Stacy Weitz Minch

10x8", oil on board I think I'm ready to call it quits with this painting. Working from photos--I probably just shouldn't do it. One of my professors told me that a long long time ago, and he was probably more than right, but for some reason I keep coming back to it. And why? Convenience. It's so much easier to be able to hang around in the corner painting after the kids are in bed than arranging for some way for them to be occupied or cared for while I paint outside on location :P And sometimes I get tired of painting still life (which usually ends up being piece of fruit I have around the kitchen). But painting from life leads to much better decision making, and it's worth avoiding the frustration of trying to translate a photo into paint. Anyway, I think the color is alright (though it does seem a little hyper saturated in this photo). What really gets lost, I think, is the freshness of approach. For some reason, the immediacy of having the thing in fro...

This is a commission I received from someone who ran across my paintings online, and I think it's just about finished. It was a fun one--especially the color. I haven't painted in a while. But one thing I'm starting to realize is that practically all of the problems of painting (except color and paint handling) can be learned/solved through drawing. So I'm okay with not painting a whole lot right now, though it sure is fun to pull out those paints once in a while  ;)

10x8", oil on panel I felt like doing a landscape yesterday, so I pulled out a photo from a trip to Bryce Canyon a couple years ago. We were there on Valentine's Day, and it was beautiful weather (at least in the afternoon--pretty unusual for February!). I was into shooting film at the time, and I took lots of photos (always with the idea in the back of my mind that I could paint them sometime--film had a better dynamic value range than digital, at least a couple years ago, and my digital camera is about 8 years old now). This particular reference photo was from a hike on the bristlecone pine loop. Bristlecone pines are some of the longest living organisms on earth. They can be up to 5,000 years old. And they grow in the rockiest of terrain. I always feel a little floored when I think about something that's been around that long (though this tree definitely looked among the smaller/younger ones on the loop). Here stands this little tree on the very edge of a cliff...

5x7", oil on linen panel Another sketch of some little pumpkins we picked up at the pumpkin patch the other day. I left the white one out this time. I don't know why it's so much easier for me to see value and temperature on brightly colored objects, but it is. I guess the variation of color/value on white is probably just a lot more subtle, so your perception needs to be much more fine-tuned. In any case, I'll keep working on that white stuff. With the pumpkins, I'm finding I have to make sure all the darks are connected, and all the lights are connected, or it looks really wonky. I don't know if that makes sense, but it does in my head. And here's a quick sketch of a cat, done from a photograph. I'm feeling the fall vibes, if you can't tell ;) 

16x20", oil on stretched canvas This little canvas was something I started in April (sorry for the weird angle/distortion--I was trying to get a shot without a lot of glare). In my opinion, the composition was way too ambitious for the depth of my experience (I mean, how many more faces, limbs, and hands could I have crammed in there? :P). And in the end, I felt there was only so far I could push it given the existing start. But I had resolved several months ago to bring it to a somewhat sensical point of existence, and this is where I believe it will stay (though I do reserve the right to change my mind ;).  It took a while to work up the motivation to finish this, but working on this painting really has been a good learning experience. I used four colors (ivory black, titanium white, yellow ochre, and cadmium red), and that was something in itself. Simplifying the color scheme helped unify the colors (though there was no way I was going to get the color of that blue ...

6x6", water mixable oil on gessobord, 2/29/16 I caught my kids' cold this weekend, so I haven't been feeling very well. And when the cold medicine wore off at about 5AM, I found myself awake and sandwiched in between two sleeping kids on our queen sized bed (I don't think it's recommended for 4 people ;). So I decided to just get up and go do a little painting while the house was quiet (it didn't last long!).  This painting was done from a photograph that I found on morguefile.com. I have a hard time painting from photographs. There's just not enough (or maybe too much?) information to create a feeling of three dimensional depth, and I guess I just don't have enough experience painting from life yet to successfully add (or subtract) the info that would pull off the illusion. So it may not be a masterpiece, but hey, at least I painted. With a cold. At 5AM! Painting is one of those things that the more you learn about it, the less you feel like...

12x16, water mixable oil on board, 1/6/16 It was really hard to get a photo of this painting. If I expose for the sky, the building is too dark. If I expose for the building, the sky is too light. So the clouds/sky are probably slightly blown out in this photo because I tried to find something in the middle. I've loved this building ever since I saw it. It was such a tragedy when it burned down, and I'm so glad that it's a living building again. The grounds look really gorgeous, too. Looking forward to getting a peek at the inside sometime in the near future :)

16x20, water mixable oil on panel, finished 12/13/15 I've been in the mood to finish old projects lately--the dress I started sewing for my daughter (which I'd like to get done before she grows out of it!), a quilt I started 6-7 years ago, and this painting. You can see which of my projects got first priority. An unfinished painting sort of gnaws at me, and I don't really know why... from what I've heard, DaVinci carried around the Mona Lisa for 25 years while he was still working on it--25 years!!! Ha, I don't think I could do it. Anyway, it was that silly white blanket and the proportions on the woman that kept holding me back, and while I am not perfectly satisfied with everything about this painting, I'm calling it good enough (mostly so I can feel good about starting on something else--I really don't like unfinished projects, and this one's been dragging on too long). So I guess all there's left is to do is sign my name ;)

18x24", water mixable oil on board, 11/30/15 I don't know... I think I'm about done with this one (maybe a few more touch ups?). This is probably the biggest I've ever painted with oil, and my goal was to be loose and fast. I feel like I've been a little tight with my painting lately. I really want to be able to accurately represent reality, because once you can do that, I think it gives you a great freedom to be able to do whatever you want to do with your art. But at the same time, I don't want to get so caught up in accuracy that I lose the fun. So I pulled out the really big brushes on this one, and didn't let myself get too caught up in any of the details, drawing or otherwise ;) I'm okay with that; it's basically what I was going for. Loose, fast, fun :). This is the view from the post office parking lot to the southwest of the building (the gray on the bottom is a big cement wall, ha. I left out the wrought iron fence and row of bush...

Currently dangling precariously between #3 and #4 in the sequence below (and I don't always make it to #6 ;)

6x6", water mixable oil on canvas board, 9/14/15 As a junior high student, I rode the bus to and from school every day. I was one of the last houses on the route, which made for a short trip in the morning, and a long one after school. I always secretly enjoyed that long ride home--45 minutes sitting on the bus gave me some much needed time for contemplation after a long and often eventful day at school.  I can still remember how it felt to stand on the corner waiting for the bus on that first day of school--who would I sit by? what would happen after I stepped off the bus? so much anxiety and excitement--I can't really say I miss it... but then again, maybe I do just a little?

6x8, water mixable oil on canvas board, 9/7/15 I fiddled with this one for quite a while before finally deciding to be done. I always find it difficult to work from photos. My brain processes values in real-time much more reliably than from a photograph--not sure why. But I might just have to try another balcony and see if I can make my vision match my painting a little better on the next go :)

8x8", water mixable oil on canvas board, 9/5/2015 Just a cute little photo I found on morguefile.com. I'm always drawn to images of children. Since I didn't take this photo, I can only imagine what they might be looking at so intently--maybe a parade, or some street performers?  With this painting, I was just trying to keep it simple, and not get too caught up in the details. Definitely something to keep working on!

6x6", water mixable oil on canvas board, 9/1/2015 Another crack at the fog challenge on dailypaintworks.com--this time with a purple ground.

6x6", water mixable oil on canvas board, 9/3/2015

6x8, water mixable oil on canvas board, 8/31/2015 Painted for this week's challenge at dailypaintworks.com. I like participating in these challenges, because it encourages me to try subject matter I might not choose on my own. Living in a desert as I do, fog is a rare occurrence, so it was definitely challenging to try to get the feeling of fog here. I don't have a lot of visual memories of staring through the fog, so I was mostly relying on the photo reference to try to get it. Now I'm wanting to go find some real fog and paint it from life. The colors are always so different in person!

6x6, water mixable oil on board, 8/31/2015 My sister-in-law has requested a posthumous portrait of a favorite tabby cat for her Christmas present this year. I haven't painted many cats, so I thought I would try it out with a few small studies and see if I can come up with anything . This is the first :)

6x6", water mixable oil on canvas board, 8/10/15 Oh boy, has it ever been hard to find an hour to paint this summer! I'm just counting down the days until my daughter's preschool starts back up in a week and a half!  By some miracle, my baby took a nap at the same time my daughter was happily playing with a friend this afternoon, so I was able to pull out the paints for this quick sketch of these beautiful wildflowers from our Oregon trip :) Happy almost-end-of-summer!

12x12", water mixable oil on board, 8/6/15 I painted this same scene last December on a smaller scale, but decided to paint it again as a gift for my Great Grandpa Curly, who turns 100 this September. I hear tell that when my great uncle Larry took Curly to Yellowstone not too long ago, Curly jumped out of the car to be in the middle of a herd of buffalo and just about gave poor Larry a heart attack. Well, when being in a herd of buffalo is on your bucket list and you're nearly 100 years old, why not? On another note, Grandpa Curly and my grandma Frances used to paint together. They would video record the Bob Ross show on PBS and send us copies of the VHS tapes to watch. Thank you, Curly for being a part of instilling a love of painting in me from early on, and happy 100th birthday to you!

I painted this scene from Yellowstone a few months ago, and it's been bugging me ever since. It seemed unfinished, but I was a little afraid to go back over it, for fear I might overwork it and ruin it altogether. But since I was unhappy with it anyway, I decided to go at it this weekend and see if I could make any improvements. On my first attempt, I basically just copied exactly the values from my reference photograph. But on my second attempt, I really tried to visualize the true values of the landscape (photographs clip both ends of the light/dark spectrum, giving false values). There was too much dark in the sky and distant hills, making them jump up into the foreground, and there were too many hard edges I the sky. Although I'm not 100 percent satisfied with this painting (I'm not sure that will ever happen anyway), I'm happy that it seems my changes improved the feel of the image, instead of the opposite, which seems to be what usually happens :) ...