Can you do the Canna, can!

Is anyone still out there? It's been another long time since I've been here on the blog, and no excuses, but back with an intention to post more regularly, even if just for my own documentation.

I've been trying to find the pure pleasure of drawing and painting again - after far too long of producing work to order, that seems to have gone by the wayside a bit. I think less writing, which takes me longer and longer, and more artwork is the key to keeping up.

These drawings I made when I had a problem with my left eye recently, which was frightening to say the least. After months of fussing about what to draw, what to paint, when, how and why... when faced with an actual threat to my ability to do so, I just sat down and drew what was in front of me, a desiccated canna flower on my studio windowsill. I resisted doing Inktober again, as a pressure I wasn't feeling up to, but got out my Indian ink, watercolours, and the dregs of my morning coffee to make these. My eye is OK again, thankfully, after a small op, but a lesson was quickly learnt - less pondering, more action. Seems obvious doesn't it!?

Life, oh Life

I've been back to life drawing sessions again - just a model and a group of fellow strugglers, no tuition. I stopped going some years back as I'd collected such a pile of drawings that I didn't know what to do with. It is one of my favourite things to do, when you get into such total concentration on contours, shadows and the subtlest of tones and hues that you lose all sense of time or whatever else is going on... but I did get to a stage when the whole exercise seemed a bit pointless, so since I've returned to it I've been trying to find new ways to interest myself - which for me usually comes by way of happy semi-accidents. Semi because I do use the watercolour very wet, and allow it to do its thing with just a little guidance from me. This one came closest to making me feel a bit excited to go further with this approach, with other more controlled or less successful attempts below. I tend to get some great bits, like an arm or a left leg, together with some awful ones, a bad torso or face, I need to get all the great bits together in one painting!

The model for most of these has been bringing her Jack Russell with her, which has provided another lovely dynamic to the poses (and two models for the price of one). A bit sad though as the little dog is old and not well, and so content to lie quietly wherever she's placed - the closeness between the two is obvious. 

The charcoals are quick poses, I think the first was half an hour and the others five minutes. The watercolours mostly half an hour - the one at the bottom an hour.

 

These are all quite big - perhaps I wouldn't have such trouble storing them if they were smaller, but strangely given all the small scale sketching I do, I feel compelled to do large figure studies - even A2 paper isn't quite big enough!

Finishing things

Over the last few months, on and off, I've been spending time in the studio determined to finish a whole bunch of half-done paintings - for better or for worse!  

These you may (or well may not) recognise from a previous post on Greg Kerr's Objets Trouvé workshop in 2014. Below are some of the stages these 60 x 60 cm paintings have gone through, some rather tortuously, via a series of processes. Splashing, rolling and printing paint onto the canvases with an underlying prepared motif  - mine our birdbath - which had to consist of organic and geometric forms. Interventions followed of adding textures, patterns and elements - some prescribed by Greg (each painting had an element taken from someone else in the class's paintings, to explain some strange additions... the crystal, the water tower, the child swimming, the sardine tin) as we worked through the course, some added tentatively or recklessly by me as I eventually took the plunge and tried to leave dependency on the teacher behind me.

Often I wished I could backtrack to a previous stage of simplicity or clarity, and in the one with the child swimming (I changed my classmate's child into my daughter) I was at the point of scrapping the whole thing but decided that more might be more and carried on adding flowers and fishes and glazes... it may still be scrapped...or cropped down to just the little girl swimming...or I could add the kitchen sink...

With changes and a move from Joburg sometime in the not too distant future, I have to finish and clear out so much stuff I don't know where to start. Painting is the relatively easy bit, I have to get them out of here!

Flighty, but Fun

I've been playing with some presents I bought myself on holiday - a few Daniel Smith watercolours from the Italian Artshop which stocks this brand that I've read about and wanted for years, not least because of the generous size tubes they come in...makes you feel a little less Scrooge-like about squeezing a dollop onto your palette with our poor Rand diving ever deeper into a hole; and a very reasonably priced Black Silver Dynasty 'dagger' shaped brush from Artsauce in Observatory, an artist-friendly shop in both price and helpful advice. I love the shapes and marks you can make with this brush, from broad flat stripes to pointy or swirly leaf shapes, to fine, sharp lines, it doesn't hold a lot of paint though so you have to dip often.


I used DS Phthalo Blue, Naples Yellow and Deep Scarlet in the top sketch of my son sleeping on the couch and on the strip underneath him - trying to see how much of a range I could get with just those. I also bought Moonglow, a lovely purplish granulating shade and Pyrrol Orange which I'm now wondering why... I did like it on my test strips hanging on the line in my studio. A transparent, glowing orange it could come in useful when painting... sunlit nasturtiums perhaps? I don't really like to fuss about colours and have actually been thinking I should trim my palette down as it's too confusing, and unnecessary to have so many. Sigh, ah well.

Hanging on a line in my (messy) studio here are offcuts of bits of watercolour paper that I've kept - very useful for playing around on and happy moodling!

Has anyone else caught onto the 'Word of the year' WOTY phenomenon? Suddenly it seems to be everywhere, with several creative mentorship sites promoting it as a creative spur or focus. I think I've decided on mine... FUN... which seems rather trivial, flighty and frivolous, but for some time I've been feeling a tad anxious and weighed down by what should or shouldn't be done and where I ought, or ought not to be artistically and otherwise, and the state of the nation, and that's the word that has jumped out at me from various sources. So I think I'll take it and see where it leads to. Would love to know yours if you have one!

What I love

I've received this Award - again! - from Adam Cope, someone with a real, palpable passion for painting and everything to do with it, including teaching it to others. Do visit his blog Dordogne Painting Days and have a look-see.

The award involves naming seven things that you love, but I decided that instead of composing a written list, I'd spend the time drawing the 'things' with this dip pen, which I've re-discovered and love, and sepia ink, ditto...

My studio - still in a mess, but I love it anyway!

Spring en plein air

There are probably a 101 things I should've been doing, but I went and sat in the shade of the lemon tree and painted the Yesterday Today and Tomorrow bush (the flowers in yesterday's post), and the plum tree in blossom, with my little shoe-box studio behind it - en plein air! It was a glorious day to be outside, but as I type this I am remembering a few of those things to do... uh-oh...
Just saw this is my 100th post - gosh!

Fast fast slow

This is the view from the glass doors of my little studio - it was another glorious autumn day and actually a pleasure to be outside hanging up washing and instead of going back inside, I went into the studio and sketched the washing. The big dark shadow it threw interested me, so I painted that again. I have vague plans for this piece of garden including herbs, flowers, arches and water, but it has to also contain the washing line - there is just no other place for it...
I really need to slow down on my watercolour painting, or at least spend more time planning it. I'm not really getting past this sketchy stage - very impatient to get everything down as fast as possible. I want to keep a loose fresh quality, but also be a bit more accurate with the information - those trees in the background of the first one are just scribbled. After this I started drawing my paintbrushes perhaps to send in for Vivien Blackburn's project... very painstakingly and slowly to train myself to look more and slow down. Now that I've re-read her challenge, I see it's sketching your paintbrushes, so perhaps I should hurry it up again. Sigh.

Patchwork painting

It's not been the greatest start to the year as far as my goals are going - posting three times a week - but a goal is something you work towards, not so? Neither have i been painting... got a bit caught up in my son's back-to-school paraphenalia - in fact we missed the first day back at school, thinking it was only next week, but all is once again on track (whew).
I look around my studio and see, again, wads of failed watercolours lining drawers and walls - the painting above is a collage I did of such attempts - the sleeping (pregnant) figure was one of two the same I painted years ago, and left in a very unfinished state, and then later built up with torn strips and pieces of old paintings, plus tissue paper, touches of gold pen, etc. This one was sold and the other one a friend has got - I never photographed it for my records, which I must rectify. I must say I do enjoy doing this rearranging and recomposing of colours and elements, turning things that gave me great frustration originally into something new - a bit of a cop-out, I know, from improving my watercolour technique and skills, but so liberating too. They are big pictures - especially for watercolour - about 80cmx50cm, or almost A1 if I remember, perhaps if I didn't do such big ones, I wouldn't have so many failures... but then I couldn't do fun collages either.