Sycamore Series

Sycamore study #730, watercolor, 9 x 12 inches

I've been painting a lot of pictures of trees.   I have a favorite sycamore along our creek.  It is damp and covered with moss and vines.

The trick here is to suggest the idea of woods without spelling out all that chaos.   Lots of marks.  

Here is the second version: 

Sycamore study #731, 9 x 12 inches

The paint did more of the heavy lifting here and I'm in love with the stuff going on just to the left of the trunk. 

Now to try it bigger.  Much bigger.

Next version:

©Robin Edmundson, 'Sycamore - 733', watercolor, 18 x 24

Painting something that much larger requires a rethinking of many aspects of the piece.  Mostly it means larger brushes and a lot more paint preparation.   I like this more the more I sit with it.  I like the light, the moss, the balance of paint runs and marks, the lights and darks.  It feels like a friend. 

I'll be submitting this to the Hoosier Salon this year.   

More Trees

© Robin Edmundson, 'Trees and Vines', watercolor and ink, 18 x 12 inches.

Framed to 24 x 18 inches.  $450.

There is a group of three sycamore trees just down the way from us.  They're on a creek bank, covered with moss and vines.  I love them. 

After the experimental tree that I shared in my last post, I spent some time thinking about these trees. I painted the piece above thinking mostly about the vines and lines that festoon and crisscross every tree in the woods.  

In the next piece, I focused on the beautiful [and ubiquitous] moss.  Here in southern Indiana, the woods stay damp all year long and the moss thrives.   During the winter months, when the colors of the woods fade to umbers and grays, the moss glows.  

© Robin Edmundson, 'Trees and Moss', watercolor and ink, 18 x 12 inches. 

Framed to 18 x 24 inches.  $450.

The process of working through these tree studies is deeply satisfying.  I can be expressive with my mark making and the lines and I'm learning to let the paint do its thing and work with it instead of trying to control it.

Stay tuned for more.

December Garland

There are a few garlands of these in the trees.   I think they are gorgeous.

I have no idea what they are, but those little lanterns are enchanting.

Enchanting, I tell you.

Some of the Prettiest Color in the Woods

...comes from the wild vines.  

I think this is an air potato vine.  [If you can identify it more accurately, let me know in the comments]

Poison Ivy.    It's gorgeous in October.

More poison ivy.  Do not be tempted to pick this stuff.   It's nasty all year long. 

Virginia creeper.    It's glorious this time of year. 

Bush Beans and Pole Beans

These are my beautiful bean vines.  [That's the morning sun hitting the trees behind them. And you can just see the chicken coop on the right.] 

Last year I saved some seeds from the beans I grew.   I saved some dragon tongue bush beans and some kentucky wonder bush beans.  

And when I planted them this year, they came up!

I was so excited.   Seeds are kind of a whole different ball game from just watering a plant.

Seriously.

Anyway, my beans came up with 100% germination rate, which was really great and which meant that I had planted way too many because I do that, just in case, and so I had to pull out every other baby bean plant. 

It's good for me to practice thinning things.    I tend to over crowd things and they just grow better if I thin. 

So I thinned. 

And I still had a lovely row of each kind of bean. 

And then something interesting happened.   The green Kentucky wonder bush beans got awfully long. 

And then they got longer.

Some of my bush beans threw seeds for pole beans.   Also, some of my green beans had flat pods like the dragon tongues, but green. 

Even though beans aren't supposed to interbreed accidentally like that, these beans must have had a lot of genetic diversity and also been highly suggestible.    I'm thinking the dragon tongues talked them into the whole flat pod thing that one weekend last year when we were in Michigan. 

At any rate, we put some fence posts in the row, laid some strong twine from post to post and tied our beans up.   About half of them are happily climbing higher and higher.   The other half are still bush beans. 

The heat has meant that they've been spotty setting bloom and seed.   The dragon tongues seemed to tolerate the heat a bit better, but there are a lot of blossoms on all the beans now, so I'm hoping we'll get a second late harvest.