TONIGHT’S MEETING CANCELLED. Due to the severe winter warnings issued by the weather services, tonights NorthStar Watermedia Society meeting has been cancelled. Stay safe everyone!

NEXT MEMBER MEETING: Nancy Carney: Creative lively figures with gesture drawing

Thursday, February 20, 2014 at 7 p.m. Roseville Skating Center 2661 Civic Center Drive (Lexington Ave. and County Road C), Roseville, MN

Bring your sketchbook and Sharpie!

Creating lively figures with gesture drawing will be the subject of the demo by Nancy Patrick Carney at the February 20 meeting. Carney’s imaginatively stylized paintings feature urban landscapes and the people who live there.

Working from her studio gallery in the Northrup King Building in the historic arts district of Northeast Minneapolis, she creates images that are colorful, quirky, playful expressions of 21st century life.

With an emphasis on design and expressive color, Carney’s paintings in watercolor, oil, acrylic, collage and mixed media give visual form to the vitality and energy of contemporary urban life. Nancy has a degree in art education from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She has worked as a commercial artist, package designer, illustrator and art instructor for more years than she would like to admit.

She regularly exhibits at Gallery G and with a variety of art organizations, galleries and fairs. Her paintings have received numerous awards and are included in personal and corporate collections. Using very quick sketches, Nancy will demonstrate how she captures the movement and attitude of a figure, along with important details like color, value, clothing and accessories.

Feel free to sketch along with her, using our very own NSWS members as 30-second models. Just bring a sketch book and Sharpie marker — no pencils or erasers for a very good reason. Carney will also demonstrate how she uses her own gestural figure sketches to design and compose her paintings. She will discuss the pros and cons of using photos of people, as well as how a knowledge of art history and anatomy can impact your artwork. Incorporating expressive figures in your paintings can add dynamic personal interest as well as a sense of time and place and scale.

Come sketch along with Nancy Patrick Carney at the February meeting and start your own collection of gestural figures to add to your artwork.    

CeCeile Hartleib – Wet in Wet and More

  St. Paul artist CeCeile Hartleib entertained our January audience with her “Wet in Wet” painting demonstration. As a graduate of Atelier, CeCeile explained how the program trains the eye to see what is actually there and not what we think we see. The training is accomplished by learning the sight-size method to draw and paint from plaster casts, from still life set-ups and from the human figure. Using a photo of a brilliant sunset, CeCeile departed from Atelier which does not permit photos. She had stapled a sheet of 300 pound Arches cold press paper to stretcher bars so that she could wet the front and back thoroughly. Then she brushed in a large yellow area, followed by cadmium red, a spray of water, then ultramarine blue. She prefers a limited palette because this unifies the painting. Going back in with each of the colors, she defined the clouds and brilliant sunset, lifting here and there with a dry brush. “Every painting needs red,” she advised, and continued to deepen red areas in the composition. Finally, adding the foreground landscape, she dried the paper during the break and then added the large foreground tree. A beautiful warm painting on a blustery cold night!