Inside out and Sauerkraut

Inside Out and Sauerkraut, egg tempera on panel, 30 x 20cm

Sometimes when I set up a still life I get really excited because the beauty of the colour relationships and shapes just feels right. On Sunday, when I put this together (minus the tulips and plums) I couldn't wait to get started.  First I needed some tulips and some fruit. I raced to Stowmarket before the shops shut and had to visit two stores and there were only yellow tulips available. I thought the plums would work. 

From the start, this was a stop and go still life - I've had a busy week. Busy because the first three days of my week I leave the studio for as much as half the day: Once for life drawing; once for portrait group and once for Pilates.  This week I also met up with three artists.  And it was also the culmination of the Impeachment Hearings so my podcasts and live stream filled the studio with intrigue.  

I named the painting from a line in an opinion column, a line that seemed to me like the perfect metaphor for the world we inhabit at the moment. I don't find the radio distracting. Painting takes over and fills my brain -  I turn the 'inside out and Sauerkraut' into something else - dabs of colour on a support, that make me feel happy. Returning to the painting again and again, gave me the opportunity to look again and again and  time to think.  Yesterday I got to that place when I couldn't make what I was painting work and then I remembered that it was time to stop painting exactly what I saw in front of me.  I needed to create a version of the stilllife that had the feel that seeing the colours and shapes had instiled in me when I began.  That's a funny thing I find happens. The most exciting beginnings often become the longest toughest slogs.  Can you tell?

Value and colour, a struggle to convey a place

Committed to printmaking for the moment, I rolled the sky and sketched with ink onto the plate.  Next I made a provisional print, to remove some of the ink.  I did this by placing a rougher paper than I usually print onto on top of the plate and rubbed lightly with my hand.  The result was a print, but it was not in the least resolved, I didn't intend it to be. These quick sketches can be the start of a pastel drawing. After print two, I painted with pastels on top of print one (above). I was interested in marks and wanted to create some sort of cohesion with marks. I omitted the animals and house from the scene because this version didn't seem to need either motif.

 The next print (above) took the better part of the day. I wanted to keep it painterly and to use colour in a satisfying way.  There are passages that I like but there are many small pieces so the space didn't feel confident and I wasn't satisfied with the values.

When I began this series, a few weeks ago, I wanted to use value to capture the light and mood and imagined using light pastel over prints to tint the image.  I thought I might be able to convey the moodiness of the landscape that way. So, to salvage the idea and to reuse the drawing I'd already done,  I painted back onto the plate with a blackish ink to approximate the feeling of the light. Once printed (onto wet paper this time) I tinted the values.

Textile studies

Often I buy things for the pattern and colour.  I don't have expensive tastes, most of my shopping takes place in charity shops and car boot sales.  I know I will use them in a drawing at the least, so I gather stuff. 

My mother, Janice M Moss,  makes fabric beads with delicious patterns in luscious colours and I wear them most days.  People stop me and comment on their beauty. 

I often mention that the I find it tough to navigate between figurative and abstract and when I was thinking about what I wanted to do this year, one of the ideas I had was to draw and paint figuratively about textiles in a way that would create abstract designs.  I thought the necklaces might be a good place to start. 

The cloth under the necklaces this time is a vintage bathrobe and a Mexican shirt that has a tiny headhole that makes it impossible to wear.   The drawing really is this dark but what you can't see in the scan is that the ground was made with metallic pigment that shimmers, so the circles, which shimmer in real life shimmer in the drawing a bit too.

I loved making this drawing so will revist beads.

Studying Matisse's colour

There's a part of me that likes to go out and 'find inspiration' and I consider wandering and gathering ideas important, but when I started this blog, a long time ago, I also knew that I have more than enough material to keep me busy FOREVER and it's a just a case of looking at what I have around me, intently, to see what's next. 

What better place to look again than with Matisse.  

Drawing in colour

In the split second after a model strikes a pose, when you know you will only have minutes, to tens of minutes to say something, grabbing colours can be almost arbitrary. I usually start with three colours and then choose the next few to get a range of values and to complement my first choices. Sometimes the model is really quick and I barely have time to choose the first few and rely on what is in my hand to begin again.

I am starting to draw in order to paint, although in that split second I don't think I'm thinking about anything like that.  I am just trying to get the shapes in the rectangle to work together.

 Not all poses or choices work, but a piece of something unsuccessful may inform something later.

The light of snow

I'm spending my evenings working through David Hornung's book COLOUR: a Workshop for Artists and designers. As I often point out, I am terrible at following directions so this morning when the weather station alarm woke me (-10C), I suddenly realised I had been mixing my chromatic greys/grays incorrectly and the first thing I did after taking pictures of the pink trees and the blue sky etc... was to re-do last night's assignment. 

I think I was primed from that and was about to work one of my ongoing projects when I noticed the snow light.  I found a canvas 5 X 7 and tried to record it. They say it will be snowy for a few days.  Beautiful light!