Laurelines

Cars, gardens, and a trip to Turkey!

Yes, on the road every week and getting my redone gardens off to a good start---this is how things go right now.

But there's Turkey this week, too! Off to Istanbul, Bodrum, Ephesus for a few days, leaving Wednesday.  Back the next Thursday.

Sketches from Turkey!! Soon! 

Until then, some more quick in-the-car sketches, part of my ongoing project this year to sketch FAST, so that I can do it more deftly when I want to. I won't always want to, of course! There's a lot to be said for slow and careful, too.

Starting a garden journal

 Last fall, when life seemed very *sad, I decided I needed to cast a lifeline into the future and redesigning my lapsed gardens seemed the way to do it.

In rethinking my gardens, I've drawn inspiration from my travels, and from gardens I've seen in books and magazines. Each of my new garden areas will have a governing spirit of place: there'll be the Mediterranean garden, the Normandy garden, the Charleston/Brittany garden, and so on. Though separate, they will be connected in important ways.

It occurred to me today to document the development of these areas in a systematic way, in a separate garden journal. 

So, a little late into the process, I've started.  I won't reproduce the first pages because they are all text, but I will fill you in on the story over the next while.  

*My mother's very fragile health was the source of great sadness last fall. Doctors felt she had weeks to live, six months at the most.  The good care she is receiving at her nursing home has miraculously slowed her precipitate decline. Visiting her and caring for her each week, as well as fulfilling other intense family obligations, have for the present cut my studio time by more than 2/3.  This is by way of explanation and not to complain. I cherish the time I have with her.

Keeping an illustrated garden journal is one of several things I can do under these circumstances. I am keeping my painting lifeline going and drawing other subjects, too, in the time available.

I have two trips upcoming, one to Turkey, and one, in early June, to France.  There will be travel sketches here, too--if all goes according to plan, which, as you can tell, it may not.

Happy spring to one and all! Or happy autumn to our southern hemispherites!

Drawing with a vintage Waterman pen

Dear Kate Johnson  and I egg each other on with our delight/mania over art supplies, but what are friends for? She was having such fun with some beautiful old Waterman fountain pens that I decided I had to try one, too. I'm not crazy about my first sketches with mine, but I AM crazy about the pen (what a supple, sensitive nib!!) Now I've got to figure out a way to take it with me on my sketching trip to Turkey at the end of this month----it's not the pen I'm worried about, it's the quantity of Platinum Carbon ink I don't want festooning the insides of my suitcase! Other than my windmill palm and a few other shrubs, my new Mediterranean garden looks like a bunch of sticks stuck in the ground. It's March, you know, so let's be circumspect. I'll be sketching the garden as it develops. As for the trip to Turkey, I'm so excited! I've been invited by a new friend to visit and sketch and Casey Toussaint, my great buddy, is going with me. We've drawn together in Paris, Amboise, Brittany, and Charleston, SC, and now we're going to add Istanbul and Bodrum and places yet unknown to our map. I, of course, am still anguishing over which art supplies to take. It was ever thus. 

In other news, I've been asked to be the judge for a poster competition at Artybuzz.

 I was not familiar with this site when I was asked to participate as judge, but there is an interesting range of work there, some of it quite good. There are two weeks left to enter and to vote for your favorite, so check it out!

My new Mediterranean garden

 I had the idea last fall to redo my garden (it had lost all design cohesion) but I wasn't sure how. I have two gardens, a front one, a back one, and they're quite different. Both are being transformed. But THIS story is about my front garden. 

For several reasons (one of which was our recent horrendous drought),  I decided to go Mediterranean.

I couldn't conjure up a design at first. Over time, shapes appeared in my mind's eye. Then colors and textures, then individual plants. It was like looking into a crystal ball day after day and seeing a garden appear with increasing clarity, of its own volition, in its own time.

When I can't sleep at night, I go to the garden in my imagination and have a look around and see what has appeared there since last I checked. 

I will show you photos later in the spring. Right now, it looks like Brown Dirt World. Here are some sketches of some plants waiting to be planted and a couple that already have been.

This is a new sketchbook with very thin paper and it buckles a lot when watercolor is added, creating awful discolored areas when pages are scanned. Ick. No more watercolors in this book! Here's a similar set of images done on thicker paper. Lesson learned.