Laurelines

Atmosphere, atmosphere, atmosphere: why I love toned paper

 

Yesterday, I posted on instagram a sketch I made of a still life in our new/old house on that cold, rainy afternoon. I made this on a Stillman and Birn gray Nova sketchbook, using colored pencils and other assorted materials.

This sketch took me right back to another interior still life I made at the house of dear friends four years ago at just this time of year. Atmosphere!

 

These started me looking back at the many drawings and sketches and some paintings I've made on toned paper for many years. 

Gray and tan paper automatically provide a lovely mid tone to give lines and colors a soaring start in life. This has many advantages. For a traveler like me, who takes only a carryon suitcase even on long international trips, I can pack a few pens, crayons, pencils and still have the range and flexibility I want.

Crucially for me, this paper guarantees the kind of atmospheric work I strive for.  And since I love to travel to, shall we say, atmospheric places like Norway, Wales, and Iceland, quite often in atmospheric seasons like winter, it is perfect for the task.

I have used three kinds of toned paper over the years: kraft paper, pastel paper (very rarely), and both Strathmore and Stillman and Birn toned paper in sketchbooks.

When I went to Alaska for an art residency a few years ago, I took along some high quality kraft paper to use for landscape studies. The ability to make atmospheric drawings with an economy of means was critical. Here are two of many from that project:

Toned paper has traditionally been used for pastel drawings/paintings. I'm not a pastelist, but I have used it occasionally, for my own purpose. Here I've used watercolor on pastel paper. The toothed softness of the paper gives the watercolors a texture boost and the bright colors against the gray/tan paper come to life.

Finally, I have so many of the above-mentioned atmospheric travel sketches to show you that I'll have to sit on my hands and just pick a few. Before there was Stillman and Birns toned sketchbooks, there were Strathmore ones and I used them plenty. Below are examples from both brands.

If you've seen this blog before, you've seen scores of my cold weather outdoor atmospherics on toned paper, so I won't repeat them, but here's a link to work from a recent December trip to Norway.

 

Atmospheric indoor scene at a Norwegian café in December:

Woman waiting at the Vienna train station on another chilly December day:

Blue jellyfish washed ashore in Abersoch, Wales. I adored how the cool colors and degrees of opacity behaved on the warmish gray Stillman and Birn paper!

New Year's Eve warmth and light in our seaside cottage on Whitesands Bay, Pembrokeshire, two years ago:

Hot chocolate helped ward off the cold at an outdoor market in Vancouver a while back in a Strathmore sketchbook:

I'm now sitting on my hands. Enough atmospherics! I do have other uses for toned paper, particularly in the making of expressive drawings and museum drawings!  Let that be a story for another day.  

New house, new studio, new work, and a new poem from a friend

 

As I've written here before, I'm researching the history of our new house and its people.

A quick background recap:

The one-story farmhouse was built in the 1860s in Smithfield, NC, by Burkett Jones, a cotton farmer and entrepreneur, an exConfederate soldier, who had been injured early in the war and sent home. The structure was moved to its present site in Hillsborough in 1997 to prevent its demolition at the expansion of the Smithfield airport.

Since the house's story is now part of mine, I want to weave its history into my art life. First steps in this process have been making loose portrait drawings of the original owners, drawing a cotton plant from life, collecting red clay soil to turn into paint for use in the coming weeks.  Below are a couple of early examples.

Cotton bolls and stems bought at the state farmers market. Acrylic, ink, soft pastel on paper.

Drawing from a copy of a copy of a copy of an original photograph of Burkett and Mary Ann Jones, provided by the Johnston County Heritage Center in Smithfield. No doubt these faces will appear again in different format and media. Graphite, water-soluble crayon, and soft pastel on toned paper.

Recently, Rachel Victoria Mills, a local poet and a new friend, as yet unmet in person due to Covid restrictions, saw on Instagram my image of cotton above, and, in her words, "the fields opened up", and, after a long period of quiet, a new poem emerged. 

Here are Rachel's own words as they appeared in a recent blog post of hers:

On the nowhere road between home and office, those 18 years I lived in the Eastern part of the state, this time of year the fields flatten and turn to short-haired flax, much like the farmers driving their loads along the highway next to me.   Along the road, the cotton workers go about their work, hatted and gloved, darker and more serious as they gather the seed-specked balls in combine-waves across the landscape.  Trip by trip, I must have absorbed that common scene until years later it has impressed itself indelibly in memory.

But it is Laura Frankstone's Instagram photo of her painting, yesterday's "warm-up" (as she calls it), which brings that vision back to me.

 

Cotton, in its various envisionings, has been a sort of opening of the field, to borrow Robert Duncan's phrase. Laura has been writing about the slow work of getting back to art after a long time of personal trials and removals, and her days finally in her new studio,"warming up" again to the field of making.  Whether, like her, there is now a new, big bright space to work in, or like me at this small table before a window which looks out, just as brightly, to garden beauty, insights come from all the windows we look out of.

 

I feel happy and deeply moved by Rachel's response. Who knows what will prick the creative spirit and when? As for me, I have light and color, rich stories, new energy, and lovely new studio windows to look out of. 

Colors! It is not only red clay that is warming up my world. Christmas flowers in the new place have thrilled me. Ink and wash on paper:

Quick sketch of flowers I'm adding to my new garden. I will document this new creation of mine in the next blog post. Ink and watercolor wash.

 

And last, a glimpse of my beautiful new studio, until recently a two-car garage. In 2021, may you, too, have new windows to look out of and opening creative fields.

Happy new year!