Beach Family

I spent a happy few hours yesterday painting the Different Strokes from Different Folks project, and blew out some of the doubts and negative energies that have been assailing me, though I must say for the first hour or so my overriding sensation was one of fear and panic - performance anxiety? Until little things started happening with the watercolour like
<--this and
<--this
which just made me remember how I love this stuff and to enjoy the process. I've also been devouring various articles, such as the latest Painter's Keys clickback and Karin Jurick's pep talk on motivation on DSFDS, which addressed many of my ponderings, and dipping into my copy of Art & Fear... it's wonderful how you can send out a little SOS to the world at large, and the answers come flowing in.

Awards, awards!!

A belated Thank You to Teresa of delightful 'Blueberries, Art & Life' for awarding me this award on the left, even when I wasn't feeling quite so blogging Fabulous!

And thank you very much to Art with Liz and Anne Marie Propst for the Passion for Painting Award - I'm honoured.

I'm to pass them on to five and seven bloggers, which always throws me into a tizz of indecision - there are so many I feel are fabulous, and have a great passion for painting, many of whom are probably swimming in awards already - my regular fixes of inspiration and motivation - Laura, Laura, Ronell, Suzanne (where are you?), Linda, Helen - to mention a few. So I've decided to nominate some bloggers who have come to my attention recently, and oh lazy me, ask them to pick an award - or both - I think passion and fabulousness go together well. And pass them on if you want to.

Pat Reese Design - a new blogger who does beautiful watercolours and drawings

Isabel Fiadeiro of Sketching in Mauritania - produces prolific, colourful, evocative, exquisite watercolour sketches of her travels and the people she encounters

Sharon Burl of Steelmice Art - a cousin of mine that I've never met, except in cyberspace, but who has re-discovered painting after years of not and started a blog, both of which I want to encourage - her paintings are full of life and passion - keep going Sharon! I know it's hard-to-impossible with little children at your heels!!

Orly Aveneri of One Artist Journal who records her days in creative and lively style - as one who's started umpteen journals that have fizzled out I admire one who keeps them going.

To keep it in the family, nepotist that I am, I would nominate my sisters Gillian of Ketchup Sketchup and Vivienne of Kitchen Table Sketches, but I don't want to apply any pressure, as they seem to have almost fallen off the bottom of my blog list, apart from a particularly Fabulous tea-cosy knitted by Vivienne and blogged by Gillian, but I do love to see new sketches and creations from them, even if neither are the blog-addict that I have become. No Pressure!

Um - that's six - the other one for all the other great passionate fabulous bloggers out there who deserve it too. Oh I think I'm supposed to list seven Things I Love too, but I need to take this blogger's bum for a walk.... I'll think about that as I go...

Still here...

Ooh, I feel like I've been away for ages and ages... I haven't cleaned my studio out yet, but I've purged most of my house, and had a very pleasant visit from my Aussie sister and a much less pleasant visit from lurgies attacking my husband and son and which are trying to attack me, but I'm fighting back with everything I can muster. So I have nothing to show you but this page of sketches of my dog - which I really enjoyed doing because of the lovely pen and ink I used (and my lovely dog). I wish I could take them out to sketch around Joburg (not the dog, though he could come in useful) but it's impossible to perch around a street with a bottle of ink and a dip pen, plus sketchpad and handbag with car keys - though I think some people do.

... and this ballpoint-on-exercise-book sketch of the current Different Strokes project which I'm hoping to get to do in watercolour before Wednesday - I love those reflections in wet sand.

Autumn Clear-out

Digging around in my old paper drawers, first to find those old sketches of my daughter, and then in a vague and unsuccessful attempt to sort through and throw out to make room for the growing piles of newer paintings, I wondered, not for the first time, if my work is actually improving, or getting worse over time! These two bring back a happy period when I was painting only once a week, meeting with a friend and sharing a model. I seemed to immerse myself far more in the process back then, going home exhausted from a morning of concentration and expended creative energies. Donvé and I both worked on really large paper - the one bottom right is 55x75cm/21x30" - and were avid admirers of Charles Reid's figure and portrait study books. My palette was clean and simple and the brushstrokes look much surer than I seem able to apply them lately (although the one on the right is very unfinished-looking). I think I am rushing through paintings now, for various reasons, and I need to find bigger chunks of time to devote to the process, and perhaps another fellow-painter to help create that atmosphere of industry (Donvé moved away to the Cape).
I definitely need to clear some space in my studio, so my 'Autumn Clean' shall continue - so if I'm a bit scarce for a while, that's what's going on, hopefully with a productive outcome at the end of it.

Tractor time

I went around the corner to the local health-food shop and café - called Fresh Earth - to tackle drawing this tractor for Urban Sketchers. There have been a few abandoned cars and machinery on there lately, so I faced my fear of mechanical rendering and tried, when nobody was around on this Sunday afternoon. I hope there are no tractor experts to spot the many errors! There's another sketch of it in it's pavement café setting over here on USk, that I did from my car on Friday when it was open.

Gallery cakes

I'm spinning my wheels a bit and not getting anything of any substance done - one of my many distractions was this fun thing that Vivien and Joanne did on their blogs. It is a very small 24x18cm painting from a series of cake paintings I did for a particular food exhibition some years ago.

Here's another one - those gallery viewers must be feeling quite ill!

Off to see the world

Another daughter has ventured forth and flown off to London to find her feet - if not her fortune. In January last year I did a post about her sister going off to Dubai, and dug out some old sketches I'd done of her. This child, being the one who never sat still, and then later who was always 'out', has far fewer of my efforts expended on her, I had to really scratch to find these. I suspect we may hear more of her news now that she's far away than I did when she was home, in between work, netball, yoga, party, party, party, scuba-diving, rock climbing and just hanging out with her friends. Well I hope so anyway!
Though none of these sketches look terribly like her, they all remind me of the various stages of her childhood. Endlessly interested six-year old, happy confident niner, slightly sulky sixteen-wishing-she were-somewhere-else, and sunny excited just finished school and off on her first unsupervised holiday with the ever-important friends.
She arrived at Heathrow at 5.30 this morning, and we've had a message from her to say she found her way to her destination on the tube all by herself!
God Bless, golden girl - I hope London and wherever else you roam to, will be as wonderful as your wildest dreams.

Ginger flower

I hadn't had a look around my garden for weeks as it had been raining endlessly and everywhere was squelchy up to the ankles. But the sun has been out, and so have these gloriously messy ginger flowers - they've been having a private display to themselves between a big old cypress tree and our back wall.
I took my paints and watercolour pad out there, and had to stand up to paint this enormous flower - it's about a foot from top to bottom - if I sat down it was hidden behind the leaves, so my painting is even messier than the shaggy bloom. I think that ginger is an alien plant species (it certainly likes a lot of water!) and I suppose we should pull this out, really.