Red Maple Inspiration

By Kathy Garvey

I recently spent time at Furnace Mountain Zen Center in Kentucky where I had a month in a wonderful cabin surrounded by wooded mountains and fields. I got to walk every day with my camera and it inspired several paintings and digital works.

On my first walk on my first day I discovered a beautiful but tiny Red Maple down by the barn. (Yes, there is a huge barn, many cabins, a Tea House, a permaculture garden, paths, caves, rock formations, etc. Amazing place!)

The leaves looked blazing in the afternoon sun. I made a point to walk to its location nearly every day to get photos at different times and in different light. Below are a few of my untouched photos of the maple.

The branch from above.

The same branch from below with the sun on it.

So beautiful, I visited it every day! 

Below is one of the paintings I completed while on the retreat. It's acrylic on a beautiful piece of 22"x34"rice paper I bought at Ralph's Art Supply before I left.

Below are digital works inspired by the red maple completed while on my retreat.

This is a digital plan for a future painting on the rice paper.

Maple by the Temple

The Temple is constructed of beautiful wood inside and out and it has a gorgeous blue tile roof. The back of the Temple faces woods and rock formations. The front has a long series of steps down to a pond and the hillside along the steps is covered with milk weed in bloom now, and soon zinnias and cosmos.  (However, the maple is actually located by the barn, quite a distance away. Artistic License!)

More posts to come on my fun artist's retreat and the amazing Furnace Mountain Zen Center!

Kathy Garvey

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"Catchfly" or The Joys of Sketchbooks and Retreats

by Kathy Garvey

Two years ago I went on a great, but way too short, one week retreat in a cabin at WildAcres in North Carolina. I had a beautiful fully furnished cabin, three glorious meals a day and all day long to wander the woodlands…all while being entertained by the Kumandi Drummers who were also on retreat that week.  And, I had a new sketchbook that could handle wet media! (Click any image to enlarge it.)

While there I photographed and sketched plants and critters (like marmarated stinkbugs) we don't see in Florida. When I got back, I started painting from them.

The great thing about a sketchbook is you can revisit it whenever you want. And this week, while packing my Stillman and Birns sketchbook for another retreat, I did just that. I remembered loving the shape of these beautiful little flowers that I had trouble identifying. Then I discovered it's common name was "Catchfly"...Yuck! I started working with one of my little ideas for them.

(I totally forgot that I had already done just that. Below are my images from 2017. And I called them Evening Lychnis because it sounds so much prettier than Bladder Campion or Catchfly!)

I was really surprised after remembering the first versions above to see the difference two years has made in my depiction of the same little sketch. Below is the mixed media version I just started and finished this week.

And here it is after a round of playing with the same painting in Photoshop.

I'm really looking forward to my upcoming retreat at the beautiful Furnace Mountain Zen Retreat Center in Kentucky! What wonders will I find scouring the Kentucky woods? 

You can visit the websites for both marvelous places.

http://www.furnacemountainzen.org/

http://www.wildacres.org/

For information about Artists Residencies at Wildacres, visit
http://www.wildacres.org/workshops/residency.html

My First Pieces Of Eight Vacation

Hello Pieces of Eight fans. I am the newest piece and my name is Phillis Holland. I was lucky enough to join this wonderful group of eight creative women just weeks before the annual Pieces of Eight retreat. We headed for the mountains of North Carolina for a week of fun, food, and comradery with a bit of painting thrown in for good measure. It is such a great joy in my life to have made friends with this extremely talented group of women. They are all so nurturing and encouraging that one cannot help but grow as an artist. With the gracious help of Kathy Garvey, one of our pieces, I am finally creating my first post to our blog. I have included several pictures that I painted on our retreat. Now that I have learned the new skill, I will try to keep posting as the paintings accumulate.