Laurelines

Going Places

The thing about working on a Places Project, as I am, is that, well, you go places. And that going does interrupt the work flow (not to mention the blog stream!!), though it keeps the inspiration rushing at flood tide! So, it's a matter of trying to do both, of staying balanced. i won't always be at the flood tide stage and in fact, I see 2019 as more of a steady work year, with less travel. (But Iceland! Back to the source!)  More about that in December.

Anyway, here are some paintings, or parts of paintings, I've been making. I have so many more in process and am delighted and vastly relieved to feel that I am at last in a kind of flow here in the studio.  Withdrawing from illustrating and teaching and my various Other-oriented art activities this year has been a hard but very fruitful thing to do.

Before turning to Norway as a subject, I have been thinking of Wales. There is something so compelling to me about western coastal Wales. Like Norway, it is a land of pronounced darks and lights... or so I see it. And it appears, at my hands, to be a land of shards and angles, too,  and infinite atmospheres and textures. In short, it's heaven (one of several)  for me.

 

Lligwy Bay, afternoon drama. Acrylic on board, as are all of these paintings:

 

 

 Lligwy Bay, after rain:

 

Dulas Bay, blue hour. This is the very first stage of this painting. I have since gone farther, but haven't finished. I want to remember this early, airy stage! I love painting on natural wood surfaces.

 

And my latest start, a detail of larger painting... another dramatic sky over Lligwy Bay! The foreground of this painting isn't shown, but once it is done and the whole pulled together, I'll be so happy. Won't be long now.  Texture! Atmosphere!  Yes! You can see my mind is turning to Norway! My numinous places connect in many ways. 

A sketch of my dear friend Michael, a Yorkshireman who took Penelope, his love and my dear friend, around Yorkshire this past October. Yorkshire proved to be a magical place and one that I learned, to my great surprise, is a very important part of my life story!  I drew this in a delightful pub in Whitby, where Penelope, Michael and I had lunch one cold and rainy day.

And, last, an image I treasure from the Yorkshire trip: I'm in awe before Gordale Scar, imagining the ancient glacial melt processes that created this striking topography.

I'll be back in December! My emotional logjam has broken and I'm once again a member of the visible world!

Happy Fall-into-Winter to you!

80° North, anyone? Art supplies for the Land of the Midnight Sun!

 

That's where we'll be the first part our trip!  Far, far, far northern Norway, off the mainland. I am going to try to get some sort of memento with that latitude engraved on it! I'm a north-going spirit, that's for sure. 

This being such a once-in-a-lifetime trip, I vow to document it fully in writing and sketches, in addition to the separate group of drawings I'll do for my Caledonian Orogeny project.

But what supplies to take with me?? I travel only with a carryon and that has to contain clothes for winter weather (still there in May and early June in Svalbard) as well as for cool spring days, which I hope we will find in the other parts of Norway we are going to. Yikes!

Wakeful at 2am today (and you can understand why!), I looked at past sketches of similar atmospheric situations. Here are my tentative choices. If you have any suggestions, by the way, please do make them!

I know you've seen most of these before, but bear with me. I have to think.;D

1. Caran d'Ache watercolor crayons: I use these often. Here are some examples from  the past:

Iceland, Budir Bay

More Iceland. Here there's a wash of Daniel Smith Lunar Black with the crayons. I'll take that and Lunar Blue and those will be my only watercolors. Right? I can add more washes later. if I want to.

 

Mt Hood, Oregon. Unlike my previous trips to Norway, which all took place in the Arctic Twilight, this trip will be, as I mentioned, under the Midnight Sun!

    2. Pentel pocket brush pen. These are practically extensions of my hands. I use them everywhere.

In Bergen, Norway, with white gel pen and watercolor wash

 

In E.Lansing, Michigan, with watercolor crayons! Two for the price of one!

    3. Inktense pencils? When you must have bursts of juicy color!

Don't you love how a mere spritz of water makes inktense sketches ebullient!

Inktense pencils at Carn Llidi, Wales. Speaking of atmospheric, as we were:

     4. Cretacolor Oil pencils in Nero. I have to have these for regular drawing, right?  With these, you can be both gestural and precise:

And I'll need these for my Caledonian Orogeny drawing, of course;

    5. Sketchbooks: I'll have a couple of custom handmade concertina sketchbooks for the rock drawings and then two Stillman & Birn softcover 8 x10s, one in gray, one in white.

    6. Blue and red colored pencils, not watercolor ones. Oh, let's add orange and green, too. I just like to draw with these and they come in handy if you want quick, dry color.

 

 Oh, I've given myself a headache now.

I'm serious... if you have any suggestions, any new products you like for travel sketches, or old favorites of yours (not watercolors, though, or fountain pens for this trip, unfortunately,) I'd love to have them!

Takk!

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!

Alaska, part two, sketches and studies continued

Here is the second and last batch of studies from Alaska. I wanted to post them before September completely sweeps me away with planning my drawing classes for the Nasher Museum of Art and pulling things together for David's and my trip to coastal Wales two days after the 3-part series ends!

I have some painting ideas growing out of my time in Alaska and evolving from my sketches and studies... and I need to get the rough lineaments of these down in the studio before I head for Wales. So, hurrying along I go.

For now, here are two more gestural mountain studies. The sky in Alaska was where most of the actual, visible energy of the place manifested. The mountain peaks held and exuded their own energy, of course,  but what was surprising in Alaska was that the water itself was pretty calm. This is not always the case with Lake Clark, but compared to the sea, the lake's drama is simply going to be more subdued in most cases. Somehow, this had not occurred to me before I went!

I had packed a Strathmore sketchbook filled with gray-toned paper, but I used it less often than I thought I would. That brown craft paper was so much sturdier!

The angular peakiness of the mountains became more and more apparent as I drew. My curving, swooping gestural style ceded to the reality of those chiseled shapes as the days went by.

Sitting on the deck of the bathhouse one late afternoon, I grabbed some pencils and sketched a view of the mountains, seen through the branches of an Alaskan spruce.

Oh, I had fun drawing with charred wood from our bonfire! Here are two more found charcoal sketches:

And a quick shot similar to the one I posted last time, of two sketchbook spreads, the pages of which won't fit on my scanner:

I'll be posting work made by the participants in my drawing series at the Nasher over the next three weeks. I had forgotten to take photos of the drawings last time and I won't make that mistake again. We are going to have a wonderful series and I want to share it with you!

A story of Alaska

 

A story of Alaska, in three essays and two epilogues.

 

Essay one, my art residency application:

 

Back to Alaska: My Story

...

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

 

Lines above and below from T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Four Quartets.’

 

I was born on Adak, an island in the middle of the Bering Sea, in a blizzard, at home. Wrapped in an army blanket, placed in a cardboard box, I was taken by jeep to the hospital.

When my mother died five years ago, I was seized by the idea of heading back to my birthplace. I had not been there since I was a baby. It was time to return.

Research reminded me what my father could have if he were still alive: Adak is often besieged by high winds, fogs, cyclones, and snow.  Flight delays of days or even weeks are common. Facilities for travelers are now practically non-existent, after the government’s relinquishment of the military base where my family had lived. My dream trip seemed outside the realm of possibility.

Still, even though I have painted in Iceland, a similarly rugged landscape, I could not give up the idea of going back to an Alaska in some way related to my Aleutian island. When I found the Chulitna Lodge art residency online, I began to think this might really be possible. Adak is several hundred miles from Port Alsworth, but there is a real geological connection: the mountains in the Lake Clark National Park are part of the Aleutian Range and all of this area, of course, was once one landmass stretching across the Bering Sea. 

A passion for energy and place, as well as a delight in the materiality of paint, pencils, ink, and surfaces, have been the propelling forces of my art life. At Chulitna Lodge, I would be able to experience these in a deeper way than I have ever done before.

With the model of British artists like Richard Long in mind, I could document my stay there using wilderness materials: mud as paint, pigments I would make from local rocks and other natural materials, twigs as drawing tools, bark as canvas, lake and glacier water as the basis for watercolor washes, and more. I would mix these with more standard painting and drawing materials, exponentially increasing my expressive repertoire. I would make drawings, sketches, studies for larger paintings, monoprints, mixed media pieces.

The possibilities seem various and thrilling.  Not only would my work be a metaphor for the c’hi emanating from the Alaskan wilderness, it would literally embody it, containing as it would the DNA of the wild place where I was born.  

 

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

 

Essay two, statement of intent:

In order to fully immerse myself in the Alaskan landscape, and to express in my artwork the energy that pervades it, I intend to make art with natural, found materials... mud, rocks, twigs and bark, among others.  I will draw in the sand and document that process with photos. I will draw and paint on any available appropriate surface.

I will combine local organic materials with a limited number of conventional art supplies that I will bring with me, so that I can fully express the life force I find in that milieu. I will make studies for later paintings. I will make sketches and on-site mixed media finished work.

I am going to spend the next months developing the practice of using found organic materials for art making, something I haven’t done before. At the same time, I want to be sure to bring a sense of spontaneity and discovery to my week there, so I will guard against forming a lot of preconceived ideas of exactly what I will produce.

A week is short, but I am used to traveling and orienting myself quickly to the spirit of a place, and documenting it with drawings, paintings, and sketches. In a week I will be able to work hard, experience deeply, and build up a store of images, both in the artifacts I create there and in my heart and my mind’s eye… a store of images that I can turn to as an artist once I return to North Carolina.

It will have taken me a long time to get back to an Alaska related to the island where I was born. I'm not going to lose it.

 

Essay three, artist statement:

I’m a restless artist, a shape shifter, a seeker, and therefore, not surprisingly, a traveler.

The past three years I’ve done a lot of illustration work, work for other people. It was a good thing to do, a necessary part of my trajectory, I’m convinced. I’ve also spent a long time drawing and making sketches, work that is an immediate and direct response to place and people. That, too, was worthwhile and right.  Now I’m determined to get back to my own paintings, my own deeper path, to plunge back into that thrilling process of trying to know what it is I need to say and how in the world I’m going to say it.

I know I need more of mountains, rugged open spaces, cold days and nights, and skies with lots of stars...the numinous places of my history and my imagination. With my trips to Iceland, Norway, the Alps, I have been circling back to the source. That is where I need to be.

Not long ago, on reading Michael Pollan’s wonderful book A Place of My Own , I was reminded of the concept of ‘c’hi:’

' "C’hi" is the Chinese word for the earth spirit, or cosmic breath, which flows in invisible currents over the face of the earth... . This earth spirit animates all living things.'

It’s when I pick up my brushes and address the c’hi, that life force I sense so strongly, in places that are personally important, that I am a painter in a way that matters most to me.

Epilogue one:

180 people from around the world applied this year for this residency program, which is available only in the summer months.  Applicants were told they would be notified of results around the first week of January. The large number of applicants made for a long delay in the selection process.

On Easter morning, I got an email in my inbox. Out of 180 applicants, 8 were chosen. I was one.

Reader, I’m going!

 

Epilogue two:

Because I didn't hear from the residency program for a long time, I assumed I hadn't made the cut, so I made another plan to spend time this year making art directly connected to a numinous place. I wanted a place somehow related to coastal Norway, but closer and easier for me to access. I chose coastal Wales and I'm going there, too! And that is a story for another day! 

Moving along: October

October has been a month of transitions. I moved past one big set of deadlines, slowed down a bit and made some really fun Inktober meanders. (Inktober means making an ink drawing for every day in October. I didn't make the daily goals, but I made several drawings throughout the month.)

Then I approached another deadline, did that work, and finally, here I am, ready for travel and trying out new materials and methods for painting and drawing. Will tell more about that later, but for now I'll just say that I'm really, really excited about these new directions for 2016!

And here are some of the Inktober forays. I learned to my delight that I can draw on my interior landscapes of the far north, of Iceland and Norway, and with a few strokes of ink and wash and resist, bring those numinous places to myself again!  It felt like magic!

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In a move of great counter-intuitiveness, I am going to a hot and dry place next week, to stay with an old friend and visit others. I'm so looking forward to the friends, but the heat... not so much.

December will find me running truer to form.  I'll be going to the Bavarian Alps, circling back to a well-loved place of my childhood.

I'll be back with sketches of that hot, dry place soon!

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.

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.

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!