Laurelines

A pause for pencil

In a complicated world, experienced by a complicated mind (mine, to wit), it is well from time to time to simplify. What could be simpler than pencil on paper? And it's so much fun, the pencil. Here are colored pencils in action at the Audubon Gallery at the North Carolina Museum of Art. I usually find taxidermy distressing and depressing, but the birds at NCMA are lovely. Their spirit remains.

I commend to you, in addition to the Audubon Gallery at NCMA, the Iris restaurant where, along with bright and tasty food and polite fellow diners, you get to rub shoulders with one of Patrick Dougherty's sublime site-specific branch and twig wall sculptures. Pencil with a bit of added wash happened here.

Why do I like blue pencil so much? I have no idea, but there we are. At a workshop I went to last weekend, I blue penciled my fellow attendees. And on blue-lined paper, too. I sense a theme evolving here.

and

On the other hand, we have non-blue pencils and here is one very dandy example ... I used a multi-colored, swirled-together leaded pencil for a quick drawing I made of my daughter Kate on her birthday. Those multi-colored pencils are delightful... they're rainbows in pencil form.

And here's a nude guy from a figure drawing session I went to,  drawn on 18" x 24" paper. Brown pencil here, I don't remember which kind.

People and countries behave badly often, but pencils... they're low-key, they're steady, they're workhorses. On the cusp of July as we are, with its heat and its relative quiet (Northern Hemispherically speaking) and in the midst of global troubles, it's worthwhile to consider pausing with a pencil or two. That's what I'm doing.

My artist's garden, radically changed!

Here in the midst of my painting/drawing projects, I'm also working on my garden. This is actually the first summer in four years that I've been able to pay much attention to it since I have been determined to stay untethered by big deadlines this year! What a relief!

Artists and gardens... well, you know we pair well.  

But, oh, has my garden changed! Here it is in its sort of English garden phase, ten or so years ago,  before I decided no more chemicals for a green lawn in MY garden.

There were intermediary stages, but let's jump to THIS 2010  total redo.  Click on the link to see how drastic the changes were. I ripped out lots of bad design and indecision, too frillyness and not Me-ness, and got these bare bones:

One short year after that, the garden was cooking!, with, among other changes,  new stone pathways instead of those mulch ones.  Hard to believe this is only a year later! I was ripping and roaring! I based my new visions on some exquisite gardens I'd seen in Normandy and I also drew upon childhood memories of formal gardens all over France.

In the past six years, I've tweaked and tweaked the garden and it has, all on its own, matured (haven't we all? * a hem*)  I've figured out, through insane amounts of trial and error, what will actually grow here! Imagine that!

And so here we are today, or anyway, recently. I feel I've finally got the look I want, flowers when there are my favorites blooming, but not too many.

Textures galore, just as I like in my paintings and drawings. And look how those boxwoods have grown!

Serenity... more and more necessary for me as the world gets the opposite.

 

I travel to numinous places, it is true. Here at home, in my garden, I've made a place, built from memories and inspiration, that is meaningful to me.