The freedom of gifting your drawings

Deciding to make a sketchbook with a theme, in my opinion, creates a momentum of its own. Another thing I've found is that knowing that I am 'releasing' the drawings makes me freer and sometimes better. I discovered The Sketchbook Project https://www.sketchbookproject.com/ before Christmas and began putting my sketchbook together, due early March, over the weekend.  They say you can rebind your sketchbook with different paper so I began doing that.  After a hiccup I decided I needed four signatures for the pages to sit right and prepared them for pastel with gouache and ground. There are 32 pages so I need to make at least one drawing a day.

If you don't know about the Sketchbook project, you pay, they send you a sketchbook, you draw like mad and send your sketchbook back to them, in Brooklyn, and you never see it again unless you visit the Sketchbook project, or find it digitally online. Good thing I have no problems with letting go. 

Using a drawing to inspire a painting

The House with Green Shutters, pastel on opened book, 23x16 cm

Occasionally when I do a drawing I think, 'Maybe I could make a painting from that idea'. That's what happened when I made the opened book above, over the weekend. The title of the book, The House with Green Shutters, inspired the drawings and led me to trawl back through images I had taken or drawn in America over the years. When I think of green shutters I think of America. In Maine every other year there are open gardens on the mainland and if I am there at the right time I love to follow my mother through the gardens and past the mansions. I'm noyt sure if I am more enchanted by the spaces or my mother in her hat and bespoke tops.

I made the drawing on the left first and when considering what to put on the right I knew I needed to make something bolder. Hydrangeas and peonies are the two flowers I think of when I think bold. I liked the scale of the figure and the acid green and purple. Still not sure about the sky. I've looked at Milton Avery, Dorothy Eisner and Fairfield Porter but will wait to let the paint dry again to test some alternatives.

Hydrangeas and Hat,  oil on canvas, 30x40cm

Looking at myself

(study) Self Portrait in Red Chair - egg tempera on panel - 15x20

So I had lots of goals when I began the little egg tempera study. Reading Bonnard I thought about this statement: 'The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world... the picture... which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him.' Patrick took a photo and using that in black and white, a mirror and my intuition I tried to project something about myself. I looked at Bonnard, in particular ' Vivette Terrasse c.1916.https://my-museum-of-art.blogspot.com/2014/02/pierre-bonnard-vivette-terrasse-c1916.html 

I wanted to make the surface exciting but to draw the viewer to my gaze.

Self Portrait in Red Chair - oil on canvas - 40 x 50

When I  finished the egg tempera I primed a canvas with kings blue and used the leftover paints from before Christmas that were still on my glass palette. I think I did that to avoid delay and maybe because I could blame the colour choices on that… mostly though I just wanted to get something down. At first it was really loose but I found that I wanted to do something that felt complete at the end and I didn't know how to do that without getting more explicit. I looked at Bonnard more and I looked at Julie Held. I have worked on this a bit more - the left side of the chair and the wall and the vase all  work better, but haven't photographed it yet. 

Jettisoning local colour for January

According to the Nabis from: https://www.theartstory.org/movement-les-nabis.htm, a painting was a harmonious grouping of lines and colors, with outcomes to include many different solutions. An artist's personal style was, in fact, accomplished through the choice of how to arrange these lines and colors. As an example of the Nabi approach, at the beginning of their meetings, they would recite the following "mantra" together: "sounds, colors, and words have a miraculously expressive power beyond all representation and even beyond the literal meaning of the words." 

When I visited the Barber Institute last week, in Birmingham, to see the current Vuillard exhibition, I came away remembering that I don't have to stick to local colour and that my instinct, even my handwriting has always been about colour and pattern primarily. I reflected  that last year taught me how to see acccurately and how to record what I see better but that my personality can sometimes be obscured when I think too hard about all of that.

Today, arriving late to drawing, I worked quickly to put something authentic down. The two rectangular drawings below, 19 x 28cm were 20 minute poses made before the break. The square below those, 17 x 17 cm, was a challenge in that it was a 1/2 hour pose and I had to look hard to find something to say about it. The moment that I chose the blue, I began to feel it was about shapes and colour and no longer a model.  The image at the top was the final drawing and it was about 25 minutes, 28 x 19cm, and the surfaces and the design elements of the arrangement inspired me. The ground was a lime green which guided me in colour relationships.

January objects and artifiical light

What I found in January, pastel on tinted paper 16 x 16cm

When I picked a little bouquet of what I had in the garden it occured to me that I wanted to make the shapes of the hellebores stand out from the background.  I have a cupboard in the studio with cloth (clothes and pieces of fabric) and most of it is pattered and highly coloured. I don't have many solids and I don't have any velvets. That was what I was hankering after.  When I started, the colours were actually quite light and punchy.  In the end I migrated towards local colour, although the colour and light were never the same yesterday and again this morning - they were  grey days and I needed to turn on the natural light lamp before long. This drawing was a puzzle and when I finally introduced the ceramic lemon squeezer for balance I felt I had found the January feel of stillness indoors, and had done as much as I could with this arrangement.

Zooming, changing the focus, abstracting shapes

charcoal on paper, 16x14 cm

I have a bunch of ideas I want to explore and one of them is about memories of my young family. I began this project by looking through one of many boxes of old photos. From there I drew a memory by choosing elements from a few photos, creating a mood and story that never really existed but feels true, with lots of truths within it.

B & W print of oil pastel, crop

B & W print of oil pastel, crop

I am using lots of different media, including those fat oil pastels that are like using a big paintbrush to get a feeling rather than a detail.  Ultimately I want to paint from these ideas but for the moment I am trying to keep it open so I can figure out what I want to say and how I might say it.

B & W print of oil pastel, crop

B & W print of oil pastel, crop

watercolour and gouache on book page

pencil on paper 16 x 25 cm

oil pastel on paper 17 x 12 cm

Distemper as a medium

Capricorn Bouquet, distemper on panel, 20 x 25 cm

Before the holidays I took a class with Mick Kirkbride using egg tempera and distemper. This is the first chance I've had to use distemper since the course. I have been preparing surfaces for the past few days, ready for the new year and have a few books I'm using for warm up activities but today was a full painting day. 

I loved the start of the distemper process. Everything was loose and exciting.  The rabbit skin glue mixed easily and the light was good. As the day wore on the glue got pesky (I think my studio was a little cool), the light faded and I tightened up. I think the main problem is I wasn't sure what I wanted to accomplish, not knowing the medium, it's hard to know how to use it. On top of all that, I had a bouquet of flowers I bought on sale from the grocery store ( three days ago) still in their wrapping, in the sink, and although I wanted to find an interior, I felt I should use the flowers. Also, when distemper doesn't cooperate, it REALLY doesn't cooperate.  At first I thought of it like working with monotype ink - fighting the medium - In the end I had to get out a hotplate to keep the glue  and the mixed distemper warm enough to use and then it dryed out and flaked off the piece of glass. Glass is cold, so perhaps not the best surface to mix on.

I have some other ideas and motifs I want to explore with distemper and it was only my first effort but I have the sense that it may be an uphill battle.  You never know I might get up tomorrow and have a way to strengthen this, on the other hand it's probably best to move on.