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

Figures in response to Delouis

Day one on a 60x40cm canvas.  Taking up the idea of the hat again and using memory (open gardens 2012 on Mount Desert Island) and imagination but letting colour, shape and mood lead me. Trying to be me, responding to colour, painting about what interests me, unashamedly: people, landscape, objects, colour, oh everything! What I was really struck and delighted by in Delouis was the way she uses paint.  So I'm going to focus on that next. I used my palette knife on the trousers - a departure!

Complacencies of the peignoir

soft pastel on paper 22 x 24cm 

It's easy to avoid things that others scorn. And then I read Messum's catalogue about Nancy DeLouis - she has an upcoming exhibition there and I have to admit feeling affected by her view of the world, a 'feminine' view. It's easy to think you need to change and go a different direction even when you get a thrill out of decorative work.  It's easy to see yourself as dated (rehashing) and then you talk to a few fellow women artists and feel that little bit more confident. 

I've been getting up early and enjoying those hours of the day before anyone else has risen.  I want to do everything, read, write and draw immediately and at the same time. It's often the everyday that take me in.

ZEST OF THE DAY

That hour between

fill of day,

nothing of night

Pre-dawn

milky, lemon zest

stolen before

morning peeled

from night

Ideas that feel

like balancing stones

Hope’s black, cold, clear

watery worlds Those

glazed limpet walls,

smooth, brittle lazuli

beads of dawn. 

‘There is no whiteness so white as the memory of white.’

The title of this post is something Giorgio Morandi said, according to Barbara Haskell in her book on Milton Avery.  I have been reading.  Haskell also refers to Okeefe who said , ‘nothing is less real than realism.’ I have been dreaming about those words and working.  I think some of the struggle has been about ensuring, to myself, that I have some skill and that is easy to translate into drawing correctly and perhaps drawing realistically.  Diebekorn reminds not to believe in the first thing.  I don't BELIEVE in today's beginning oil sketch, but I do know that I need to trust my memory and my sense of colour and not worry about creating 'feminine' art.