Laurelines

February in the studio: collecting, dreaming

I've been collecting images this month, fossil images relating to the places I've been to and hope to go to. This is an offshoot of my desire to make artwork with and of the numinous places of my life. I plan to paint and draw with found organic materials, as I've mentioned before. I won't be using fossils themselves, I hasten to say, but will incorporate that imagery somehow into my work, if and however it works out.

I've also been generating lots of images for illustration projects, one of which I finished, but can't share until it is published in April. But I CAN and do keep the leftover bits and pieces and recycle them in the pages of my  journal.

First, though, the drawing below. It's throwback to an old, old theme of mine from my early years of blogging, in which I collected interesting objects found on my walks, brought them home and drew and painted them. As usual, it was the textures and gestures of the objects that captured me.

I have birds! My most recent illustration assignment for Charleston Style & Design centered around singing birds in a cherry tree. I put my cd, A Field Guide to Eastern Bird Songs, on the laptop and played it as I drew. Perfect inspiration!

Here are some of the aforementioned illustration leftovers, pasted on a page in my journal:

Below, more leftovers, from two different projects, appearing together in the pages of my journal.  A happy pairing, I thought:

Below, a spread of the fossil studies I mentioned earlier:

There is something very compelling to me about connecting in my artwork, in any way I can, to the deep energy of the world we stand on. It's that old sweet song... channeling the ch'i.

In a few days, I'll be back in the San Francisco to see my daughter and my dearest friend Kathleen. I'll be sketching there, you can count on it. 

I'll tell you then about the place I've recently added to my plans this year, a country connected to Norway by virtue of the events of the Caledonian Orogeny. What's four million years' separation between friends? I'm beside myself with glee, thinking of the new place!

See you soon!

Oregon sketches, last batch

It's always fun to sketch with another person. Sketching with my daughter Cecelia is more than fun... it's thrilling and so gratifying. Because we were together, I sketched more in the short time period than I often do. Well, and it was so beautiful where we were. That kind of incentive works well, too!

I drew the mountain several times, as you have seen, each time from a slightly different perspective and in different light conditions. I could have gone on forever, I think. I'm hoping to go to the Bavarian Alps next December and that may be my next mountain trip. I'll be more than ready when the time comes.

Here is my daughter drawing in her large sketchbook on our first morning. It was warm enough that day for us to sit and sketch without (fingerless) gloves and hats.

I am always drawn to figurative sculpture, from the fountains of Paris to the folk art of New Mexico. At Timberline Lodge, the interior of the building is animated by lovely carved wooden animals. These and much of the original furniture were made by artisans expressly for the building, in accordance with the Works Progress Administration's goals of providing work for laborers and craftsmen during the tough economic times of the 1930s.

Another quick sketch of the mountain, made with Caran d'Ache crayon, Cretacolor nero pencil, and watercolor wash.

Finally, a sketch of the restaurant/bar area at the Residence Inn in the Pearl District of Portland. Cecelia and I sketched there together last August and we did do again last week.

I'm home now and glad to be here, but I miss Cecelia and our time together in Oregon. Good thing I have these sketches as mementoes!

Oregon sketches, first batch

Last week, in spite of cancelled flights due to horrible ice and snow eruptions along my travel route, I managed to make it out to Mt. Hood, Oregon AND back. I went to have some time with my daughter Cecelia, hoping we'd be able to sketch together and to enjoy the mountain together. And we did!

For this volcano-loving, mountain-loving artist, you couldn't ask for a better place to be. Mt Hood is the largest dormant volcano in Oregon. Sitting on a giant tufa boulder (ouch!) to sketch the south flank of the mountain that first morning was thrilling... all was quiet, all was bright. We don't ski, but we were able to snowshoe a bit up the mountainside later in the day and get even closer to this majestic cone of earth.

Here are a few sketches of the mountain and of handsome Timberline Lodge where we stayed, one of FDR's Works Progress Administration constructions from the 1930s.

More sketches to come!

Around the World Blog Hop: My Turn

I want to thank my friend and fabulous artist Kris Wiltse of Whidbey Island, Washington for passing the Around the World Blog baton to me.  If you don't know her exquisite, multi-facted body of work, please check it out. You will be so happy you did.

Here's how this works.  A blogger answers four questions and then invites another blogger to answer the questions on their own blogs the following Monday.

Here are my questions and answers.

What am I working on?

 I'm in the beginning, exploratory stages of paintings with mountain imagery as a point of departure. I've written about this recently so I won't repeat myself too much, I hope. 

I have on paper, on board, and in my memory, images of mountains in Italy:

Mountains in Norway:

Mountains in Iceland:

 

I'm not sure how the new mountain pieces will go and what they want to be. We will find out in time. Of course, I have to go and see more mountains! I am a passionate traveler, always looking to get back to the Source. (Most any excuse will do ;D.)

Why do I create what I do?

The real subject of my work, and my reason for making it, is my deep response to the energy I feel everywhere around me. Call it the ch'i, the life force, the vibrations that, according to string theory, are the pulse and generator of the universe.

It is present in the landscape and it is present in and through human beings and other creatures:

 I foresee for this year at some point and as a complement to my mountain paintings, a return to my first love in art, the human figure. Somehow, some way. I'm seeing, with my mind's eye, loose portrait-ish pieces made by drawing with paint, incorporating some cut and torn paper and some pattern elements.  My recent illustration work using pattern and cut paper has fueled my imagination. 

How does my work differ from others in my genre?

I work in several ways, with different approaches, purposes, and different media. Maybe my  pronounced mutability is a key difference, though the other artists I most admire are seekers like me and their work is always evolving and varied, too. 

How does my creating process work?

I keep a deeply personal, introspective sketchbook journal in which I record ideas, images, as well as observations and facts. It is the wellspring for my work as well as a record of its progress. The work I care about emerges from this dialogue with my deep self.

In terms of the physical making of my imagery, I feel more and more as if I'm becoming a kind of human divining rod. I approach a subject or idea with an open and inquisitive heart and I wait to feel the energy that I know is there. That process, when I'm lucky, gives me a gestalt, a sense of the basic gesture and forms involved. Looking at the examples I've included here, you will agree with me that they are nothing if not gestural!

The materiality of my work gives me so much pleasure, too. Really, on some level, I paint and draw just so I can immerse myself in paint and ink and graphite, crayons and paper and gessobord.

I have asked my brilliant and multi-talented friend Beth Adams of Montreal, Canada to follow me in this blog hop. Beth is a publisher, writer, editor, graphic designer, painter, and printmaker. Her blog The Cassandra Pages is worth a long, long visit.  

From an island in Washington state to a college town in Piedmont North Carolina to the major city of Québec...we're hopping!

 

 

 

2015, the gift

It's early Sunday morning as I write this. The delicious, protracted hiatus of holidays and my January birthday is about to end and, oh, it's been a heavenly two weeks! I have loved (mostly) every second of it... the quiet (mostly), dark, pulling-in time of the year is my time.

For the first time in two years, I haven't had the sword of Damocles in the form of a big show hanging over my head as I start the year... and no small deadlines for now, either.   Just my beautiful new Paolo de Faveri Alpine wall calendar hanging in my studio to inspire me and one more day to get that studio ready for painting paintings.

This new year is a gift and I want to make sure I use it well and wisely. 

And it's clear to me that using it well will be to be mostly inner-directed in my work.

 I am full of excitement and very unformed ideas about how to respond to the places I have fallen in love with recently... the Scandinavian world, the alpine world. Oh, those Italian Dolomites that I loved for themselves but also for how they brought back the best of my childhood memories of time spent in the Swiss/French alps! There is a deep, pervasive energy in that northern world, a primal source for my life, that sets me vibrating like a divining rod.

Part of this inner direction will be... to let go and see where my heart takes me. When I was making paintings for my Iceland-inspired show year before last, I had as my mantra the Icelandic line, Hvert liggur thessi vegur?  Where, then, does this path lead? 

I had little idea of what sort of work would come out of my passion for Iceland and Norway and I accepted and ran with that unknowing.

Last year about this time, I wrote the post Cutting Up and Letting Go.   (In my ten years of blogging, I've made a habit each year of posting my intentions for the coming year.)  There I made the case for again running with the unknowing, for following my inner sign posts.  But it didn't quite happen. I had lots of deadlines and obligations.

In that post from last year, too, I talked about how much I love the materiality of my work, the textures, the shapes, the colors that can, if I do it right, appear on my paper and my gesso board.  They have a life of their own. It's my job to open my arms and catch them.

In addition to painting, I'll, of course, be drawing and sketching. Drawing has been a major part of who I am since I was 3 years old, if not before. 

So this year. Feeling more humble and grateful for the gift of another year, less breezy and complacent, I'm ready to run down that path, not knowing where it leads, but knowing I have to go there.

May 2015 take you where you want and need to go.

Sketching in museums

I'm leading a sketching session at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University this weekend, as I've mentioned. I've been sketching in museums for a very long time. This occasion at Duke prompts me to think about what it is *to draw this way and why it is we do it.

Sketching at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges.

Sketching is about connecting, whether the subject is a beloved 15 month-old child, an Alpine peak in Italy, or a monkfish on a slab at the Bergen fish market.

I like the word 'cathect' to express what we do when we draw: verb tr.: To invest mental or emotional energy in an idea, object, or person.

When we are lucky, the energy runs both ways. We become a conduit for the emotional energy emanating, on its own, from the Other.

Sketching in museums is a perfect opportunity for this kind of interconnection. As we draw, we participate, in varying degrees, in the process of creation of another's work.

 The varying degrees part is key. Sometimes when we sketch a painting or sculpture, we feel as if our hands and heart are one with the original artist's hands and heart.

 Sometimes, we attempt to get at the heart of the artist's creation through close observation and faithful rendering (remember, my rendering is always on the loose side!) :

At other times, we are simply making gestures in the general direction and spirit of the work in question.

All are worthwhile stops on the continuum of interconnection.

As with writing, we often don't know what we think about something until we draw it. And the process of drawing can be revelatory in ways other than intellectual.

Recently at the Nasher, I drew some pieces by Joan Miro.

His creaturely figures manifested an intense spirituality, much more so than the 15th-century German bust of Christ I also drew that day. I might have expected the reverse, but the Christ figure was stolid and very human--- which may have been what the artist intended to convey, after all. The Miros were eloquent and transcendent, for all their apparent fragility.

 

There are other things to say about sketching in museums. We could talk about drawing materials allowed in museums and ways to expand that often limited vocabulary. We could talk about sketching certain kinds of work for consolation and personal affirmation. For example, I love to sketch sculptures of the Buddha and bodhisattvas when I need a tranquility boost.

 If you have any experiences or observations you would like to share on these subjects, please do comment!

 *Here I'm not referring to the practice of copying Old Masters in museums,  a mainstay of past academic art training, but something more personal and most often less rigorous

Art supplies for Italy, that age-old question

It's the eternal question for us traveling artists. Which art supplies to take? On my upcoming trip to Italy to attend the TBDI 2014, I'll be taking only a carry-on bag, so the lack of space makes the question even more agonizing. 

I am usually a quick decider, but on this question, I waffle with the worst of them.

 The truth of this hit me hard recently as I was choosing some of my sketches to be published in Cathy Johnson's upcoming book, provisionally titled, "Sketching on the Spot.'  The first decision, then as now, boiled down to which would be the default sketching tool: pens or pencils?

I most often sketch with pens, such as my Pentel Pocket brush pen, which feels like an extension of my fingertips. Being a painter, I love the brushiness of those lines. They do robust, they do atmospheric, they play well with color or on their own. 

Bouziès, France

 

Copenhagen, Denmark
 

Bergen, Norway

Other times I want a crisp line, so I use a fine-tipped pen like the Ecco Pigment pen... again, with or without color:

 

Fontaine de l'Observatoire, Paris

But lately, my heart is leading me back to pencil, that most sensuous of drawing tools. There is NOTHING like the skidmarks, the fractured trails of a big, fat, soft pencil on good paper. With or without color added.

 

 

 Brittany, Presqu'ile de Rhuys

 

Middleton Place, Charleston, SC  Northern Norway

And then there is the matter of the which and the how of taking watercolors! I think this time, I'll take a few squeezed-out blobs from my paint tubes in a very lightweight plastic travel palette.

So here's the plan for now: two pens (one brush pen, one hard tip), a couple of pencils, limited watercolors and, if I have space, 4 or 5 watercolor crayons. And did I mention which sketchbook to take? I did not. That's a thought, alas, for another day. My decider synapses, now exhausted, have taken to their beds.

Four from February

February finds me a little scattered. I'm trying to simplify means and method and media in sketching. Here I had to work quickly (which is, after all, what sketching IS) because baby Miles was sure to wake up any minute. I've used two Pitt Artist pens,  a smidge of watercolor, and a fountain pen. Would love to pare down my sketching gear, for now, to these three basics.

No surprise, I'm back to drawing on my toned Strathmore paper. It's addictive. I first used it 2 or 3 years ago and I've been in love with it since. Below is my tabletop, a view the day after a Norwegian meal I prepared: 

Below: two of many drawings on various subjects in a series. Could I get any vaguer than that description if I tried? 

And I've got to get started seriously on my work (both paintings and drawings) for the upcoming fall show! The theme is plants: mostly flowers, but some trees, etc. I have to figure out a way to produce pieces that are personal and powerful. Otherwise, there's no point ;D.

2014, cutting up and letting go

Two things I learned last year in the studio:

Thing One:

    I am in love with texture, shapes, color... the materiality of my stuff. Seeing brushmarks on board or paper makes me giddy with delight, euphoric. That, and the drive to respond to the chi, the energy that is in and through all things, are the reasons why I paint and draw. It comes to that.

Thing Two:

When I follow my inner prompts, I go places. I know now to stay tuned.... and move aside... when I hear the call of the (inner) wild.

So, having learned all of that:

I'm going to spend the rest of this month playing with paint on big sheets of paper... making all kinds of marks and textures and shapes on page after page.

This will loosen me up and make me happy. The sheets of paper will be used--- maybe, maybe not, who knows how--- as elements in future paintings and illustrations.

See! Look what happened just this morning as I was cleaning up my studio! While filing away old sheets of paper on which I tested colors last year, I really looked at their surfaces for the first time. And picked up my scissors and started cutting. Birds happened. (The big one is maybe 12" across.) A whale happened.

So, cutting up (which also means, in American English, to act in a silly and/or noisy way) and letting go.

Letting go of my need to control. Letting go of foregone conclusions. Is there any art more boring than the same stuff cranked out year after year, where the artist knows exactly what the piece is going to be at the outset? Ugh. 

Of course, I haven't abandoned all need for structure. I'm just minimizing it in my art life.

With another painting show slated for next fall and with, I hope, continued illustration assignments this year, there'll be enough structure in my work days.

Of course, my thinking self is still (mostly) in charge of my wild self. It's a lively pas de deux.  

In 2014, I'll be painting, drawing, writing, cutting up. I'll be using acrylics, inks, pens, pencils, crayons, scissors, glue, and watercolors.

So, from this morning, a watercolor sketch, on pastel paper, of a hyacinth in my studio.  

In 2014, I'll also be traveling (of course) and I'll be starting a secret (for now) drawing project, the idea of which just came to me yesterday!  I'll tell more as the days go on. I'm excited and happy!

Are you coming with?

Norway 2013 sketches, resumed!

My scanner seems, for now, to be working again, so I've decided to postpone the 2014 Plan post so I can, at last, share these! We are turning back to Norway, where I was this time last month.

There is something so profoundly calming about the northern Norway coastal landscape in winter. It is the opposite, in my mind, at least, of Icelandic landscape, which teems and pulses with energy.

 

The café in Ersfjordbotn was the one warm and open place we found during our stay in that small fishing village near Tromsø. We walked through the snow to this cozy place every day and ate things we should not have.  They were delicious ;D.

Lanterns and candles are used everywhere and all day in Norway, in a valiant effort to illuminate the dark December days. I loved this cozy café corner, with its candlesticks, lantern, strings of lights.

 The Oslo Opera House is rightfully noted for its stunning architecture. An equally stunning sculpture, all crystalline and icy-looking, seems to float in the fjord behind the Opera House. 

And here is one last look at the rugged mountains and valleys of northern Norway, drawn quick, quick, quick as our ship made its stately progression ever northward.

Next up: the Plan! It's still January, it's definitely still 2014. All is well!