Laurelines

Bringing the far North closer

When my beautiful daughter Cecelia won a scholarship to live and go to high school in Germany at age 16 for a WHOLE YEAR (!!!) I missed her so desperately that I started painting paintings of her at all stages of her childhood. In a miraculous way, those paintings brought her back to me during the endless 12 months of separation.

In a similar way, the paintings and studies for paintings I'm making for my upcoming show bring Iceland and Norway back to me. The studies below are quick and gestural, drawn from sketches and from the images in my mind's eye.

 

The trick will be to make finished works that share some of the energy of these studies. If I could, I'd spend one whole year just making large scale study after study like the last one shown here, acrylic on board. I wouldn't worry about producing a certain number of finished pieces, I'd just paint my heart out. And at the end of the year, I'd see where I'd been. Maybe that will be what 2014 holds for me. We'll see. There's a still-fresh 2013 to live first!

January! We're new again!

Because my birthday coincides with the new year, I'm always ready to get clear of the past and start again, with hope and gusto!

And so, here we are, starting again. My primary goal for the year is to get paintings painted for my show next fall. 

But, of course, I will always have drawing and sketching and writing in my journal and occasional illustrating to do. Once I have shared these images with you, two from my new Stillman and Birn Alpha  9 x 12 journal (this is my eighth!), two from a drawing session I had here yesterday with two friends, I'm going to finish tidying up my painting studio. And THEN I'm going to paint.

These drawings are of my young friend Meg, who is obviously quite beautiful. But there is a quality to her that has made me really want to draw her from the first time I met her. I can see the tiny child Meg still there in her features and I can also see the spare beauty of a Byzantine saint as well. Her soul is both old and new.

Finally, some palette cleansers, as I call them... today's sketches from my new journal. I make these images first thing in the morning in my studio, as a way to sweep away yesterday's struggles, to invoke new energy for the day. I love the natural calligraphy inherent in flowers, so when I have them, I draw them.

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!

Riding the chi: my artist's statement, illustrated

I'd dreaded coming up with the artist's statement I needed to have to apply for a solo show in 2013. Not to disparage artists (one of whom I am, you'll have noticed) but their/our "statements" are often, well, boring and pretentious. Lots of words are used, though!

Don't ask me why this is. I'm already in hot water enough by revealing my feelings about these darned things. Besides, I don't know why. So that's reason number two not to ask.

(By the way, most of my artist friends dislike writing these statements... it's never really OUR idea in the first place.)

My particular main task, it seemed to me, was to figure out and explain what unifies the various, seemingly loosely related, paintings and drawings I produce. 

Here are two recent ones, as cases in point. Keep in mind, too, my volcano pieces, though I may be at the end of this series for the moment.

This is a study for what I think might be a return to a theme I've dealt with a lot in the past: rocks and water. I'll do lots of these studies and then see how they might translate into larger paintings.

And here's a drawing I made yesterday with a garden subject:

And here is my artist's statement. It incorporates what I've done in the volcano series, as well as some of my other past work, and tries to anticipate how I might be doing over the next months. Pretentious it probably is, but it feels true.

I’m a restless artist, a shape shifter, a seeker, never able to stay in one place, keep to one mode of making art, for long. Painting hasn’t come easily for me. Drawing is my native language. Not long ago, on reading Michael Pollan’s wonderful book A Place of My Own , I was reminded of the concept of ‘chi:’

' "Chi" is the Chinese word for the earth spirit, or cosmic breath, which flows in invisible currents over the face of the earth... . This earth spirit animates all living things.'

It’s when I address in paint this chi, this force that thrills me, that animates the world as I experience it, that I begin to be a painter in a way that matters to me.

In these pieces, I'm leaping back and forth between the particular and the abstract, all the while reveling in texture and color, in energy.

I feel like I’m reinventing myself as a painter... or I’m being reinvented. When you’re a shape shifter as I am, and you’re riding the chi, it’s hard to tell.

Painting paroxysms, round two

Four more finished to add to the three already done. Three in the wings. After  I finish 8 to 10 of these volcano paintings, I'll move to the next series. Which is still a little glimmer in my mind and heart. We shall see what emerges!

Sketching at the North Carolina Museum of Art

I'm still madly and happily painting volcanoes, but I miss frequent sketching. My husband and I went to the North Carolina Museum of Art this past weekend to remedy the situation. Here is what resulted: 

This polychrome 18th century German, 'Adoring Angel,' calls to me. I've sketched this before,

but wanted to connect to the angel again.

Another view:

On a (very) different plane, here is a self-portrait:

and a vignette from the African Gallery:

The second batch of volcanoes should be ready to share soon. I can't rush the process, much as I wish I could.

Painting paroxysms

Volcanic paroxysms, that is.  A paroxysm is, as you know, a sudden, violent outburst of energy. I have them, you have them. Even educated fleas have them. Ours pale in comparison to volcanic ones. At least, mine do and I hope yours do, too.

So now, after my recent illustration for The Morning News, I can't stop painting volcanoes!  

This subject has grabbed hold of my very being and it won't let go. It's no surprise, really. I was born on a dormant volcano, one of the Aleutian arc volcanoes, in the Bering Sea. A lifelong wanderer, I have felt most at home on this planet in Iceland, a country that absolutely oozes volcanic and other forms of primal energy.

I have long been drawn to exploding, expansive gestures. 

 

 

My love of fountains is another example of my attraction to expulsive energy.

I'm working right now on 7 volcano paintings, the first in what I believe/hope will be a longer series. These are smallish, 11" x 14", a great size for beginning exploration of the subject. Medium is acrylic on board, though I have some water soluble oils I can't wait to try with this series!

 

So, onward, volcanically. I'm learning as I go what works and what doesn't with these paintings and I'm really enjoying the process. I'll have more to say and show soon.

*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.'

Lines, colors, shapes: January

I was only able to dip my toe into the great sea that is lithography during my two-day workshop in Austin, Texas.  I would like to find a way to continue working in this medium. I really like it.

Here are two very different first steps in lithography. One is a face roughly derived from my sketch of the adoring angel below. It sort of just appeared on the plate as I drew.

The second image comes from a recent sketch done in my studio here and is a way of seeing how my normal gestures and lines behave under lithograph conditions. The plates were small, 7"x9", so it was hard to get real momentum going.

Here is the mixed media sketch of the protea mentioned above:

And finally, a little loosening-up sketch from this morning: This loosening up is necessary because I'm going to Rome next Tuesday to see my daughter Cecelia (she who never stands still) and hope to get some sketches of Rome (think fountains) done while I'm there. She, as you may remember, is an avid sketcher now, so we can enjoy this together. I'm also meeting up with Concetta Flore, lovely artist and very nice person. She lives in Rome and wants to sketch with me...I'm really looking forward to it. I'm going to prepare some loose sheets for sketching by applying acrylic washes like the one I used for the Greek/Roman head below. Then I'll use ink and crayon on site. Playing with mixed media outside of the painting studio keeps me open to new ways of doing things inside it.  I'm taking a travel sketchbook, too. Ciao, Roma!

Fall, on the periphery

Since last we spoke, I've had to turn my attention to the kind of thing for which girding one's loins is necessary. No worries, I give it my all and then I can let it go, knowing I can't control the outcome.

On the periphery, art goes on. There's something so reassuring about examining the periphery and finding yourself still there, don't you find ?