I Have To Have Another Studio Sale & Have 2 New Paintings Done

They say that it is good to let go...move on ...clear clutter...and I have decided to have another studio clean up sale.  “A Mid-Winter Special Studio Sale Of Art Work “ .  The work offered in this studio sale can be seen on my website on a page created specifically for that sale. I hope there a painting there that you cannot live without! It is ‘ Easy Peasey’ to buy it with Buy Buttons through secure PayPal.  Help me de-clutter and buy hay for my horses!!

I have finished a new water color of a driving pair. Another ground driving painting, with the movement and brio that can take part in even the simple discipline of ground driving horses. “Ground Driving the Pair” is now up available on my Equine Art page.

"Ground Driving The Pair" , watercolor,  17 x 16"  ©2014 www.kathipeters.com

 As soon as I finished the watercolor, I did a small casein of a Jack Russell pup….our hairy Nell modeled for me. She is a cheap model!  One chewy bone and she is good to go.

"Soft and Fuzzy"  casein on gallery wrapped canvas ,  6 x 6"

I am waiting for spring with such a longing. This winter has been brutal....warmth and green growing will be welcomed!

Until it comes.........I will paint!

Wind in your hair...

Tonight my husband and I did something we haven't done since we were kids.  Driving home in a desultory kind of way from the grocery store, we passed a school playground baking in the late afternoon sun.  Within 5 minutes we were both climbing onto the swings and heavenbound.  And with the lurching back and forth of the swing, the feeling of breaking the boundaries of the earth and soaring into the oak tree limbs, the stomach dropping moment of weightlessness at the apex of the arc, with each pass of the wind in our hair we felt better, younger, lighter.

This is my first blog post of 2012.  I realize that, and, if any of you were anxiously waiting out there for an update on the studio antics of one Joanna Zeller Quentin and Co, I humbly apologize.  It's not that I/ we haven't been busy - we have!  Four months into 2012, I've traveled to California and Louisiana to see my work hanging in big art exhibitions, seen my art published on the cover of a major six-week long international horse show program, had lunch and rubbed elbows with Olympians, seen some world class horses do incredible things, gave a giant hug to to my favorite author, taken over 2500 reference photos of various animals doing interesting things, had work accepted to a major wildlife art show, actually completed more work in time for the deadline for another major art show and become a member of the International Equine Artist's Association.  Whew!

Anyway, the point of all this is that being on the swings tonight reminded me of the simple, meditative joys of doing what you love, and how important that is to your emotional, physical and mental well being.  Watching twilight bleed through the oak trees in a sky Maxfield Parrish would have envied (and then painted, of course), listening to the soft squeak of the metal chains, feeling the air rush past my face, and just being oddly present and yet a million miles away... it was NIICE.  Better than nice, it was inspiring.

So I came home and spent some time working on a new watercolor.  I've got some vague plan of gouache and oil and gold leaf, so we'll see how that works out.  In the meantime, here are a few "new" images for 2012.  There's much more to come, so please stay tuned!  And, as always, thanks for reading.

PS - the new Jack White CD ROCKS.

(and just a reminder, please respect my copyright.  All work ©Joanna Zeller Quentin 2012.  All Rights Reserved.  www.MoosePantsStudio.com)

"Naples"  oil on canvas

"Flying Purple Plantain Eater" mixed media on board

"A Plea for Wilderness" india ink and scratchboard

"To the Jumper Ring"  pen and ink on bristol

"Chestnut Sketch #1, Alla Prima"  Oil on board

"Power Steering"  Oil and ink on board

"Picture Perfect" Watercolor and gouache on board

"Rhapsody in White" watercolor on paper

ALL WORK ©Joanna Zeller Quentin 2012.  All Rights Reserved.  

www.MoosePantsStudio.com 

Racing Art by Kerry Nelson

"Mr. Eye Opener" 12x16 inches, alkyd oil painting

Available for sale now. buy it here;

http://www.ebay.com/itm/140692559389?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

www.KerryOriginals.com www.KerryOriginals.blogspot.com

The Importance of Being Educated

Yesterday I had the very great honor of being awarded the 2012 HITS Themal Desert Circuit (CA) Show Program cover.  HITS produces some of the richest and most highly attended and regarded hunter/ jumper show circuits in the country, and to be selected as the cover artist is quite a big deal.  I've been invited to the HITS Ocala Fine Art Gala several times, and I was also honored to participate in the HITS Saugerties Art Gala in 2010.  I've never been to Thermal - in fact, I've never been to California - but it looks like I now have an excuse to go!  Hundreds of riders from across the country attend these multi-week shows, and I'm excited to be able to put my work in front of a West Coast audience.

The HITS Ocala cover was also awarded this week, and it went to a wonderful artist from Florida - Mary Verrandeaux.  I've had the pleasure of meeting Mary a few times (at the Ocala Art Gala, in fact) and I really, really like her work.  But my favorite thing about Mary is that she and I graduated from the same college - the Ringling College of Art and Design.  She graduated in the 1980's, and I graduated in 2000, both of us with degrees in illustration.

I owe a debt of gratitude to my college, and I'm proud to say I'm an alum.  I came to Ringling in 1996, with a decent amount of drawing skill from high school and middle school art classes.  Magazine pictures, attempted photorealism, unremarkable still lifes, the usual.  My first year in college, our professors took all we knew about art and threw it out the window.  They challenged us to rethink the whole concept of how to draw, how to paint, how to SEE, and in the process, they tore down everything we thought we knew about art and forced us to start again from the beginning.  My second year painting teacher had such a formidable reputation that almost of the students assigned to her class switched to the other painting instructor.  I had an unspoken rule never to change professors, so I ended up in a painting class with only three other students, and for a whole year, we had almost an hour of one-on-one instruction every other day. (Painting classes were 3 hours each, three days a week.)  We learned to PAINT.  (We also learned to stretch our own canvas and make our own gesso, but that's another story.)  I had only had one unhappy experience with oil paints (I painted a hideous flower and my mother rightfully banished the painting to the laundry room) before I walked into her class, so if I have any skill at painting today, a huge amount of credit goes to her.  My illustration teacher was an innovator of American illustration (seriously, he's in the book "Innovators of American Illustration" by Steve Heller) and introduced us to the idea of art as narrative.  He gave me some of the best art advice I've ever received in my life, and I often think of his words when I'm particularly vexed by a painting.  His daughter was "into" horses, and she actually showed at Madison Square Garden (pony division, if I recall correctly), and so he and I spent a lot of time discussing horses.  He gave me hope that a career revolving around equine and wildlife art was possible and encouraged me to continue on that path, and I'm forever grateful to him.

I had other influential teachers in figure, printmaking, English lit, and computer illustration, but I will forever cherish the four years of art history we were required to take.  We weren't just taught art history with names of artists, dates and schools of thought, we were immersed in the time.  We learned how the art and the music and the fashion of an era went together, how politics, war, famine, wealth and industry affected not only the art of a nation but impacted the entire worldview of its people, and how such events spurred and nurtured - or stifled - the proliferation of the arts worldwide.  If I am ever fortunate enough to teach art history, that is the model I will use.  Art doesn't develop in a vacuum, and to teach nothing but dry names and dates robs the student - and the teacher - of the most compelling parts of the story.

New!  HoofPRINTS Notecard and Print  

"To the Jumper Ring" Pen and marker on bristol board 

© Joanna Zeller Quentin 2011.  All Rights Reserved.  www.MoosePantsStudio.com

"... a rose by any other name..."

"Only the Lonely" done- 12 minutes before the"official" deadline.  It has gone off into the wide netherworld of cyberspace in little electronic swirls and whispers, and will hopefully coalesce in the designated email inbox as a fully realized, fully articulated sweeping ode to a magnificent equine in shades of burnished grey, evocative of isolation, fragmented beauty, windswept barren plains, the essential duality of light and dark, day and night, good and evil.  Or maybe it will just look like a picture of a horse.


My bestest best friend in the whole wide world complemented me on my names today. "You always have the most clever, intelligent names..." which is high praise, coming from her.  And it is true, I spend a great deal of time thinking about what I'm going to call a picture.  If I can't come up with the perfect name for it - before a single line has been drawn - it doesn't happen.  There have been a few exceptions to this rule, and almost all of them are half finished train wrecks of ink and paint.  They lack that last little bit, the "je ne sais quoi" if you will, and I have to think it's because of the name.


A name gives purpose, direction, attitude.  My degree is in fine art, but my field of study for 4 years was Illustration, or "the visual representation of a thought, emotion, idea" etc.  The naming of a piece, therefore, captures the mindset I want to be in while working on it, dreaming about it, scribbling it out.  Hopefully, sometimes some of that makes its way into the actual art as well, but that might just be wishful thinking.  And it's fun, too.  "Office Romance" presents not only the real life love affair of husband and wife cattle ranchers, but also presents what for many of us would be an ideal working environment -  on the back of a horse with your sweetheart, breathing in fresh air and sunshine, roaming across the open country.  "Red" is not only done almost entirely in a red color palette, but also reflects the common barn name of many chestnut racehorses, including Man o' War and Secretariat.  "Lope" shows a cantering, or "loping" horse, but was done as a fundraiser for LOPE (Lone Star Outreach to Place Ex Racehorses @ www.lopetx.org).  And I must mention here that "Only the Lonely" was actually suggested as a name for another piece by my mother, but I immediately grafted it onto the then unformed drawing which was simply hanging out there waiting for the perfect name.  So, thanks Mom!


And finally, here is the newest entry in the stable.  Graphite, conte crayon (and eventually india ink) on clayboard.  My reference photo is of two sweet, gentle Belgian mares nonchalantly lounging about in their field, but a slight breeze just barely lifted tendrils of mane up at the right moment when I took the shot, and I took the idea and ran with it.  Here is the beginning of "Tempest".  (And I apologize for possibly the worst photo of artwork ever taken!)

"Tempest" WIP  

©Joanna Zeller Quentin 2010.  All Rights Reserved.  www.MoosePantsStudio.com

"Only the Lonely"

© Joanna Zeller Quentin 2010.  All Rights Reserved.  www.MoosePantsStudio.com

APPALOOSA ART

Here is my latest creation using Corel Painter. It is my tenth piece using this new digital medium. I only hope to get better and better at it. I am especially fond of the quickness I can paint my horses. Would love to venture into highly detailed hyper-realistic works someday.

Come back often to see what I am up too...

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Equine and Children from the "Painting a child a day" project

Hard work pays off 5 x 7 Watercolor $50.00



















Day dreamers 5 x7 Watercolor SOLD



















Silent communication 5 x 7 watercolor SOLD
 
I've been painting a lot of small 5 x 7 Watercolors of children with their horses for the "Painting a child a day" project. These great little gems are full of emotion.
Many have been selling and if you would like to grab one or two for yourself, give me an email at debflood@debfloodart.com
You can also submit images of yours to me, for consideration in the Child a day. Each 5 x 7 is created on watercolor board with a half an inch white border and comes sealed in a clear sleeve, until you are ready to slip it into a mat and frame. Right now, if you purchase two or more the shipping is free within the USA.
You can see the whole collection, which started in April of 2009 at http://www.paintingachildaday.com
The end of September marks the end of 6 months for this project. The project will be running for a year. The first six months will be showcased in Volume 1 of "Painting a child a day" book. This book will certaily be a treasure keepsake. If you would like to put your name in to reserve a copy for you, send me an email. Place the words "Painting a child a day book" in the subject line, thank you, and include your name and contact info. I'm working hard to finish this book before the Holiday season kicks in.
You can also follow these paintings and other paintings on my Face book Fan page
It is much easier for me to communicate with you on that page. I also have an RSS Feed on there for you to recieve updates on Blog posts.
Thank you for following and enjoying my art.
Debbie

Thoughts of Spring - and Foals!

I almost sold this pastel painting a week ago, but the woman decided that she wanted an oil instead. I had to take it out of storage and hung it on the wall while she made up her mind. It has been such a cheerful addition to that wall that I've left it up and have enjoyed it every day since.

This little foal had just been turned out with his mother and was showing his juvenile exuberance by running, bucking and prancing around the pasture, doing lots of "airs above the ground". The title is "Feel So Fine" and it is available for purchase framed. If you would like something new to brighten up your wall this Spring, please contact me through my website by clicking on the image above.