Resolution number one: paint more

Oriental Bouquet in January 30 x 30 oil on canvas

I sanded down a painting that was tight and unresolved from last spring and tried to apply what I'd learned from a small pastel drawing .  The drawing was done from life and much of the set up remained. I painted quite thickly at the start of last week and it was only dry enough to return to today. In the interim my ideas had moved on, the flowers had changed and I had begun a necklace series. 

In the same way that local colour can be a barrier to making the most interesting drawing, the objects in front of you can be too. Sometimes invention is the only solution.

initial 6 x 6 pastel drawing: Freesias and Kimono

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.

Begin again with what you know

It's my first day back to the rhythm of what I do. So I began with what I know very, very well. This is where I stand to prepare food and it is the place where outside and inside merges, where if I am lucky I see the owl fly, the moon rise, the night fall.  I got bogged down by local colour a bit… why do I do that? But I'm satisfied by the rhythm and that was what I wanted to find today.

Drawing in drawings

When I was in my teens I learned that anything is a still life and any place is an interior or a landscape.  You just have to look hard to see the magic.  We had a new model, Esme, last week.  It is hard to draw someone new.  But it's also exciting.  Someone like me, who enters into every drawing as though I have never drawn before, really has no idea what will happen when the new model begins to emerge on the page.  Local colour is repetitive… it's the same rust coloured cushion, the same white radiator, the same grey brown floor.  I shift the colours one direction and the other colours follow, if I'm lucky.

Yesterday I turned the page with Esme to the front of my pad and put it next to a new jug of flowers  I'd treated myself to.  I found a scarf I'd bought in Edinburgh at a second hand shop, a bowl from a different charity shop, my scarf and gloves and celery-coloured pumpkin I'd grown. I love the chaos of finding the rhythm and the energy without drawing the forms. Both drawings are 6 x 6"

I also love taking drawings or books and using them as objects in subsequent drawings!

Colour to enliven a dreary day

Market Flowers and Silk

I had some errands in town and while there couldn't resist some flowers at the market.  The man who sells the plants and a few bouquets is such a sweetie, who could walk by without a purchase.  I was imagining the colours I'd pair with the flowers as I drove home on this grey windswept day. I was a bit frustrated that it was already getting dark when I got in from walking Lyra, but nothing like my boxes of pastels to chase away the December doldrums!

Discovering snow light

23 x 23 cm (framed) fused plastic on paper with paint and stitching

23 x 23 cm (framed) fused plastic on paper with paint and stitching

30 x 40 cm (framed) paint on book pages

I'm getting work ready for the upcoming Freudian Sheep exhibition that opens on the 5th of December, COLD. We had a little dusting of snow the other day and have had some hard frosts that bleached the grass and created the orangey-pink sky that is peculiar to the cold and I've been thinking about that.  I've just glued the work to board and I'm hoping that solves the wrinkles… if not will have to take apart and reassemble differently. 

Scale, Shape and Versions

Late Dahlias, pastel on paper, 6 x 6" 

Late Dahlias V2  pastel on paper, 19.5 x  28 "

It's fascinating to see these next to each other on the same scale!  The top drawing (more than three times smaller) was made first and is complete.  The bottom drawing is not complete yet because the light faded and I could no longer see what I was drawing, so needed to stop. I made the first drawing, intending to use it to make a bigger piece. I began the second drawing by working from the first drawing, using many of the same colours, but I worked upside down. Once I had the gesture and the basic colours laid down I began working from life, the right way up. Because the second drawing was bigger than the first I needed to work on a table and the table was lower than my plein air easel, I was a bit further back too.  I hadn't made my mind up about whether I was going to cut the larger paper to a square.  In the end it worked to use the whole thing.

Here is the finished drawing, which has been pre-selected for the Mall Galleries Pastel Society exhibition!