Just for Today

The following guest blog post is contributed by Huron River Art Collective member Cara Cummings. Cara’s watercolor painting, Just for Today, was accepted by Juror John Gutosky into the Collective’s Fall Juried Exhibit, 2022.

Just for Today, 9×12″ watercolor painting by Cara Cummings

Holding a flower in my hand, feeling the textures, seeing the subtleties in colors, noticing how many petals there are, how they curl, and how they are attached to the flower head – this is how I begin a painting.

Botanical art is only partially about creating a beautiful picture of a plant. It is also about learning to look, and beginning to understand, and share more about it. How are the same kind of flowers different from each other, or similar to a completely different species, genus, or even family? Twirling a stem between your fingers helps you to understand the form, to see how structures are related to each other. How can you tell the story of a plant by getting to know it? 

While photographs can be helpful reference tools, they do not provide a full picture of your subject. Using photographs to document your subject can be important, especially if it takes weeks or months to complete a painting. But even then, I use them sparingly, and only to compliment my sketches, notes, and color studies (color can be very off in photos).

Daylilies are big, bright, beautiful, magical flowers that arrive in the summer, and true to their name, only last for a day. And within a couple of weeks the whole display is gone again until the following year. 

I have always loved them, but for a long time have avoided painting them, as I was unsure of how I would work on such an ephemeral subject – I am a very slow painter – but this past summer, after watching them come and go for several seasons of living with this garden, I couldn’t let the brief opportunity pass again. Their bright, complex clusters of orange petals looked almost electric as they hovered in the deep green shade of the unmanicured jungle in the back corner of my back garden.

I chose a few stems that were just beginning to open, knowing that I didn’t have much time. I always start with quick, light pencil sketches, and find the form from there. I pulled one of the flowers apart, and holding a petal between my fingers, sketched it from several angles – I wanted to get to know it, so that when the petals began to shrivel up, I would have the memory of the feeling in my hand. I also took notes about the number of petals, the direction of the veins in the leaves (a monocot, parts in 3s, parallel veins…), and color of the closed buds – anything that would help me later. 

Finishing the initial sketch, and doing a quick color study went pretty quickly (the flower opened as I worked). But I was only able to begin the painting before the flower had changed, and then was gone.

Because I take the time to get to know my subjects, I am able to finish my paintings without having the original flowers in front of me. I do pick more blooms (if they are available) to have as references for a few more days which allows me to hold them in the light and get the colors of highlights and shadows, and to find details I may have missed, but for the most part I can continue to work from the memory of having held the flower in my hands.

Cara Cummings is a fine artist, illustrator, gardener, and educator from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her work represents the synthesis of her background in biology, environmental policy, agriculture, and lifelong love of nature. Her garden is the place where she grows flowers and food, and is a place to inspire new art, and to provide educational ingredients to share with her students. To inquire about purchasing artwork by Cara Cummings, email: cara@carasgarden.com

Huron River Art Collective’s Fall Juried Exhibit can be seen at the Ann Arbor District Library (lower level) through the Reception on November 13th, 2-4p. Artwork is available for purchase directly from the artists with no commission. Join us at the reception to hear from the Juror, John Gutosky, and for awards.

All members are invited to submit guest blog posts. For Guest Blog Post Guidelines, please email communications@huronriverartcollective.org.

Woodcut Thoughts

The following guest blog post is contributed by Huron River Art Collective member, Exhbits Chair and Community Exhibits Coordinator, Dennis Gordon. Dennis had two woodcuts accepted by Juror John Gutosky into the Collective’s Fall Juried Exhibit, 2022.

Teasel, 22×32″ woodcut print by Dennis Gordon

The term ‘woodcut’ is a confusing term, since it refers to the print made from a wood plate.  The above print (aka woodcut) , ‘Teasel’ is currently on exhibit at the Huron River Art Collective Fall Exhibit at the Ann Arbor Public Library.

This woodcut is the only time I have engraved on two separate plates and then attached the plates together (with thin slats on the back side – lots of them, and lots of screws!).

There are many things I like about woodcuts, but if I narrowed it down to two, they would be the strong black lines that you tend to get and the unpredictability of the whole printmaking process.  No matter how much you plan and prepare, you really don’t know what you have till you take the print.  Sometimes it is a good surprise, sometimes not.

One of the nice surprises with  ‘Teasel’ is the variety in the strength of the lines, with the foreground being very defined and the background being blurred.  ‘Teasel’ is similar to many of my other woodcuts in that it comes from a photograph that I have taken where a somewhat simple image can be worked on to produce texture and detail beyond the original photograph. I find woods, shadows, reflections, unusual angles of objects and scenic vistas to be my most frequent inspiration.

While many of my woodcuts are black and white, I often integrate color by painting a loose, not well defined background painting, letting that dry, and then inking up the wood plate and printing the image on that background.

Dennis also has some woodcuts on display at White Pine Studios in Saline and at the Gallery at Cherry Hill Theater in Canton. To inquire about purchasing artwork by Dennis Gordon, email: dennishgordon@yahoo.com

Huron River Art Collective’s Fall Juried Exhibit can be seen at the Ann Arbor District Library (lower level) through the Reception on November 13th, 2-4p. Artwork is available for purchase directly from the artists with no commission. Join us at the reception to hear from the Juror, John Gutosky, and for awards.

All members are invited to submit guest blog posts. For Guest Blog Post Guidelines, please email communications@huronriverartcollective.org.

Where Fantasy Meets Realism

The following guest blog post is contributed by Huron River Art Collective member Marilynn Thomas. Marilynn’s painting Sky to Sea was accepted by Juror John Gutosky into the Collective’s Fall Juried Exhibit, 2022.

Marilynn has been painting and making things out of any supplies she could find since age 5, eventually getting a  B.A. in Art Teaching and Fine Art at Eastern Michigan University. After university, she worked in oil,acrylic,clay, batik, and jewelry-making but her first love has always been watercolor. She dabbled for the next 25 years, but  in ‘99 decided to go professional, creating a body of work and doing art fairs in Michigan and Florida. 

Marilynn began entering national shows and has signature status in American Watercolor Society, Transparent Watercolor Society of America and Michigan Water Color Society.

To purchase Marilynn’s artwork, email her at tmarilynn@hotmail.com


I don’t tend to speak a lot about my watercolors; I feel they should speak for themselves, but given a chance for a guest blog for the Collective, how could I say no?

I’ve always strived for realism in my work.

My first accolades as an artist happened when I decided, around age 5, to draw a baby in a buggy, not from the side, as I usually saw done, but straight down from above, my obvious vantage point.

Here you can see what I discovered as, at age 7 as I tried to draw the house across the street through my bedroom window and realized there were also trees, electrical wires, and strangest of all, the slats on my venetian blinds that covered part of the scene.

This realization opened me up to the concept of ‘getting everything down on paper which has followed me throughout my life as an artist. Realistic watercolor is also what I fell in love with in the years since my dad took me to my very first Ann Arbor Art Fair at the age of 13.

Though I believed (was taught), at an early age, all art should be a product of one’s mind and emotions, not a representation of something seen and loved, those are the very things I wished to capture on paper or canvas, not something out of my head.

Grackles’ Delemma

The best way to do this was to photograph the image, then work from that, so as not to miss any of the details.Working from memory just didn’t do it for me.

For the last 20 years, I’ve come to love birding and natural objects. Walking in the woods and taking photos has provided some of the most enjoyable times in my life.  Some might ask how painting from my photos is more artistic than simply taking the photo and enlarging it. But, often a photo simply does NOT show the true nature of a bird. It misses a lot.

No matter how good the camera and how cooperative the bird, feather or plant, the sense of life and dimensionality simply does not come through in a two dimensional photo. More is required. If the painting does NOT reflect the liveliness and beauty of the subject significantly better than the photo, there is no point to painting it.

Still, after more than 15 years painting birds, realistically, in their natural habitat, I feel the need for something more. Can I manage to both capture the reality of the subject AND my inner thoughts and feelings about its place in the Universe? “Sky to Sea” is an attempt at that amalgamation of realism and fantasy. I’ve done a few of these types of paintings and feel they are my best, and more importantly, my favorite pieces.

Marilynn’s painting Sky to Sea 34×28″
Some of my favorite things painted on a full sheet of Arches watercolor paper. I often like to work all the way to the deckled edge, so the painting can be framed without a mat, showing the entire paper. I’ve also used stencils, erratic brushmarks, and a mouth atomizer combined with my more usual realistic style as an experiment.

I’ve also written down my dreams for years, especially the ones that contain original paintings, and hope to combine those with real objects in new work. Deciding whether to paint them in watercolor or oil has been a dilemma. My work in oil is quite a bit looser and freer than my watercolors, so perhaps oil would be a better choice?

Crane Kimono

Currently I’m working on a watercolor dream of a chair upholstered in 1940s barkcloth (weird maroon-grey background with teal and ochre tropical plants) where the cloth continues past the chair and onto the wall. I’m finding this interesting but difficult and I’m not quite sure where it’s going artistically. That’s one of the fun things about art: working with the uncertainty of exactly where one is going! 

And I’m really not yet sure where the birds will fit in!


Huron River Art Collective’s Fall Juried Exhibit can be seen at the Ann Arbor District Library (lower level) through the Reception on November 13th, 2-4p. Artwork is available for purchase directly from the artists with no commission. Join us at the reception to hear from the Juror, John Gutosky, and for awards.

All members are invited to submit guest blog posts. For Guest Blog Post Guidelines, please email communications@huronriverartcollective.org.