'A Scholar' in Lindisfarne sketching in an old book

Near the Sea

We arrived in Lindisfarne just as it was safe to cross onto the island, Tuesday evening 6:30ish. Patrick and I hadn't left East Anglia since February and most of the time we were home or at a food shop five miles from our door. We had both wanted to go to Holy Island since seeing it from the window of car or a train on our many trips to Scotland. Louise Kirkbride organised a painting week with Mick Kirkbride teaching, and that was perfect.  

There were five artists (plus Mick) and a few partners (jincluding Patrick) as well as Jacob, Lou and Mick's son. For a few others, Covid stopped play and they were missed.  

I got ready for the trip by preparing a book to draw in. This title was appropriate, as I had been the NEAC Scholar and Mick had been my mentor. As I drew, I found that the words on the page were also apt and they became my titles.  I have not finished the pages as I like to whiten the areas around the specific words I have chosen, I may try to resolve some of the drawings that haven't quite worked, yet, but I fear that my list is so long that may takes weeks so thought I'd show you my progress so far!

In the Sedgy

This was my first drawing, made in the harbour; it was the perfect place to begin. I was determined not to dwell on my drawings.  I can see some lobster pots but doubt you can...

It Established its Right

This was my last drawing, looking across a pool of seawater in front of the lime kilns, with the castle to the left. Patrick and I were driving back to Suffolk.  The water gave me a very hard time, changing from almost white to dark blue as the clouds went in and out.  

Rain Near Priory

Rain Near Priory was not made in my sketchbook.  It was raining too hard and I worried that the wet might damage the drawings I had made earlier in the altered sketchbook. I faced the storm which pelted down rain and puddled the pastel.  I used a rag to wipe everything off a few times when I thought the storm was abating, it never did while I sttod there. In the end I kept what I could and gave into the chaos, smudging with my fingers the pastels disintegrating in my hands.

So Far as Distance Goeth

From the harbour you could look ahead and see the castle and the boats, look left and see the tussled hills and sheep, or look behind or right to see buildings. This is unfinished, delighting in one of the other less iconic views.

Standing at the Boundary Wall

Standing at the Boundary Wall was made before Near the Sea.  For me, one of the most striking things about the view was the blue, almost black, of water. People walked out onto the ledge and I could just see their stick figures in the distance.  The tide was coming in as I finished the drawing and deciding where I should freeze it in time was one of those variables of plein air drawing that it's hard to get right, for me.

Tales of the North Country

This is the only page I drew on in my second sketchbook, (same name). This was another quickie, to capture the flavour of the layers of landscape and the buildings I saw.

The Opening

Our experience was that it rained when the tide came in and as the tourists raced to get home across the causeway. The opening was made as the rain died down, shortly after Rain Near Priory. When the rain returned and we were ready to head back I had only noted the gesture of the harbour from behind the Priory gate. It wasn't a really quick sketch, instead I held back defining it. The light was viscous. The following day there would be archeologists with the Big Dig on the other side of the wall.

The Sound of the Bell

This was from the first morning of drawing.  The tide went out, the tide came in and the confusion of what was water and what was mud is all too apparent!

We Must Cross the Water

We were high up and the wind was blowing in my face.  My hat blew off, but the downward road caught my eye and I unpacked my easel. I think the fixative made this even darker than it already was.  The relationship between the wall and the water was constantly changing and my final marks made everything worse.

By the way, my new website is live.  There are still quite a few improvements to make but let me know what you think in the meantime! https://www.rebeccaguyverart.com
 

What about watercolour life drawings in an altered sketchbook?

Doreen is a special model, utterly natural.  Today she moved around the room slowly with her lavender piece of organza for the first fifteen minutes. I mostly made a contour drawing as she moved - which was confusing. Doing that got my eye in, though, so when we had ten minute poses, I was primed to look with care.

I have never mixed watercolour with pastel before and today it just sort of happened. For one thing, I forgot the pad I had prepared so ended up doing different things to what I had imagined. I forgot my kitchen roll so every mark needed to work. 

Some of the drawings/paintings are on cartridge paper, others are in two of my altered sketchbooks.  The tan pages are watercolour ground over book pages.  The orangey is a pastel ground.  I drew in the wet watercolour with the pastel. It was all fun.

Turns out sketching on holiday in Orkney is possible

Down From Old Man of Hoy 7.7.17

Dwarfie Stane 3.7.17

In preparation for our trip to Orkney with our friends the Hawkins, I hurriedly created a new altered sketchbook the afternoon before we travelled. The words on the spine are Histories Book One and it was the title that helped me to choose the book. Of ocurse you can imagine the pattern and the colour appealed to me. I think I may give it a different name eventually.  I have painted over the title for later. Pages are only 13 x 18cm and I glued and gessoed first and then tinted with acrylic and schminke pastel ground, taping around the edges with removable tape. that way I was ready to begin each day.

Near Tomb of the Eagle 4.7.17

Nousty Sand, Rousay 6.7.17

Orkney Museum Garden, Kirkwall 5.7.17

Sketching while others in the group aren't is a little bit challenging in that I am not very good at asserting myself or rocking the boat, and I hate to miss anything the group does… so I only drew when it fit in with the rythmn of the day, while we were eating our sandwiches, waiting for a boat or a car, early in the morning, when someone else wanted to do something different so we were waiting. As a result I didn't so much find my spot as find something in the spot that was interesting. Also there was time pressure, so some of these sketches were made in ten minutes, others half an hour and I spent about an hour on one. My goal was to say something about the place.

Overbigging Orkney, 2.7.17

Path Midhowe Beach 6.7.17

Rackwick Beach 3.7.17

I took my pastels and a few pieces of charcoal in my two vintage tins. I limited my palette. What I did differently was I used the charcoal to think tonally before I began using colour.  I learned that from Melissa Scott-Miller, NEAC by watching how she worked in her plein air painting during the workshop she taught. 

Waulkmill Bay, Beachcombing 8.7.17

Color possesses me

The title for this piece comes from a Paul Klee quote, ' Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter." 

I began with the latest pieces of plastic I had acquired: a Marks and Spencer's bag, a Jacobs cream crackers packet, a bag of mixed nuts, salad bags, and a Doriano biscuit wrapper.  I added a bit of that kelly green from an old RA mailing (not members this year) because I needed that. I had been thinking about Klee, Mali Morris - she's coming to talk in Colchester on Friday, Howard Hodgkin and Rothko.  In my mind these people gravitate towards bold shapes and colours. The Marks and Spencer's bag and my recent foray into grids for Nichola Orlick's exhibit in Kyoto was still in the back of my mind. I had finished putting a portfolio together for something coming up, so felt light, happy.  It was happy hour.

With my stitching I like to accentuate colour relationships, to move them back, bring them forward and the colours in the frame seemed to make the most of the inner life of the happy hour. It was hard to keep it simple but I resisted the temptation to complicate things.

High Stile was where we stayed in the Lakes.  Happy Hour in HIgh Style says Jazz to me.

The above is copied from my post in Dining on Plastic: http://diningonplastic.blogspot.co.uk
(sometimes I like to highlight the overlap between my experiments in plastic and all the other experiments I make in other media … apologies if you see it in two places.  

This bouquet was sent to me for Mother's Day by our adorable children from a florist in Kersey, a village nearby. I was still quite sick on Mother's Day and rushing to prepare for our trip to the Lakes, but I managed to record something about it in my new altered sketchbook:

The flowers travelled in the Defender up to the Lakes, back down and were beautiful until Saturday morning when I went out and picked a bouquet with my niece, Gracie. You might recognise some of the objects, reconfigured.  I glued some paper onto the vase. 

Spring Green and Book, pastel on paper,  A4

From Sketchbook to something bigger

Looking at part (of the still life) I

Looking at part (of the still life) II

View of Patrick's side of the bureau and the view from above the bureau

My altered sketchbook only has four pages left. As I've worked through it, it has increasingly dominated my life. Deciding to draw in it every day has amplified the feeling that I might have run out of ideas.  So I am in a heightened state of alert.  I've noticed things I might not have noticed and that's great. What I've remembered is that there are beautiful still life possibilities everywhere and all I need is a hand full of pastels and my sketchbook and my day is sorted. I'm drawing on both sides of the page, so these drawings will remain bound in the sketchbook.  

What's interesting is that I am always drawing anyway, but deciding to make the drawings in one place has changed the structure of my whole day. With that in mind, it's time to get on with some of my ideas, so yesterday I primed six canvases and today I constructed a big still life in my studio and prepared three big drawing surfaces to use to respond to the still life. Seeing the Hockney made we want to try using a series of canvases to interpret a scene, and since my scenes seem to be still lifes right now, I'm beginning with that.

Fishing for Biscuits with Cups and Clutter

Cups and Clutter

Fishing for Biscuits, fused plastic collage with stitching and paint (21 x 21cm)

Tomorow I go down to London to pick up my unsold drawing from the Pastel Society show. Although it would have been even better if it had sold, I am looking forward to meeting Keith (who I met at the opening of the exhibition) and seeing the Watercolour Competition Exhibition at Bankside where a few of my firends have work.  Today we celebrated International women's day with Suffolk Refugee Support at Burlington Halls, in Ipswich. It was fabulous to see the women in their finery and to sample some of their cuisine but it was most of the day and I didn't have much time to work.

I was able to finish last week's Dining on Plastic, though.  It was predominately made of vegetable wrappers - mostly different kinds of lettuce.  Earlier in the week, I polished off a packet of water biscuits and the shimmery royal blue comes from that. Andrex toilet paper blue is a staple and I didn't find any roadside plastic!

Yesterday I drew in my sketchbook as the light was fading.  I found a box of old pastels, so old I can't remember where they come from… were they Patrick's?   New colours are always inspiring and chasing the light makes you concentrate hard!

A smattering of inspiration

Although I caught the dreaded Tanzanian cold, I dragged myself to the studio and tried to put something down everyday.  I haven't really got much else done in the past week.  I did go to London to draw at the Pastel Society's event at the Mall, see the Hockney and the Nash and have people over for dinner and then visit two local exhibitions http://www.northhousegallery.co.uk/art-exhibition/artist/martin-fidler-and-melvyn-king/red-crag-project/  and  http://www.thesentinelgallery.co.uk, but in terms of beginning new work, that didn't happen. I'm feeling much better this evening, so am hopeful that tomorrow will be a painting day.

It's interesting to see how I use my two page spreads to respond or at least test something different on each side.  It's similar to the way I work, shifting from drawing to plastic to printmaking and painting. But I can't fail to notice that I've been jumping all over the place getting something down. Still it's a sketchbook and these ideas might come in useful sometime...

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Sketching at the Edges of Abstraction

I know logically that shapes are shapes and a cup or a flower is just a shape of colour, but I think differently about things I can name and use my pastels differently as I draw.  I often feel that my best drawing happens when I am truly confused and can't understand the things I can name so they become simply colours next to each other rather than a hand or a foot or a petal. I hate that feeling, and the confusion isn't always good, but I wonder if it is about a different part of my brain being activated.

This altered sketchbook (using soft pastel) is about the edges where figurative and abstract mark making meet. I have said before that making fused plastic is a playful part of my practice where I am freed to respond and which is more like solving a puzzle than drawing.  It is intuitive and does require careful looking, but it isn't as rooted in eye-hand coordination, it is more about discovery. As I progress through the altered sketchbook, will it be possible to combine the two in a different kind of drawing?

Last year I made a series of pastel drawings where I combined still life objects with some of  my painted paper collages, drawing about the two together.  They were surprising. Is this a direction that could be intriguing?

These are the last two of my dining on plastic pieces.  You can see more about them and the other from previous weeks at that blog here:
.http://diningonplastic.blogspot.co.uk

Mozarella and Mangoes at the Pier

Carrots Downriver

Still Life by Colour

Yellow and Pink, 23 x 25cm, pastel on paper

While running my 30 minutes this morning, I decided to put myself under a new kind of pressure. I made no New Years resolutions this year but am chipping away at the things that need changing anyway. 

A few days ago I saw a twitter feed about a sketchbook open submission and I have been debating whether I could finish my altered pastel sketchbooks in time for the deadline.  Finishing them would have meant altering my course with the two that I have on the go. One is life drawings and the other is landscapes in Maine.  This morning I decided to attempt to make a new altered book sketchbook focused on whatever I was working on in the studio, so studies, after studies and related things and experiments. As I was looking at the set up I had made (the one with the orange and green) I considered how even as I was setting the still life up I kept thinking: THESE ARE NOT MY COLOURS. I wondered whether still life set-ups intentionally focusing on colour would teach me anything or lead my anywhere. 

Yellow and Pink was fun to compose.  Who knew I had any yellow. The big yellow motif behind the flowers is a plastic bag I found while walking.  The yellow things are lemons.

altered sketchbook still life by colour and experiments P 1 & 2

I started the altered sketchbook in Glasgow at Christmas but I hadn't had the time I envisaged and it went nowhere, so I began again leaving a little of what was there before.