Boundary Paintings: Squaring Squares

Boundary 6. 24”x24” Oil on canvas. 2021

I have a new series of paintings just in time for spring! I’ve named it the Boundary Series and they come from the idea of a quadrat, a square that marine ecologists use to mark off a square on the beach or intertidal. They count all of the animals or plants found within the square and do some math to calculate species diversity.

I wondered what it would be like to drop a quadrat square in the ocean. Oceanographers simplify the ocean into squares and cubes for study, but it’s hard to imagine one square meter of water because water is always moving. What if your square misses the thing you want to measure? Is it possible to impose rigid boundaries on something fluid and ephemeral?

2021: We Could All Use Some Extra Love This Year

What a long, strange year it has been! This time last year, I was shopping for plane tickets to Baja to go see the gray whale calving ground near Loreto. Amazing trip! There were more gray whales than I could count in Magdalena Bay, active, and mating, and babies everywhere. And enormous blue whales in the Sea of Cortez. The tour operators use pangas which are small boats that sit really low in the water, so the whales seem really close. I imagine it’s like kayaking next to a submarine, even though I’ve never seen a submarine in real life!

I guess I’m fantasizing. I miss the sun this time of year! And being warm. And on the water. With whales. And fish tacos. I wish I had photos to share, but I was too busy experiencing life to document anything. In the age of influencers and curated posts, I highly recommend taking some time to STOP documenting life. Just live it.

Sometimes it feels like I’ll never travel again.  Last year when I left Seattle, the world was still ‘normal’. COVID had begun, but nobody was too worried in the US yet. One week later the world had changed. The border officials at the Loreto Airport were wearing surgical masks. There were a few empty seats on the airplane. It still didn’t sink in for me. Not long after that cases were discovered in King County. And the NBA cancelled its season. And Seattle shut down.

And the world changed. On the plus side, I can make a mean cast iron pizza. I have time to make art. I made and sent Christmas cards this year, something I rarely manage to do. And my card making has expanded into a whole group of screen-printed wave-themed cards. Then I remembered IT’S ALMOST VALENTINE’S DAY! I NEED A VALENTINE’S CARD! AAAAAHHHHHH!!!

I came up with the Waves of Love card. It’s a limited edition—I’m only ever going to make 50 of them. They are hand screen-printed by me in metallic gold on heavy 140lb. watercolor paper. I send them in rigid mailers so you can fill them out yourself. OR, tell me what you want to say and I’ll fill it out and mail it for you! Totally worth ten bucks! I’m selling them on my website, and in my Etsy shop. I think we could all use a little love note this year, that special someone, mom, BFF. And if we send enough of them we can make our own Wave of Love!

Shop Link: Here

Etsy Shop: etsy.com/shop/LizEwingsStudio

Seattle Night

New little watercolor—Seattle Night from a CLEAR, that’s right CLEAR winter night. And by clear, I mean NO RAIN!! Whew! I walked around outside just to remember what dry air feels like. Air. Hee-hee! Can you tell I’m giddy from the lack of rain? Enjoy the weekend.

Winter Trees

Welcome to 2021! We’re less than two weeks into it, and things already feel crazy. I wondered what to expect to see falling out of the sky, so I checked the Seattle Weather Blog. Did you know that Seattle has already had 5” of rain this year? No wonder that’s what I’ve been painting! It’s one of my favorite things to paint. Car headlights and streetlights reflect off the wet streets at night like Las Vegas neon swimming in a pool.

Slow Snap: Painting Still Life in the Age of Instagram

Googling ‘still life blogs’ summons a list of photographic blogs, written blogs, as well as a few blogs about oil painting. The term ‘still life’ refers to a drawing, painting, or photograph of an arrangement of one or more non-living objects. In French, they are known as nature morte, dead nature.

I began my foray into still life painting to visualize what diatoms would look like on land. Diatoms are microscopic organisms that live in the ocean and photosynthesize. They are the base of the marine food web, an ocean analogue for plants.

Still Life With Glasses Red Yellow Green 14" x 11" Oil on Panel 2020 © Liz Ewings

What would diatoms look like on land? I have photos of them taken under a microscope. Their appearance changes dramatically with different lighting, so they would probably look completely different out of the water. But like what? The exterior of a diatom is made of glass, and inside are colored pigments used for photosynthesis. Glasses filled with colored water seem like the best available proxy. I used a completely blank light colored paper background to separate the colors of the reflections and shadows from everything else.

Reflections of colored light on other glasses and in their shadows fascinate me. I added a plastic bottle half filled with colored water to see the difference in texture and reflectivity between glass and plastic.

Still Life With Overlap 11" x 14" Oil on board. 2020 © Liz Ewings

Once I noticed how the colors played off other glasses, I thought it would be interesting to line the glasses up and look through them at the transparency. And because the interplay between the objects is interesting. And aren’t relationships the only thing that really matters to humans?

Is an iPhone photograph of a painting of glasses of colored water. Is that a meta still life? Second derivative of a still life? Or just a really slow snap?