Dabbling with Oils

I've just discovered Bill Guffey's Challenge via Liz's blog, and seeing that I've registered for an oils workshop which is coming up soon - painting urban landscapes - I thought I'd get some practice and see a bit of Lisbon at the same time. I found a street name that I recognise -Rua Bartolomeu Dias - who left little stone crosses around our southern Cape coastline 500+ years ago when he discovered the sea-route to India.
I settled on No 102 Rua Bart Dias because it had a nice bougainvillea peeping over the wall (although I didn't get much of it in my painting - I have mostly road-surface in that!) and it would make me tackle perspective - not my forté.

I love painting in oils, but feel very uncertain about what I'm meant to be doing, with fats over leans and how to stop everything squidging together when you try to finish a painting in one sitting. My good, kind, thoughtful husband gave me a set of oil paints, brushes and a stack of huge canvases for my fortieth birthday, and a few smaller canvas boards to experiment on before starting on my large 'works'. The first ones that I did on the small boards were so enjoyable, I felt free to dab away without obsessing if I was doing it correctly... and they are still the ones I prefer over all the attempts at masterpieces I've done since.
This early arum lily painting spent time leaning against a wall that had a severe water leak down it and the canvas peeled away from the warped board. I hadn't left enough space around it to stretch it over another support, so its a bit wrecked - any suggestions on how to stretch it again? That white border is all the canvas I have to work with.

My very first oil painting is this one on the right... done when I was 11 or 12 years old, on lined exercise book paper with a paint-by-numbers set of little oil pans. We were living in a flat next to the railway line in Cape Town, and I had just read a book about Vincent van Gogh, and loved his Café Terrace by Night so much that I was inspired to do a version - sort of (note the rather tipsy-looking man's bell-bottoms - it was during the 60's!)
I had forgotten all about this - I don't remember giving it another thought - until my little sister (who would have been 9 or 10 at the time) presented it to me a few years ago. She had put it away safely, kept it through four family house moves, high school, art school (me) and drama school (her) and my moving up to Johannesburg, taken it with her to live in America, and on a visit back to SA, one very surprising middle-aged birthday, tucked it into a gardening book she gave me! It's the only art from my childhood that has survived the years - thank you Gillian!!!

A sculpture exhibition

I can't believe it's over a week since I posted - the year is galloping away and leaving me a bit dazed in its wake. Yesterday I somehow got dressed in clothes that were too smart to paint in (I'm working on an oil painting, but not at all sure that I'm ready to show it to anybody) so decided to go and look at the Dylan Lewis sculpture exhibition at the Everard Read Gallery and do a bit of necessary shopping. The sculptures are gigantic and roughly hewn - he leaves many of the marks of building, finger and hand prints, interspersed with carefully crafted details - they look as if they've been dragged, or dragged themselves, up from the earth. I sketched one of the massive figures, hoping someone would come along to show the scale in my drawing, but no one did - you can more or less tell by the size of the doorway. I photographed the explanatory piece on the right - I think its written by Laura Twiggs - that was up on the wall, as well as writing down a quotation that was displayed as part of the exhibit, on the sketchbook page.

I've just started reading Art of Sketching (Sterling Publishing) and trying to be more expressive with my marks - so far its a really helpful and informative, richly illustrated guide that promises to reveal many of the aspects of sketching that have eluded me up to now.

Steamroller printing

One of the good things about Urban Sketchers, is that it makes you get out there and partake in Life! It's so easy (or it is for me) to ensconce yourself in home and studio and just let the world go by.
I had an email about an art project happening at 44 Stanley, where a steamroller would be used for linocut printing. Which I thought sounded interesting, but it was at about the same time as SA playing the All Blacks in the Tri-Nations Cup... and parking is so hard to find at 44... and I should be spring-cleaning my house... but I hadn't done any urban sketching for quite a long while, so... all that went out the window. Except for the rugby, of course. If I wanted company and moral support on my sketching expedition, I had to wait for that to finish.
Directly after the match (Go Bokke!!!) BFG and me hurried off, found a parking space right next to the steamroller and spent a delightful hour watching, chatting (BFG) and sketching (me). Students of local art schools and print artist Fiona Pole laid out and inked their linocuts and used as their press, a cute little yellow steamroller! I did wish I too could be 20 again and just starting out on this whole art adventure, but also happy to be standing on the sidelines and recording the event. Two or three of the students were curious as to what I was up to, and I think - I hope - I may have found a couple more potential Joburg urban sketchers for the future. We'll see...
After that lunch amongst the wisteria and sunshine in a buzzy, trendy courtyard - table no. 13 lucky for us as the previous couple up and left just as we arrived.
Below one of the lino-prints and some of the students with their work...

Sad tale of a Dikkop

I had rather a sad walk yesterday - soon after I left home I found a trail of striped feathers, leading to a poor, quite large, injured bird under a bush, panting, hiding its head and wishing (I imagined) that the world would just go away. I decide to carry on with my walk, and if it was still alive when I got back, try and do something to help it. It was, so I fetched a basket from home, picked him up and put him under a tree in my garden while I went to look him up in the Bird book and find a phone number for the zoo.
He's a Spotted Dikkop - and I realised when I read the description that we've been hearing him often at night lately - a loud panicked sounding call when all else is still. I had thought it was a bird in distress somewhere, but apparently this is it's territorial scream!
When I went back to check on him, he was dead - killed I suspect, by a certain delinquent black cat in our neighbourhood who I've seen tossing pigeons around with the greatest exhilaration.

I couldn't let such a magnificent creature die in vain, so I spent a few hours drawing him and his feathers that I went back to fetch from the crime scene - in my newly-established sepia nature journal, though I added a bit of watercolour to soften the contrast - for the feathers I used mostly watercolour after finding the pen too harsh and scratchy for their softness.

Ink pencils for Spring

So off we went this morning, my ink pencils and I, to the dam (surprise, surprise!) and after a ten minute walk I found a spot where the rising sun didn't blind me and the tender new green outfits of the willows were on display. I scribbled and washed, scribbled and washed, getting some rather startling results as the water mixed with the crayon - dark areas went lighter and murkier, subtle blends became shockingly bright and garish - which really, those new leaves are, but are so tiny and delicate in nature that they don't look it - unlike when I try to paint them. So I'm not at all sure about the crayons... I liked the black one for this sketch of a hadeda who came with a friend for a bath right next to me... but the colours are very tricky to manage.
The birds flapped off squawking raucously, as they do, when a helicopter flew overhead. There is a joke that goes 'Why do hadedas make such a noise when they take off?'.... 'Because they're afraid of heights!' That struck me as enormously funny when I first heard it, but maybe you have to know them.

Jasmine bouquet

I've been bound again to desk and computer, and absolutely longing to get out into the fabulous spring weather and its sights and smells. I finished the next stage of my work this morning and didn't have to go far to find a ready-made bouquet to sketch, right outside the dining room window. I thought I'd practice a bit with my Inktense pencils before taking them out for a walk... started out quite tentatively, then when I realised I was not going to capture every bud and blossom, got looser and scribblier. Although the colours are fairly restricted, I think they'll be good for laying down quick impressions of a scene. Now, for a week I think, I'm freeeeeeee!!!

Spring Day in the South

Spring has arrived right on cue - our long (to me, *Cathy ;-) cold winter has morphed into warm, balmy, fragrant, birds-and-bees, blossoms and lime-green trees miracle once more. I haven't been here for a whole week again, as life got busy and some more work arrived, but I had to give a nod to the season that is bursting out all around and sketch in watercolours these freesias that have obligingly popped up in my garden, though I'm sure they were planted a few years ago.
I hope whether you're entering Spring or Autumn, that you can get out and enjoy the changes.

Cathy's comment in a previous post: *However, I must tell you I disagree on the "long" winter we've had... for us europeans expats your south african winters are so amazingly short compared to ours in Europe!!! But it's only a matter of point of view!! I entirely agree on the "cold" bit though - even as a European!!!