Laurelines

The story unfolds at last: my garden book finished!

Phase two* of my art projects relating to my new home, my new garden, my new life is finished! Using a Seawhite of Brighton concertina sketchbook, as I love to do, I painted, drew, collaged a narrative of images from May to October. Starting with my grapevine in spring and ending with the same grapevine in fall, I chose highlights of the garden to include in the record, and with each spread, I chose whatever method and media I felt like . The result is 12', unfolded, of colors, shapes, movements, textures, and, since it is a pollinator garden, a few bugs and birds hover here and there.

 

The clip above was made in dim light and the resolution is not great, but you get an idea of the whole. Below are shots of half of the book unfolded in sunlight, in the very garden the book was made from and for. Below that are double spreads of a few key images,  scanned to give a more accurate idea of the colors.

 

For years, I have loved accordion books to record travel images as well as my Caledonian Orogeny drawings made on site in Wales and Norway.  Open these books up, and you find the very format for a story, moving from left to right. My blog's name is a clue to my love of the storyline, both visual and verbal, and these books give me a perfect springboard.

Here is one more example of my use of this format, my first record of the Caledonian Orogeny project, made on Whitesands Bay near St Davids, Wales, in 2017. Here you get a better sense of the spread, although this one is not completely extended either. It's hard to find a 12' long surface! 

Now I can move to phase 3 of my new house and garden art project: paintings made with pigment from the red clay soil we live on here and/or new pieces working with house and memory imagery.  I have started several of these and am eager to get back to them, now that the garden book is done!

 

*Phase one was the pair of portraits I made of the original owners of this 160 year-old house. 

 

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SO much to share after a too long hiatus! New work, new garden, new life!

These past months have raced by. I am aghast that so much time has elapsed since I last posted. I have three ways to explain what's been taking ALL my time:ongoing repairs and renovation, helping with first grade remote schooling, creation of my new garden obsession!  But life should be freer for me now, so here we go!

Here is work directly related to my new house and my projects related to living in this area. 

A quick background recap from my earlier post:

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.

I have several lines of work within this general subject and I hope now to be able to begin work on all of them.

First, the portraits of the original owners of my new old house, Burkett and Mary Ann Jones. Acrylic on board, 16" x16". I worked from a blurry many-times copied photo so felt quite free to simplify their images, paring them down to what I felt to be their essences. I will hang these over a doorway in my kitchen where they will preside over a long interior vista from back to front of house:

 

Second, one of very few drawings (to this point!) of my surroundings. I SO look forward to getting back to this! Reed pen and ink sketch of the view from my studio window on a cold February afternoon.

Next a couple of studies done in my ongoing project to make paint from our red clay soil. I have not had a chance to take up this strand again but will do so very soon. I truly have no idea where these will lead, which is fun. My life, as I said, should be freer!

 

Finally, a series of photos showing my garden's progress from the early bare days to the present. I struggled to keep this concise! Ish. ;D. I have hundreds of photos of the garden already!

Here are two shots from early October:

  

And here are recent ones:

This does not look like a garden of only a few months, does it? The topsoil I had delivered and tilled into the red clay was obviously what the garden wanted! I consider this garden a full-fledged member or my art life.

More to come and I am so happy to know that!!

Happy summer to those in this hemisphere and happy fall to our southern hemispheric friends!

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!

New/old house, new garden, new studio-to-be, new life!

I have felt more or less stuck in amber since my leg injury in February. It has been a challenging time.  Since March, of course, we've all been in a stuck-in-amberish situation with the Covid 19 pandemic. 

But now, big new life changes are in the offing and I have shaken my torpor of these last months!

I have mentioned here that my husband and I plan to downsize and leave the beautiful house and garden that we designed and built for our blended family 26 years ago. We have loved it, but it was time for a change.

We have now found our new dream house for the next phase of our lives and it's all a surprise to us!  I did not imagine we'd live in Hillsborough, much as we love it, and much as we love our many friends who live there! But since nothing had come up in the areas we targeted for house-searching, we added Hillsborough to the search parameters. Within two days, this house came on the market. We went to see it and that very night, we put in an offer for it. Our offer was accepted. There is work to be done on the house, so it will be about eight weeks after closing that we will move in. 

Let me show you something of the new place!

This is the Burkett Jones House, aka the Simon B Jones House, built in 1850 or 1860 or 1880.... sources vary in dating the house, though most say 1850 or 1860. 

A farmhouse from Smithfield, NC, it was moved in 1997 to its present location, about 30 minutes from our house in Chapel Hill, to escape demolition at the expansion of the Smithfield airport. 

I love the emerald green lawn, typical of houses in the area, but I will switch to organic maintenance methods as soon as I can. I LOVE the fact that the house has vast open sky, with a perimeter of mature trees. Soon I can stargaze to my heart's content, simply by stepping outside and looking up!

Above is a closer look at the front of the house. And below is the front porch.

The area I will establish for the main garden in is a narrowish strip stretching from the back of the house to the property line, bordered on the eastern side by deer fencing and mixed shrubs and trees. I have lots of ideas for plantings, as you can imagine!

Below you also see the two-car garage that will be made into my studio! I am ecstatic! I have never had a full-sized studio. Now I can make big paintings, I can hold workshops, I can be free in my movements!

Below are raised beds made by the current owners, along the northern edge of the lawn. I will eliminate those to have that space for my new design.

Below, we are standing at the northern edge of the property, looking back to the house, with the garage/studio to the right. 

A two-story log cabin, seen below, is on the western edge of the 1.4 acre property. 

If I were a writer instead of a painter, I'd have my workspace already, as you can see above!

With this move, I can return to an idea I'd had a couple of years ago, to make paint out of soil in the places I love.  Unfortunately, I was not able to fully realize this at the time, because the places I love were/are northern Norway, Wales, Alaska... hard to collect soil in large quantities, absent a long stay in one place.

The painting below is a study I made on corrugated cardboard, using paint made of Chatham County soil, acrylic paint and medium. This will be a point of departure for a new series I have in mind, using soil from Johnston County, where our new house was built, as well as soil from Orange County, where our new house now is.

Analogous to my desire to use mostly native plants in the garden, is my interest in drawing and painting with local, natural materials in some of my work, such as here below. I drew with charcoal made of burnt blueberry bush from a fire pit and two kinds of pigments made from different soils, both collected at the Alamance County farm of two good friends.

Below is a sketch I made using soil found near St Non's Well near St Davids, Pembrokeshire, Wales and the juice of blackberries growing on a hedge nearby.

I'm eager to know as much as I can about the history of our new place, so David and I will drive east to visit Johnston County Heritage Center next week. We will ask the researchers there to help us discover who exactly built the house and who lived there over the 170 years following.  In my own research, I have learned where the Burkett Jones family cemetery is and I want to go and pay my respects to these intrepid 19th-century North Carolinians, whose home an improbable, gadabout, traveling eurocentric 21st century couple will claim as their own.  I will take a bucket and trowel and hope to get permission to dig up soil on the property, now near the airport, where my house lived for most of its life. I want to make of this an art piece to honor our predecessors in the house.

I will post what I learn about the house in the next installment of the story of our new life. 

I'd love to have your company.

 

Surfacing from the maelstrom

Or as I like to call this period, My Cuisinart Life! Ouch, there are way too many, big and life-changing things going on.  I do feel like I've been tossed in a giant Cuisinart and chopped and mashed and swirled for several months. I assume I'll emerge relatively intact, but I know I'll be transformed. In many ways, it's been an exciting time. It's been stressful. It's been necessary. It's not over yet.

Anyway, I will tell more when I can, but for now, let me share a bit of what I've been working on in the studio and to say I'm so looking forward to a return, with my husband, to Norway in December!

I've got several paintings going in my Places Project, as I mentioned, and some of them are even finished! I'm applying for a show of this first phase of work, excluding, unfortunately, my Caledonian Orogeny drawings (they can't be exhibited in the place I'm applying to,  because of their unusual format.) But I've got several paintings, acrylic on board, of various sizes, and I will keep working on this series in the next year.

My trip to Norway is part of this Places Project... it's been several years since I was in Arctic Norway in the winter and I need to go back and get an inspiration re-infusion. And, my husband and I love that part of the world anyway, so it works out well.

Here are some of my finished pieces. I won't hog your bandwidth with photos of all of them.

 Polar Twilight 1. I've attached a number to this one, because I plan on making several more in this sub-series, after our trip to Norway. I can't WAIT.

More Norway:

Wales, a painting of a stormy scene from Anglesey I have shared only a detail of in the past:

More Wales. This painting was inspired by my polar swim on Whitesands Bay last New Year's Day:

On Whitesands Bay, one cold and damp day last January, the sky was covered in a network of chevron-shaped clouds:

Just to show there are blue skies in even my cold places, here's a painting I made of Dulas Bay in north Wales, after a recent autumn trip there.:

After Norway, I still have northern Scotland to go to, my last place in the work inspired by the Caledonian Orogeny. Not sure when that trip will happen. 

I'm now turning to that age-old question: which art supplies should I take on my coming Norwegian trip??!  This is an issue we traveling artists always wrestle with, but for me, who travels only with a carry_on (that has also to hold my winter gear!!) it's a real puzzler!

I'm so glad to have resurfaced and I send thanks and love to all who (still) follow my wanderer's (recently subterranean) life.

 

Québecois Detour!

In the midst of months of painting and family events and obligations, a dear friend and I took a liqhtning quick 4-day holiday to Québec City last week. I had been to Montreal and Mont Tremblant, but never to the oldest (founded in 1608) city in Canada. Friends who had been had raved about it and since it was much easier to get to than my usual places (arctic Norway, anyone?) I decided to go.

Robyn and I stayed just outside the walls of the old city and it was a lovely 9-minute walk there. We walked everywhere, in and around, up and down, 7-10 miles each day. We sketched, we ate delicious food, and we drank an Aperol spritz or two (not quite the national drink of Québec, but still ;D.) We were charmed by this vibrant, small, deeply historic place.

The sketches I made are all over the place, stylewise, mediumwise, and subjectwise and just as I was getting a feel for being there, it was time to go. Fortunately, I'm going back for another short stay in August, but this time with my husband and two of our grandsons. I look forward to seeing the child-centric parts of Québec City and I hope I have time to make a sketch or two then, too!

I had long had a passion for sketching fountains. It felt like coming home to sit down and sketch this lovely Fontaine de Tourny, near l'Assemblée Nationale!

I'm not a great one for sketching architecture, normally, but in such a city, with such architectural richness, wouldn't it be churlish not to!  

And, on the other hand, I AM one to sketch people and flowers, so voilà! Me in my element with brush pen, ladies, and geraniums, after eating a delightful mushroom and ham crêpe at le Petit Chateau.

More architecture, but Chateau Frontenac... need I say more?

Continuing my mixing up of mediums and styles, I drew this fantastic salade Niçoise on a sunny, warm day at lunch with Robyn. I felt this happy subject called for my Koh-i-noor Magic Pencil, with its multi-colored lead. I love this drawing tool that leaves magic behind wherever it goes!

And I can never resist drawing figural sculpture, particularly men with curling locks, knee britches, and supercilious expressions.  I'm sure my DNA is involved somewhere here.

This last sketch is actually the first I made. I'm using a small, stiff-nibbed pen here and so the drawing is a bit stiff, but I still enjoyed making it. And I loved loosening up again over the next days.

 

I feel refreshed and clear after this little trip and I hope I will be able to transfer that feeling when I get back to the studio tomorrow. Oof, what a time it's been!

Happy, happy summer! May your heart be light and all your colors Québecois!

Starting the New Year in Wales, a glorious beginning

There's a lot of story to tell, too much to try to share tonight. 

But before I post a few sketches, I will share quickly some memories: my exhilarating polar swim in the Irish Sea on New Year's Day; seeing the Quadrantid Meteor showers on my birthday night while wrapped in many layers and sitting on the front lawn of our cottage on Whitesands Bay; with the help of a traveling professional astronomer on the same birthday night, seeing nebulae, a galaxy, the Milky Way in bright form, many constellations, the fuzzy green comet 46P/Wirtanen; at Evensong of the first Sunday of Christmas at St Davids Cathedral sitting in the choir stalls with choir and clergy, hearing hymns and the liturgy in both Welsh and English.

I walked and walked and walked and walked some more until my heart was overspilling.  My husband and I slept deeply in that quiet, safe, numinous place. 

It's been another rough re-entry to real life (like the one from Norway last year) but I have several paintings going, a few from before the trip, but several newly started ones, all inspired by Wales. This circular and multi-pronged approach has me nudging each one along until I finish one, then another, then two more, etc. I'm happy in the studio.

So, sketches, just a few. I spent more time being, being outside, walking, resting, being with my husband, taking it all in.

Looking out over the Irish Sea to Ramsey Island and beyond, from the warmth of our cottage by the sea. This is white marker and pencil on brown paper. In real life, the sketch goes across the gutter of the sketchbook, making a double spread. I will add the other side later. 

Brush pen sketch made on site at Whitesands Bay, color added later.  These rocks and the ones below are old friends. They figured in the 12' long concertina sketchbook I made in May 2017, part of my Caledonian Orogeny project!

The first thing I bought on New Year's Eve day were two votive candles and holders. With these and the wood fire burning in our cottage living room, we had light and warmth.

After the polar swim on New Year's Day, I was cold and starving, so David and I repaired to our favorite St Davids café at Oriel y Parc and had lunch. I drew the family at the next table.

Sketch of St Davids Head, made standing on Whitesands Beach in the cold and wind. This and the one above are roughly and quickly drawn (the cold! the wind!), with color added later.

I'll be staying at home more this year, finishing paintings, being with family and friends, walking and trying to get more sleep! Wales spoiled me in that way and in so many others.

A tardy, but very Happy New Year's greeting to you!

Back on track:Norway story, continued

Summer heat has cast a pernicious spell on me, it's clear, but the winds are changing, the light is changing, and, finally unwilting, so am I.  Weather aside, reentry to normal life has been very difficult after such an exalted and inspiring time in Norway.

My chief reason for going on this trip was in pursuit of my Places Project,  to see and draw another vestige from the Caledonian Orogeny, circa 450-250 MYA.  I had fewer days to do this than I had for my first two drawings, made in Wales, one in Pembrokeshire, one on Anglesey.

The accordion sketchbook I drew in here was custom made for me by book artist friend Josh Hockensmith. It is 10 1/2' long when stretched to its full length and each page is bigger than those in the Seawhite of Brighton concertina books I used in my first two drawings. The paper is ivory and slightly toothed, not white and smooth, and so the resulting drawing has a slightly different look from the first two.

The rocks I drew were very different, too. The rocks in Wales were faceted, sharp, angular, with mostly smooth surfaces. The rocks in Norway were flowing, textured, and multi-colored in shades of grays, ochres, some siennas and subtle blues. These outcrops will lend themselves to later studio pieces, some collages, some linocuts, perhaps,  and I am looking forward to seeing what will emerge!

 

In between my days of Caledonian Orogeny drawing, I sketched, as you will have seen in my last post. Here are some miscellaneous moments, caught in my sketchbook. On a remote island in the Barents Sea, magenta saxifrage grew improbably and brashly between rocks in the tundra.

Later, in the Lofotens, I drew another view of the majestic Olstind mountain, seen from our cabin near Reine.

My husband and I love Bergen and it was in Bergen that I had this delicious vitello tonnato dish for lunch at a café near the Kode Museums. Note the candle, lit in the middle of the day in sunny, summery Bergen. This is one of the things I love about Scandinavia, the use of candles, a profound celebration of light, at all times of the year, at all times of the day, in the Polar Night or in the time of the Midnight Sun. I have taken this to my heart and I do the same thing in our home in North Carolina.

Circling back to Longyearbyen, here is a drawing of a bus passenger, who was a wonderfully monumental figure, compelling to draw:

On the painting front, two recently finished pieces.The first is another work belonging to my Places Project. This is a Copper Mountain sunset painting, inspired by my artist residency in Alaska, fall before last:

The second is an example of What I Did for Love, a snowy owl painting requested by my four-year-old grandson Miles. I have two more requested owlish pieces to finish, but I am returning to Norway in the studio in the next days, too.

I won't wait so long to post again. Soon I am taking a shortish trip with two dear friends to Yorkshire, not on the trail of the Caledonian Orogeny. The main focus will be to spend time with my friends in the birthplace and childhood region of one of them. Though I have lived and traveled widely in the UK, I have never been to Yorkshire. It turns out that my long-ago ancestors from Norway, settled in Yorkshire (coincidentally near where we will be), before much later emigrating to the US, so I will be, in some small way, returning home. Who knew??? See you soon!

80° North, anyone? Art supplies for the Land of the Midnight Sun!

 

That's where we'll be the first part our trip!  Far, far, far northern Norway, off the mainland. I am going to try to get some sort of memento with that latitude engraved on it! I'm a north-going spirit, that's for sure. 

This being such a once-in-a-lifetime trip, I vow to document it fully in writing and sketches, in addition to the separate group of drawings I'll do for my Caledonian Orogeny project.

But what supplies to take with me?? I travel only with a carryon and that has to contain clothes for winter weather (still there in May and early June in Svalbard) as well as for cool spring days, which I hope we will find in the other parts of Norway we are going to. Yikes!

Wakeful at 2am today (and you can understand why!), I looked at past sketches of similar atmospheric situations. Here are my tentative choices. If you have any suggestions, by the way, please do make them!

I know you've seen most of these before, but bear with me. I have to think.;D

1. Caran d'Ache watercolor crayons: I use these often. Here are some examples from  the past:

Iceland, Budir Bay

More Iceland. Here there's a wash of Daniel Smith Lunar Black with the crayons. I'll take that and Lunar Blue and those will be my only watercolors. Right? I can add more washes later. if I want to.

 

Mt Hood, Oregon. Unlike my previous trips to Norway, which all took place in the Arctic Twilight, this trip will be, as I mentioned, under the Midnight Sun!

    2. Pentel pocket brush pen. These are practically extensions of my hands. I use them everywhere.

In Bergen, Norway, with white gel pen and watercolor wash

 

In E.Lansing, Michigan, with watercolor crayons! Two for the price of one!

    3. Inktense pencils? When you must have bursts of juicy color!

Don't you love how a mere spritz of water makes inktense sketches ebullient!

Inktense pencils at Carn Llidi, Wales. Speaking of atmospheric, as we were:

     4. Cretacolor Oil pencils in Nero. I have to have these for regular drawing, right?  With these, you can be both gestural and precise:

And I'll need these for my Caledonian Orogeny drawing, of course;

    5. Sketchbooks: I'll have a couple of custom handmade concertina sketchbooks for the rock drawings and then two Stillman & Birn softcover 8 x10s, one in gray, one in white.

    6. Blue and red colored pencils, not watercolor ones. Oh, let's add orange and green, too. I just like to draw with these and they come in handy if you want quick, dry color.

 

 Oh, I've given myself a headache now.

I'm serious... if you have any suggestions, any new products you like for travel sketches, or old favorites of yours (not watercolors, though, or fountain pens for this trip, unfortunately,) I'd love to have them!

Takk!