Laurelines

2016: Time out. Time in. Begin again.

 

It’s late for my yearly post about my art (art AND life. I don't separate them any longer) plans for the new year.  That’s because I am moving into a new phase, one in which there are no clear roads and goals.

And that, for me now, is a GOOD thing. Control? Let it go.

The primary direction I’ll be taking, as I hoped it would be last year, will be inner.  The work I’ll be making will come from me and not for jobs. There are millions of people who can make illustrations, but there is only one person who can paint the paintings that are inside me, waiting to take shape and draw breath. 

Of course, this is close to what I said LAST year:

and some from the year before. I got off my intended track, but that, too, is life. Nothing is lost. I learned a lot.

As for my work, I (almost) don’t have a clue what’s waiting to be born and therein lies the excitement as well as the anxiety. I have the mountain series in mind, as with last year, and I’m going to get back to it. But maybe re-addressing this idea, to this point not fully realized, is itself just a step along the way, maybe it will point me in other directions, whatever and wherever they are.

 

To support this inward journey, I’m doing all sorts of things: meditating daily, reading widely on the topic of mindfulness meditation and lovingkindness meditation, books by Tara Brach and Pema Chödrön. I’m taking a year-long online course called Foundations of Wellbeing by Rick Hanson, author of another of my favorite books, Buddha’s Brain. I’m thrilled by all that we are learning about the brain and Rick Hanson, as a noted neuropsychologist and author of several books, is in the forefront of that field.

I’m walking a lot, as usual, working out, and eating really healthy things, even healthier than I always have.

I’m trying to demote myself from Type A to Type C, or at least to Type B-. My immune system is not fond of stress.

I’m continuing to keep my journal, my Big Fat Black Journal, as I call it. As I've said so many times, it is my true lifeline, connecting me with my deeper self and with all the richness as well as the scary awfulness of this world we share.

 

I’ll still be illustrating some, but only those things that speak to me, that make me happy, and that aren’t so time-consuming that I’m knocked sideways. Here's my illustration for the current issue of Charleston Style & Design. I'm working on another for the spring issue, even as we speak. The people there are a joy to work with.

 

I’ll be teaching some drawing classes and leading sketching sessions at the Nasher Museum again. My focus in the fall series will be drawing with nontraditional materials.

 

Some of my work will be in two books to be published this year. More details as I know them.

I’ll be experimenting some with making my own paints and pigments and drawing materials and supports from natural materials. This interest comes from my growing awareness of the importance of place to me.  I would like to draw and paint with the materials that are literally derived from the numinous places of my life. And I’m going to travel to some of those numinous places, too.

 

I’m taking a silk-screen workshop and I’m keeping my antennae up for other new learning experiences, new ways to make art.

 

It’s 2016 and this is my one and only life. I’m raising my hand now and I’m saying, “Here.”

 

Happy 2016 to you. May you find peace, love, fulfillment this year and every year.

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!

Woman at work, July-into-August

I've been quiet. The heat, not so bad the last two summers, is here with a big, fat thud. I am never my most effervescent self in this weather. Add to that the fact that this is the third summer in a row when I've had a late August, early September deadline for big projects. So I wait for cooler (and *cold) weather to be energized and extroverted, and I do my work.  

Magazine work:

I had a fun assignment for the summer issue of Charleston Style & Design, illustrating a lively essay (read it here) that didn't have a lot of visual content.  Well, there was a dead baby possum, but my editor and I agreed we'd leave that alone. A door hinge is the central image of the story, so here is my hinge!

 

Charleston Style & Design magazine, Summer 2015

Restaurant job:

In May, I accepted a job making illustrations and paintings for a new restaurant opening in Chicago this September. Along with some pen and ink work, I am to provide 7 paintings to illustrate key moments or motifs in the chef's life...  moments that led to her decision to open her own restaurant, after having been the executive chef at a four-star restaurant for several years. The seven moments/motifs are set out in stories that will be displayed with the paintings.

I love a challenge and this is one: the hotshot interior designers want the paintings done on vintage cutting boards! The boards have come from France, and Texas and the lord knows where. I've had to have the surfaces sanded and filled to be able to paint on them. Here are some of the boards in progress, along with some studies I made on regular gessoed boards to figure out palette and technique. This is not my usual kind of work (is it anyone's?), but the chef and her business partner are so nice and are great fans of my work and the featured cuisine is northern Italian. Could I say no? I could not.

Here are some boards and some studies, some things-in-progress. To give you a sense of scale, the large round board is 22" in diameter, the smaller round one is 16":

Here's a close up of a study for the painting which  will illustrate the chef's love for fishing in particular, and for nature in general:

Sketching classes at the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University:

I'm going to teach classes on sketching at the museum for three Saturdays in September. I will tell more soon. I am SO excited about this and am full of ideas of things I want us to do! My approach will be different from the norm, but flexible enough to accommodate those who want and need more standard instruction.  I'm eager to get back to sketching myself. My effervescence is revving up, just thinking about this!

Travel to *cold places:

My husband and I are going to the Bavarian alps and to Munich and Salzburg with friends in December! The idea for this grew directly out of my trip to the Dolomites with the same friends last October. I need cold. I need mountains (my mountain paintings series have gone into pause mode for the summer and fall.) Going back to the Alps, as I learned while in the Dolomites, connects me with the happiest moments of my childhood. I haven't forgotten Scandinavia, though! It's on the 2016 To Do list! Effervescence, here I come!

 

I hope you are cool or warm, whatever works best in your hemisphere.  I'll be back soon with updates!

Illustration for Charleston Style & Design Spring 2015

Margaret Locklair writes in that charmed space where memory and longing intersect. This is psychic territory I know very well, too. To have had the assignment of illustrating two of her essays for Charleston Style & Design has been a real joy. 

Here.... you can read in full her current essay "Moss Houses."

And here is her essay on fireflies, which I illustrated for the Summer 2014 issue.

The beginning stages of any art work are my favorites. If I'm lucky, I can get back to myself as the 4 year- old Laura, blissful on the floor, sheets of paper and 48 Crayola crayons scattered around me. This was such a case.

The dominant images in this essay involved, in my mind's eye, a play between opacity and transparency.  Paper cut outs combined with layered paint were the solution I chose to accommodate these two qualities.

Here are some pages from my journal showing experiments with texture, palette, shape, composition:

Here are the final two images I submitted:

You can see they chose the second image. 

This project was a delight from beginning to end. Thank you, Margaret Locklair. Thank you, Charleston Style & Design.

2014 in the rear-view mirror

If 2014 were a road trip, I'd be dizzy from the speed and velocity of it! Whoosh!

For the second year in a row, I've had a significant show of my work in the fall to work toward. In 2013, it was my Iceland-inspired paintings at the Horace Williams House. This past fall, it was work on a floral theme at the Ackland Museum Store, UNC-Chapel Hill. They were two very different shows, the 2013 one featured all paintings, the 2014 show included ink and wash and mixed media on paper pieces, among others.  And the pieces were too big to be scanned and I didn't have time to take good photos of them... whoosh!

 

Having deadlines is a powerful motivation, but I learned from these two shows not to say yes to another show unless I have over half the pieces already finished when I agree to show! (Yikes! and pass the ibuprofen!) Still, the show went really well and I loved working with my fellow exhibitor and friend Ippy Patterson and my buddies at the Ackland Museum Store.

2014 brought more illustration work for me, including images for Walter Magazine, Charleston Style & Design and Chapel Hill Magazine. Other clients this year were The Nature Conservancy and Edible Hudson Valley.

Fireflies for Charleston Style & Design.

Person Street illustrations for Walter Magazine.

Blue crabs for Edible Hudson Valley.

Continuing on the art front... my work appeared in an excellent new book on drawing by Katherine Tyrrell of Making a Mark blog fame.  Her book Drawing 365 is now available here in the US and will be released in the UK and worldwide in January. This is a book you will want to own if you have any interest in drawing. It's hands down one of the most informative and useful of this popular genre.  Here's a small peek at one of my contributions to it... a blind contour drawing, demonstrating one of the 365 drawing tips Katherine writes about:

I travelled a lot in 2014, but since this is already sounding like one of those annoying Christmas letters, I'll mention only the trip that relates directly to my art career, my October trip to Italy. I had the great fortune to have been invited to Rimini, Italy for a conference organized by the Italian tourism industry, one designed to connect people whose passion is travel with people whose business is travel, to see what kind of synergy might result. My years of travel writing and sketching on my blog led to my being chosen to participate in this exciting new conference, now in its second year.

It was exciting, fascinating, informative and fun. I learned so much about the travel industry and about the power of social media and about what it is I do as a blogger and why I do it. I met many lovely people from all over the world.

I will be forever grateful for the organizers of TBDI 2014 for having given me this opportunity.

While in Italy, I fell in love with the Dolomites

and they, along with my passion for the mountains of Norway and the rugged topography of Iceland, have filled me with ideas for new paintings... some kind of response, I know not yet what, to this mountain splendor and energy. More about this in my 2015: A Plan, to be published in the next couple of days.

Finally, on December 20th, I led a sketching session at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. This was a kind of reaching out and giving back as an artist that I have done very little of,  but I so enjoyed that I am eager to do more, more, more!  I had a fabulous group of sketchers, almost all beginners, and they reported having benefited a lot from my talk and our working together. It was such fun and very rewarding!

So, I think that covers it... though I can't be sure, dizzy as I still am from all the 2014 action! 

I have many thoughts about what is to come and will share those, as I said, in the next few days.

Happy 2015 to you, dear readers. I hope 2014 has been kind to you. Thank you for sharing this journey, many of you, year after year. I am so very grateful for your interest and support.

Fireflies, Charleston, summer, progress, etc.

Here I emerge, bleary-eyed but happyish for today, to share with you one of my recent illustrations. (Bleary-eyed because of lots of work and deadlines...I'm making progress, though!)

This was my first (and I hope not last) assignment for Charleston Style and Design magazine. I thoroughly enjoyed it because a) I love fireflies and all things that soar and shimmer (meteors, anyone?) and b) I like very much the essay that was the reason for the assignment. Read it below, I think you will, too; and c) this job allowed me to work in a slightly different way from my usual way(s), and d) I have a complicated and deeply meaningful relationship with Charleston, SC. This assignment gave me a new connection with that beautiful place.

 

Here, then, is a screenshot of the page the essay and illustration appear on, followed by a capture of the original illustration, differently proportioned from the one in the magazine.

Meantime, I have 9 illustrations to appear in the upcoming issue of Walter magazine and 7 spot illustrations in another city magazine, new as a client to me, to appear in their September issue. I will tell more about the latter later... first I need to do the work! I'm still in the studio working on pieces for my upcoming art show, which opens on August 30th. You can see that I have come by my bleary eyes honestly.

I hope you are more than happyish, I hope you have reached full-tilt happy! I will join you there soon(ish!)

In print, recent past and near future!

An update on the recent illustration front. I did 8 sketches for an article on Saxapahaw, NC for Walter Magazine for their May issue. Saxapahaw is a happening little town, about an hour's drive from Raleigh. Here you will find great natural beauty, music, art and craft, delish food, and lovely people.

Here are some images from that article. Click on link above for full text. All 8 illustrations appear in the print version, but not online.

 

 

My oyster illustration appeared in the Florida Weekly/Charlotte edition newspaper on April 24, 2014, on behalf of The Nature Conservancy, as part of their Coastal Awareness campaign. 

 

And today, I start a new assignment for the August issue of Walter, having this week finished one for the upcoming issue of Charleston Style & Design, a new client. I'll share these after they are published.  

Now to paint!