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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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.

 

The Canary in the Coal Mine: Sheltering at Home

On February 20th, I badly injured my left leg while at the gym. It's a long story, but the bare facts are that I was in driven pursuit of a goal and I was careless. I was not paying attention to my immediate surroundings. 

Afterwards, I was basically bedridden for two weeks and then I had to have surgery. In all the weeks since my injury, I've worn a full leg brace and now it's been seven weeks that I've been confined to my house. 

I posted bits of my story and some sketches I made on social media. People were lovely and sympathetic, of course. They urged me to have patience and fortitude. Life went on as usual in the world outside my own.

Then, the pandemic hit and soon, everyone was confined. My personal story blended in with the world's story. I had a four week's head start for sheltering at home, so I knew what it meant.

Now we are all trying to be patient and have fortitude. We are all trying to stay whole, healthy, and sane. 

I've on and off felt like drawing throughout this period. I've had some really down moments, as have we all.  I miss my family so much. I miss my friends. I miss walking. I miss all sorts of physical activity. I miss being in my studio and working on my painting project. Under these circumstances, both personal and societal, sadness is normal. 

But this will pass. All things do.

Here are some sketches I've made in these past weeks.

As soon as the pain medications diminished, I felt like drawing. The bedside table was handy.

As days went on, I found myself obsessed by the bottle of hand sanitizer on my table. While I was drawing it, I realized that the bubbles in the bottle, frozen as they were in viscous liquid, sheathed as they were in harsh plastic, felt like me, my spirit, my ability to move. I was drawing self portraits.

Bored with my bedside, I drew faces from Netflix screen captures. It was something different to do:

 

Kind friends brought food and flowers. These gorgeous sunflowers captured my longing for vitality and the sun:

Well, and there was always, and again, that bedside table. It grew crowded with jostling objects. It still is.

Tulips from a beloved friend seemed to yearn for freedom after a few days in a pot on my bookshelf. They became another self portrait.

Eventually I was able to sit in my garden, in a wheelchair, and draw a bit.

So here I am and there we are. Together, I hope. Patient, I hope. Blessed with fortitude, I pray. I send my best wishes to all and my deepest hope for a brighter world waiting.

Artist in the studio, artist in the garden

I'm really mostly in the studio these days, walking my long and slow painting path.

As I work with the cool, atmospheric palette of the littoral paintings of my Places Project, though, ( the example shown here is a poor reproduction I nabbed from my Instagram feed, but you get the idea),

 I begin to think of the colors waiting on the other side of my studio door, ready to smash through winter's gray barrier. 

The earth is turning and it's calling me as a witness. 

Last April, 1300+ people were here to see my garden, one of several on the Chapel Hill Garden Tour.  My garden was a total party girl, bedecked in many shades of pink, purple, green, yellow, blue. And, lordy, there were blossoms.

Since I didn't share with you images from our star turn last year, I thought it would be timely and fun to do so now.

First, a bit of history, a 2010 ink and wash drawing I made of the early stages of my garden,  a major redo after my life-changing visit to les Jardins Agapanthes in Normandy:

And here we were last May, many years later.

 

As of today, spring is still in babyhood. I'm tweaking the garden design, of course, simplifying and rethinking shapes and colors.  Likewise, In the studio: tweaking, simplifying, searching for solutions. I'll be back to share some of those solutions when they emerge.

Happy spring to you! 

 

PS Here are links to a couple of essays I wrote on the history of my garden, in case you missed them and are interested!  

Photo essay in Walter Magazine 

Illustrated essay in Charleston Style & Design

Only Connect: My Trip to North Wales

Connections are surfacing everywhere in my life this phase. Without going into a long explanation right now on that topic, (but I will soon!), let me share some images from my two weeks on the Lleyn Peninsula and on Anglesey, two very different, but equally magnificent places. 

Walking along the sandy beach on Abersoch Bay, I saw several luminous blue mounds and wondered what they were. They were Velella jellyfish, washed up on shore, a phenomenon that has occurred on the various coastal regions of Wales often recently. Here I started with the Winsor & Newton tube gouache I took along and finished with crayon since the paint took so long to dry.

 Tea time at the beautiful house and gardens Plas yn Rhiw on the Lleyn Peninsula was a great treat. My husband and I were able to sit on the terrace and have our tea, a rare occasion on this often blustery, rainy, chilly trip. Here I used watercolor crayon and Pentel brush pen on site, adding colored pencil green later at home.

Traveling light as I do, I had pared down my paint and crayon palettes to just a few colors, one of which was not green, so I used my blues and yellows to make this sketch of the Italianate garden on the grounds of the house we stayed in at Abersoch. I ended up being glad I had no green; I like the retro Technicolor effect I got from those limited colors.

On Anglesey, at the café of the art gallery Oriel ynys Môn, I had for lunch, what else, Welsh Rarebit. It was warm and comforting on another one of those chilly, blustery days. Again, here I used Pentel pocket brush pen, watercolor crayon, and a blue colored pencil.  And you can't tell this from the sketch, but that was wonderful Welsh sparkling water in the small glass.

On the many, many walks I took on Anglesey, taking advantage of the lulls in rain and high wind, I often started by walking down a magical holloway, or sunken lane, behind our house, leading to the Anglesey coast path. Here is one of the parade of venerable trees that line that old way:

I don't have landscape sketches per se, because I was concentrating on a different way of looking at land forms and that was the underlying reason for the trip. This has to do with the Caledonian Orogeny and it has to do with connections and you've read some about that here before.  Here's just a snippet of the 12' drawing I made this time of the rock outcrops I found on LLigwy Bay, rocks that are 450 million years old, give or take a few million.

The story is longer and so is the drawing and so is the time it would take to tell it. But it's an important story to me and I will be back soon!

In Print and at the Nasher: My Colorful World

We left North Wales a week ago today and I am still under the spell of that gorgeous, compelling landscape. Before I post the drawings and sketches I made there, I have a few other things to share. 

In September, I had the great pleasure and honor to be asked to provide illustrations for the menu card of an event celebrating Chef Bill Smith of Crooks' Corner Café. In addition to his wildly successful career as a chef, Bill Smith is universally loved and admired for his kind nature and for a lifetime of good deeds.  I thought at first the assignment was to provide food illustrations, so it seemed an easy one to accept and I did. Quickly, I learned that the job required a portrait of the chef himself!  Not only is he famous, so if I got him wrong, it would be glaringly apparent to lots of people, but Bill's a friend of mine, too. No pressure there ;D.

After dozens of drafts, I got him! I did!  And I used my Magic Pencil, which gave me color subtly, but unmistakeably. It was just right. For the card's border, I painted loose watercolor versions of honeysuckle blossoms and leaves, in honor of honeysuckle sorbet, one of our chef's signature dishes. This made a garland that would frame the portrait without overwhelming it.   

Here's the original illustration:

And here's the final product:

 

A few days ago, an essay I wrote and illustrated on the topic of my garden was published in the Fall 2017 issue of Charleston Style & Design Magazine. I chose a simplified ink and watercolor wash method for this assignment, to match the lighthearted tone of the essay itself. Here are some of the originals:

This is the main illustration of my garden, showing my boxwood topiaries and their allium companions:

And here is one of the garden vignettes. The shapes and sizes and layout of the page where these appear imposed lots of challenges for me! You can see them all and also read my essay by clicking on this link!

Finally, in preparation for a 3-session drawing series I'm teaching at Duke University's Nasher Museum in November, here are a couple of prep sketches I made showing the loosely structured, gestural approach I use.  We will focus on and engage with the important Carlo Dolci exhibit now on view at the Nasher. We will draw from live models for half of each two-hour session and spend our other hour in the galleries, drawing from the figures in the Dolci paintings. My approach will be non-dogmatic, non-academic, lively, fun, and, I think, very rewarding!  Come join us if you can!! Here's a link with all the info you need to sign up.

Please come back next week and see what happened in North Wales! See you soon!

In a liminal state

Here it is, the end of one of my favorite months, the eve of another.

I am standing on a threshold, with loose ends to tie up before I leave for Wales and some miscellany to share.

Having finished my summer workload, I turned back to Alaska-inspired paintings. I felt as though I had, literally and figuratively, painted myself into a corner with the Copper Mountain series and their restrictive color palette. These are self-imposed restrictions, needless to say, and so are readily set aside for a while.

As a way to sneak up on and vanquish my stymied and procrastinating self, I turned away from orange and verdigris and thought about the cool blues and greens and earth tones that characterized 99.99% of the Alaska I experienced while I was there!

More studies. The trick is to keep the energy and verve of studies in my final paintings... that has been the hitch with the Copper Mountain series so far. Nevertheless, I persist.

Study of Lake Clark, Alaska and its turquoise waters and dramatic sky:

 

Standing here today, I believe I see some thoughts of Wales sneaking into this study! Liminal states are like that, with their rearview glances to the past and their earnest wonderings about the future.

I mentioned last time my brush pen technique as a solution for the garden illustrations I had to do and that worked well. I actually simplified shapes and tones and ended up with not a lot of nuance, but some fresh and light-spirited images which went well with the tone of the essay.

I can't share the final illustrations until they are published this fall, but here is a collage I made of leftovers from the process, all pasted into my journal/sketchbook. Color and light and simple shapes dominate here.

 

Having lately rediscovered my beloved brush pen for pleasure drawing I vow to make more drawings with it. Here is one of my daughter Kate from a few days ago. Pentel pocket brush pen and Caran d'Ache watersoluble crayons:

So now, again, back to the painting studio and to thoughts and plans for my upcoming trip to north Wales. See you soon!

Brush pen memories

Help! I'm working on illustrations to go along with the essay on my garden that I wrote for Charleston Style & Design's upcoming fall issue. Deadline: NOW or a time very much like it.

I have made dozens and zillions of drafts for these, mainly because I can't settle on the technique I want to use. My collage approach doesn't fit with this subject and the format of these images. My studio floor, the repository for rejected drafts, is a mess, 

What to do??!! Last night, I thought, "brush pen, why not?" I love working with my Pentel pocket brush pen. It feels almost like an extension of my drawing hand. I've used it for lots of sketch subjects and some illustrations over the years. I looked back at my Flickr account to remind myself of the ways I had done this and was waylaid by memories.

May I share some of these rediscovered images and memories with you?

Below: In Pasadena,a cactus garden, part of the larger Huntington Gardens, that I visited with my friend and brilliant artist Virginia Hein on a sketching jaunt fall before last. This brings back such wonderful memories of our time together.

I had hesitated to try brush pen with my current assignment because I wasn't sure I could get the nuances I want with it. But this sketch managed nuance!

Next a scene from Oakland Bay from 2015. I was visiting my daughter Cecelia. Looking at this, I am instantly back in that day, in that place. And I miss my daughter so much. Some nuance here, too!

In another vein, a portrait sketch of Sir Walter Raleigh for the cover of Walter Magazine in 2013. I submitted several images. They chose another one for the cover, but I have always loved this Sir Walter's sassy and flourishy attitude.

Jumping again to a quite different topic, here's a pretty atmospheric, nuancy sketch of a scene in Iceland. Drawing in the twilight, especially the Northern twilight.. aahhh. Heaven. 

The sketch below is another one-way express ticket to the past. David and I were traveling in the Dordogne with our friends Moreton and Drake. Moreton drew me as I drew this scene on the river near Bouziès. I spy nuance! Fabulous memories here, too!:

Finally, speaking of being overtaken by memories, I saw this pen and ink and crayon drawing of our Miles three or so years ago and, though it's not a brush pen drawing, it IS a drawing of a beloved baby, so that counts for a lot, doesn't it? Memories.

Back to work now, keeping my fingers crossed that my brush pen and I will get this done!

Getting back to 'Yay'

I've been drawing all my life, from at least aged three, that is. From my twenties on, I've sketched while traveling, just for the delight and curiosity of it.

Lately, though I've continued with travel sketching, I've fallen off the daily sketching habit, I realize this has to do with all that sketching I've shared here and on Urban Sketchers and other web sites over the past twelve years.

Sketching on location began to feel like a performance, an obligation that grew onerous. The spark that this sort of drawing held for me dimmed the more I felt it a duty and not an inner-generated (even if outwardly shared) activity, the way it had been all my life

This weekend I had to fly to Michigan to attend a memorial service for a dear friend. I wasn't sure if I'd feel like sketching or if I'd have any time to, but I packed some crayons and a brush pen just in case. Out walking in the early morning, I came upon a garden scene in reds and greens and lights and darks. I thought, 'I want to draw that!'  I broke out the few crayons I'd packed and my brush pen and I set to.

After a few minutes I ran out of time and had to wrap it up.

There was my sketch.  'Yay," I thought, yay!' 

'Yay' is child speak and it perfectly expresses that spontaneous delight I'd been missing. I agree with psychologists who say that we carry our child heart inside us all our lives and that is where our creativity lies.  

This quick and modest sketch of a slice of a summer garden seems to me a kind of breaking of a spell. I have lots of other work going, work that I (mostly) enjoy, illustrations and a much-procrastinated-upon painting series, but this is different. This was made by the crayon-wielding child Laura who looked at something she thought was beautiful, took out her colors and said, 'Yay!'

  

 

I have four illustrations due in the next few days and then it will be time to think about my next trip to Wales. As of today, August 1st, I can say I'm leaving next month, even if the date of departure IS the end of September.

I still have so much to say about that trip and where it fits into my larger Places Project. After my deadlines, I'll be back to tell more.

Yay!

Midsummer update: painting, drawing, following a trail

Here you go: some miscellaneous news and images from midsummer. First: several paintings still in process (albeit a very long and frequently interrupted one.)  Well, it takes what it takes and I am who I am, so there, as I often think, we are. (Update from yesterday's studio time: moving forward! I'm learning more what the paintings want to be!)

Other news:  a writing and illustration assignment for Charleston Style & Design Magazine, due August. I'm to do a double-page spread on the subject of my garden in words and watercolor sketches. I'm in the midst of this and, whew, it is not at all as sticky a process as the painting one. 

Recent photos of my garden so you can see some of the context for this:

I will be teaching another three-part drawing series at the Nasher Museum of Art this fall, but I've asked for November dates, since I'll be in Wales again in September!! This series will focus on the figure and I am to tie it to the important Carlo Dolci exhibit, opening late August and running through December. I'm very, very excited about this series! We will have live models and we may hold the sessions out in the open space next to the galleries! What a lively and outreaching museum is the Nasher! 

And then comes Wales! We will be going to north Wales this time, to Anglesey and the Lleyn Peninsula, following the Caledonian Orogeny trail! Oh, and on the subject of that unfathomably ancient mountain range, I have more plans and ideas! Odd, perhaps, to have a 450 million year old mountain range as a muse, but I do have it and so there, once again, we are. Once I get the summer obligations met, I will tell all about my plans and dreams for the Caledonian project over the next two years. God willing, it will be the project of a lifetime, with thrilling trips to bring it forth.

Finally, some miscellaneous sketches from my time in Pembrokeshire in May.

View of Carn Llidi, near St. Davids' Head, in blues and orange.

A slice of the disused slate quarry at Abereiddi.The colors of the stones and rust from the abandoned quarry are stunning:

Carn Llidi again, with rapeseed field, late afternoon into dusk:

View of Carn Llidi and jackdaws from the window of my apartment on the first day, a day of mist and rain:

Ink and watercolor drawing of green sandstone outcrops at Whitesands Bay:

Tidal leavings harvested at Whitesands Bay and later drawn as still life, with sand from the beach applied to the page:

My beloved Carn Llidi, drawn this time on a sunny day with brush pen and watercolor:

A little collage in my sketchbook of some of the wildflowers in bloom in the May hedgerows around St. David's. I fell in love with those hedgerows! This spare collage is more of a mnemonic device for me than anything. I will return to that subject later.

Though we will be in northern Wales this fall, as I said, I am not through with Pembrokeshire and St.David's yet! There is so much of great personal meaning for me in that area and we were, with our friends, so happy there!

 

 

See you soon on the Caledonian trail!