Kate Aubrey's Art Blog

I am delighted to announce that my painting, “First Fiddle” has been accepted into the National Watercolor Society’s 104th International Open Exhibition. This has been a dream of mine for more years than I want to say, and I am beyond honored.

Thank you to the wonderfully knowledgeable and hard-working people who make this one of the premiere ...

Welcome!

Thanks for checking out my “new” website. This has been a year of big changes for all of us, I think, and my website was part of that. Numerous and rapid tech changes left it in the dust a while back, so it’s really a pleasure to be able to get in and post and enjoy all the work my wonderful webmaster has done. Thank you, Kara at B4 ...

As my 30 days of thumbnails wind to a close, I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve only scratched the surface of what they will teach me. The more of them I do, the more I will learn. Take today’s photo of the dock scene on the index page for my blogs as an example. I love the colorful fishing buoys you can find in any harbor on Cape Cod, especially ...

For the longest time, I resisted doing 3-value thumbnails. Oh, I did “thumbnails”, don’t get me wrong. But black, white and only one medium gray? No, no, no. Surely you jest. There had to be shading in there; maybe not as much as in a value sketch, but at least three or four grays. And doing those sketches helped. I discovered all kinds of things ...

I've become addicted to online challenges. They keep me honest. I say I'm going to do something, like post a new Apple painting every day for thirty days, and I actually do it. Why?

Because You Are Watching.

That's it; it's that simple. If I don't post, you notice. Since letting people down hits about six dozen childhood hot buttons, I pull ...

Several years ago in Reno, NV, I took the first of two workshops with Ted Nuttall. In a workshop setting, he’s a quiet, thoughtful man with a deep well of understanding when it comes to painting people. Specific people. Real people with hopes and dreams and hurts and loves. He teaches care-fully as he paints and he taught me several things I ...

At last. The finished painting I wrote about in my last two, and the funny thing about it? The part that looks hardest was easiest. Yup, the dreamer, herself just flowed; it was keeping the background loose while darkening it that took the most time, thought and effort. That and achieving the final balance, which merits an entire blog on its own.

I’ve had to face it. I’m not one of the artists people write how-to-get-inspired books for. There are so many paintings I dearly want to paint that I’m not going to live long enough to do them all. And that’s today. Tomorrow there will be more; and the week after that, and the week after that. 

The more I learn as an artist and a person, the ...

Well, everyone, here I go. This is my first blog on my brand new, not-completely-loaded website, and I’m nervous. Excited. A little appalled at what I’m attempting. And unwilling to procrastinate any longer. So here goes:

After yet another missed competition deadline, I stepped back a few weeks ago and said, “Hey. What’s going on? What am I ...

Last Friday, while a friend and I were trying to find some time in our busy schedules to get together and talk art, we commiserated about how hard it is to pull painting time away from family and friends and responsibilities. Is there anyone out there who can’t relate to that?

It doesn’t matter whether you snatch an hour to paint on Saturdays or ...

I really do. Taking them and giving them. Workshops with good teachers are a sure-fire cure for the creative humdrums.

That means the year has started out beautifully, because I had the opportunity to give a floral workshop in Reno, Nevada -- my old stomping grounds -- during the second weekend of January. It was a wonderful experience.

I don’t ...

After Jeannie McGuire. While I haven’t worked myself up to using a lot of titanium white, the way she started with intense color and deep darks grabbed me by the throat and shook me. Wow, I thought, and plunged into my own painting after her demo.

The first stroke on “The Committee” (three men above right) would never have happened if I hadn’t ...

A couple of years ago, my friend Charlie came back from his first Charles Reid workshop flying high. He told us Reid puts in his darkest dark first, then went from there to build the painting. He was intrigued and excited by the process, and his enthusiasm was catching. Hmm, I thought, I’m going to try that on one of my paintings.

Of course, I ...

Well, it was a heck of a winter, and now summer is sweeping me away!  Taking the winter months to paint and learn turned out to  be exactly the right thing to do despite requests to teach here on Cape Cod.

I started with Mary Moquin’s Master Class. In it she concentrates on helping artists find their “voice”...that is, how to get the emotion into ...

Those of you who have known me for a while know that I’ve been working hard to take that next big step in my art development. I felt like every painting I finished, no matter what the subject or approach, was just like the last one I had done. I both wanted and needed something more.

I started with Steve Quiller, who told me to draw less on the ...

It has been a most amazing winter. Just over a week ago, I was painting en plein aire not far from the place where this photo was taken.

Today, on the other hand, I’ve spent my time recovering from a whole lot of snow shoveling yesterday.

I keep seeing this in my head with deep, warm pockets of colors in the negative shapes between the trees ...

Hi, all. If you’ve been trying to find my website, it’s been offline while I changed hosts. If you can read this, it means I’ve finally got things straightened out.

There’s more, though. I’ll be upgrading my operating software during this next week, and I don’t know what kind of glitches I might have, so pray for me. I’m not sure to whom. Just ...

Well, the hustle and rush is done at last. The cards are sent; the gifts are mailed, and friends are duly missed. To all my past students, you have made a huge impact in my life. The gifts you have given me, the ways you have touched me cannot be numbered or even described. I would not be precisely who or where I am without you.

In these coming ...

This is not a normal winter. Everyone from Boston to Provincetown says so. Here it is, December 18th, and we have just gotten our first snow here in Falmouth. All 1/64 of an inch of it.

Hey, I’m not complaining; we’ve had plenty to get used to for the last half year, so the reprieve has been welcome. I’m just kind of amazed. It actually felt good ...

Good models are hard to find. Excellent models are downright rare, so finding an excellent model who connects with your muse is like a marine biologist finding a new pod of endangered whales. When you find one, it can spark a whole new series.

Which is what has happened. The young woman above is a local model and artist who is very good at what ...

OK, here we go. We’re settled in, I’m meeting new maybe-friends, and joy of joys, only two boxes are left to unpack! It’s time to talk art!

The single biggest difference from Nevada to Massachusetts is the trees. There must be 400 different kinds in any square mile. That’s a lot of greens. It’s like Ireland or Great Britain: if you want to paint ...

We got our first goldfinch today! Those of you who visited my studio in Reno know that I love feeding the birds, especially goldfinches. Well, I finally got it together enough to buy some thistle seed and put out the single feeder I’ve been able to find. (The other two are down in the basement, because those are the only boxes left.) Then I ...

It's amazing how quickly life can return to normal. It almost feels like there wasn't a huge storm last weekend. It also implies our life here has developed a "normal" mode again. I like that.

Cape Cod in the summer is inundated with visitors, so much so that the road system is really strained. High season only lasts for two months, though, so ...

We made it! Yay! The last half of the hurricane was worse than the first, which surprised me. The wind would back off for a while, crouching like a cat shuffling its back paws into a better position...shuffle again...once more for perfection and... POUNCE! The back off and repeat. This went on for a good five hours.

Fortunately, Irene was ...

Mother Nature doesn't sleep. I woke up at 3:00 a.m. Still no wind, but when I parted the blinds, those tattered-soft San Francisco clouds were racing across the sky.

OK. Time to crack a window open on the house's lee side. That's to equalize pressure inside the house with the rapidly falling pressure on the outside of the house. I didn't know ...

Waiting for a hurricane is an odd pastime. For us, it's been one-third final errands (topping off the gas tank, searching for one more flashlight in shopped-out stores, getting a few more groceries), one-third prep (I just finished filling the bathtub with water so toilets can be flushed), and one-third watching the storm's progress in the skies ...

Enough bragging. Life is full of other interesting stuff, too.

Like Irene. That's Hurricane Irene to those of you who are just now hearing about the mandatory evacuation of New York City. Since this is our first hurricane/tropical storm, I thought I would post what it's like here on the blog.

Today, we've just finally figured out that the best ...

You’ve all heard of the Big Fish Little Pond Scenario, haven’t you? Well, so had I, and believe me, there are so many highly accomplished artists out here “on-Cape” that I was feeling a bit intimidated.

The best cure for that, of course, is to take a deep breath and plunge in, so that’s what I did. Paintings were finished and framed. Shows were ...

...we’ve seen a lot of them in the last seven weeks; we being one husband, one incredible brother-in-law, one poodle, and one cat. My apologies to those of you who haven’t heard from me during that time period.

With almost no notice, we had 3 weeks to fly to Massachusetts, get a rental to live in (which we did not get, actually, until the day the ...

It’s been a while, but despite prolonged family illness, death, and a car wreck...oh, did I leave out war and famine?... I’m back. Oh, boy, am I back! I just got news that my painting, Guardians at the Gate, has been accepted into the Northwest Watercolor Society 71st Open Exhibition!

For the uninitiated, the NWWS is one of the top-tier ...

Excitement comes in all sizes and shapes these days. From requests to teach workshops to the upcoming Scotland trip to study with master water media artist Stephen Quiller, this has been an amazing few months. And it just keeps coming!

Recently, I entered “23rd Psalm” (below) and “Remembrance” (see my Florals) in the Richeson 75 Still Life & ...

Remember me saying how much I learned from Mike Bailey? (Getting Serious About Design, Sunday, May 30) Well, I got another boost from excellent artist, Jane Hofstetter (7 Keys to Great Paintings). Right in the middle of her demo last month, everything just went “click”...you know, the kind of “click” you feel everywhere in your body.

I went ...

If you are looking for someone to help you with design, I have a couple of great names: Mike Bailey and Jane Hofstetter. Back in March, I took “Watercolor - Beyond the Obvious” from Mike and learned so much that I was dreaming about painting all night long. It was great! I’m still jazzed.

A couple of months later, I got to watch Jane Hofstetter, ...

I am incredibly excited about this coming August and September. A deep love of the United Kingdom has something to do with it, of course, but add a Stephen Quiller workshop to it, and now you’re talkin’, honey! Aside from being a phenomenal painter, that man can teach!

Armed with the amazing insights I gained during Mike Bailey’s “Watercolor ...

For those of you who thought I’d forgotten, here is the sunflower painting I demonstrated in last year’s Summer Flowers in Watercolor class at TMCC’s Continuing Ed campus. Not only that, it has been accepted into the Richeson 75 Still Life/Floral International Competition in Wisconsin! Here is a photo to show you where I was when we ran out of ...