Laurelines

The Wandering Sketcher... c'est moi!

I have never felt as much on the move in my life as I do now. Ironically, I won't be traveling as much this year (though I have a thrilling trip to northern Norway planned for this coming December, about which more later)... the journeys I refer to are interior, surprising, and profound.

Some of the products of my interior travels will be apparent before too long. At least, I hope so, since many of them are a response to my September art show deadline!

Back in the visible world, I  appear on the pages of a couple of magazines, with more such appearances to follow this year.

In the June 2013 issue of Watercolor Artist, I'm included in an article about urban sketching, written by noted artist and writer Cathy Johnson. It's called 'The Pulse of the City; Seven Artists from Around the Globe Share What it Means to Record Life ... .'  Cathy (or Kate, as her artist friends call her) has written 34 books and zillions of articles. She's a national treasure. I'm honored to be one of the seven artists she writes about:

 

I am also a contributing illustrator to a magazine called Walter; Raleigh's Life and Soul, as you may remember from  a recent post here.

Because of my painting obligations, I have not been able to accept all assignments, but a recent one was lots of fun...once I stopped being terrified at the idea of producing a map! Luckily, the map in question was small and could be done in my sketchy, quirky style! I can't wait to do more maps! If ever a subject were tailor-made for me, the wandering artist, this is it.

 

My next assignment for Walter is tailor-made for me in a different way. I'm to make sketchy illustrations of the J C Ralston Arboretum in Raleigh for the magazine's June issue. The Ralston Arboretum is renowned in the horticultural and gardening worlds. I look forward to sitting in those gardens and responding to them in my own way.

February color!

Here's some color to brighten your February! Maybe your February doesn't need brightening. The days are appreciably longer now. Little green things are pushing through the ground. Here in the northern hemisphere, spring is next on the agenda. Cheers! 

 

Illustrations by yours truly from the February 2013 issue of Walter: Raleigh's Life & Soul. It's a  new magazine about Raleigh, NC ( you guessed that part?) and its fresh and lively spirit is reflected in the title.

2012 was important... and busy!

This has been a significant year. I've worked on several fronts, most art-related but not all directly involved with the making of art. 

It all began on January 2nd. A friend I saw at a party urged me to apply for a show at a great local venue. I was between galleries and so I thought, "Why not?"

In February, I made an illustration for The Morning News and fell hard for volcanoes as subject matter. I carried on with volcanoes as images for paintings and started a painting series as part of my application for a solo show.

 

So now, I'll be having a show fall of 2013! I'm a slow painter, so I'll need all that time to get the paintings done.

I had some illustration jobs to do, small and large. In addition to the volcano one for the Morning News, above, I designed the logo for a new literary prize that is launching in a few days. My friend Maxine Mills, a brilliant graphic designer, tweaked and fine-tuned. My reading pig looks very polished now, don't you think?

I illustrated the second edition of a local foodlovers' guide.

I curated the first group exhibition of Urban Sketchers, a brilliant idea proposed by Alice Southwick of the Ackland Museum Store in Chapel Hill, NC! My fellow Urban Sketcher correspondents were so generous in donating their work to this successful fundraising show.

I traveled a LOT in 2012. First was Rome in February to see two of our children and to sketch with Concetta Flore!

 

In late June, it was back to Italy again, this time for the wedding of a dear, old friend's son.

In October, compelled to visit the land of volcanoes again, my husband and I went back to Iceland.

Then, in early December, it as off to Vancouver for a brief celebration of our 21st wedding anniversary!

Putting it all together like this, I'm overwhelmed with gratitude for what WAS, clearly, a very important year. I'm reenergized and I'm ready to begin again! I thank you for sticking with me through a year of infrequent blog posts. Life, the blogging world, change...and we change with them. I'll be back with more in 2013! Happy New Year to every single one of you!

Sending you love! Laura

Iceland: last sketches

Much of what I made in Iceland were sketches designed to prime the pump in my painting studio once I returned... more private, more shorthand and oblique than my usual ones. But here are some that fall more into my normal scheme of things. 

The fields surrounding Hverfjell crater are basins of abstract shapes, curves and ovals. I saw dark chocolate with powdered sugar and caramel sauce, too, in the colors and textures there.

I wish I could post these two sections below of the one drawing and show them connected as they are in real life, so you could see the tiny islands scattered pell mell  through Breidafjordur.

Across from Budir bay on the Snaefellsnes peninsula are ridge after ridge of volcanic mountains, stretching as far as the eye can see.

<

On the way to northern Iceland, I was sketching in the car, first a little snow flurry and then the snow came thicker and faster. My marks got more stacatto and urgent... all of a sudden, we were in a snowstorm. The car fishtailed. It was quite scary. We made it, obviously, but not without increased reverence for nature's power in Iceland.

The land forms swoop and slide, as below... when they don't jut and jab.

<

The pen I used below had water-soluble ink, unbeknownst to me. Thus the grayish casts in the washes. Probably appropriate, all things considered.

I

So now, I'm hatching plans for my NEXT trip to Iceland, wherein we will pay a visit to the south and east coasts. I've got glaciers on my mind!

Loosening-up drawings

I'm working on some stuff for other people and that stuff is not finished yet. At times like this, when the images I need to work on may not be... shall we say... right up my alley, I procrastinate and I pout. I fidget and I cast about for the way to produce what I need to produce. Ugh.

 

But if I, first thing in the morning (pre-dawn, in my case,) pick up my pens, my brushes and just play in my journal, draw what's in front of me (mostly flowers right now), without thinking, I'm happy.

And by playing, by trying this line and that,
by picking randomly from among my vast collection of drawing tools and putting down marks, I find myself again. It's quite simple. You try it and see if I'm not right.

Okay, but then it's back to drawing pigs. 

Journal pages, June.

 

I'm coming to the end of volume two of my 2012 journal. I use, as you may remember, a Stillman&Birn Alpha series, 8"x12" hardbound book, because it is stoic, sturdy, hardworking, and loyal. 

This one, this April-June one, has been mostly written, with fewer images appearing.  I've been painting more in the studio, so that energy has gone to finished work, work to be hung, not work on pages in a book.

At the moment, I'm a bit stumped on how to proceed with some color illustrations I'm working on, so I did some warmup exercises in my journal. Early this morning, I picked some flowers from the garden and plunked them in a vase. I opened some ink bottles, picked up a brush, and let it flow! My work problem may not have been solved, but I sure feel better!

 

Earlier in the month, I was just starting to play around with ink and wash as a medium for illustrations. I want looseness, but more focus than the rough sketches here... and I want more color.

Dear Laura, get to work. Signed, Laura.

In the upstairs studio, woman at work

My purpose-built painting studio is small and, me being me, messy. There I fling acrylic (and rarely, oil) paint and am generally pretty scattered.

This photo shows the studio... after I'd cleaned it up for company, i.e., YOU!

There's not room in this downstairs studio to make paintings AND to make more precise work, work on paper, work with ink or watercolor, without endangering their surfaces. So I have another room, an upstairs room ...one advantage of an empty nest...where I can work on illustrations and, in more contemplative moods, paint in my journal.

I'm in the middle of an illustration project that calls for pristine surfaces and rather quiet imagery.

I'm, in short, upstairs. At work.

I'll show you the illustrations when the job is done. 

For now, here is a page from my journal... where I can still channel the chi (see post just below), albeit within the constraints of a journal page. My black and white, quieter work isn't threatened a bit.

 

 

And here are some glimpses of the upstairs studio. I like to start work there very early in the morning.

In less than two weeks, I leave for Tuscany and Umbria, where I will attend the wedding of my dearest, oldest friend's son, and where I will FINALLY get to meet up with fellow artist and blogger Robyn Sinclair, a cyber-buddy of many years' standing and a true kindred spirit. Joy, celebration, food, wine, gorgeous countryside and sketches will ensue!

*Postcards from the volcano

I got a commission last week to make an illustration for the website The Morning News. I'd done an illustration for them last summer and both they and I enjoyed the experience a lot. The current article is on natural disasters. Kate Ortega, the editor I've worked with, suggested volcanoes as a theme. I latched onto the subject with glee and ended up submitting three images. This is the one Kate chose:

Here are the two others:

*And here is the poem I've filched my blog post title from:

A Postcard from the Volcano

by Wallace Stevens

 

Children picking up our bones

Will never know that these were once

As quick as foxes on the hill;

 

And that in autumn, when the grapes

Made sharp air sharper by their smell

These had a being, breathing frost;

 

And least will guess that with our bones

We left much more, left what still is

The look of things, left what we felt

 

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow

Above the shuttered mansion-house,

Beyond our gate and the windy sky

 

Cries out a literate despair.

We knew for long the mansion's look

And what we said of it became

 

A part of what it is . . . Children,

Still weaving budded aureoles,

Will speak our speech and never know,

 

Will say of the mansion that it seems

As if he that lived there left behind

A spirit storming in blank walls,

 

A dirty house in a gutted world,

A tatter of shadows peaked to white,

Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

 

This has been a favorite poem of mine since I first read it in my late teens, then still practically one of the children Stevens refers to in the first and sixteenth lines. Now, a lifetime later, I'm closer to the 'We' of the poem, hoping that I, too, will have left, when that time comes and in my own modest way, something of 'what I felt/at what I saw.'