Laurelines

My artist's garden, radically changed!

Here in the midst of my painting/drawing projects, I'm also working on my garden. This is actually the first summer in four years that I've been able to pay much attention to it since I have been determined to stay untethered by big deadlines this year! What a relief!

Artists and gardens... well, you know we pair well.  

But, oh, has my garden changed! Here it is in its sort of English garden phase, ten or so years ago,  before I decided no more chemicals for a green lawn in MY garden.

There were intermediary stages, but let's jump to THIS 2010  total redo.  Click on the link to see how drastic the changes were. I ripped out lots of bad design and indecision, too frillyness and not Me-ness, and got these bare bones:

One short year after that, the garden was cooking!, with, among other changes,  new stone pathways instead of those mulch ones.  Hard to believe this is only a year later! I was ripping and roaring! I based my new visions on some exquisite gardens I'd seen in Normandy and I also drew upon childhood memories of formal gardens all over France.

In the past six years, I've tweaked and tweaked the garden and it has, all on its own, matured (haven't we all? * a hem*)  I've figured out, through insane amounts of trial and error, what will actually grow here! Imagine that!

And so here we are today, or anyway, recently. I feel I've finally got the look I want, flowers when there are my favorites blooming, but not too many.

Textures galore, just as I like in my paintings and drawings. And look how those boxwoods have grown!

Serenity... more and more necessary for me as the world gets the opposite.

 

I travel to numinous places, it is true. Here at home, in my garden, I've made a place, built from memories and inspiration, that is meaningful to me.

 

 

Passing through Pasadena and LA with pencils, pens, color

Since I was in the LA area primarily to visit an old friend who is not a sketcher, I made fewer travel sketches than I normally would have.  We went to my favorite kinds of places to visit when I travel, though : museums and garden. The first two sketches here are, in fact, some I made with fellow artist and Urban Sketcher and longtime cyber buddy Virginia Hein! No worries there about taking up HER time while I sketched!

 The cactus and succulent garden at Huntington Gardens was fabulous. I have seen other such gardens, but this surpasses all of them.

Red hot pokers (kniphofia of some description) interwoven with succulents at Huntington Gardens. Eye-stopping.

 

 At the Norton Simon Museum, Rodin's Balzac, with his leonine head and sphinx-like hauteur, reigns over the front courtyard.

Indian sculpture, Digambara Yaksha Sarvahna,  circa 900.

 

Next up (and soon!) Munich, Salzburg, and the Bavarian Alps!! Watch this space!

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.

June then, June now.

This is a repost from another June because I'm completely submerged in this one! Not in a bad way, just lots of work. And one of the projects has to do with garden-inspired art! So everything old is new again.

It's total immersion, sun up to moonlight, day after day. Soon it will be too hot. For now, if you need me, look for me there.

February again, on several fronts

There's the fall show front, here represented by a color, texture, and composition study of hyacinths made in my ever-present portable studio, also known as my Stillman & Birns Alpha Series 8 1/2 x 11 sketchbook. This is the fun part! Who knows what relationship the final pieces will have to these studies. We will all find out in time. Oh, and that's a sweet gum ball at the bottom of the page. More fun with textures!

There's the illustration front. This is a portrait of Zach Clayton, a columnist for Walter Magazine, making his debut in the current issue (February 2014.)  He was easy to do. He has lots of facial architecture, unlike some of my other subjects. Do you sense a smidge of frustration in that last phrase? Clever you.

 

 

 

The last two are images from my personal drawing/painting front, a project I started earlier this month. It's a long story, that one, and I'll tell it soon.

 

 

 

 

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!

 

J C Raulston Arboretum illustrations

I can finally show these since the June/July issue of Walter, the magazine of Raleigh, NC, has been published!

 

Here's the horse chestnut image, direct from my files, so you can get an idea of what the *original of these is like:

And there's SO much going on in my studio, all of which will be shared in time! 2013 has been such an important year for me and much of what is important has just... bam! .. appeared without a warning. It's a really good thing I didn't know all that was coming, because I might have, politely but unwisely, declined the upheaval. Upheaval is another word for growth, isn't it?

 

 

* I will also post the originals in my 2013 Gallery, at left.

The Wandering Sketcher... c'est moi!

I have never felt as much on the move in my life as I do now. Ironically, I won't be traveling as much this year (though I have a thrilling trip to northern Norway planned for this coming December, about which more later)... the journeys I refer to are interior, surprising, and profound.

Some of the products of my interior travels will be apparent before too long. At least, I hope so, since many of them are a response to my September art show deadline!

Back in the visible world, I  appear on the pages of a couple of magazines, with more such appearances to follow this year.

In the June 2013 issue of Watercolor Artist, I'm included in an article about urban sketching, written by noted artist and writer Cathy Johnson. It's called 'The Pulse of the City; Seven Artists from Around the Globe Share What it Means to Record Life ... .'  Cathy (or Kate, as her artist friends call her) has written 34 books and zillions of articles. She's a national treasure. I'm honored to be one of the seven artists she writes about:

 

I am also a contributing illustrator to a magazine called Walter; Raleigh's Life and Soul, as you may remember from  a recent post here.

Because of my painting obligations, I have not been able to accept all assignments, but a recent one was lots of fun...once I stopped being terrified at the idea of producing a map! Luckily, the map in question was small and could be done in my sketchy, quirky style! I can't wait to do more maps! If ever a subject were tailor-made for me, the wandering artist, this is it.

 

My next assignment for Walter is tailor-made for me in a different way. I'm to make sketchy illustrations of the J C Ralston Arboretum in Raleigh for the magazine's June issue. The Ralston Arboretum is renowned in the horticultural and gardening worlds. I look forward to sitting in those gardens and responding to them in my own way.

Sketching Austin, Texas

I had just two full days and pieces of another two on my visit to my daughter this past week. I fell in love with Austin's houses this trip. I know of no other place that has the number and variety of quirky, colorful, and plain old adorable houses that Austin has. What IS in the water there, because I want some of it!

Unfortunately, I only managed one house sketch, but am dying to go back and (see my daughter, of course) and sketch more of these little jewels. That's what they are.

Austin also has good restaurants aplenty. My new favorite is Olive and June and I thank my daughter for suggesting it for our first night together!

I travel. I sketch. I sketch gardens and the things in them. This trip was no exception. We spent parts of two afternoons at the lovely estate Laguna Gloria.

Entering the Bullock Texas Museum of State History, you see quotations carved in huge scale on the marble walls flanking the entrance to the exhibits, trumpeting the wonderfulness of Texas. This kind of boisterous self love can be endearing, but it’s also a bit off-putting, given the state’s early history of exploitation and destruction of the native people by European settlers. This is true of much, if not all, of the original European settlements in the new world, of course. Still. Note to Texas... and to self, for that matter: healthy doses of humility never go amiss.  

Italy sketchbook, part two

Someone recently asked me for my advice about travel sketching tools and paraphernalia. I've been asked lots before... and I had answers. But I'm in such a muddle now over what to take where, I can't even give myself advice!

Here you'll see I'm all over the place--- with brushpens filled with acrylic ink, Copic brush pens, colored pencils, Memory brush pens (which I love but they've long been discontinued, so no more when these give out,) Faber Castell Ecco Pigment pens, Portuguese laundry pencils! See... I'm a mess! So don't believe a thing I say on this subject. I should be asking YOU.

 

There's at least one more batch after these. Ci vediamo più tardi!