Lisa Haderlie Baker • Art and Illustration

New Line of Greeting and Holiday Cards from Lisa

2011-09-17T18:10:00.000-07:00

In the past few months, I have been working on a new line of greeting cards to add to the twenty one cards I designed last winter, some of which have sold out and had to be reprinted. This time I have eleven new cards, making a total of 32 images to choose from. Included in this latest set are several cards with winter and seasonal motifs. Most are landscapes and streetscapes, some include animals, and some are flights of fancy inspired by old children's book illustrations. They are 4.25 x 6" and are blank inside, for you to write your own personal greeting. All of the greeting cards are printed on 100% recycled stock, with high quality envelopes and clear protective sleeves. They are available at Books Inc., Vines Cafe and Gallery, Red Wagon Collectables and the Alameda Natural Grocery in Alameda, and also at The Framer's Workshop on Channing, and Castle in the Air on Fourth Street, both in Berkeley. The greeting cards will be priced at $3.25 retail, but I will also accept mail orders with an additional charge for shipping.

Be sure to see my post of December 25, 2010 for all of the images from my first set of cards
(most are still available, some in limited quantities).

These are the images of my new line of greeting and holiday cards:

New Landscapes:

Alameda Evening, Bungalows and Palms

September Sunset, Taylor Avenue

Island of Ghosts

Sunlit Courtyard

Winter Street

New Holiday and Seasonal Cards:

Christmas In Our Parlor

Early Spring

Christmas Cottage, Taylor Avenue

Winter Gifts

The Eiger by Moonlight

Firelight Pug Dance

Lisa's Paintings at ACCI Gallery, Berkeley

2011-07-25T20:14:00.000-07:00

I am very pleased to announce that this month I was juried into ACCI (Arts and Crafts Cooperative, Inc.) Gallery. ACCI is a Berkeley landmark that has been on the corner of Lincoln Street and Shattuck Avenue for over fifty years, and is in the heart of the famous Berkeley Gourmet Ghetto. It is also the oldest arts and crafts cooperative west of the Mississippi. The handsome old brick building, formerly a French laundry, has been extensively renovated over the years to provide a spacious, well lighted space for displaying a wide range of high quality original art, including jewelry, ceramics, sculpture, textiles, glass, photography, and paintings.

I currently have eight framed gouache landscapes exhibited at ACCI: a selection of atmospheric scenes of the East Bay, San Francisco, and the Monterey Peninsula. My extensive line of greeting cards based on my paintings is also available at the gallery (see my December 2010 blog posting for all of the available images).

Below are some photos of the gallery and of my pieces there. Visit the ACCI gallery website to look at all of the artists represented, and to learn more about current exhibitions and events. Please stop by ACCI Gallery to see my work and the huge selection of other fine arts and crafts on display.

The entrance to ACCI Gallery on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley.

Lisa's landscapes at ACCI

More of Lisa's paintings, between a quilt and a bronze sculpture.

The small outdoor sculpture garden is in the background.

Lisa's paintings displayed above some of

the large selection of hand-crafted contemporary jewelry.

Fairytale Pugs by Firelight

2011-07-03T20:50:00.000-07:00

I have just completed a commissioned painting for my friends Phil and Sue Lauer. They have three pugs and a wonderful website at Pupstar Sonoma, featuring their adventures with their friends and their pugs. Both Phil and Sue are terrific photographers and are also serious mushroom hunters in the northern California woods, as well as collectors of carnivorous plants like sundews and venus flytraps. We decided on a fairytale scene for the painting, in a dark forest by firelight, with lots of mushrooms and a carnivorous plant or two! Their three pugs dance gleefully around the fire, surrounded by a fairy ring of mushrooms of many varieties, with an owl and a frog as the amazed audience.

One of the things I love about doing my pet portraits is including all of the crucial details that are important to the owners - setting the animals in real or symbolic landscapes, with special objects or toys, and concentrating on the personality of that particular pet - in this case three pugs in one picture!

Below find photos of the progress of the painting over the course of a couple of weeks, from the full-sized final sketch to the finished 12" x 17" completed work in gouache, titled Firelight Pug Dance: Blue, Roxy and Bono.

Pencil sketch, final size.

The sketch has been transferred to heavy rag watercolor paper,

And the some of the outer details have been roughed in.

More detail and color - only the pugs

(the most challenging part of the painting, so I left them until last)

are still in sketch form.

The fire now "glows" more effectively,

and the mushrooms and carnivorous plants are taking shape.

Blue, Roxy and Bono start their dance!

The final painting on the easel, masking tape removed.

I've darkened the owl's wings and toned down the white smoke

with a pale purple wash to make the core of the fire the brightest

thing in the picture, and I've added shadows under the dancing pugs.

Firelight Pug Dance: Blue, Roxy and Bono

New Exhibit of Lisa's Paintings at Tomate Café in Berkeley

2011-05-18T09:42:00.000-07:00

From May fourteenth through June twenty-fifth, ten of my framed California landscape paintings and one small giclée will be exhibited and for sale at Tomate Café at 2265 Fifth Street (at Bancroft Avenue), in Berkeley.

Tomate is an excellent, “artsy” restaurant in West Berkeley near the Fourth Street shopping district, and serves breakfast and lunch every day of the week. It’s also dog friendly, with a lovely leafy patio in the courtyard for sitting with your favorite canine. Come on by, have a latte or a great meal, and take a look at my recent work!

All of the pieces exhibited at Tomate (and most of my paintings for the last 30 years) were framed at The Framer's Workshop in Berkeley. Carefully chosen frames and mats make an enormous difference to the final look of a painting, and the experienced staff at Framer's is excellent at working with the artist to match the style and tone of a painting with the perfect frame. My digital files don't show the gorgeous frames - but you can view them at Tomate!

www.framersworkshop.com/

www.tomatecafe.com/id2.html

Painting the Marshes of the Bay Area

2011-03-17T16:28:00.000-07:00

Most of the Bay Area was once ringed by ancient marshes and wetlands. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century more than a third of the original bay was filled in, drained, and paved over with roads, bridges, cities, military bases, docks, industrial parks, shopping malls and suburban development. In recent years large areas of bay wetlands have been restored, but much is gone forever. Arrowhead Marsh, one of the few large protected wetlands on the Oakland shore, is a favorite spot of mine, and I have painted it several times. In clear weather you can see San Francisco, Mount Tamalpais, and Oakland from the marsh, and sometimes hundreds of birds. I love the abstract shapes of the landforms, the huge sky and the reflective water in marshland, which changes in mood so dramatically with the time of day and the weather.

Wetlands also exist in unexpected places. Port Chicago, on the banks of Suisun Bay north of Martinez, is where the waterway Walnut Creek eventually flows into the bay. The creek has been routed through concrete conduits under the towns of Contra Costa County, but ends up as an open waterway and then a river wetland at Suisun Bay. Waterfowl like the swans I painted overwinter here, sharing space with the nearby Naval Weapons Station, refineries, salvage yards, and gravel plants. The sight of these huge birds flying over the fortress-like gravel plant was an amazing experience, and I hope my painting of it captures some of the drama of the moment.

New Greeting Cards!

2010-12-25T16:23:00.000-08:00

In the New Year twenty-one different greeting cards of images from my paintings are available for purchase through local card, gift, and pet stores, and also directly from me. A large selection of the cards are already featured at Books Inc., the Alameda Natural Grocery, Dog Bone Alley, and the Encinal Market in Alameda; Payn's Stationery on Solano Avenue, Castle in the Air on Fourth Street in Berkeley, ACCI Gallery and The Framer's Workshop, also in Berkeley, and at the Arlington Pharmacy in Kensington. Check back for new venues!

The first eleven images are of "Secret Alameda" landscapes, mostly in and around my home on our island here in the San Francisco Bay. The second ten cards are of all kinds of dogs and cats, mostly, but also the occasional chicken and horse, in landscapes and interiors both real and imagined.

Over the years I have created several different small sets of greeting cards from my paintings, but this year I decided to create a true "line" of note cards for retail sale from a selection of my gouache landscapes and pet portraits, with blank interiors for your personal message. They are handsome note cards, printed on 100% recycled stock, folding to 4.25" x 6", include white envelopes, and are individually wrapped in a protective clear sleeve. The suggested retail price at local stores is $3.25 per card, but I will also accept mail orders with an additional charge for shipping.

Here are eleven images for my Secret Alameda series of note cards:

Sunset, Crab Cove Lagoons

The Seawall, Crab Cove

Early Morning Back Gardens

From the Alameda Ferry

The Garden Gate

The USS Hornet

Night Scene, Santa Clara Avenue

The Oak at the End of the Road

The Ready Reserve Ships, Alameda Navy Piers

The Last Livery Stable

The Palms

And here are ten images of pets, in real and symbolic landscapes, also available as greeting cards:

Nell Gwynn, the Marmalade Cat

Pandora on the Turkish Sofa

Slater in Landscape

Study in Black and Fawn: The Artist's Pug

Teddy's Afternoon

Belinda, the Red Hen

Bernie on the Blue Armchair

Miss Woo in the Moorish Parlor

Mitch and the Tennis Ball

Miss Camille Clotille, Hurricane Katrina Survivor

For updated information on stores carrying my note cards, or to order individual or sets of cards from me directly, please contact manopanthea@yahoo.com

Painting the U.S.S. Hornet

2010-07-17T14:58:00.000-07:00

My solo show, "Secret Alameda", at Vines Gallery in Alameda in June was a success on all fronts - I sold almost all of my paintings, and it was exciting to be enthusiastically supported by the gallery, the attendees, collectors, and friends. Such a thrilling experience to be validated as an artist by so many people in these hard economic times...

One of the paintings displayed in the show was a large sunset view of the Ready Reserve Ships, docked out at the Navy Piers in Alameda. The gallery owner suggested that I contact the USS Hornet (a huge aircraft carrier, now a museum, berthed next to the ships I had painted) to see if they would be interested in a portrait of the Hornet. I contacted the museum store manager, and she decided that visitors to the Hornet would be very interested in a dramatic view of the aircraft carrier, similar to the one I had done of the Ready Reserves. I then visited the ship many times at sunset to study the changing light as the sun went down. On the 4th of July the ship was bedecked with flags, so I added those after I had basically finished the painting to add some interest and color above the flight deck. I thought at first the flag at the prow was the standard stars and stripes, but then noticed that this flag had only red and white stripes, not 50 stars on blue. It is apparently a striped "Navy Jack" flag, flown first in 1775, and still flown on Navy ships on special occasions like Independence Day. I painted it carefully with stripes only!

I have spent a lot of time creating the most powerful composition I could come up with, and finally have a painting that I think catches the looming majesty - and threat - of this enormous warship.

Here are some photos of the painting in progress:

First I cover the entire sheet of heavy rag paper with a tinted wash - in this case cadmium yellow. I paint the sky, setting sun, and clouds first, then work on the foreground details. I had already painted the ship when I decided to take these photos, so half of the painting is in effect done.

Here the water and reflections are being added, and the details on the ships on either side.

The final painting, still on the easel, with the rest of the Navy flags added last of all.

Here is the final scan of my gouache painting of the U.S.S. Hornet on the 4th of July.

SECRET ALAMEDA Artist Reception and Show

2010-05-03T09:52:00.000-07:00

I live on a small island in San Francisco Bay, originally an oak-covered peninsula that now is separated from the Oakland shore by an estuary. Alameda was settled in the mid 19th century, and has an astonishing number of old neighborhoods remaining in relatively pristine condition. A man-made lagoon snakes its way through the island, and beyond that is the bay. We are surrounded by water, and can hear the container ships, and the fog horns out on the bay from our house, as well as the trains coming and going from the Jack London station just across the estuary. Old oaks from Ohlone times still grow in Victorian gardens, and the sun sets over the great bay with the skyscrapers of San Francisco silhouetted on the horizon.

It's an evocative place for a painter. So many of my pictures are of quiet, mysterious corners of our island, often in twilight, that when Vines Gallery offered to host a one-woman show of my work, my husband suggested a name for the collection: "Secret Alameda". The artist reception and show will be on June 5, 2010, and the paintings will remain on display for a month.

Landscapes and Streetscapes

2010-01-07T13:08:00.000-08:00

My media of choice is gouache, and my favorite subjects are landscapes and studies of animals and the natural world.

Gouache is water soluble like watercolor but can be worked as a pale aqueous wash or as a thick impasto like oil paint. Underpainting and working light on dark are also possible, as well as incredibly vivid color. For many years now I have been experimenting with gouache alone; and gouache with layers of aging varnishes, crackle varnishes, and tinted glazes. Each imparts a different patina and depth, and allows the creation of faux old masterpieces like the tongue-in-cheek "Gainsborough" portraits of pets, or the twilight landscapes inspired by the early California Tonalists.

Many of my paintings are evening scenes—old neighborhoods, quiet gardens and shorelines, painted at the time of day when edges blur, details become merely light and shadow, and when representational images verge on the abstract.

Line Art Illustration

2009-12-31T15:47:00.000-08:00

I have been creating black and white line illustrations for many years for a wide variety of printed pieces and publications; working for the Sierra Club, Stanford University, the University of California, and for many science curriculum projects. I began drawing in pen and ink on paper in a pre-computer age, and now I also draw on a Wacom tablet in Adobe Illustrator. The art still feels very much mine, only the tools have changed...

Ecosystem Posters and Book Covers

2009-12-31T10:13:00.000-08:00

The images above are a series paintings I created for a science and literacy curriculum for elementary school students: Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading, developed by the Lawrence Hall of Science at U.C. Berkeley and Berkeley's Graduate school of Education, and published by Delta Education. Each painting represents a different aquatic ecosystem: a Costa Rican rain forest, an Arizona desert, an Indian mangrove swamp, and an Alaskan river system. The paintings include fauna and flora native to each ecosystem, as well as a small "I Spy" detail in each showing some form of human impact, no matter how remote the location. All four were published as large posters within the Aquatic Ecosystem unit of the Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading series.

Below are three of the many book covers I have designed and painted for the Great Explorations in Math and Science Teacher's Guides, also created at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley. GEMS produces preschool through early childhood activity guides and is a highly respected curriculum development and training program for teachers, parents, science centers, museums, and community groups.

Pet Portraits

2009-12-23T22:06:00.000-08:00

Detailed Pet Portaits are one of my specialties. I place the subjects of my paintings in their own personal or symbolic environment: gardens, favorite hiking trails or parks, their special place at home, or in an idealized landscape, often inspired by 18th century English portrait painters like Gainsborough and Reynolds.

To see more examples of my pet portraits on the terrific Pupstar Sonoma webpage, please click here.

Stanford University Libraries Bookplates

2009-12-23T22:01:00.000-08:00

Bookplates are small gummed labels pasted inside books and book collections to identify the library and the donor. Visit the Stanford University Bookplate Exhibit to see their full collection of custom-designed library bookplates, including many that I have created for rare book funds and collections at the Stanford Libraries. A new trend is beginning at some major libraries to create "digital bookplates" rather than printed pieces. My designs are all easily adapted to be digital files for library websites, as well as traditionally printed bookplates.

Below is the first bookplate I designed for the Stanford Libraries. This plate is for use in books purchased through a book fund at Hopkins Marine Station, created in honor of my parents. The illustration is my pen-and-ink rendering of the marine research vessel Te Vega on which my father spent many months in the 1960s in the South Pacific.