Snowlight (inside) 2

The snowlight is flat today.  They say snow is coming and in 'pathetic fallacy' terms the snowscape looks malevolent, not playful.
I realised I don't have a col red (carmine) in my oils, so found it difficult to get a low key fuscia.  In the end I turned to my neocolour.  Love the colour studies book! Also finding it manageable to do 5 X 7 oil sketches.

Snowlight (inside)

This snow light is beguiling! That high key blue-green white-light through the window changes everything. Another tiny 5x7 canvas.

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!

making Pauline's covers

Pauline is a Suffolk writer who asked me create the cover for her first book, Utterly Explosive.  If you want to read her book go to: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Utterly-Explosive-Pauline-Manders/dp/1478208414

Waking to a New Year

Listening for Children

Upstairs I rake sounds through floorboards

tweezing the prosthetic ‘a’ to make sense

of chirps below.  My cheeks decipher walls,

a toe tug and time between years.

I count vertebrae,

sink through baklavaian sheets,

sleeping between teenage sounds,

wonder up aisles of half centuries,

while threading chain to sprocket

with bare hands.

RG 1.1.13

Young people sleeping in the studio.  Limited by the trash in the office bin.

Fresco from a drawing

Fresco on lime plastered wattle and daub frame 10 x 12

I've been keeping up my blind drawing, or morning drawing, depending on whether I can grab my glasses.  Jane Lewis lent me her copy of Barbara Rae's drawings and that spurred me on to use some colour as I draw.  The original drawing was pen with watercolour over and I thought that would be a good starting point for my next attempt at the plaster experiment. It hasn't dried fully yet, so I'm not sure what the final piece will look like but this feels more like me than previous attempts.  I like working in wet plaster more than on dry with casein, I think. 

pen and watercolour on paper