Just a Box - and the Kitchen Sink

The scary time continues, may you continue to stay safe... I feel so fortunate to be an artist at this time. There is nothing that takes my mind off all the agonising news, thoughts and possibilities than just trying to draw or paint something. Even an empty cardboard wine box is so full of variations and fascinations it completely absorbed me for many hours. As you can see in the series of steps below, I started with a cobalt blue ground, and stuck to a limited palette of yellow ochre, a touch of burnt sienna and white and I think a touch of Paynes grey to reclaim some of the darks.

And carrying on with Urban Sketchers everywhere, another scene at home - my kitchen window sill and sink. Mess is now an excuse to sit down and draw it instead of a guilt trip to clear it up - although that does have to happen eventually, I suppose (rolls eyes).

Staying Home

What a very strange time this is for the whole world - my thoughts go round and around it, to the places and people who are badly affected and suffering from Covid-19, to the places, including this country and continent where the full effects are still to be felt and dealt with - we really are all in it together. Our government, thankfully has taken early (crossing fingers) and decisive action to restrict the spread of the virus, with more to come. So we, like you more than likely, are staying at home as much as possible and finding ways to cope and keep in touch. I read a nicer way to think of this new situation, as 'Physical distancing, Social interaction', which is my experience of the online art and sketching groups and support systems that have sprung up to encourage each other. The Urban Sketchers with their #uskathome #outthewindow #SketchwithHongKong and other hashtags - prompting my sketch from the sitting room - my under-used car and the pavement ash tree and its autumn leaves which overhangs our wall.

My local Whatsapp friends studio group is posting a challenge a week - last week was self portraits (it's hard to find a willing model when you're isolating!) I find doing them initially excruciating but of course you get caught up in the process and forget your appalled self-criticisms, and capturing the folds and wrinkles becomes an objective exercise. I think I've actually made myself look younger in this one, and more highly coloured, I'm pretty pale IRL!

After that intense effort I made a series of blind contour drawings, with water-soluble wax crayons - not looking at the paper until finished (well, a peep or two to find my place) and added a bit more colour and a watery brush afterwards. They're all a bit frightening, but it's fascinating to notice resemblances to family members here and there, and for some reason I find them more interesting than my conventional attempt. Bottom right reminds me of the work of Del Kathryn Barton..?

This week's challenge is 'Elevating a humble object' if you feel like joining in, let me know in the comments or tag your work with #artinthetimeofcoronavirus on Instagram.

Please take care of yourselves and others - stay at home and stay safe. 

Objets Trouvès 3 W.I.P.

Back in class in May with our 12 colour exercises (see previous post) for inspiration, and having chosen another subject - which had to include both geometric and organic forms, with photographs of it to work from - we were let loose with acrylic paint on three of four big canvases (600x600mm).

We did have some restrictions on each format - on one we were to draw our geometric forms with aids such as rulers with an acrylic line of changing hues, and then washes or glazes of pure hues, pulling back with a cloth to reveal shapes and textures (pic 2).
On another we made shapes and textures by any means other than brushstrokes - printing with textured surfaces, rolling on colour with cloth or plastic, splashing, spraying or slapping (pic 1) and transferring some of this wet mélange onto the third canvas, where colour, shape and texture was further achieved through stencils and transfers (pic 3) This last one changed completely from the way it appears here, but I forgot to take more photos until much later in the process.

So this was mostly a lot of liberating fun and playtime, especially for someone like me who tends to get pernickety about rendering things (that comes later!) I had chosen a very simple image - the bird bath in our garden with some brickwork and foliage behind and reflected in it - and was getting worried that I would be spending the rest of the year painting my bird bath.... I still am but with so many surprises and interventions in store, it's hardly recognisable - but I'll get to that eventually.

End of the Dinner Party

 I've just come to the end of this year's Greg Kerr (website currently under construction) painting course, "The Dinner Party", which once again has been a fascinating, informative and unpredictable ride through the world of painting, art and artists, as well as really fun, sociable interludes throughout the year.

It started with researching and making Valentine cards for 5 artists, plus yourself, as preparation for the course. During the first week we painted place settings for each one in acrylic, glazed and embellished later if needed in oils. As prep for the following session we had to make and photograph clay models of the artists at a dinner table, in a setting, which we drew up carefully and painted in class onto one canvas and freely painted onto a second, using oil glazing methods.

In September, we were introduced to a process called Decalcomania, where we covered our place-setting paintings with plastic, repainted the images thickly in primary and secondary colours in acrylic, and then quickly transferred to a new canvas of the same size, repeated as many times as was necessary for a rich textured surface. This process produced unexpected and random results; blobs, blotches, textures, misregisterings, all of which were part of the grand plan.

On these printed images we were to cool down and warm up chosen areas (Mavis and Fred in Greg's unique terminology!) to make them recede or come forward, and then go through a list of possible interventions to challenge us, develop a dialogue with the work, and create an interesting patina and history - including more decalcomania, patterning, glazing, shadows, wet-in-wet and dry brush painting.

The entire project has upended my 'normal' way of doing things - which I welcome wholeheartedly, bored as I often get with my faithful renderings of things and people - but challenging and perplexing it certainly is...and am still busy with, so no final results to show you as yet, but here are some pictures of the process so far.

The Gatecrasher

Thank you everybody for your comments on Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? - I can't take any credit for the concept, I would never have thought of all those connections without prompting and guidance from my highly creative and innovative teacher. Here's the answer to the gatecrasher riddle for those who are still wondering... Salvador Dali, no less, who would normally I imagine, completely dominate a dinner party, so I had to keep him firmly and discreetly in his place. At the top is a rendition of his Lobster telephone, then a tiger from his 'Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bumble Bee round a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening' (how's that for a title!) in which the elephant in the spoon on the right also features, then the face from his painting Sleep. In the salt and pepper set, very hard to see - the Persistence of Memory, and finally his face of 'Mae West Which Can be Used as an Apartment' installation, another catchy little title.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

These are what I've been very busy on in between quick sketching trips lately - place settings (420x300mm) in acrylic for my artist's Dinner Party for this year's Greg Kerr painting course. Each place has a main guest in it, plus the guest to his or her left - except for one dinner companion who appears in two as I, the hostess, appear in all of them, as does a gatecrasher who was randomly thrown in as a curveball while we were puzzling over how to arrange all those elements. Mine was ignored by most of the guests, so felt very small! Finally we were to include the Valentine cards, or an element or part of them, from the preliminary stage of the course.

Can you guess who they all are? Answers over here in the Valentine cards, apart from the gatecrasher, who didn't deserve a Valentine, besides I had no idea he would be there.

If you thought that was challenging, and it was (I'm hoping my paintings don't look too much like a car-boot sale!) - wait till you hear the next part of the project.

A Late Valentine...or six

I really wanted to post these on Valentine's Day, but I was just too pooped after the second day of this year's Greg Kerr painting course, 'The Dinner Party'. For our preparations over the last few months we had to design and make Valentine cards for five artists of our choosing, plus one for ourselves (how difficult was that!). It involved much research, reading, thinking and copying. We had to put in something of the artist, something of ourselves and something about Valentines. It was a very clever way to totally involve us in our chosen subjects - I was amazed at how Mr Bacon kept me awake at night! I went a bit overboard on the hearts, lace and flowers - but I thought if I'm going to do this I might as well go the whole hog. So without further ado, here are my tributes to Georgia, Wayne, Francis, Marc, Alice and me!

Georgia O'Keeffe

Wayne Thiebaud



Francis Bacon

Marc Chagall

Alice Neel and me

Resurfacing...

It's been a long time! My apologies and thanks to all who have left comments over the last few posts, gone mostly unanswered, though not ignored - I have read and appreciated every one of them.

I thought this year would be a slow, relaxed stretch of time for sketching and painting, now that my son has finished school and no longer requires as much taxiing around and motherly ministrations (wrong about that too!), but it has spiralled into a maelstrom of activity. When I started this blog, it was partly to motivate myself to make art regularly - in that respect it has succeeded, and then some!

I mentioned some time ago that I registered for a year long course with artist and lecturer Greg Kerr. Four sessions of four days each, spread over the year with the surprise addition of plenty of homework in between. We're half way through that now, having just completed the second session.

The first entailed preparation of sourcing our own images through a programme that Greg and other university lecturers developed called 'The Dark Cloud', from which we made large charcoal triptychs.

Each panel is a full sheet - of Arches hot press 300gsm in my case - at the moment being displayed in the David Brown Gallery in Nelson Mandela Square in Sandton with eleven other student's work - a credit to Greg's teaching that all the work is so different, individual and good! It was chosen not on any merit system but merely those who had finished and submitted in time.

For homework we had to make 24 very small images from cropped sections from the source material photographs - I still have 6 to go (relieved to find we weren't in for detention or a rap on the knuckles for non-completion!)

These are on A6 sheets of Fabriano, with the images 120x85mm, and are meant to force the charcoal to be as photographic in nature as possible. When all are done, to be bound into a book form.

In the second session we took three of these tiny images and blew them up to large canvas size to make tonal studies in acrylic paint, with added interest of thin coloured edges - I left some areas of the canvas showing the coloured underpainting, with lots more thinking and work still to be done on them - very much work in progress.

I began the first full-tonal range panel on a big canvas - 1000x800mm but switched to smaller 550x750mm ones for the high and dark toned ones after I'd spent the first day filling in between the lines. Not sure where these are going yet, but I have no doubt there will be surprises in store the next time we get together in August for oil painting.

A big advantage of a course spread out like this over a period is that you learn to live with your work, think about and develop it, as well as the discipline of returning to it - to become a habit by the end of the course, instead of the workshop becoming a pleasant, but dim and distant memory - at least that is what I hope happens.

But wait, that's not all I've been doing! In between this was another short watercolour workshop that I'll write about soon, the Urban Sketcher's Symposium rushing up and needing attention - some preparation under my belt but lots more to do - a workshop that I've just given on sketchbooks and art journals, the lovely postcard exchange which deserves more time and effort... how did this all land up in the same year, I'm sure it could keep me going for five!