdays. What a ride! What a view! I can’t recommend these trains enough.

We reserved a tiny bedroom — bunk-beds, sink and an even tinier bathroom — that included the room services of “Kat,” our hostess,

3 meals in the Dining Car,

and seats in the View Car where we sat awe-struck day after day, hour after hour as the western U.S. rolled out before us. Highlights of the ride were the Colorado Rockies,

the lonely deserts of Utah,

a bleak dawn in Nevada,

the snow-covered Sierras of California,

and, finally, that celestial City by the Bay — San Francisco!

We were delighted to see foreign passengers also glued to their seats, especially a group of 6 young German men who just couldn’t get over how vast the country was. I like knowing that people from other parts of the world are seeing how beautiful our country is.

We spent time in the city and the wine country, but my favorite place was Point Reyes National Seashore, a hauntingly beautiful preserve of windswept rolling hills, rocky cliffs, “wow!” views of the Pacific Ocean and a terrific variety of animals: elk, whales, seals, coyotes, etc. I enjoyed painting this view that seems to capture the essence of the place:

“En Route,” gouache on paper, 7 x 10.5

This is in gouache — opaque watercolor — which I’ve been experimenting with a lot lately. Gouache has the advantage of being re-workable after drying, like watercolor. Thinned with water it can either be laid down in transparent washes or in creamy opaque passages. This piece is quite a bit looser than my usual style and was executed in record time — for me, that is — just 2-1/2 hours. I started by laying a wash of raw sienna across the paper, then built up layers of color from thin-to-thick. A good way to proceed with this medium.

2012 Classes & Workshops

marilynn — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 21:32:18 +0000

July 1 – 7: The Watercolor Journal Goes a-Travelin’ – The Clearing, Ellison Bay, WI. Sketching along Lake Michigan’s rocky shore and in a pretty rural village in Wisconsin’s lovely Door Peninsula. THIS CLASS IS FULL! Click here for more information.

“The Three Pines,” The Clearing, Door County, WI – ink & watercolor on paper

July 14 – 15: Sketching the Landscape in Watercolor - The Gratiot Lake Conservancy, Eagle Harbor, MI. Sketch the rugged coast of Lake Superior in Michigan’s breathtakingly beautiful Keweenaw Peninsula. Click here for more information.

“Red Cabin,” Eagle Harbor, MI – ink & watercolor on paper

August 3 & September 7: Watercolor for the Advancing Student

AND

October 5, November 3 & December 7: Watercolor for the Advancing Student - Spruill Center for the Arts, Atlanta, GA. A critique-and-paint class for students who are beyond the beginning level. Click here for more information.

“The White Basket,” Southern Appalachians, NC – watercolor on paper

September 17-20: Traveling with Colored Pencils – The Alabama Folk School at Camp McDowell, Nauvoo, AL. Sketch-as-you-go when you can carry only minimal supplies. Click here for more information.

Meyers Beach, Apostle Islands National Park, WI – ink & colored pencil on red Fabriano paper
- October 14 – 20: Immerse Yourself in Watercolor - John C. Campbell Folk School, Brasstown, NC. Watercolor for the absolute beginner. Click here for more information.
“Turtle,” Atlanta Botanical Garden, Atlanta, GA – watercolor on paper
- October 26: The Illustrated Journal in Ink & Watercolor for Beginners – Blount County Artists’ Group, Blountsville, AL Introduction to watercolor journaling. For more information contact Maria Brindle: marialdenb@gmail.com
  AND
  - October 27-28: More Watercolor Journaling for Intermediate Students – Blount County Artists’ Group, Blountsville, AL Watercolor journaling for students who have taken an introductory class. For more information contact Maria Brindle: marialdenb@gmail.com
  “Patio View,” Wildacres, Little Switzerland, NC – ink & watercolor on paper
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Traveling with Colored Pencils

marilynn — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 02:23:03 +0000

A few weeks ago I taught a workshop on travel sketching with colored pencils. This is a way to sketch on the run with the barest minimum of materials. You need about 2 dozen pencils to be able to mix enough colors, but besides those, you need only pack along some paper, a pencil, an eraser and a pen. Here are some examples:

Fishing village, Cape Breton Highlands, Canada

Meyers Beach, Apostle Islands, Wisconsin

Library at Wildacres, North Carolina

Marsh, Cape San Blas, Florida

Obviously, I love creating these sketches on colored paper! I like to play complementary colors off against each other to get the maximum color punch. I prefer Canson drawing paper. It stands up to erasing and stays smooth and flat, even under sweaty palms. Unfortunately, I know of no spiral-bound sketchbooks with colored paper on the market, so I make my own, using a Levenger “Circa” punch. Because I do most of my sketching with ink and watercolor, it’s very refreshing to turn to colored pencils now and then and let the paper do half the work for me.

If you’re interested in this kind of sketching, I’ll be teaching this next September at the Alabama Folk School. Meanwhile, here is my supply list if you’d like to give colored pencil sketching a try.

Art buddies

marilynn — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 15:54:16 +0000

Each Tuesday morning I join two other watercolor artists at the local botanical garden to sketch flowers, plants and critters. The outing is such a treat — I look forward to it like a child anticipating a trip to the beach. What our outing offers is companionship on a joint venture, mutual support and a creative kick in the pants. It would be so easy for any one of us to back out on any particular Tuesday because of all the responsibilities of job and home that crop up every week, but we don’t because …well, because the other two are going and none of us would dare! So we go and paint and share our work with each other and go home fully satisfied in the way only concentrated creative work can satisfy. Art buddies keep you working at your craft; I highly recommend it.

“Journal sketch: Turtle,” watercolor on paper, 5 x 8

“Journal sketch: Poison Frogs,” ink on paper, 7 x 10

Back in the studio; the value of studies

marilynn — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 03:24:36 +0000

I’m delighted to report that I’m back in the studio! My return to my workspace coincided with a spring warming that has chased the chill out of the room, making it doubly welcoming after my prolonged absence. I got down to work with a series of sketches from the Everglades trip. Sketching is an easy way for me to get the creative juices flowing again. A sketch takes only about an hour, but the energy it gives me lasts for days.

I can’t stress enough the importance of doing sketches. So many of my students want to plunge right into paint — understandable, given how pleasurable the act of brushing liquid color on paper or canvas can be! — then end up disappointed because they didn’t figure out composition, value patterns and color choices beforehand. This is particularly deadly in watercolor, as you can’t go back, scrape out and redo a passage. Case in point, here’s a sketch I made of dawn over the sawgrass at Everglades National Park:

“Study: Everglades Dawn #3,” watercolor on paper, 4.75 x 8.5

In creating this sketch I was able to try out a glazing technique for the sky and water, play with the location of the center of interest and consider how I wanted to treat the horizon. The sketch enabled me to make changes in the next, larger version — e.g., heightened color intensity, a strip of gold next to the trees on the horizon — that I think enhanced the painting.

“Everglades Dawn #3,” watercolor on paper, 8 x 14

Sketches also free me up. Because I don’t consider them “the real thing,” I can paint with abandon…and sometimes that makes them as good as “the real thing.”

“Study: Everglades Dawn #4,” watercolor on paper, 5.5 x 8

Aside from the value sketches bring to the painting process, they’re just fun! Because they’re quick, they offer instant gratification. Can’t beat that!

Life Intervenes

marilynn — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 22:44:56 +0000

I’m writing from bed, where I am recuperating from emergency surgery last week. A major pause in the flow of things gives one great opportunity for reflection. The Resolutions I made in January no longer seem so urgent; right now healing and regaining my strength are my primary goals.

Nonetheless, I was making good progress with my New Year’s Resolutions. I kept after the studio clutter and left my work spaces organized each night, if not exactly tidy. One of the advantages of a studio is you can leave unfinished work out, ready to be picked up the next day, and that’s what I decided worked best for me.

Getting into the studio for two hours each day was more of a challenge. The reality was 4 hours one day, none the next, two the following, an all-day painting excursion mid-week, etc., etc. In other words, each day had its own demands, and maintaining my studio commitment required constant adjustments. But I think that’s OK; the important thing is the Resolution kept my studio commitment on my mind, and that nudged me into the studio more often than if I hadn’t made the Resolution.

Here is a selection from January’s studio time:

Everglades Series: Mahogany Hammock, watercolor on paper

I found working piecemeal a bit frustrating at times. When I have a project that’s flowing, I don’t want to stop! But I still believe., with practice, this can work. I can plan a painting one day and create thumbnails, select and prepare a support, lay down a preliminary drawing and finally start painting over the course of several days. The important thing is to maintain continuity, because creative flow is nurtured in that continuity. How quickly a creative idea dies if neglected for a few weeks!

Finally, I found the Resolution to finish two projects a month a bit confusing, if not impossible. What’s a project, anyway? A series of sketches, a finished painiing, plans for a painting? I will need to revisit this, especially in light of my recent hospital adventure. The work flows, you finish what you finish. A Resolution to finish a specific number of “projects” seems to work against creative flow. The point is to get into the studio and let the magic happen. And maybe something gets finished, maybe it doesn’t, but the journey continues.

Journal sketch: Camellias, Birmingham Botanical Garden, watercolor on paper

New Year’s Resolutions

marilynn — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:53:53 +0000

Each new year I make resolutions for my art-making. They usually go like this: “ Paint more. Paint more.” This year I sat down to analyze why I wasn’t “painting more” and what I could do to make that happen. I had one rule: whatever changes I resolved to make had to be easy and realistic.

One of the reasons I wasn’t painting as much as I liked was that the studio was always cluttered and I had to spend time cleaning up workspaces before I could get down to business. Hence rule #1:

My studio will be ready-for-work every morning.

Easy enough. All I had to do was clean the place, then just tidy it nightly thereafter. I set-to right after New Years and here is my lovely, clean studio, ready for action.

Another problem is the time I spend planning the classes I teach and doing household tasks. The obvious solution is to commit to a specific time each day for painting, but in the past I was never satisfied with, say, a measly two hours, so I set lofty goals like 4 – 6 hours every day. Hah! Didn’t happen. So now I’m being more realistic. Hence, resolution #2:

I will paint two hours a day. (Yeah, that sounds pretty pitiful, but it’s do-able and if it works, I can always add more time.)

Two hours isn’t much time to get a painting underway, let alone finish it, so I had to think about what I can do in two hours. And that is, simply, to make progress. This means breaking an art project down into steps and tackling one at a time. Easy and realistic. Hence, resolution #3:

I will work piecemeal, happy to complete one small step at a time.

To be able to work this way, I need to have clearly defined art projects in the pipeline. so I spent a little more time thinking about what I really want to accomplish this year. This is the hardest thing for me as I’m always itching to take on more projects than are even remotely feasible. But I gritted my teeth and narrowed my projects to just two this month: one painting and one completed watercolor journal, both derived from my residency at Everglades National Park last November. Next month I’ll choose two more projects. Again, it sounds simplistic, but if I stick with this, I’ll have at least 24 finished projects at the end of this year instead of 50 unfinished ones. Hence, the final resolution, #4:

I will undertake and finish two projects a month.

OK, so that’s it. Now to put this into practice and see how it works.

On the way home, a cautionary tale

marilynn — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:59:34 +0000

Just as I was concluding my residency at Everglades National Park, what should appear? Well, not eight tiny reindeer, but a summons for jury duty! Because my mail had been forwarded, the summons didn’t reach me until just a few days before I was to report. No more basking in the tropical sun for me! It was time to turn tail and run home.

But on the way, north of the park, were the Kissimmee River, Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades Agricultural Zone, and I had to see each of them. To explain why, I need to tell you a story.

Once upon a time in Florida the rains came and filled the winding, weaving Kissimmee River until it flowed into Lake Okeechobee, which in turn periodically spilled over its banks out into the broad flat land, and the water flowed slowly, slowly south all the way to Florida Bay. This is what author Marjorie Stoneman Douglas called the “River of Grass” and this was the Everglades. Birds thronged its edges, alligators probed its shallows and deer, panthers and raccoons wandered its woody hammocks. But at the turn of the last century, men wanted this land for farms and towns, and began gobbling it up, draining, dredging, channeling and paving as they went, until the River of Grass ceased to flow.

The once-meandering Kissimmee river, dredged and straightened into a lifeless agricultural canal.

Big beautiful Lake Okeechobee, second largest lake in the continental U.S., choked off from its surroundings by a man-made dike.

Sugarcane in the Everglades Agricultural Zone, where the waters of Lake Okeechobee used to flow into the “River of Grass.”

In 1947, afraid this unique ecosystem would soon be gone, people rallied and convinced Congress to make what remained of the Everglades a national park. But a lot of damage had already been done and the park’s plants and wildlife had begun to die, especially birds, whose populations have sine fallen an astounding 90%. Thus began a 60-year fight to save the Everglades. It was a long, tough fight, as political fights usually are. But to everyone’s amazement, in 2000, an unlikely coalition of politicians, farmers, environmentalists and private citizens finally came together and created a Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. It will take 30 years and cost $10 billion dollars, but the miracle is, it is underway! Levees are being torn down, canals refilled, roadbeds raised, the Kissimmee returned to its meandering — and there’s even talk of sugarcane fields being cleared! — so the water can flow again into Everglades National Park. Still, urban sprawl, with its pollution, insatiable water needs and invasive species, creeps closer and closer every day.

So, will the Everglades be saved? No one knows for sure; this effort — saving an entire ecosystem — has never been tried before. But I, like the many park service and water management personnel I talked to, am cautiously hopeful. The plan cannot fail. There are no other Everglades in all the world.

To learn more about this amazing story, read The Swamp, by Michael Grunwald, and see the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan website. Better yet, go see the incredible, beautiful Everglades yourself. As an unknown environmentalist said years ago when the fight to save the park was in its infancy, “The Everglades is a test. If we pass, we may get to keep the planet.”

Having gotten home in time to do my civic duty as a juror, I am now going to settle into my cozy studio to relive my Everglades adventures in paint. Have a happy holiday and watch for my new paintings after the New Year!

South by Southwest

marilynn — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 02:35:01 +0000

US Highway 1 island-hops its way to Key West between azure waters of Florida Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Along this highway is a seemingly never-ending parade of marvels:

Old railroad trestles, the remains of industrialist Henry Flagler’s 1908 railroad, parallel the highway bridges. Built to shuttle the wealthy to winter resorts on Key West, the railroad was a marvel of its time. After the train and most of the track was destroyed by a hurricane in 1935, the railroad was dismantled and replaced by the Overseas Highway, but the old steel and concrete bridges remain a testimony to turn-of-the century engineering.

A stunning variety of ocean-side parks and wildlife refuges line the highway. Among them: the Key Deer National Wildlife Refuge, the only sanctuary in the world for these endangered miniature deer. Just a little over two feet tall, they’re about the size of a beagle. They are easiest to spot mornings and evenings, like this Bambi caught in the afternoon light….

But it’s hard to really appreciate how small the deer are without something that gives them scale, like this mailbox:

At the end of the highway is Key West, as weird and wacky as only a tropical island thronged with tourists at the southernmost point in the country can be. But Key West is not as west as you can go. The Dry Tortugas, a gaggle of uninhabited islands that comprise one of the most remote of our national parks, lie 70 miles further. On one of the islands, Garden Key, is Fort Jefferson. To get to the island you take a 2 1/2 hour boat ride….

and eventually the fort appears on the horizon, immense and forbidding — made more so the day we visited by menacing clouds and a cold rain. (I was told it rains only once a year in the Tortugas. My lucky day….!)

The fort’s purpose was to defend the mainland during the Spanish-American and Civil Wars, but its troops never saw battle. Instead they fought yellow fever, dysentery and mind-numbing boredom. Samuel Mudd, the doctor who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg and was thus judged an accomplice in the murder of Abraham Lincoln, was imprisoned here, but pardoned and set free after saving soldiers from dying of yellow fever.

Given all these interesting sights, you’d think I’d have sketches of islands or islanders to show. Alas, no. I traveled light to the Keys and left my scanner back at base camp. I’ll have more to show next week after I take my leave of Everglades National Park. On the way home I’ll be taking a look at the sugar cane fields and the Kissimmee River, both of which figure prominantly in the Everglades story. Until then, a last look at Everglades:

Serenity of the swamp

marilynn — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 19:30:44 +0000

Long time, no post! I’ve been on south Florida’s west side, in and around the city of Naples. In the midst of this bustling metropolis, a variety of environmental and civic organizations have been working feverishly against the rapid pace of development to preserve what’s left of some irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind ecosystems. One of those is the Big Cypress National Preserve, an immense tract of dwarf cypress and pine that shelters birds, reptiles and the elegantly striped, endangered tree snail, which was almost collected out of existence.

Just north of the Big Cypress the Audubon Society has set aside a beautiful sanctuary, Corkscrew Swamp, that preserves the very last remaining stand of giant Baldcypress — some of them 12 feet in diameter — in the U.S. All but this small preserve of trees was cut in the building booms of the 40′s and 50′s. The trees were breathtaking in their width and height, but what delighted me most were the dark, quiet pools of ferns, flowers and baby alligators. This is the most serene place I’ver ever seen. It’s immense, cathedral-like quiet was so compelling, visitors spoke in hushed voices.

My final excursion was to the western corner of Everglades Park to take a boat tour of the Ten Thousand Islands. Well, not all ten thousand…..dozens, maybe. The tour heads out from Everglades City into the main channel that leads to the Gulf of Mexico. Wading birds, dolphins and sharks are the kinds of critters seen out in these waters. Our group, however, saw none of that, as a storm from the east that had been threatening all day suddenly hit, and heavy wind and surf prompted the captain to turn the boat rapidly back to shore.

But that in itself was an interesting lesson. Boaters going into these mangrove islands need to know what they’re doing; it would be easy to get lost in the mangroves or undone by the weather. In fact, we saw a poor couple walking their sailboat back to shore (the water here is only 4-6 feet deep), having given up on making headway against the wind.

I’m now back at “base camp,” my tiny apartment on the southeast side of the park, regrouping before heading down to the Florida Keys. I managed to finish two new paintings. The first, a scene at Shark River Slough, is a bit of a disappointment to me. I’ve decided the road, which serves to lead the viewer into the painting, is out of place. Yes, there are roads in the park, but they tend to be noisy, full of cars disrupting the quiet serenity of nature. I wish I’d left it out. Oh well, next time…..

On the other hand, I was pleased with this study of what I think is a “leather fern.” It evokes the rich, tangled, jungle-y world along the trails, a world where you can get away from it all.

Speaking of getting away, as I sit here in Starbucks, “White Christmas” is playing in the background. Imagine how bizarre this is! Temperatures are still in the 80′s, the tropical sun is blazing and palm trees are waving against an impossibly blue sky. Sometimes it feels like I’m on another planet.

And that may well be where I find myself next week: Key West on Thanksgiving — Margaritaville, here I come!!! So long ’til then.