Video Interview: A Conversation with Painter Todd Orchard

Last week was a huge week for me. Lara and I drove to Rexburg Idaho Thursday morning and arrived for a 1 pm interview at the Spori Gallery. My good friend Kyoung conducted the sit down interview, it took about 2 hours because we keep cracking each other up. The camera, sound and light guys were great, and editing was really fast and professional. So Big thanks to the media guys up there at BYU Idaho.                     

                

not supper happy with the particular frame they used here... I look like I have just been told the buffet is closed. It's about 17 minutes long, hope you have time to watch.

creation in fast motion

I needed one more painting for my big show at the Spori Gallery on BYU Idaho campus in Rexburg Idaho that opens this week...

so I naturally put off starting the painting until the last possible second. I did actually get the painting done, but it is so cold in my studio it won't dry so I can Glaze it! Any way!.. one of the reasons I was able to paint it so fast was that I set my camera up on a tripod with a time lapse timer firing every 45 seconds. the 801 images in the following video add up to roughly 10 hours of work time.

 

 if you can't tell from the video I got a haircut about 1/2 way through... here is the unglazed final painting in the frame.

Russian Olive Tryst, oil 36x36 inches $3800

Living in the past

I don't mean to live in the past... I just haven't posted anything for months... so I thought I better review some of my activities this year. This painting was of some friends of mine from Provo 12 years ago. Todd and Heidi moved to New York about the same time we moved to American Fork. I noticed it was Heidi's Birth day so I sent this picture to her. I had to Dig through old paintings to find it but finally did. I made a simple frame for it and shipped it to them...

I have been making many frames lately, from the very large like this 30x48 inch frame for my show in Rexburg, to this 3x3 inch frame for a friend. these frames are getting some attention too. My buddy Booker is making a short documentary about my work including the frames. It has been a fun project to work on, I have been doing time lapse photos of paintings in progress.... I will post them soon. For now here is a rough production time lapse me working on a sketch for a current commission.

This is really rough and I had the white Balance set to shadow so the color is off... it was really just a test. I added Ellie Goulding music to it and now it won't play on mobile devices... OK.

This was one of my favorite paintings from last year, at the Wasatch Plein Air Paradise event... this painting sold to one of my collectors so this year I did this version of the same house.

I made a new paint box kit for myself.. but broke the glass palette the first day out...

 

there is never enough time to do all the things I would like to do... like paint more sheep.

Sleeping Princess

"Sleeping Princess" 2014 oil sold

I have been working on a series of these paintings from some photos I took a few years ago, trying to squeeze all the goodness out of the subject. I have always loved the Light vs. Dark combinations and have done many paintings with this as a driving element.  This pond once existed on Pioneer crossing in the heart of Utah county. I drove past it every morning on my way to a job I hated and wished I could paint those reflections. I think the hard part of painting reflections is getting the image to really feel like it is a reflection. Most people can see that the upside down image represents the mirrored image of the object above, but a reflection is more than that. The water reflects most of the light from the subject back... but not all so the reflection should be darker. I try to make the reflection less detailed and even slightly blurry to exaggerate the effect of the image in the water.

Two of the Same.... Fall Benediction

Its not too often that I paint a painting multiple times. I use photographs, locations, and ideas again and again, but rarely do I repeat the same painting. The experience of creating is satisfying, but usually when the painting is done I want to move on to another challenge. I have done these 2 paintings in the past month with a little variation.. mostly just variation that happens in the natural process of the process. One was painted on a 9x12 (rectangle) linen/canvas hardboard, and the other on a round piece of MDF approximatly the same size. I think the rounded top had a dramatic effect on the way the second one was painted.

Fall Benediction (1)

9x12 Oil 2014

$625

 This 1st version is in a partially rounded frame, I cannot vouch for the color correction as I took the picture with my iPhone with plain old light-bulbs in the studio... below is the painting without the frame.

I think this second version is more sensitive to the format/support it is painted on. I might do a larger version of this one with a rounded top....

Fall Benediction (2)

Oil 2014

$625 (presently unframed)

watercolor study

I did a quick study for a painting idea yesterday and posted it to Instagram.. the only way to get a long format image to work in Instagram's square presentation was to use a free app called Pic Stitch. The trade off is that your image has a huge white space proceeding the rather small image. Sigh.. what to do?

This small watercolor (5x13 inches) is the beginning stages of an idea for a large longer painting and a symptom of my growing obsession with long landscape format. I was originally thinking a painting ratio of 1 to 3, a triple square, would be good but I like this slightly less long format.

The Scene is of a pond on Pioneer Crossing (a main road in Utah County) looking east toward the Lone Peak and Timpanogos Mountains above Highland and American Fork. I like the atmospheric quality and depth of the background compared to the dark and textured nature of the foreground. I don't have the tree placement figure out yet, I like the ones on the right.. the trees on the left seem stiff.

Open to ponder

5x13 inches, watercolor $300 (presently unframed)

Pleasant Cloud Shadows

 I take my camera everywhere I go, well I used to anyway until I started carrying a cell phone, then I thought it was easier to take photos with the cell phone. Nothing beats a fully adjustable digital SLR. I digress...

Any whoooo... I took a picture one day while I was in the Costco parking lot in Lehi Utah, looking toward Pleasant Grove to the east. The hills were just starting to turn red and golden, and despite a few clouds in the sky it was a beautiful day. In the photo there are houses and trees in the foreground that are in shadow... I had originally intended for those to be in the composition as a way of grounding it. Maybe that painting will happen in the future.

Here is the first small (4x6) study, its not exactly the same format I was planning on for the final painting, but I mostly wanted to see what some of the colors on the top of the mountain would look like..

I started a number of new paintings at the same time, I started this one first, but it came together last.

At this point in the process it seemed like the painting might make it... the bright bluish purple hills in the background to the right are a nice anchor and a good medium value between the top of the hills and the bottom foreground.

You can see that the color is off a little bit between the image above and this "official" image. There was more I could have done with the clouds, but knowing my tendency to overwork clouds I stopped while it still felt fresh.

This painting is currently at the Dixie Invitational show in ST. George Utah. If it comes back I will post the particulars....

Two rather different pieces

This is a little gem that I did a few years ago that just came back from a gallery up north. I am going to do a few paintings in this vein and thought it might be a good starting point...

Pioneer Pond looking toward American Fork

7x14 inches, Oil $525

 It seems like there are a lot of paintings with shadowed hills and water coming out of the studio lately. this one is rather different than the one above.. lots of reds and purple, black/silver frame...

Red tree

9x12 inches, Oil $625