An Art Retreat

Posted on November 18, 2025 by marciahillart

A couple of weeks ago I did a little three-day art retreat with an artist friend. We were at my home. I cleared out part of a room that had good light and we set up our art stuff, brought along plenty of materials and ideas, and spent three days painting. When I say “three days,” what I really mean is three 5 hour days with a brief lunch break. Painting takes incredible focus, and five hours of it just wiped us out. There is a reason the results are called “art work“! I know there are professional artists who work all day, but they have spent years building up to it. I usually work no more than a few hours at a stretch.

I made five paintings. Two are losers. Maybe I will eventually do something with them, but maybe not. One was not quite finished and I tweaked it over the following few days. But I will show you all of them here, in the interest of letting you see how erratic the process of painting can be. Years ago, when I first started painting, another pastelist invited me to see her studio. I remember her explaining her process, and at the end she said something like “…and if it’s not a success, I throw it in the fire.” It was wonderfully freeing. Not all paintings are a success, even for the most accomplished artist, and certainly not for me. Occasionally I can go back to one and change it up until it becomes something I like, but some just never see the light of day.

Here they are, in order in which I made them.

Observation Post

“Observation Post,” 8″ x 8″. I had already given some thought to how I wanted to approach this, which was very helpful. I knew that I wanted to add direction and texture to the sky to offset what was a fairly static image. I knew that I wanted the tree needles to be spiky and rough for the same reason, to add interest to the image. When I finished I was still not completely satisfied and felt that the color palette lacked spark. I added a line of red to the breast of the crow, which pleased me. It’s an ART crow, it’s not a real crow! And then I put a sprinkling of red in the tree as well. I quite like this one.

One of the losers. I feel that it just is not that good, and I’m not sure what I would do to salvage it. It’s from a photo I took in New York City, of all places, because I liked the curve of the trees. I do still like the concept, though, and may try again at some point.

Night Lights

“Night Lights.” I did get as far as titling this, but I still feel liken it is not quite “there” yet. It’s like the crow painting before I added the red – just a little too blah. I may go back to this if I get inspired about what it needs. Not a bad painting; it’s just not a good one.

At this point in the retreat, I was feeling discouraged. Three paintings into the process, and I only had produced one that I liked enough to frame and post. But I thought of an art workshop I took in which the instructor talked about the “four Cs” in art. They were concept, composition, color and commitment. Sometimes you just have to keep going. So I did.

Origins

“Origins,” 12″ x 18″. This is an interpretation of the origins of the universe. I was intimidated by the challenge of it, but I also really wanted to do it. So I did a couple of sketches first to figure out the composition, and then a very small version first (4″ x 6″), to see if I could work out color and other details. My artist friend suggested subtle shading of the background instead of pure black, and that helped. I finished the painting itself fairly quickly for something this size, probably because I had done all that preliminary work. I like it! It has drama and mystery, which I find intriguing.

“In My Mind,” 9″ x 12″. I did use one of my photos to remind me of a pattern in the clouds that I liked, but most of this was simply invented (thus the title). Really I just wanted to play with these colors: I just find purple, magenta, and gold so delicious. It has a vaguely landscape-y quality, but the landscape is really just in my mind. Even something that seems so loose and made up like this takes a lot of work to get the color balance, values (light and dark) and composition working. But it was fun to do.

Scotland Forever

“Scotland Forever,” 11″ x 14″. The reference photo was one I took in Scotland, land of heather, ancient stones, and brooding skies. The painting is not unlike the photos, but is more vibrant, of course, and I moved the tree to help the composition. I did a fair amount of color and value adjusting with this one, and this is the painting I continued to revise over the next few days. At first it was just too uniformly purple: purples in the skies, purples in the heather. I love the color and it’s a mistake I can make quite easily. Ultimately, I complicated and lightened the colors in the heather, adding muted pinks and blues. There are at least six or eight hues in there. I incorporated some soft gray-blue in the sky. I added in more grasses to give the scene the messiness of a real-life field. I recently discovered from an ancestry DNA site that I am a wee bit (as they would say in Scotland!) Scottish!

And that’s it. A productive three days. Wearing, discouraging, fun, and satisfying – which is pretty much how you might describe anything worth doing.

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She’s baaaack!

Posted on April 9, 2025 by marciahillart

It has been a slow few painting years for me. In 2022, I fell down a flight of stairs and it took several months to recover from the concussion. In 2023, I was pulled over by a dog eager to get to a treat someone had, and broke my femur. I was in the hospital 8 days because of blood loss, and the surgeon had to insert a metal rod into my femur. It was a long recovery. (A quick public service announcement here: If you can donate blood, please do so. I would have been out of the hospital sooner if they had had enough blood to give me.) In 2024 – at least this one was planned! – I had knee replacement surgery, during which the surgeon also removed the rod from my femur. My new knee is terrific! And then this year, my dormant macular degeneration suddenly got worse and my vision is affected. Trust me, you don’t want to know what the treatment is!

Here’s a painting from the x-ray after the femur surgery. My local group of pastellists decided we would all paint “Interiors,” and I figured that this was pretty much as interior as it gets!

But I finally feel back to myself, more or less, and have finished four paintings so far this year.

“The Knowing Forest,” 13″ x 17″

“An Afternoon in March,” 11″ x 14″

“Running Away From Home,” 10″ x 8″

“June’s Generosity,” 8″ x 10″

It feels good to be painting regularly again! In a recent interview, Henry Winkler said that being old is like living in a bad neighborhood: anything can happen. Exactly. I hope the fates leave me alone for a bit!

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Two New Abstracts

Posted on February 27, 2024 by marciahillart

Where do abstracts come from? Damned if I know. I know where most representational painting comes from: I see something that strikes me and even if I change it, I am trying to convey the thing that called to me initially. Abstracts are an entirely different matter. They are not a response to something outside. Sometimes they are a response to something inside, like this one….

My two most recent abstracts, though, are from something more, well, abstract: an impulse to say something with color. Both paintings developed from the center outward, meaning that I started by thinking about that horizontal line and a color that I wanted to put next to it. Then I played with it in my mind, imagining different colors and how they might play off one another as well as how they might feel all together. Often I turned it over in my mind as I went to sleep. I spent weeks doing this. Eventually I tried painting little sketches, about 5″ x 7″, to see how the colors looked in reality.

Finally, when I had a sense of where I was going, I went to the easel for the real thing. But even then, the painting morphed and changed as I went along. After a certain point, whether abstract or representational, you have to put aside your image and let the painting tell you what it needs. I realize that this sounds kind of “woo-woo,” but it’s not, really. I start to see where I could improve color harmony, or balance; where I think something would be better off softened and pushed back, or where more detail or a touch of light would make it sing.

Here is “Hypothesis,” which is 11″ x 17″

It’s almost a landscape, isn’t it? It started that way in my mind, as a kind of simplified landscape, with the bright green line against the magenta. But then I wanted a little variation in the color of the line, which looked too static, and added the turquoise. I had intended initially to have smooth transitions from the yellow to orange underneath and the magenta to purple above, but as I was putting the color in, I found myself liking the variability in the transition, so it stayed, and even increased.

This is “An Alternative Explanation,” which is 12″ x 18″.

This painting started similarly, with the idea of the red-orange line against that bright yellow-green. This one really does not look like a landscape at all, except that it sort of has something you could see as a horizon. I intended that the red-orange line be more even, but as I drew it in the initial sketches, I got sloppy. And then I started to correct and ended up with a forked line, and then I liked that even more. The yellow-green looked too blah when I put it in and I started varying the thickness. As one part on the left started drooping down, I decided to bring it down to the bottom of the paper. Some of the green looked a little wave-like, so I went with that. I forget how the red “stars” in the top came about, but I share critiques with a painter friend (Cindy Griffith), and she suggested making them slightly more prominent. You don’t really see them right away, but you do see them, and they echo that red line.

I have no idea where the titles came from. I guess I wanted titles that were as abstract as the paintings, and these popped into my head, so there you are!

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Nocturnes

Posted on January 20, 2022 by marciahillart

Night. Our limited vision at night colors the concept for humans. It can have an edge – or more than an edge – of fear: the unseen assailant, the “things that go bump in the night.” Night’s darkness offers a kind of freedom as well: think of block parties at night, dancing and kissing in the dark. And darkness can feel cocooning, especially on soft summer nights.

In paintings, night scenes are a wonderful way to focus on light. A nocturne, after all, is all about light: the light from buildings or cars or signs or the moon.

My most recent painting is a nocturne. In this, I wanted to express first the welcoming quality of the light from a house. Your house, perhaps, or mine; this is meant to represent more a concept of home than any particularity. In my imagination, it’s a gentle summer evening. It has rained, but now the sky is clearing. The moon is there too, but I wanted the viewer to find it later, a kind of sweet reminder of the rural night.

“Welcome Home,” 12″ x 9″

Here are some other nocturnes I’ve done over the years.

“December Walk,” 9″ x 9″

This bridge in Montpelier had been strung with Christmas lights and then is snowed heavily. I loved the bright blurs of the lights under the snow. When this couple walked across the bridge hand in hand, I knew I had my image. Here is night as a time for romance and magic.

“Rural Mailbox,” 9″ x 12″

This is from a photo taken at our village’s Fourth of July fireworks. It is not quite dark and the crowd is gathering, laying down blankets on the field and chatting with neighbors. Here is a warm summer night. As you look at the house, imagine the sound of voices and children running around laughing and the feeling of anticipation behind you.

“Rainy Montpelier Night,” 9″ x 12″

Umbrellas and people standing in doorways: the rain has stopped for the moment. I loved the wash of reflected neon on the sidewalk. Here is night in town, with the shops and restaurants inviting you in.

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The Emotional Sky

Posted on September 24, 2021 by marciahillart

During the pandemic, my art changed completely. I painted symbolic images about the pandemic. I painted a few desolate landscapes and a couple of abstracts. Then I laid fallow for a bit, unsure of what came next. But I have found it: I am painting skies.

At a workshop with Liz Haywood-Sullivan, she said, “The sky is the most emotional part of the landscape.” It’s true, the sky can be extraordinarily expressive. It conveys everything from tranquility to terror.

You would think that skies would be easy to paint. After all, no one knows what a particular configuration of clouds looks like, so it’s certainly not a matter of accuracy. And a peaceful sky is not too hard to paint: you choose color gradations, a light source, and blend carefully. But a dramatic sky is another matter. In painting clouds, I am always thinking about making them look cloud-like, and you might be amazed at how often I struggle with that. Also, I am continually assessing the pattern of the clouds. It’s almost a form of abstract painting, which is also not as easy as I used to imagine. Composition is critical with a cloudy sky (or a sunrise/sunset), so I rearrange them or change their shape. Thinking purely in terms of composition and shape without reference to familiar objects is definitely abstract painting.

Clouds are more than shapes, though, they are carriers of light. I think this is what I find most compelling, and also most challenging. Every landscape painting needs consideration of the source of the light. Clouds, though, hold the light in complicated ways, and the painting won’t work until I figure that out.

Here is a painting I did just as the country was transitioning to the Biden presidency and just as vaccines were becoming available. What does this sky say to you?

“First Light,” 16″ x 20″

Here’s a recent sunrise photo, although I titled it as if it were sunset. Do you see the balance between the light and dark areas? The pattern of the salmon-colored clouds and the blue clouds? My goal was to bring the eye back and forth across the painting, from the darkest blue clouds in the upper left, across and down the angle of the salmon-colored clouds, and finally to the mist between the hills.

“A Graceful Ending,” 11″ x 14″

And finally, a recent painting that pushes the abstract aspect of the sky. Here there is no reference at all to the landscape per se. I have abandoned realistic color altogether and made a turquoise cloud against a dark red sky. I love this painting, and it hangs over my desk at home.

“Upswept,” 14 1/2″ x 17″

This, to me, is pure feeling.

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Self-Portrait

Posted on March 18, 2021 by marciahillart

I’ve never painted a self-portrait. I guess I never saw the point, really, although I know of an artist who painted a number of them because he himself was the easiest and least expensive model he could get. However, I belong to a small group of local artists and we are taking turns suggesting things for all of us to paint. The most recent challenge was to paint a self-portrait.

I knew right away that I wanted to do a pandemic self-portrait, mask and all. Because most of my face would be covered, I wanted to make my eyes as realistic as possible. And I wanted to include an exaggerated version of what I’ve been calling my “pandemic hair.” I have not had a professional haircut (or color, my color of the last several years being blue) since March of 2020. My partner cut my hair very short last May and I have not done anything about it since then. I have thick hair, and as it’s grown it seems to have acquired a life of its own, waving around my face in often ridiculous shapes. As I thought of the self-portrait, I visualized my hair waving all about, flying out away from my head.

I have found that symbolic paintings like this need a fair amount of time to develop in my imagination before I can start to paint. As time passed, I imagined leaves in my hair as well. And then I thought that I might include snowflakes, too. Finally, a few days later, I suddenly thought: and a bird! I could have a bird perched on my head! In this, I may have been inspired by a friend telling me a couple of months prior about one of her chickens flying up and landing on her head. What a story! I wish I’d had a chicken on my head! So this was my chance to have something similar. With the decision to add the bird, the painting in my imagination felt complete, so I started work.

I needed to find an image of a bird, so I looked in my bird identification book. I looked first at songbirds, searching for one that was positioned the way that I wanted. Finally, there it was, a photo of a yellow-throated vireo, a bird that was beautiful, positioned just the way I had in mind, and that even comes to Vermont.

Portraits are interesting to paint. Unless you want to forego reality (a perfectly legitimate choice), you do need to get it right. I once heard an artist define a portrait as a painting of a person in which the mouth is not quite right. So true! For this painting, I took a photo of myself wearing a mask by using a mirror. Then I printed it out, sized it, covered the back of the paper with pastel, held it up to my painting surface, and used a pencil to go over the primary lines. Voila! A faint “sketch” of my face with the proportions all correct.

Painting my eyes was not as difficult as I had imagined it might be. I think it was just one of those things that happens sometimes with painting. Occasionally I have to struggle and struggle to get what I want and occasionally it just comes. Mostly it’s somewhere in between. This one just came. I painted the rest of my face (mostly mask) and my crazy floating hair. I decided that the kinds of leaves in my hair mattered to me, and I chose oak and witch hazel, both trees important to the Celts, my ancestors. Once I had done that, I realized that adding snowflakes would detract rather than add to the image. Then I painted the bird. Then final tweaking. Here is the result. I am very happy with it indeed, because I feel that it shows something true about who I am. And that, I suppose, is the definition of a successful portrait! [“Pandemic Self-Portrait,” 10″ x 10″]

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Landscape Contrasts

Posted on February 1, 2021 by marciahillart

Landscape may seem like an ” it is what it is” kind of subject, but in fact it can be remarkably expressive. The subject matter is part of this: What is the weather? How is the light? Is it stark or lush? And some, of course, is the interpretation of the artist: What do I choose as a focus? How large is the painting? What do I do with color or movement? The artist makes dozens of choices, and each one contributes to what the painting says.

Here is my last painting of 2020. The political situation was beyond awful; it was frightening. Thousands of people were dying of COVID-19 every day. Our lives were constricted and every action outside one’s home required strategizing about safety.

“The 2020 Landscape,” 8″ x 8″

For me, this image expresses this time well. it is small and the color is muted. There is a path, but it is unclear where it leads. It is desolate. We were desolate.

Here, in contrast, is a landscape I just finished (early 2021). We are far from OK politically, but at least we have a president who is interested in the welfare of the country. He has appointed capable people. His early actions have addressed the pandemic, climate change, and human rights. Vaccine distribution for COVID-19 has started. In my state, I will be eligible for the vaccine within a month. If vaccination is widespread enough, we will return to something approaching the before-pandemic days by this summer or fall.

“First Light,” 16″ x 20″

The light! This painting is much larger and does not feel so constrained. The dark clouds are prominent, but they are not the whole story. Light after darkness is perhaps the most joyous of light.

May your vaccination be soon. May your spirit find hope.

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Art as a Political Act

Posted on December 31, 2020 by marciahillart

When George Floyd was killed – yet another Black man dead at the hands of the police – I thought a lot about this country’s reaction to racial differences. We have struggled throughout our entire history with this evil. It changes form, but it is still deeply embedded in our culture.

These paintings are part of my response to that.

“We Are America 1”
“We Are America 2”
“We Are America 3”
“We Are America 4”

“We Are America 5”
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Pandemic Art #2

Posted on May 13, 2020 by marciahillart

I have been continuing to make pandemic art. I am finding that most of these paintings require a lot more preparation than my usual paintings do. I’ll give a couple of examples as I post them here.

“Pandemic 6”   Much of this one was developed while I was painting it. I knew the general concept and feeling that I wanted, but chose colors as I went along, changing and refining them until The result was what I wanted to convey.

 

“Pandemic 7” This continues the theme of the prior two paintings. For this painting, I looked at many, many images of rocks online, then chose three or four to print out. The rock I painted is a combination of the images as well as my own invention. I learned quite a lot about painting rocks doing this!

 

“Pandemic 8: Choose”  Perhaps really fantastic artists can paint anything from their mind, but I am not among those! I looked and lots of images of birds as well as plenty of photos of rope knots. I had an image in my mind, and of course nothing I found online was a match. But I printed out enough close ones to give myself something to look at for the particulars. I tried a couple of ways of conveying the balancing of the two images, before settling in the narrow pointed shape with the line across the top.

 

“Pandemic 9” This was relatively straightforward. I gave some thought to the colors I wanted and sketched out the design. I did look at photos of people expressing horror: all were similar, so I had a good idea of how to proceed. I wanted it fast and rough, so focus on detail was not necessary.

 

“Pandemic 10” I did not need reference photos for this one, but it took quite a long time to sketch. Precision mattered here. I also reworked the color a number of times until I felt that it suggested depth, circularity, and perhaps a spinning. I used acrylic paint for the tiny white spatters.

Every time I finish one of these I think, well, perhaps that’s all. And then I imagine another image, or part of one, and apparently that is not all. I wonder how this series will develop. After all, we are only a couple of months into the pandemic. I got my hair cut in early March, and I remember thinking, “I hope this is safe,” but avoiding that kind of contact was not quite on anyone’s radar at that point. Within a week, everything was feeling potentially dangerous. Within a week, we had an official national emergency. By the end of the month, there had been hundreds of deaths in the United States. Now, only six weeks after that, life seems irrevocably changed.

Be well, stay safe, and take care of one another.

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Pandemic Art

Posted on April 6, 2020 by marciahillart

In less than two months, our world has changed dramatically: We now live in the time of a plague. Many have said that the world will never be the same, and it is my fervent hope that humanity in general, and the United States in particular, can use this as a portal to transformation.

I was working on a painting of a winter tree as things started to unfold, and without any particular intent on my part, I found the painting taking a somewhat unusual turn. It was stylized, with shimmering color. It was clear to me that the painting was no longer a portrait of a winter tree, but now represented something about the onset of the pandemic. Here is “Pandemic 1.”

Almost as soon as I finished this painting, another image occurred to me. This has not been the way I have usually painted. Almost always, I start with an image, generally a photo. I may change some of the particulars, and in fact I often do. Sometimes I turn the image over in my mind for hours or days, looking for ways to help the painting reflect what I want to express. But in this case, the image shaped itself in my mind, and I explored it mentally as a way to imagine the final version. I have heard it said that you cannot create what you cannot imagine, and I find that true in life as well as art.

Here is “Pandemic 2.”

I had no sooner finished this than I knew what the next painting was. Thus, “Pandemic 3.”

It took a while, but only a matter of a few days, to know what the next image would be. In this case, I started more directly with a feeling I wanted to portray, and then got a sense of the basic shapes, and finally worked out the colors. Some of the final decisions were made at the easel. “Pandemic 4: Some Will Live and Some Will Die.”

Finally, the most recent, completed two days ago: “Pandemic 5.”

Each of these images has significance to me and each expresses something about the experience of living in these times. But I will refrain from saying my interpretation. (Except, of course, for “Pandemic 4,” which is the only one that I knew had an explanatory subtitle. Interestingly, it’s the only abstract as well.) Art belongs to the viewer as much as to the artist, and you will have your own meanings for these paintings.

I already know the gist of the next image, and am in the process of working out some of the particulars in my mind. This whole process has been so interesting. Although all of my art is expressive, I have never created in this way. The art seems to have its own agenda.

Be well. Stay safe. Create something.

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