Speaking of Art Blog

Lavender Glow, pastel, 11x14"

What is so special about the Indiana Dunes?

“The Indiana sand dunes are a treasure trove of nature featuring more than 1,100 flowering plant species and ferns, as well as more than 350 species of birds. The park covers 15,000 acres with 50 miles of hiking trails.  There are multiple ecosystems packed into the park: sand dunes, wetlands, prairie, river, and forest.”  –Rand McNally, 2019

Since early May when I learned of my new Artist-in-Residency (AIR for short), I have enjoyed exploring places new to me at the Indiana Dunes National Park.  Some of those explorations have been with a ranger guide.  I love learning and so these learning excursions have been a special treat.  But I have become completely overwhelmed at times with the mind-boggling diversity in the plant life alone.  I was trying to keep up with the identification of ALL the wildflowers I’ve been seeing along the trails, but it’s become too much, especially this spring with the huge proliferation of flowers like I’ve never seen before.  My appreciation for the knowledgeable naturalists employed by the Indiana Dunes National Park has soared.

There are several wildflowers that look exactly alike.  The only way to tell them apart sometimes is to compare each plant’s height, the shape and size of their leaves, and their habitats, NOT how their petals look.  The same can be said for some butterflies, which I’m also looking for while I’m hiking.  One seemingly minor detail like whether there’s an extra white dot on their wing in a certain spot determines what kind of butterfly they are.  Wow!  I do like knowing about my subject before I paint it, but this amount of knowledge is on a whole new level.  Is it necessary?  I’m not sure.  I guess time will tell.  I’m starting to make a list of all the possible subjects I might paint.  So far I’m sticking with the ones I can identify.  Maybe I’ll start small with some unknowns and only tackle a few from my hundreds of photos I’m accumulating on a weekly basis now.

Am I enjoying this?  Yes, very much.  But at the same time, it’s also totally overwhelming.  I think I need to listen to a good friend’s advice just last week: “Mary Ann, you don’t have to become a park ranger by the end of your residency.  Just zero in on what interests you.”  Problem is, I’m interested in ALL OF IT right now.  Overload, overload, time to take a breath and prioritize.  Identifying pastel brands by glancing at a mish-mosh pile of pastels and noticing their characteristic shapes and sizes is so much easier for me.  But I think it’s pretty exciting that even though I’ve lived within 2 miles of the Indiana Dunes for over 30 years, I’m now discovering that that same park is teeming with such a diversity of life that I didn’t take the time to notice before.  Watching a sunset over Lake Michigan while I sit on my favorite dune is awesome, but so is learning about all the plants and trees and flowers and birds and butterflies and wildlife over there too.  It’s ALL amazing.  It leaves me breathless and humbled.

This week I received a very important letter in the mail.  It was from the Indiana Dunes National Park headquarters congratulating me on being chosen to serve as an Artist-in-Residence in 2023 for the Indiana Dunes National Park.  What an honor!

What does that entail?  I will be hand writing 14 journal entries into a communal AIR journal, recording my thoughts and impressions as I explore the national park while I experience it as of an artist.  I will also be gathering reference photos and storing away memories that I will then combine to create a 2-D piece of artwork that I will donate to the Indiana Dunes National Park, to become a permanent part of the US National Parks’ artistic archives.

I’ve always had a special connection with the Indiana Dunes my whole life.  I can still remember coming to the Indiana Dunes to camp with my family and several other families as I grew up.  We would always arrive on Father’s Day.  We kids would hike up the sand dunes and then race to the bottom again, play in the waves of Lake Michigan, watch the sun set over the lake at night, and sing around the campfire.  We would wake to the sounds of birds we never heard singing at home in a south suburb of Chicago 35 minutes away, and we would gawk as graceful deer would sometimes cross our path while we hiked in the woods.   We would notice from year to year how the sand dunes slowly migrated and shifted, and we would sometimes attend a ranger presentation at the nature center, learning about the geology, plant and animal life of the area.  Each year I looked forward to being closer to nature at the Indiana Dunes for one week.

When my husband and I moved our family to Chesterton IN over 30 years ago from Illinois to Indiana, finding a home within 2 miles of the Indiana Dunes was a big plus for us.  The number of hiking trails and opportunities to interact with nature are endless.  My whole art career would look very different if not for the Indiana Dunes being so close by.  From dune vistas to sunsets over Lake Michigan to a plethora of unique birds and flowers and butterflies and wildlife, I have never run out of inspiring material to draw and paint, all at the Indiana Dunes.

What specifically is my personal artistic goal I want to achieve as an Indiana Dunes National Park AIR?  Now I can give back to our US National Parks system and to the Indiana Dunes National Park in particular.  Lord knows our national parks in this country need our support.  They are chronically underfunded and underappreciated.  If my artwork in some small way can help raise the public’s awareness of what this one national treasure has to offer, then it will be time well spent in creating it.

What aspect of the park will I be concentrating on in my artwork?  Ah, that’s for me to know and the public to find out.  I have my plans (and I already had to spell them out in my application process).  But for now, that’s between me and the Indiana Dunes.  Time will tell, so stay tuned.  Meanwhile, I have some hiking and listening and watching and picture taking and journaling and painting and drawing to do.  So much fun ahead, only now it’s official.

Tulips, Lace and Light, pastel, 11x14"

I recently taught a very rewarding pastel workshop at the Pickle Street School Studio in Hopkins, MI.  Joy Richmond is the artist/instructor/owner.  My focus for the 2 days was on rendering a closeup look at a small group of flowers in the tradition of Georgia O’Keeffe.  We had great fun creating lots of petals.  https://www.picklestreetschool.com/

Pickle Street School Studio, Hopkins MI

Before I left home to drive to the workshop, I dipped my hands into my portable Guerrilla Painter box and made sure I had the correct colors in that box for all the various color areas in my upcoming demo painting, Tulips, Lace and Light.  I keyed my chosen colors in place on the painting. I always keep the closest right-hand compartment in the box empty, ready for putting colors I use for my demo in there.  So, I started with all the keyed-in colors in that corner compartment, and then as I worked in front of the students, I added more colors from the other compartments as needed.

I work slowly, so completing my demo during the workshop wasn’t going to happen.  Didn’t matter.  I like to give my students plenty of time to work on their own projects with my input.  This is how far I got by the end of the workshop.

After coming home, I did NOT start using all my other pastels that are in my rainbow cockpit at my easel.  Why not?  Because my color palette would have changed.  It might seem slight at first, but if I’m reaching for a slightly different shade of each of the colors I’m using, it doesn’t take long for my color palette to totally shift.  So, I temporarily set my portable painter’s box on top of my home stash of pastels at my easel and I continued to use only the colors I took with me while I was at the workshop.

I call it color consistency and I highly recommend it for when you start a painting away from home and then finish it in your home studio.  If you are doing a study away from home and then you start a new painting based on the study when you’re back at home, that’s different.  But if it’s the same painting in both places, then I think it’s really important to stick with the same color palette.  How do I know this?  Did I make the mistake of switching back to my home stash of colors in the middle of a painting one time and learn the hard way that that doesn’t work?  Um, yes I did several years ago.  It was painful.  Lesson learned.  Now I take the time to set up my Guerrilla Painter's box back at home and I finish the painting with my away-from-home colors.  Ah, much better.  Morphing bad, consistency good.