Laurelines

2014 in the rear-view mirror

If 2014 were a road trip, I'd be dizzy from the speed and velocity of it! Whoosh!

For the second year in a row, I've had a significant show of my work in the fall to work toward. In 2013, it was my Iceland-inspired paintings at the Horace Williams House. This past fall, it was work on a floral theme at the Ackland Museum Store, UNC-Chapel Hill. They were two very different shows, the 2013 one featured all paintings, the 2014 show included ink and wash and mixed media on paper pieces, among others.  And the pieces were too big to be scanned and I didn't have time to take good photos of them... whoosh!

 

Having deadlines is a powerful motivation, but I learned from these two shows not to say yes to another show unless I have over half the pieces already finished when I agree to show! (Yikes! and pass the ibuprofen!) Still, the show went really well and I loved working with my fellow exhibitor and friend Ippy Patterson and my buddies at the Ackland Museum Store.

2014 brought more illustration work for me, including images for Walter Magazine, Charleston Style & Design and Chapel Hill Magazine. Other clients this year were The Nature Conservancy and Edible Hudson Valley.

Fireflies for Charleston Style & Design.

Person Street illustrations for Walter Magazine.

Blue crabs for Edible Hudson Valley.

Continuing on the art front... my work appeared in an excellent new book on drawing by Katherine Tyrrell of Making a Mark blog fame.  Her book Drawing 365 is now available here in the US and will be released in the UK and worldwide in January. This is a book you will want to own if you have any interest in drawing. It's hands down one of the most informative and useful of this popular genre.  Here's a small peek at one of my contributions to it... a blind contour drawing, demonstrating one of the 365 drawing tips Katherine writes about:

I travelled a lot in 2014, but since this is already sounding like one of those annoying Christmas letters, I'll mention only the trip that relates directly to my art career, my October trip to Italy. I had the great fortune to have been invited to Rimini, Italy for a conference organized by the Italian tourism industry, one designed to connect people whose passion is travel with people whose business is travel, to see what kind of synergy might result. My years of travel writing and sketching on my blog led to my being chosen to participate in this exciting new conference, now in its second year.

It was exciting, fascinating, informative and fun. I learned so much about the travel industry and about the power of social media and about what it is I do as a blogger and why I do it. I met many lovely people from all over the world.

I will be forever grateful for the organizers of TBDI 2014 for having given me this opportunity.

While in Italy, I fell in love with the Dolomites

and they, along with my passion for the mountains of Norway and the rugged topography of Iceland, have filled me with ideas for new paintings... some kind of response, I know not yet what, to this mountain splendor and energy. More about this in my 2015: A Plan, to be published in the next couple of days.

Finally, on December 20th, I led a sketching session at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. This was a kind of reaching out and giving back as an artist that I have done very little of,  but I so enjoyed that I am eager to do more, more, more!  I had a fabulous group of sketchers, almost all beginners, and they reported having benefited a lot from my talk and our working together. It was such fun and very rewarding!

So, I think that covers it... though I can't be sure, dizzy as I still am from all the 2014 action! 

I have many thoughts about what is to come and will share those, as I said, in the next few days.

Happy 2015 to you, dear readers. I hope 2014 has been kind to you. Thank you for sharing this journey, many of you, year after year. I am so very grateful for your interest and support.

Sketching in museums

I'm leading a sketching session at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University this weekend, as I've mentioned. I've been sketching in museums for a very long time. This occasion at Duke prompts me to think about what it is *to draw this way and why it is we do it.

Sketching at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges.

Sketching is about connecting, whether the subject is a beloved 15 month-old child, an Alpine peak in Italy, or a monkfish on a slab at the Bergen fish market.

I like the word 'cathect' to express what we do when we draw: verb tr.: To invest mental or emotional energy in an idea, object, or person.

When we are lucky, the energy runs both ways. We become a conduit for the emotional energy emanating, on its own, from the Other.

Sketching in museums is a perfect opportunity for this kind of interconnection. As we draw, we participate, in varying degrees, in the process of creation of another's work.

 The varying degrees part is key. Sometimes when we sketch a painting or sculpture, we feel as if our hands and heart are one with the original artist's hands and heart.

 Sometimes, we attempt to get at the heart of the artist's creation through close observation and faithful rendering (remember, my rendering is always on the loose side!) :

At other times, we are simply making gestures in the general direction and spirit of the work in question.

All are worthwhile stops on the continuum of interconnection.

As with writing, we often don't know what we think about something until we draw it. And the process of drawing can be revelatory in ways other than intellectual.

Recently at the Nasher, I drew some pieces by Joan Miro.

His creaturely figures manifested an intense spirituality, much more so than the 15th-century German bust of Christ I also drew that day. I might have expected the reverse, but the Christ figure was stolid and very human--- which may have been what the artist intended to convey, after all. The Miros were eloquent and transcendent, for all their apparent fragility.

 

There are other things to say about sketching in museums. We could talk about drawing materials allowed in museums and ways to expand that often limited vocabulary. We could talk about sketching certain kinds of work for consolation and personal affirmation. For example, I love to sketch sculptures of the Buddha and bodhisattvas when I need a tranquility boost.

 If you have any experiences or observations you would like to share on these subjects, please do comment!

 *Here I'm not referring to the practice of copying Old Masters in museums,  a mainstay of past academic art training, but something more personal and most often less rigorous

New Mexico sketches

 I've had a hard time scanning the double spread landscape sketches I made in New Mexico. The paper I used had buckled a fair amount ( and these buckles showed badly) and the sketches were too big for my scanner. I finally resorted to taking Iphone photos of these wide pieces. The images are fuzzy and the color is a bit off, but they somehow convey more of the originals, even with those limitations. I spent so much time trying to get good reproductions of the landscape sketches and then I realized it was just not going to happen!

The originals of the two landscapes are 17 1/2" wide and 6" high.

 

After four hours in a jeep driving through the spectacular landscape, we stopped at Madrid, a tiny, quirky town between Albuquerque and Santa Fe,  and had a delicate and delicious meal at the Hollar Restaurant. There were many regulars dining there the afternoon we had lunch. Clearly, Toto, we were no longer in Kansas.

On the day we drove to Taos, we were pressed for time at lunch, trying to make it back to Santa Fe before the impending snow storm. We had a quick and very tasty lunch at the Bear Claw Bakery and Café.

Another IPhone photo of a wide landscape sketch. With the same disclaimers as above. Frustrating to have to post such fuzzy images, but there we are.

 

We visited the International Folk Art Museum in Sante Fe and were enchanted by the carved wood animals of celebrated Hispanic artist Felipe Benito Archuleta. Of course, I had to draw some!

Soon to come, a post about drawing in museums, in preparation for my upcoming sketching workshop at Duke University's Nasher Museum of Art. I've done a lot of this in my life and it's one of my favorite sketching activities. I am always surprised by how meaningful this can be... and in what surprising ways we learn from it. Then I'll have an end of year post, reflecting on what has gone on this year (an awful lot!) and what I hope for in the year to come. Happy December!