Laurelines

Moving along: October

October has been a month of transitions. I moved past one big set of deadlines, slowed down a bit and made some really fun Inktober meanders. (Inktober means making an ink drawing for every day in October. I didn't make the daily goals, but I made several drawings throughout the month.)

Then I approached another deadline, did that work, and finally, here I am, ready for travel and trying out new materials and methods for painting and drawing. Will tell more about that later, but for now I'll just say that I'm really, really excited about these new directions for 2016!

And here are some of the Inktober forays. I learned to my delight that I can draw on my interior landscapes of the far north, of Iceland and Norway, and with a few strokes of ink and wash and resist, bring those numinous places to myself again!  It felt like magic!

<

In a move of great counter-intuitiveness, I am going to a hot and dry place next week, to stay with an old friend and visit others. I'm so looking forward to the friends, but the heat... not so much.

December will find me running truer to form.  I'll be going to the Bavarian Alps, circling back to a well-loved place of my childhood.

I'll be back with sketches of that hot, dry place soon!

September was here

At least, I think it was. I mostly had my head down in the studio. However, I finished my two big summer projects yesterday, just as the month was about to turn. My three-sessions drawing classes at Duke University's Nasher Art Museum were wonderful far, far beyond expectations. My classes were completely booked, with a long waiting list and the participants were a varied, accomplished, and very fun group!  I am still basking in the glow of all that excitement!

We accomplished a lot. The students made blind contour drawings, modified blind contour drawings, gesture drawings, structural drawings, expressive drawings. I, unfortunately, failed to take photos of their work and I won't make that mistake again. Here are some demo drawings I made for the class:

 Blind contour drawing of a 16th C Saint Matthew

 

Modified blind contour and gesture drawing.

  

Expressive drawing of a fragment of a Roman sarcophagus, made with two colored pencils taped together, done in a modified blind contour technique. 

In all the drawings for this series, we emphasized process, not product. This was about freeing yourself and finding your own relationship with the subjects of your drawings and with yourself as artist.

I will show some of the paintings I did for the restaurant in Chicago once it opens, but here are just some of the gorgeous scraps and leavings I kept, after a summer of testing colors and composition on paper. These are a treasure for me for both my future paintings and illustrations. Exactly how they will be used remains to be seen and that is the very exciting part!

I have one more illustration to do this year, for the winter issue of Charleston Style & Design, due the end of October. Then I will take November and December off for travel, family, friends, and my own work. More about all that later. I feel so happy just thinking about that freedom and flexibility. Happy October to all of us!

The 48 crayons and me

Back before I became the worrier and perfectionist I have been for so long, I was a very little girl with a big box of crayons.
 

There I am, at three or four, sitting on a shiny wooden floor, with my 48 Crayola crayons strewn around me, and one or two sheets of paper. I am drawing. I am putting shapes and colors, squiggles and dots down there on that paper. 

 

 I am drawing my brother who is four years older than me. I make a big round circle and I put his eyes in and a v for his little pointed nose and somehow I've got his mouth down and then I take my brown crayon and make many, many dots all over… those are his freckles. I gasp. It is perfect! It looks just like him.

 

 

I decide to put emerald green nostrils on the lady’s face I am drawing because they will make her face perfect. Perfect... those beautiful jewel-green shapes. I put two more emerald squiggles on her ears. There! Now her nostrils and her earrings match. The world is happy and bright,  and emerald green figures largely in it. Ahhhh.

 

  

At (too many) times in the past 3 (or 30) years, I'd get overtaken with panic and doubt about my work. It could get pretty bad. My angelic therapist told me:

She said, "Think back to a time when you loved what you were doing, when you painted and drew with complete joy and no self-consciousness." That's when I found myself again... me and my box of crayons. 

Here I am, a bit younger than the little Laura with the 48 crayons, but can't you just tell there's going to be lots of crayoning in her future?

 

She's still there, when I'm not lost or hobbled with worry, and she's calling the shots, the colors, the shapes, and the dots.

 

2015, the gift

It's early Sunday morning as I write this. The delicious, protracted hiatus of holidays and my January birthday is about to end and, oh, it's been a heavenly two weeks! I have loved (mostly) every second of it... the quiet (mostly), dark, pulling-in time of the year is my time.

For the first time in two years, I haven't had the sword of Damocles in the form of a big show hanging over my head as I start the year... and no small deadlines for now, either.   Just my beautiful new Paolo de Faveri Alpine wall calendar hanging in my studio to inspire me and one more day to get that studio ready for painting paintings.

This new year is a gift and I want to make sure I use it well and wisely. 

And it's clear to me that using it well will be to be mostly inner-directed in my work.

 I am full of excitement and very unformed ideas about how to respond to the places I have fallen in love with recently... the Scandinavian world, the alpine world. Oh, those Italian Dolomites that I loved for themselves but also for how they brought back the best of my childhood memories of time spent in the Swiss/French alps! There is a deep, pervasive energy in that northern world, a primal source for my life, that sets me vibrating like a divining rod.

Part of this inner direction will be... to let go and see where my heart takes me. When I was making paintings for my Iceland-inspired show year before last, I had as my mantra the Icelandic line, Hvert liggur thessi vegur?  Where, then, does this path lead? 

I had little idea of what sort of work would come out of my passion for Iceland and Norway and I accepted and ran with that unknowing.

Last year about this time, I wrote the post Cutting Up and Letting Go.   (In my ten years of blogging, I've made a habit each year of posting my intentions for the coming year.)  There I made the case for again running with the unknowing, for following my inner sign posts.  But it didn't quite happen. I had lots of deadlines and obligations.

In that post from last year, too, I talked about how much I love the materiality of my work, the textures, the shapes, the colors that can, if I do it right, appear on my paper and my gesso board.  They have a life of their own. It's my job to open my arms and catch them.

In addition to painting, I'll, of course, be drawing and sketching. Drawing has been a major part of who I am since I was 3 years old, if not before. 

So this year. Feeling more humble and grateful for the gift of another year, less breezy and complacent, I'm ready to run down that path, not knowing where it leads, but knowing I have to go there.

May 2015 take you where you want and need to go.

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!

Italy sketches, first batch: TBDI 2014 conference and more!

At the wonderful TBD Italy conference in Rimini week before last, I had little time to sketch! Our days were busy from 8am to bedtime! But I managed a few drawings, mostly made during talks, and here they are.

Backs of heads, fronts of heads,  people sitting,  earnest speakers making important points and opining!

And, oh, yes... profiles!

There were dozens of indoor and outdoor booths. Here's one of the latter, drawn while I was waiting for my buddies to meet me for lunch:

You can see I ended up using mostly pen and wash at the conference. One brush pen sketch I made was a bust, so I ditched it for the rest of the trip. I was busy and I had to make each sketching minute count!

I have more sketches from the second part of the trip... mountains and food, mostly. To try to capture the magnificence of the majestic Dolomite mountains in a tiny 4" x 6" sketchbook was daunting, to say the least.

More about this next time and more sketches, too.

Here's a sample, though. Quick and loose, Cretacolor oil pencil and wash: the view above Vipiteno, the northernmost town in Italy. 

I fell in love, love, love with the Italian Alps. They brought back beautiful memories of childhood trips to the Swiss and French Alps... they are the same and they are very different. Ahhh.

I am deeply grateful to the organizers and sponsors of TBD Italy 2104 for hosting me! I met so many charming people who are now new friends and I learned so much about the travel industry in Italy and beyond. I became clearer about what it is I do as a blogger and why. It was a priceless experience in very many ways. 

Four from February

February finds me a little scattered. I'm trying to simplify means and method and media in sketching. Here I had to work quickly (which is, after all, what sketching IS) because baby Miles was sure to wake up any minute. I've used two Pitt Artist pens,  a smidge of watercolor, and a fountain pen. Would love to pare down my sketching gear, for now, to these three basics.

No surprise, I'm back to drawing on my toned Strathmore paper. It's addictive. I first used it 2 or 3 years ago and I've been in love with it since. Below is my tabletop, a view the day after a Norwegian meal I prepared: 

Below: two of many drawings on various subjects in a series. Could I get any vaguer than that description if I tried? 

And I've got to get started seriously on my work (both paintings and drawings) for the upcoming fall show! The theme is plants: mostly flowers, but some trees, etc. I have to figure out a way to produce pieces that are personal and powerful. Otherwise, there's no point ;D.

2014, cutting up and letting go

Two things I learned last year in the studio:

Thing One:

    I am in love with texture, shapes, color... the materiality of my stuff. Seeing brushmarks on board or paper makes me giddy with delight, euphoric. That, and the drive to respond to the chi, the energy that is in and through all things, are the reasons why I paint and draw. It comes to that.

Thing Two:

When I follow my inner prompts, I go places. I know now to stay tuned.... and move aside... when I hear the call of the (inner) wild.

So, having learned all of that:

I'm going to spend the rest of this month playing with paint on big sheets of paper... making all kinds of marks and textures and shapes on page after page.

This will loosen me up and make me happy. The sheets of paper will be used--- maybe, maybe not, who knows how--- as elements in future paintings and illustrations.

See! Look what happened just this morning as I was cleaning up my studio! While filing away old sheets of paper on which I tested colors last year, I really looked at their surfaces for the first time. And picked up my scissors and started cutting. Birds happened. (The big one is maybe 12" across.) A whale happened.

So, cutting up (which also means, in American English, to act in a silly and/or noisy way) and letting go.

Letting go of my need to control. Letting go of foregone conclusions. Is there any art more boring than the same stuff cranked out year after year, where the artist knows exactly what the piece is going to be at the outset? Ugh. 

Of course, I haven't abandoned all need for structure. I'm just minimizing it in my art life.

With another painting show slated for next fall and with, I hope, continued illustration assignments this year, there'll be enough structure in my work days.

Of course, my thinking self is still (mostly) in charge of my wild self. It's a lively pas de deux.  

In 2014, I'll be painting, drawing, writing, cutting up. I'll be using acrylics, inks, pens, pencils, crayons, scissors, glue, and watercolors.

So, from this morning, a watercolor sketch, on pastel paper, of a hyacinth in my studio.  

In 2014, I'll also be traveling (of course) and I'll be starting a secret (for now) drawing project, the idea of which just came to me yesterday!  I'll tell more as the days go on. I'm excited and happy!

Are you coming with?

Happy 2013! It was!

 

Not to whine, for such is life... but simply to observe: 2013 was the first good year around here since 2007. Oh, there've been many good days, minutes, hours, some weeks, even, since 2007... but whole years? Not those. Neutral years, years in which nothing much bad happened? Not those, either.

2013 could have turned out differently. The stakes were high. And the big results weren't in until September. 

But what the first nine months were leading up to culminated in very happy news!

My daughter's adorable baby son Miles, born on September 13, and shown here on Christmas Day, at almost 3 1/2 months: 

 I am beyond besotted! Look at that tender, adorable face!

The painting show I started working on in early January, opened in late September to a very warm reception.  There were moments in March when I thought I wasn't going to make it. But I worked through the problems and ended up finding, as I had struggled to find, my own idiom. I made quirky paintings and they pleased me. The fact that others liked them was delicious.

I made illustrations, you will perhaps remember, for a wonderful new magazine about Raleigh, NC, called, appropriately enough Walter!

I got to do all sorts of things---maps, portraits, foodie things, even the cover of the first anniversary issue! And I had a double spread of garden imagery in June !

 

 

 

  

 

 My work appeared on other pages, too. In the June issue of Watercolor Artist Magazine and in Playing with Sketches (the fourth book my work is included in!) by Whitney Sherman, director of the graduate program in illustration at the Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art. I'm so proud to be represented in both publications.

I made trips to Austin and to Portland, OR, to see my darling peripatetic daughter Cecelia. In Portland, I had a delightful sketching meetup with some Portland Urban Sketchers.

As you may know, I ended up my year with an exciting trip to northern Norway. More sketches from that trip to appear in a few days. My scanner is still hiccupping and the holidays are still intervening! 

I will also talk about my art goals for 2014. I've done this before ;D. See you in just a few days!

And happy New Year to all of you, wherever you are!

 

Rocks, paper, scissors for Norway

I use big (18"x 24") pads of decent drawing paper (Borden & Riley Vellum) to test colors and textures when I'm making paintings.  I used to feel a bit guilty about 'wasting' decent paper that way, but it is a key part of my painting process, so I carry on.

One day, trying to solve a compositional problem, I cut a shape from my test paper and taped it to a painting to see how it worked instead of the shape I had painted there. This way of trying new compositions without making permanent changes on paintings' surfaces was fun! AND the more I looked at the energy and incidental force and flow of the marks on those papers, the more I liked them. 

So I began to use them in my illustrations. Here, in a recent illustration for Walter Magazine...

the oyster shell was cut from one of my test papers. I added a little more directional movement to the shapes... and voilà.

I've fallen in love with the idea of using cut paper (as below)

to add to sketches and illustrations and maybe, who knows, bigger paintings?

Clearly, the painted shapes in my Iceland paintings are related in some way to these paper shapes. Though which came first? It's the old chicken and the egg conundrum.

So where does Norway fit in? In a few days, I'll be there and I'll be sketching. And I'll have some loose sheets of paper already painted on, in the colors and textures I know are what I see when I'm in Norway. As here, a glimpse of just some of these colors and these textures, in a sketch from a couple of years ago:

And in Norway, looking at that icy and snowy fabulousness and trying my best to capture SOMETHING of it, I will, among other techniques, cut shapes from these papers, as the spirit moves me ----and paste them into my sketchbook and draw and paint on and around them. And it will be fun!

Lots of people work with cut paper in their sketches and paintings.

I'm doing nothing new.  Just new to me.

I can't wait. Rocks, paper, scissors, Norway... here I come!