Montana Artworking by Cindy Betka

Untitled,  oil, triptych, 18" X 48" So far this painting shall be untitled. But the color scheme, blues and yellows, bring a certain country to mind. I really can not name it 'Swede', can I?  Or perhaps, 'Shifting Shadows'. My attraction to this scene was the mass of fallen aspen leaves floating and half floating along the stream banks. I went through my fall photos and pulled together the composition using bits of several photos and my imagination. The colors came easily enough.

When you look at a photograph you will notice that there is just one plane of the distance in focus. This is do to the inherent ability of the camera lenses. Our eyes adjust naturally to what we are observing by focusing in on the objects they settle on. Everything can not be in focus at the same time. To make your painting believable you must not make all of your edges sharp. Decide what the center of interest is and really get it down with the sharp edges being concentrated there. Use the soft/blurry edges effectively also. Sometime I get carried away with what I think should be cleaner and crisper objects only to see that it just doesn't work. Depths,  oil, 18" X 18"

Cataracts and glasses seem to be a fact of life especially if you are over 40. Research is under way on eye drops that would dissolve the cataract, hence no surgery necessary. However, this potential treatment for humans would be years in the making. For artists the clouding of lenses and color changes makes for an inconvenience when creating artwork, to say the least. Monet, (1840-1926), was not immune to cataracts, by 1912 he had them in both eyes, age 72. His eye sight grew progressively worse to where he could hardly see. He remarked in a letter (1922), “I’m hard at work. I want to paint everything before my sight is completely gone”.  In 1923 he under went surgery in three stages. After the surgery he experience cyanosis or blue vision. He wrote, “I continue to see green as yellow and all the rest is more or less blue”. Here are a few of his paintings starting with the year 1914. Some are detail images. Water Lilies, Monet, 1914-1917 Yellow Irises, Monet, 1914-19...

The owner of gift shop in Estes Park, Colorado left his shop door open and a bull elk wondered in. The elk browsed around for 45 minutes. Finally some officials lured it out with yummy apple treats. The elk returned 10 minutes later still looking for that perfect gift. A moose in Hailey, Idaho went on an open house tour. While the family was out a moose fell into their 3-foot window well and pushed her way through the loose latch on the large swinging window. The family returned home to find this female moose staring up at them from the bottom of the basement stairs. Two hours later several Fish and Game officers arrived, tranquilized her and carried her up and out of the house. Before this she was not going to leave her comfortable new home. And she was quite calm about it.