JANICE RHODES LOVING PASTEL PAINTING

Recently I have been fascinated with old photographs of women. These two pastels are from this series.
I enjoy figure drawing and portraiture. Every Friday I go to a three hour figure drawing open studio to hone my drawing skills.

FEATURED PASTEL AND ENCAUSTIC ARTIST - JANICE RHODES

I am a pastel painter that also has a fondness for encaustic art. I began doing encaustic paintings after taking a workshop in 2007.  When I start an encaustic work, I sometimes don't know where it will take me. Along the way, the process requires that I use my knowledge of basic design but I also know that I must follow my intuition.
I have a studio where I am able to open doors and windows when I work, and the bees come in attracted by the beeswax, reminding me of where this material comes from and that it is an ancient art that I am putting my contemporary spin on.
My encaustic paintings vary from purely abstract to figurative, often with whimsical touches.

High Desert Art League member, Pam Jersey Bird will be showing at Franklin Crossing in Bend, OR for the month of June. The reception is Friday, June 7th during Bend's First Friday Art Walk. Pam is showing with artist Judy Hoiness. The artists have know each other for 13 years and both are former art educators. Their work has evolved over the years but both have moved in a more abstract direction. The show was curated by Art Consultant, Billye Turner who has also hung their work at the Oxford Hotel in Bend. The show will move on to the Sunriver Lodge during the month of July.

Aspen Lakes Lodge Hosts HDAL

'A SENSE OF PLACE'

Twelve amazing artists, all unique and successful, have each come to ‘sense their places’ in the realm of art. They have achieved a level of artistic expertise which enables them to share with others their timeless pieces of art. All are members of the High Desert Art League and are exhibiting their art at Aspen Lakes from June 2 through October. 

"A Sense of Place" is the theme of this exhibit where all 12 artists are displaying their recent 'Artworks in a Series' paintings and photographs. The afternoon Reception was held on June 2nd in the beautiful Aspen Lakes Lodge just east of Sisters Oregon.  The sun was brightly shining on a magnificent view of the Cascade Mountains, the appetizers and wine were divine, and the artwork excellent! 

Jacqueline Newbold, Janice Rhodes, Connie Cyrus, and Barbara Slater

David with Pam Bird and Jacqueline Newbold

Vivian Olsen

Joren Traveller

The exhibit will be shown through October 2013 with changes to the art at intervals during that time.

Richard Frederick

 

A Marriage of Convenience...Part 4

 

This is the 4th & final posting of this subject. We have learned by now that the marriage is that of Analog to Digital techniques that can produce stunning Platinum/Palladium photographic prints. This marriage allows us to overcome a significant difficulty in the original Pt/Pd process that required a very large (and unwieldy) camera to produce a large negative for printing a large photograph.

 

In the last posting I revealed a new technique invented by photographer Mark Nelson called "Precision Digital Negatives". It is this invention that allows us to use the computer program Adobe Photoshop, and a modern digital printer to produce a large negative that can reproduce very accurately all of the rich tonality of a scene captured with a small digital camera. Nelson determined through his research & experimentation that the inkset colors in digital printers had different sensitivities to the ultraviolet light that exposes the Pt/Pd emulsion on the print paper. His method is used to determine the exact mixture of Red, Green, and Blue colors in Photoshop that, when applied to the negative, will result in the very bright highlights in the scene to reproduce as paper white in the print. And through a necessary (and sometimes tedious) calibration process, all other tones in a scene (including deep black) will be reproduced in the print with great accuracy & precision. The calibration produces a "Curve" that is applied to the negative file before printing it.

 

The figure at left shows the negative I made for the Iris print with the proper "Color Density" applied. It comes as a surprise to most that a negative for a black/white print contains color. This negative was printed with a unique "Curve" applied in Photoshop. The curve is required because the Pt/Pd emulsion and specific paper combination do not respond linearly to the differing light levels in the negative of the scene. It is desirable that a 1 unit change in light passed by the negative produces the same 1 unit change in light (tone) in the print whether it be in shadow detail, mid-tone detail, or highlight detail.  

The figure at right shows the curve I generated using Nelson's invention to "linearize" the printed tones. The blue curve is an ideal linear curve, but since the Pt/Pd emulsion-paper combination is not linear the tones in the print would be seriously distorted if not corrected.

 

The figure to the right shows the curve-corrected negative in contact with the sensitized paper placed in a contact printing fixture (to keep it flat) under the intense light source that exposes the latent image onto the paper. The light source above the printing frame is reflected in the glass of the frame.

 

 Following this exposure, the paper is taken into the darkroom (all Analog now) where it is developed in a Potassium Oxalate chemical bath, as seen in the figure to the left. The developed print is then dried, flattened, & mounted on archival mat board. And...Ta Dum! Here's what you have all been waiting for...

 

The final print. Note that it is slightly warm toned, which is a pleasing characteristic of Pt/Pd. The degree of warmth can be controlled by adjusting the relative amounts of Pt & Pd in the emulsion. I wish I could show you the actual full sized print as it is superior to what I can post on the web.

Thanks for your interest in this age-old & modern process.

 

 

 

 

HDAL's New Venue at Aspen Lakes

The members of the High Desert Art League are displaying their new works of art in the beautiful lodge and restaurant at Aspen Lakes, located just outside of Sisters, Oregon. This exhibit features Works in a Series entitled "A Sense of Place" and opens June 2, 2013 with an Artists' Reception from 3 to 6pm. This venue continues into the Fall with new artwork being replaced regularly.

A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE, Part 3

 

A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE

Part 3

Richard Frederick

 

In parts 1 and 2 we learned of the need for a large negative in order to produce our desired large Platinum/Palladium (Pt/Pd) print. We also learned that a marriage of analog and digital techniques is most convenient in overcoming significant difficulties in producing the large negative by analog (camera and film) techniques.

 

So...The Precision Digital Negative: Space limitations on the Blog preclude a completely detailed description of how this negative is produced, but an overview of the process is helpful to the understanding of what is required of the photographer to produce a stunningly beautiful Pt/Pd print. To begin, a US patent was awarded to an outstanding photographer, Mark Nelson, for his invention of the Precision Digital Negative (PDN) in the 2004 time frame. Nelson's invention came about from his research and experimentation with digital techniques to produce "...a beautiful image rendered on fine paper by a photographic process that is capable of making that image sing to the viewer". To achieve that goal is not easy. It requires mastering not only the use of digital cameras, scanners, printers, computers, and Photoshop - but also the development of the individual photographer's craftsmanship to a high level of proficiency.

 

The process begins with choosing a subject and pre-visualizing (in the mind's eye) how the artist wishes the subject to look in the Pt/Pd print. To accomplish this may take years of experience and practice as necessary to develop the photographer's overall craft. For the purpose of this blog I chose a flower. The flower itself as a subject of nature exhibits a wide range of color, subtle tonalities, texture, and pleasing shape that are the essential ingredients of a fine print. The specific flower is an iris (Iris Germanicum) plucked from my wife's flower garden.This iris as I photographed it with my digital camera is shown in the figure above. A high end digital camera is required for its ability to capture fine detail, and a great deal of experience in lighting the subject artistically is necessary. Following capture the camera file is loaded into Photoshop where the main actions are to render the color image to black and white, resize the photo's dimensions and invert it from a positive image to a negative image. The black and white conversion (positive image) is shown in the figure just below to the left and the inverted image (negative) is shown at right.

A print size of 11 X 14 inches frames nicely in a 16 X 20 inch frame.

 

The uncropped image size produced by my camera is 5616 X 3744 pixels (18 X 12.48 inch @ 300 pixels/inch). A 200% enlargement (to 37.44 X 24.96 inches) in Photoshop is easily printable with full quality on a modern professional inkjet digital printer. I used my Epson 7900 large format printer to materialize this negative by printing it on PICTORICO PRO ultra premium overhead projector film (OHP). Now that we have a large negative produced by digital techniques, we are almost ready to consumate the marriage of digital to analog. In the next blog we will actually use the digitally derived negative to produce a beautiful analog Pt/Pd print. Don't miss this!

 

For further information about Precision Digital Negatives click on the link below.

 

www.precisiondigitalnegatives.com