A new Model

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2 X 2 min

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10 min

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 I remembered to bring my smaller pad with under-painted pages and attempted to apply my summer drawing approach to the model.  Looking at Vuillard before the session evident.

Loosening up

10X12

12X18

After a long hiatus from painting (2+ months), it's fun to see where I begin. I approached the start by beginning as freely as I could, with a loose idea in my head and some drawings to set me off.  As ever I feel like I can't remember what I've learned in the past, which may be a good thing.  I think I need lots of little canvases for the moment, a few colour studies and lots of drawing.

15 minute sketches

Bread to bake, so had half an hour spare, en route to drawing.  I purloined this pad and fixed pastel colours on each page with rubbing alcohol just before the timer sounded.  Next the task was to use about 5 pastels to record some part of a scene at the dock, primarily using colour in 15 minutes. I want to do three of these evry day until the book is filled. The pad pages are roughly 4X4.5".

Below a glimpse of what happens at the dock at night, written 31st July, 2013.

Night Swimming in Maine

Limb-tangle of night jumpers

pouring their bodies rapid fire

into the sea.

‘It’s a party down there,’

says the birthday girl,

breathlessly.

Light pools on bikini shoulders.

Wring of towel.

Barnacle tiptoe up stairs.

And squeals as water

peels from backs,

Labrador-style.

We listen from the house

Imagining our smaller frames

Stepping off the dock into the night air.

Light on table

What could be better than spending the morning edging a beautiful garden, midday the time to record light on a table, followed by a walk to the end of the island and back under the ripple of a hundred flags with my niece, Molly? Peter Lloyd Jones http://www.peterlloyd-jones.co.uk (who I happened upon painting the activity around the church) agreed with me that Cranberry Island is paradise.

noticing how figurative and abstract intersect

Pastel on paper 10.5 X 7.5"

Fused plastic 6.75 x 6.75"

acrylic on cardboard with fused plastic stitching  6X8"

An addition to Maine Time

Fog time

thick light 

presses down

Boat engines rumble

We leave footprints

across the lawn 

Back with my internal landscape

Getting accustomed to Maine time happens on a number of levels.  There is the physical shift from Greenwich Meantime to Eastern Standard Time; there is the totally open-endedness of time that five weeks brings; but also, time is never really your own when you are with lots of people you love.  I am thinking that I will make a new book for Cheryl Penn's project http://cherylpenn.com/wpb/ an Encyclopaedia of Everything entitled Maine Time - my last book to Cheryl was about tree time http://cherylpenn.com/wpb/?p=2178

Maine always seems to be a fertile place for me, so many memories, associations and a landscape of endless inspiration.  On the first morning as I 'came too' in the light of the barn, far too early but what was my morning... 

Daybreak swim through night-tide

daylight punctuation

 diamond barn ends

The sound of unfamiliar gulls

I was talking to Susan Landor Keegin http://susanlandorkeegin.blogspot.com last night about how one can't really plan what inspires and how that can result in a 'messy' (conflicted) range of images that don't seem to go together.  It's no surprise I began with figurative pastels and abstract fused plastic.

View from Barn Window -pastel on paper 7.5 X 10"

Maine landscape 2013 (1) -fused plastic 7.5 X 5.5

Maine landscape 2013 (2) fused plastic 5 X 4.5

Fusepo story

In this house newly discovered plastic provides speculation, discovery and sometimes new ideas. We've had a few barbecues lately (the weather is amazing at the moment) and with a different range of food comes different packaging, different plastic.  I also thought to use bag seams. While we've enjoyed the summer evenings , I've had even less time with my iron, my paints, my glue stick.  In one stolen evening I tested a few new plastics and incorporated the paste papers I have been making. 

The interplay between images and words, always there for me, came out differently here.

A day without clouds

A day without clouds in the rearview mirror.

Some after image of museum trays,

lost objects catching light through dust.

I turn the mirror slowly refracting the angle

to configure a hedge, pond repetitions,

embers burning their opaque blue.

The whole androgyny of twilight or morn

dappled in moons.  And then

a bird raises its newspaper wings and sings.

Fusepo story 1

10^th July, 2013