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. 

 

BLOG UPDATE: I have a new way to subscribe to my blog! All the old subscriptions have been transferred to follow it, the new service. If you have not subscribed before, and would like to, follow the directions in the upper right corner of the page!

September: Moving forward

A late-breaking illustration job meant I had to press Pause on my painting series, but  I've finished the illustrations and am turning my thoughts towards my upcoming trip to North Wales!  I will share the illustrations I've done this summer once they are published this October. They are colorful and fun!

Before anything else, I want to tell you about a new book on sketching landscapes by my good friend and excellent American artist Virginia Hein. Her book 5-Minute Sketching: Landscapes is one of the best out there on the topic of sketching. And since there is a vast flotilla of books out there on that topic, that is saying a lot!

Virginia teaches at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, was for many years a toy designer, and is a prolific urban sketcher with a worldwide reputation and following. Her book is thoughtfully and gracefully written and is brimming with tips and suggestions and many, many illustrations of her own and of artists around the world. I am extremely proud to be one of her contributing artists.

 Here are two of several of my images that appear in Virginia's book:

I sincerely recommend this book for anyone interested in rendering landscapes of all kinds. Virginia has a fresh, energetic, and inspiring way of thinking and teaching. No matter how many landscape drawing and sketching and painting books you might have in your personal library, you will love this one, I promise you!

Now for thoughts of Wales! I am taking two Seawhite concertina sketchbooks so I can make more 12' long drawings of the kind I made on Whitesands Bay last May..weather, as always, permitting. Other art gear I hope to fit into my carryon:

See those little tubes of Winsor Newton paint? I have a hankering to try gouache. We'll see what happens. 

Finally, two quick and happy recent drawings, using my Koh-i-noor Magic Pencil with multi-colored lead. Hmm, I think I'd better pack that one for Wales, too!

See you soon!

My birthday celebration with Kate: at the museum, reading, and sketches

When my firstborn child, my daughter Kate, was very young, I started reading to her and taking her to libraries and art museums. In fact, I started reading to her before she was six months old. I'd sit her on my lap and we'd take flight... off to the world of Good Night Moon, Beatrix Potter, Mother Goose, Eric Carle, Arnold Lobel, Kate Greenaway, A Child's Garden of Verses, and many, many more. We never looked back.

We visited London often, and also Edinburgh, where she was born. We lived in London, in fact, during her kindergarten year. And we went to art museums there, her first ones, and then everywhere we went, all the time. 

Now, Kate has her own children---two little boys---and she reads to them and she and her husband take them to museums and to libraries.

And she herself still reads. In fact, she reads more than any person I know, including me, and that is saying a lot in the world we live in. And she goes to art museums. Often. As much as possible. Everywhere.

Earlier this month, it was my birthday. We celebrated it together, at the art museum, at a library.  Of course, we did. Looking, reading, talking... mother and daughter.

 

In this sketch I made of Kate reading, she is exactly the age I am in the photo above.

As she read, I also sketched the scene behind her.

It was a wonderful birthday.

In the chilly dusk, we walked through a park, and to one of my favorite restaurants for an early dinner. Then it was home for each of us... her to her two little boys and husband, me to my husband and our dog. A day to remember, a day with a long and sweet history behind it.

Marly Youmans and her pip of a new novel

Is there anyone out there, still living (besides me), who knows the term " a pip of a... ?" It's the second part of the THIRD definition on Dictionary. com: 

pip

   /pɪp/  

noun

Also called pipperoo. Informal . Someone or something wonderful: Last night's party was a pip.

And this new Marly book, to appear on bookstore shelves and e-shelves everywhere today,  is *apparently a pip, too---the winner, for example, of the 2012 Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction.

 

 

Noted writer Raymond L. Atkins  puts Marly's book in the high pip category, too. Here's something of what HE had to say of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage:

 In A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Marly Youmans gives us a beautifully written and exceptionally satisfying novel.  The book reads as if Youmans took the best parts of The Grapes of Wrath, On the Road, The Reivers, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and crafted from them a tale both magical and fine... .

Several of Marly's friends, writers, painters, blogonauts, have interviewed her on the topic of her new book. I am one of these and so here we are: you, me, and Marly.

Laura:

Reading about your new book on your blog, I, of course, noticed that your orphan protagonist shares a name with that other famous orphan protagonist, Pip of Dickens's Great Expectations. That book and Bleak House are two of my lifelong favorites, by the way, so they figure hugely in my imagination and memory.

Names such as Pip or Ishmael or Scarlett, for example, naturally carry strong associations for readers. When a new character bears a name with heavy historical reference, we (the reader) think, "Aha! So how does THIS Pip relate to the Dickens Pip? What is the author telling us about this new Pip, even before his story starts? Is this an ironic use of the name or is it some kind of homage to the Dickens one? What does this MEAN, because in the whole unlimited universe of names from which to choose, the new author has chosen this one and there has to be a reason!

In this case, the fact that the two Pips are orphans seems a double underlining of the connection between them.

Therefore, although perhaps the Pip question has been asked a million times, I'm going to ask it again. Why the Dickens orphan reference, or ...What the Dickens?

Marly:

Laura, it is your luck to be number one! Nobody has yet asked me that question.

 

At one time there was a Dickens reference at the start of the A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, but I am afraid that I took a scalpel to it on the last pass through the manuscript. In an earlier version, I did make an offhand connection to Great Expectations in a line where the naming of Pip was referred back to the Dickens Pip as “a boy who turned out well enough.” Gone!

 

But I was very much a Dickens fan as a child and still am. His somewhat untidy books are overflowing life, and even his flat characters buzz and spin with vigor. Every now and then I feel a pressing need to reread Bleak House, and Great Expectations is among those I have read and reread. When I finally was allowed an adult library card in 6^th grade, I headed straight for whatever Dickens novels were not already shelved in the children’s section.

 

Pip’s family is composed of brothers and sisters with names that are palindromes or palindrome-like:  Otto, Chach, Lil, Mim, and so on, all named by the family patriarch.  Here’s what Pip has to say about those names: “All my brothers and sisters had names like mine—turn them around like in a mirror and they’re just the same, backwards, forwards, inside out. It was a mad freak of my daddy’s to name them that way.  Old Gilead Tattnal.  I guess he was a God-crazy man.  Thought the alpha and omega of a name had to be just the same.  But it makes no sense to me.  God’s not the same backwards and forwards.”

  

The protagonist struck me as a Pip from out of the possible palindromes right away, not so much because of Dickens (I didn’t even think of Great Expectations until later, although certainly the orphan idea is present, and an important relationship with a sibling—none of those uncommon in the world of books or in hard times, which both Pips endure) but because it felt right. Many a writer has not so much chosen a name as met a character with name already fastened, and that is how it seemed with Pip.

 

In some long-buried way, the naming may have something to do with my father having a 3-letter nickname beginning with “P” in childhood. Not a palindrome, but short. While Pip is not modeled after my father, I used the sharecropper’s house where he grew up as the model for the orphanage, and several times my father ran away and rode the rails when he was a teen. I don't doubt that it was a lot more fun than picking cotton or pulling tobacco--sixty years later, he could still doom any noun to perdition by putting “cotton-picking” in front of it.

 

Clearly the circularity of these names, particularly the name of Otto, plays some role in the story.  But I’ll leave that for somebody who wants to put on a critic’s hat, as the reasons for this choice felt obscure but important to me, and I had no wish to investigate them.

Laura:

So the Pip of your novel has no direct association to the earlier Dickens' one? 

Marly:

Not a deliberate one; I thought of the name, and then a moment later realized that it had been used by Dickens. Certainly there is a common thread joining one orphan to another--for each, a sister is quite important. The name came more from an awareness of "Pip" as suggesting the mostly-British usage of  "pipped" or wounded, "pip" as seed that may grow and flower and fruit, and "pip" as the first step of a bird toward hatching. All these things bear on the protagonist's situation and say something about it and him. Of course I remembered the Pip created by Dickens and "brought up by hand." But what did not occur to me until you asked this question was another literary reference--to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and "The Five Orange Pips." The surprising thought just came to me that "The Five Orange Pips" fetches up not only one of many writers (like Dickens) I loved in childhood, but also a direct link between "pip" and danger, death, Savannah, and the K. K. K.

Laura:

Thank you, Marly. Our discussion teaches me, once again, how the truths and power of a well-drawn character are bigger, deeper, and more various than the reader or the writer, ( if I may be so bold as to claim), can know or predict at the outset.

* I'll find out soon when I get my own copy of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage at our great local bookstore Flyleaf Books. It can be ordered online at amazon.com and other venues. Read it, won't you?

Here & there & everywhere: two books from the Great Sketch Movement

About nine years ago, something wonderfully sketchy happened. In 2003, Danny Gregory's book 'Everyday Matters' was published and a year later, Danny founded an online group of that same name. In his original and powerful book, Danny promoted the idea of sketching your life as a way to live it more fully.

In the same period,  Enrico Casarosa started his Worldwide Sketchcrawls, where participants spend a designated day sketching and afterwards, share their work with each other, again online. Danny's and Enrico's stunningly successful groups showed us what 'going viral' meant, back when that phrase was still in its toddlerhood.

In 2007, Gabi Campanario had his own brilliant idea, creating an online group called Urban Sketchers, with correspondents he'd selected from all over the world. The goal?  "To show the world, one drawing at a time."  Talk about going global. Gabi and his website have done it.

If Danny and Enrico were the founding giants of the sketch movement, and Gabi their successor in the Big Ideas category, Cathy Johnson, with her books on sketching and illustrated journaling and her various websites, has been the movement's wise woman, teacher, and generous mentor. Her encouragement, both private and published, has drawn many, many into the sketching fold.

Several books have come out of the movement already, in addition to those by Danny and Cathy, but I want to talk about two very recent ones that are as inspiring as can be: 'The Art of Urban Sketching' by, who else, Gabi Campanario and 'Here & There,' by Miguel Herranz.

Gabi's book features the work of dozens of Urban Sketchers, including, I'm proud to say, my own. It's handsomely designed and laid out and, with the variety of styles and approaches it includes, it has a near-encyclopedic reach. It's such fun to see the kind of things sketchers can get up to! AND it's the Number One seller in books on painting at Amazon as of this writing! I won't go into great detail about it, because it's already much touted, but just in case you've been distracted lately, I wanted to bring it to your attention. You need this book.

Miguel Herranz's 'Here and There' is at the other end of the encyclopedic spectrum. It is Miguel's work we see here, and only his. Like Gabi's book, Miguel's is artfully composed. Production quality is very high, which, it must be said, is not all that typical of independently published sketchbooks. And then there are the drawings themselves. You'll want to see these not only for their vitality and charm and luscious technique, but because you can trace Miguel's evolution as a sketcher on these pages. Mind you, he IS a professional illustrator, but you can still see a significant evolution in his drawing tecnhnique as he, having taken up drawing as a daily practice, gets better and better and even better. All of the drawings in 'Here & There' are lovely, fun, and full of personality. There are some drawings that will simply take your breath away.

We like sketches better, sometimes, than paintings because they are so direct, so here and now. They're personal, they're handmade, and really, anyone can produce them. You may not be another Miguel Herranz or Cathy Johnson, but you CAN sketch, you know. (Read Danny's book, if you don't believe me.)

Or you can just look at and enjoy the work you'll find in these two books.

Oh, go ahead. Either way. And let me know what you think.