Author: Lynn Holbein

The Big Sky

Sitting  by a train window hour after hour watching the endless expanse of plains and  farmland of Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana, helps you appreciate  the immensity of this country. Thinking about how you would feel if you lived there, so different in terms of lifestyle, worldview and even politics than living on the urban and suburban East Coast.

Chicago Skyscrapers

Our first destination on our Amtrak tour of the U.S. was Chicago. We went on the Architecture River Cruise, which is terrific. Chicago is rightly proud of the distinctive architecture of its skyscrapers which line the three branches of the Chicago River. In the last decade the river has become so clean that kayakers paddle nimbly among the big tour boats.

 

Seeing America by Train

I’m so grateful to modern medicine and my double knee replacement two years ago which, after nine years of limited activity, are allowing me to indulge my travel bug.  Bruce and I are just starting a 12-day train trip around the United States, something we’ve wanted to do for a long time. We’ll be taking overnight sleeper trains from Boston > Chicago, Chicago > Seattle, Seattle > Los Angeles, and Los Angeles > Chicago, spending six nights in the train and two nights in each city before returning home. I look forward to sketching and sharing with you.

 

The Frog Pond

In the middle of the Boston Common is a large shallow pond which is a kids’ wading pool in the summer and a skating rink in the winter. Last weekend, in the sweltering heat, it was full of little kids, and here is an impression I did of it.  Sketching people just requires some little marks — the mind of the viewer fills in the rest.

Families Belong Together

In over 600 cities last weekend people marched to protest harsh treatment of immigrants and separating children from their parents in different  detention centers. In Boston, despite sweltering heat, thousands turned out. I finally found a shady tree in the Boston Common to apply paint to my sketch.

One sign quoted Matthew 25:40 “Whatsoever you do to the least of these you do unto me.” Did you know (see map here) that there are juvenile detention centers in Connecticut and New York, and adult detention centers in Boston and all over New England?

The Psychology of Colors

As every advertiser, decorator and designer knows, we have emotional responses to colors.

If you are interested, here are the basics. The color wheel is made up of three primary colors — red, yellow and blue — and three secondary colors — orange (red + yellow), purple (red + blue) and green (blue + yellow). Yellow, red and orange are the “warm colors,” reminding us of fire. Blue (ice), green and purple are the “cool colors.”

Using contiguous colors together  (green trees + blue lake and sky) produces a peaceful feeling. Combining opposite colors (blue/orange, red/green, yellow/purple) creates a vibration of excitement. A woman in an extroverted mood might accent her green blouse with a red scarf. When she was feeling quieter, she might dress in neutrals (gray, black, brown) or contiguous colors.

The last two paintings which I posted, “Clementines” and “View of New York City,” used the blue/orange combination to produce interest.

View of New York City

This is a view from the “Top of the Rock”, Rockefeller Center. Looking north toward Central Park, this unfinished skyscraper caught my attention.

Our daughter Kate, son-in-law David and 12-year-old granddaughter Lila joined us in New York last week to meet baby Maggie and enjoy the sights. What a city!

Clementines

I’m working on a view of New York City for Monday’s post, so in the meantime here’s a painting from awhile ago of one of my favorite fruits. With gratitude to our dear late friend Ned Schofield for his photo that inspired the painting.

Tomorrow is my birthday. When I took my first watercolor class at age 49, never having done any art before that, I never dreamt of all the blessings it would bring, including making paintings and sketches to share with you.

Empire State in the Distance

Not until we looked twice down this Greenwich Village street did we realize we had an unexpected view of the Empire State Building.

Making informal sketches of these complex city scenes is daunting. My attempt at a sketch of Grand Central Station was so frustrating it ended up in the trash bin. I painted this from a photo I took on location. The only way to handle the scene was by simplifying and editing out a lot of detail, and I’m still not very happy with it.

Cousins Meet! And a cafe

Our two granddaughters met yesterday when our daughter Kate and her husband and daughter joined us in Brooklyn. Here is a photo of 12-year-old Lila meeting two-month-old Maggie for the first time!

And here is a drawing of a cafe.

Shakespeare Garden

On Wednesday my friend Tracey gave me a tour of Brooklyn Botanical Garden. What a beautiful place! The roses are in full bloom, the cherry blossoms have gone by, the Japanese garden is a peaceful place to escape the rush of the city. I especially loved the Shakespeare garden, which has over 60 plants and flowers mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays. Here’s a sketch of some of them.

Greenwich Village Sketches

Bruce and I took the subway to Greenwich Village yesterday and spent a couple of hours walking around, sitting on benches and in cafes. I did these sketches on a bench in front of a Portuguese coffee seller and in a playground. The figures are pretty rough, but they had no interest in standing still while I sketched them! After drawing on location, the paint was applied in a cafe and on the return subway ride. A fun way to really tune in to you’re seeing!

Brooklyn Baby

Bruce and I have driven to Brooklyn to spend the month of June helping our son Andrew and daughter-in-law Eva with our granddaughter, seven-week-old Maggie. We are so excited to spend time with this adorable baby, and to be in New York in June!

Since this is meant to be an art blog, rather than granddaughter adoration, I will add a painting I did a couple of years ago of another child at the beach.

The Magic of Watercolor

What I love about watercolor is the very thing that drives some people nuts: the difficulty of controlling it once wet paint touches wet paper. It’s much easier to control in the areas where the paper was dry. Often paintings are a combination of both.  See if you can pick out the parts of this painting where wet paint touched wet paper, and the parts where dry paper left clean edges.

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

In Cleveland before my Oberlin College Reunion this weekend, a bunch of us went to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I wasn’t expecting much, but it was really fun. A comprehensive look at the roots and branches of rock, lots of great music and videos, not to mention costumes, guitars and gift shop souvenirs. Here’s what it looks from the front, with 3-D letters that kids had fun climbing on. Worth a visit!

 

Botanical Gardens

I am on my way to my college reunion at Oberlin College in Ohio. A number of us spent a couple of days at a pre-reunion in nearby Cleveland. Yesterday some of us visited the Botanical Gardens, which are wonderful. I did this sketch (which gave me a workout on creating different shades of green) while sitting in the cloudforest greenhouse. Every afternoon they release more butterflies into the greenhouse. How many butterflies can you count in this sketch?

Cafes

Aren’t cafes the best? A place to buy some coffee and a croissant and sit down with your laptop and relax. Here’s a sketch I did at one of my favorite cafes. Since this customer wasn’t going to pose for me, I snapped a photo of her and did the sketch from my photo. There’s no need for people to be more than simple shapes.

Tea and Life

I love the poem below so I superimposed it on a painting.

I am sending you a painting every Monday and Friday, and sometimes Wednesday, at 5 p.m. I post it earlier on my blog at www.lynnholbein.com, which is a rolling blog starting with the recent postings and going back 1 1/2 years.  At 5:00 on M, W and F, WordPress automatically checks my blog and sees if there is anything new, and if so, it’s converted to an email and sent to you. The magic of technology!

Walk for Hunger

Yesterday was the Walk for Hunger, and it was lovely to walk along the Charles River and see the trees budding and hear the migrating birds singing. Thanks to everyone who enabled me to surpass my $5,000 goal! You have been so generous to me during my 38 years of walking. If you haven’t had a chance and would like to donate online, for my personal Walk page click here. I’ll mail you this year’s sketch, which I posted two weeks ago; here’s my “thank you sketch” from last year.

The food pantries and soup kitchens funded by the Walk are likely to come under increased stress in coming years. The House version of the Farm Bill now before Congress would tighten restrictions to qualify for food stamps. If passed, this would mean millions more adults and children could go hungry.

Unfurling

The few days when the leaves are unfurling are some of the more magical of the year. Right now, belatedly and all at once, that is happening in New England.

Most years I notice this process half-distractedly as I go about my day, and then suddenly the leaves are fully out, and I regret missing something. Sketching can be a sort of mindfulness meditation, so yesterday I decided to really focus. I clipped five different branches and brought them inside to draw and paint. Here’s the result.

Dinner with a Friend

My friend Linda and I went out to dinner last week. While we waited for dessert I used my portable watercolor kit (see previous post) to do this sketch. One fun thing about sketching is that it’s a conversation starter; we ended up having great conversations with two of the servers.

Portable Watercolor Kit

It’s fun to have a kit with watercolor supplies sitting by the front door, ready to grab as you go. If you find yourself in a waiting room or a coffee shop, you’re all set to make a quick sketch.

Here’s what’s in mine, both in and out of the bag. Each underlined word is a link to that item on Amazon. These supplies are surprisingly affordable, especially considering that watercolor paint, when rewetted, is good for years — the total cost of this kit is $47 plus $40 for the optional items.

Watercolor Palette with 24 colors and three waterbrushes. (Just $19!) (Video: how to use a waterbrush.) Field sketchbook. Sharpie. Bag. Ordinary #2 pencil. Napkin.  Optional four items top left: Kneaded eraser. Travel brush. Collapsible cup. Pencil Sharpener.

Walking for Hunger

Two weeks from today, on May 6th, I will be walking 10 miles for my 38th Walk for Hunger. Below is  my “thank you painting” I will mail to those who make a pledge to my walk.
One out of eleven Massachusetts residents are “food insecure.” The money raised by Walk pledges goes directly to the Newton Food Pantry and 400 other soup kitchens and food pantries across Massachusetts who offer free food to those who would otherwise go hungry. Donations go a long way because they are raised by volunteers and most of these pantries and soup kitchens are run by volunteers, plus the food is obtained from the Greater Boston Food Bank (which receives donations from grocery stores) for only 12¢ a pound.
I was honored last month to receive a “Walk of Fame” Award for raising over $50,000 in my history on the Walk. If you would like to sponsor me, click here to go to my  my personal Walk page.

Brooklyn Brownstones

When we were in Brooklyn last week for the birth of baby Maggie, I went to a cafe near the hospital and did this sketch of the buildings outside the window. Such a meditative way to spend a few minutes. Next Friday I’ll post a photo of the supplies I used, with links, in case you’re interested in creating a portable watercolor kit.

 

Goldfinches

We have returned from Brooklyn to Boston, and sadly are not there to celebrate (and sketch) Maggie’s one week birthday. On to more mundane topics.

New Englanders try not to complain, but the weather for the last two months has sucked. Spring is a figment of our memory and hope. On Monday during the Boston Marathon it was 43 degrees and pouring cold rain. The only popular place outdoors was our thistle feeder, and the goldfinches are molting into bright yellow their breeding plumage. As I sketched, I added a blue sky, which — if you live in Boston — you know was pure imagination.

 

A New Life!

Our beautiful granddaughter Maggie (Margaret Grace) was born to our daughter-in-law Eva and son Andrew in Brooklyn on Wednesday. 10 pounds 5 ounces, normal delivery, perfectly healthy. We are all thrilled and so blessed!

What potential does this new life hold?

Sara the Boy Bunny

As we await the birth of our granddaughter, I spent this morning looking through some of my older art. Here are some sketches of Sara, a lovable Dutch dwarf rabbit who lived with us for nine years. When we bought Sara, we were told she as a girl, and she looked incredibly feminine. Then one day, we babysat for a friend’s rabbit, and within seconds, Sara mounted the visiting rabbit. A month later this rabbit had babies. Thus we learned that Sara was misnamed, but it was too late for a name change.

Love

As we eagerly await the birth of our grandchild, I’ve been thinking about the overused word “love.” While it’s central to all the world’s religions, and found in nearly every pop song, what does it really mean? I like this quote from Sharon Salzburg, “When we really examine kindness,  we find it is a deep and abiding understanding of how connected we all are.”

Easter Bunny

You’d never know that spring is coming if you looked outside to see snow falling in Boston right now. But the bunnies who are appearing in the yards in our neighborhood seem to be confident that spring is on the way.

Meanwhile, Bruce and I are on pins and needles because our son Andrew’s wife Eva is 9 months pregnant with baby Maggie. We jump every time the phone rings, and can’t wait to hop in our car and head to Brooklyn for our granddaughter’s birth day!

Maryland’s Most Adorable Cat

My daughter-in-law’s birthday was yesterday, so I painted a portrait of Christopher and Angela’s cat Katie Rae (which they adopted from a shelter) as a present. Although I finished it awhile ago, I couldn’t send it out until after her birthday.

After 20 years of watercolors, I decided to try my hand at acrylics, so I took a class. Acrylics look a lot like oils but are water-based. Advantages: you can keep changing and correcting and revising. Unlike oil, there are no fumes and no messy cleanup. Disadvantages: You use a lot more paint than watercolors do, they are less portable, and if you get them on something they can harden. And when you can keep changing things forever, how do you know you’re finished? For me, there is nothing to match the convenience, lightness and transparency of watercolors. Which is why I’m still in love with watercolors, adorable cats notwithstanding.

Hills of San Francisco

Here is a sketch of Lombard Street, one of the more famous hilly streets of San Francisco. In order to get an overview of the city, I took a city tour with a guide who took seven of us in his VW bus. His VW had manual transmission, and we got a sense (audio and visual) of how profitable it must be to run a transmission repair business in the Bay area.

California Redwoods

During my trip to San Francisco last week,  my step-sister Elizabeth and I visited Muir Woods. Here’s what we learned from a lecture by a volunteer: Giant redwood trees can grow up to 320′ and live up to 2,000 years. They once covered the entire Northern Hemisphere worldwide. The climate changed and many of them gave way to other species, but there were still millions of acres of redwoods, especially on the West Coast. When white men came west, they discovered that the wood from these trees was resistant to insects and fire, so redwoods became the preferred building material. Finally, in 1909, there remained a small stand near San Francisco on land owned by William Kent. After the 1906 devastating earthquake and fire in San Francisco, the stand of trees was about to taken by eminent domain to rebuild the city. Through his Yale connections, Kent appealed to Teddy Roosevelt, who, with a stroke of the pen, and within days of the clearcutting, proclaimed Muir Woods a National Monument. It’s within an hour of the city and is a popular place to visit and see the world as it once was.

 

View of San Francisco

Last week I spent a week in San Francisco, visiting my friend Becky and my step-sister Elizabeth. What a beautiful city! I did this little sketch while sitting on the 9th floor observatory of the deYoung Museum. The museum is in Golden Gate Park, which is why the trees are in the foreground. I have a small Moleskine sketchbook which is “landscape format” (as opposed to “portrait format”) so it was perfect for this horizontal view.

 

Spring flowers

I returned from a week in San Francisco on Wednesday night to find a foot of snow on the ground in Boston. I can’t say I was sorry to be away for the two snowstorms we’ve had in a week! Bruce kindly stayed home and made sure no more of our trees fell around or on our house.

While I work on a couple of sketches of San Francisco, which I will post next week, here are a few poppies to remind us that spring is really, actually, eventually coming!

What do you see?

A semi-abstract painting, like this one, evokes a realistic scene, but has fun with color and shape. This is one of my favorites. You can see I used a variety of techniques , including painting on a section of wet paper, which flows, and painting on dry paper, which stays where it’s put.

Waiting for Takeout

Since the invention of the smartphone, we no longer feel we have the time to be bored and stare into space. There’s always email, news and Facebook to be checked. This time, as I waited for my order, I resisted the temptation to grab my smartphone and instead took out my sketchbook to draw the other people waiting to order or pick up their food. Sketching has much in common with meditation, because it brings you back to the present moment.

 

Pine Trees

Our suburban Boston neighborhood is blessed with many trees, including nine 60-80 foot tall white pines within ten feet of our house. On Friday, during the height of the Northeaster which hit the East coast, one of the trees uprooted and fell across our yard, snapping a telephone pole, blocking the street and cutting power to our neighborhood. Miraculously, it did not hit our house or our neighbors. On Saturday the tree men concluded that a second pine tree, about 150 years old, was unsafe, and that too was taken down. For a tree hugger like me, this is very sad, but we feel blessed that no people or houses were harmed.

Here is my watercolor of a stand of beautiful white pines.

Sheep in Patchwork Farmland

“Steal Like an Artist” is a book title which conveys a basic truth: much art is only partly original. We are inspired by the work of other artists, photographers, and more. When I saw the work of Louis Turpin I was especially delighted by his monochromes of the farmland of England, and I decided to try my own version. How many groups of sheep can you see? How many ponds? Do you see a barn?

A reminder that Sunday is the deadline to let me know if you’d like a copy a 124 page book of my 2017 Watercolors. At cost, it’s $36 plus $10 shipping. I’ll place the order on Monday.

Book of My Paintings

For Christmas our daughter Kate surprised me with a book of the paintings I posted throughout 2017.

The book came out beautifully, with high quality 8 1/2″ x 11″ paper and excellent colors, and I am going to order a number of copies. Each page has one of my sketches plus the narrative from that day. If you are interested in buying one at cost, they are $36 plus $10 shipping. Please let me know (just click “reply” and it goes right to my inbox) by next Sunday, March 4, and I will place the order next Monday.

 

From Job to Joy

For fourteen years, I loved teaching art to adults. Eventually though it became a chore to think up new lessons every week. When I stopped teaching several years ago, it helped bring some of the joy back into the process of painting. Painting to share with you is the “sweet spot” which makes me happy. This image popped into my mind — the universal desire to enjoy our work and lives more.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

“Connection” seems to be crucial in making us happy. Connecting to family and friends, to animals, to nature, to creativity, to our Higher Power. Nurturing connections takes time and effort, but we are repaid many times over. Here’s wishing you a mosaic of connections, big and small!

 

Nudes

The Newton Watercolor Society hires models to pose every other Saturday through the winter, and this week there were 20 people there to paint. What a privilege! The model starts with 2 minute poses, then 5, 10 and 20. Here are two of my sketches of 20 minute poses. You can see the pencil lines as I tried to get oriented. The skin color is a mixture of red and yellow.